#“maintain harmony and leverage your opponents strength against them”? no bitch!

[malaierba]

As much as I enjoy fanon where Adam is a mastermind general, NGL that's probably not supported by canon.

He's leading attacks on a population that can't effectively fight back. They're being attacked from the air, and the Exorcists are essentially invulnerable. They're all 100% skill points invested in the Attack stat, 0% in Defense. As far as everyone knows, it's pointless, so why bother? This is the very thing that Camilla exploits.

I'm not sure that's very "mastermind general" coded. It IS efficient, we could assume that he had something to do with training his girls to be as efficient as possible, so there's that. We could even imagine that he understands how to best use his warriors and leverage the terrain to corner the biggest group of (civilian, for the most part) sinners possible.

Sinners likely fight back if only to attempt to escape, so we could even give Adam extra credit and say that he's trained his girls to deal with counterattacks (most meant to immobilize them for a bit because, again, invulnerable) by having them work on groups and just, force their way through whatever trap is being set around them as quickly as possible. I do like the idea that he helped all his Exorcists be the best they could be, keeping his idea of what a perfect soldiers looks like in mind of course.

But when we see Adam fight, as Alastor correctly calls out, he's sloppy. As others have pointed out, had Alastor not been so prideful to not arm his minions + tentacles with Angelic steel, he would've killed Adam within five minutes. Adam is not very agile, his attack speed is nothing to write home about when compared to the people he fought (even Charlie manages to dodge some of his attacks, and being the pacifist she is she's likely the least trained in combat), and in true exorcist fashion he tanks rather than deflect/avoid most hits.

Every time he managed to turn the tables and harm one of the Hazbins, it was by using raw power. And yeah, he did use the element of surprise in those three occasions (attacking Alastor, killing Serpentious, catching Charlie in a chokehold. IG you could count his attempt at bodying Lucifer + attacking the Morningstar's from the back too), but it reads as more instinct/impulse than strategy.

I mean, it makes sense. The man was a hunter, a farmer later in life, then probably didn't do much in heaven until he was tasked with the Exterminations. Until they domesticated some animals, he probably picked easy prey that would relatively give him the highest reward to risk ratio, and since he was probably hunting on his own or with small support (maybe Eve when she wasn't pregnant, maybe some sons later in life) they had to be quick and surprise their prey. But relying on domestication was still preferable.

So he had to be efficiency minded. What I like to think is that he's probably a better trainer than he is a strategist, and if forced he'd be better at coaching people to survive in a situation where they have little resources/tools at hand, and little knowledge of the environment they'd be thrust in. Surviving a wasteland and managing to build the pillars of, maybe not society, but at least self sustaining communities requires some observational skills and good memory after all (although NGL Eve probably helped here. I refuse to steal credit from her to give it to Adam, let's not forget that modern anthropology theorises that agriculture was probably pioneered mainly by women).

And, he's definitely an "the best defense is to attack first" kind of guy. For better and for worse, of course.