Saladin tells the story of how hundreds of Iron Lords entered the Plaguelands and where either killed by Rasputin's constructs or fighting SIVA yet the Iron Temple has only eight statues. There is not even a tomb of the unknown Iron Lord or even anything to honour the sacrifice of the many Iron Lords we do not know the names of. There are some we do know the names of, from weapons and artifacts (Bretomart, Colovance, Deidris, Finnala, Haakon, Nirwen and Tormod), which we can assume also fell in the Plaguelands yet there are no statues for them either. Why did Saladin only memorialise the eight who made it with him to the SIVA replication facility? Were these eight (and maybe Efrideet, ???) the only ones he cares about?
As someone who has served in the military I find it odd that Saladin, a member of an organised fighting force, would only selectively honour his apparent close friends (and we can safely assume they are, as opposed to the others, as only ever reminisces about some of those eight) and apparently ignore the other Iron Lords who died as part of that SIVA mission. Am I the only the one who finds this very odd? I know it would be impractical to have an Iron Temple with hundreds of statues but to have nothing for the others?
You can’t really argue that the nine Iron Lords that made it the SIVA must been the best (and so thus the statues) as surviving a large battle in many cases is far more to do with blind luck than individual skill. Even so remembering only “the best” and ignoring the others could only be seen as extremely cold hearted. Militaries commonly heap far more honours on the commanders than the junior officers and troops under them so it could be argued the eight given statues where the higher ranking commanders of the Iron Lords. The possibility only the high rankers made it, when all their subordinates fell, seems extremely remote, or utterly ruthless if they had sacrificed all their personnel so they could survive to that point. I know this is just a game but there are some out there that really get into the lore of Destiny. I’m not really one of them but even so, I find it hard to understand the logic of why those who put together the story of Destiny and Rise of Iron would have Saladin only honouring the sacrifice of eight out of the hundreds of Iron Lords that died over SIVA.
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Over a hundred Iron Lords died. Only one Iron Lord returned to the temple. Do you have any idea how long it takes to carve all those statues? It's been 400 years, but he has Iron Banner to run (about a quarter of the time) and he does patrols of the wall and look out for outbreaks of SIVA so he has to choose which Iron Lords to carve first. Not to mention all the reject statues that he did but were crap so he destroyed them Now that he no longer has IB to do and the guardians have taken over patrolling the wall and keeping SIVA back, maybe he can spend the next couple of thousand years carving statues for another hundred Iron Lords. They will have to be small statues though because there's not much space in the Iron Temple because of the 8 huge statues he already carved