If the God Hand was killed

Hi!

Indeed there must be at least several people that were destined to make themselves giants in the course of history or who could be nudged into notoriety but whose paths simply did not pique the God Hand's recruiting interest for whatever reason. They chose and manipulated into place exactly whom they intended to. What's the point in being an evil mastermind at the center of an infinite web of manipulation if you don't make the effort to bring it off with maximum panache?

But I'm not sure what your question is exactly now. If they are on a schedule of one every 216 years then it takes a thousand-ish years to get five.

You seem to be asking, if the evil forces in the world are so powerful and can manipulate the world so, why have they not already won waaaaayyy back when? I don't know but my guess would be that a) the slow suffering of the world is cool with it/them, and watching everything play out is satisfying in itself and/or b) the world wants a reason for its suffering, but it wants the reason to be cool and epic.

The way I see is, the IoE is something like a breeder. It carefully allows circumstances, influences, traits, etc and allows them to pass on through the generations until eventually culminating into it's eventual end goal. Sometimes that happens faster than others. The IoE can only affect the outcome by influence, not by direct control, much like a breeder can select which offspring is the best to sire more offspring.

Who knows, maybe the IoE has it down to a formula, one that works out every 216 years.

Doc said:

Don't mean to derail the thread, but in the lost episode the IoE explains to Griffith that he manipulated his entire ancestry and the events of his life in order for him to become Femto. If the IoE has power on that kind of level, then I have to question why the full cycle of the God Hand took a millennium? It seems an unnecessarily convoluted process. Are we to believe that only five worthy individuals arose within a thousand years? It stands to reason that the IoE would've wanted the God Hand to have been appointed opportunely to serve its underlying master plan. So either the IoE wasn't able to accomplish that, for whatever reason, or it chose not to?

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I think you're underestimating just how dense the web of causality is, and ironically also overestimating the direct power of the Idea of Evil. It does its work in a subtle, slow manner, working behind the scenes over centuries.

Consider the Holy See pushing back magical things into the world's periphery, slowly making humans the dominant ones on the continent (before pulling the rug from under them to insure subservience). That's something that took hundreds, thousands of years.

And that's just the big elephant in the room. There are many other things to consider that take a lot of time. Providing the right geopolitical vehicle for Griffith (and the others) to be born into likely involved generations of decision to be made.

That's also not taking into account if there's some yet unexplained astronomical phenomenon that the Idea of Evil times it's occultations to, similar to the power of magic during full moons.