#i'm fully willing to believe that elusia had a perfectly good faith

[iturbide]

What would the Elyusians' religion even be??? Like, we get so little info on them and what they believe, that when we see Sombron and he's clearly doing evil things, it's like. How did this guy get a religion??? Like, from only seeing what the game shows us, it's hard to imagine a religion based on Sombron that would have any good to it. I mean, that's clearly what the game was going for, just pure cartoonish evil, but c'mon... do better.

Yeah, unfortunately the whole impression of any potential Elusian religion is tainted by seeing how Sombron is in person. He is wretched. There is nothing good about him.

But also...religion is a funny thing. It's not so much about the deity, but about the stories and what they mean to the people that embrace them. Sombron can be an absolute piece of shit (and he is) without that necessarily reflecting in any way on the faith itself that adopted him as a central figure.

Like, just as an example. We know that Sombron had a lot of kids with a lot of different dragons. We also know that Hyacinth himself had both a wife and at least one concubine, with each one bearing a daughter. While Sombron himself is a vile piece of work who used his children to further his goals and disposed of them for the most minor of infractions, Ivy and Hortensia both agree that, before coming under Sombron's thrall, Hyacinth was a loving father -- so it doesn't seem unreasonable to speculate that the Elusian faith prizes family, using a muddled record of Sombron's own situation as the basis for it. It's also clear that Ivy and Hortensia love each other dearly, which could similarly play into that concept of valuing family -- especially if Sombron's own children have any minor standing in the faith.

We know that Hortensia's mother was looked down upon for being a concubine, but we don't know what the underlying source of that disdain was: it might have been a matter of class difference between queen and concubine, with the queen coming from high nobility and the concubine coming from either a family of lower standing or even a commoner -- but we also know that Hortensia's mother eventually won over the queen herself with her smiling perseverance. Given the trials that Sombron put his children through to test their mettle, it's not impossible for me to imagine that, a thousand years down the line, the Elusian faith has enshrined such perseverance in its scriptures as a virtue.

And this is just from what very little I know from the interactions in the main game and the few supports I've managed to get with Ivy and Hortensia. There's potential for a lot more -- but it's on fans to make it all up, because the game went out of its way to imply that Elusia is as evil as the divine at the core of its faith.