Quote Originally Posted by Keltest View Post
Ok, hows this then? The patterns you think are there would seem to be there no matter how they were actually defeated. What you are actually seeing is that they were defeated at all; their defeat happened in spite of their personal plans, not because of them, with the exception of Lirian. Girard is an odd case in that his defenses fell in an unrelated incident, which I guess looks like an ironic result of his defenses if you squint.
If Girard had defenders of his gate beyond his own family, Familicide wouldn't have wiped out his defenses.

Also, a member of the Sapphire Guard blew up Soon's Gate, which was under siege in part because of Redcloak's grudge against the Guard's genocidal missions.

So, despite your continued insistence, bordering on pedantic, that it didn't actually happen that way, it did. And those facts I stated above are simply not true in all cases where the Gate might have been captured or destroyed.