Quote Originally Posted by danielxcutter View Post
I mean, the Order was literally planning to go to Girard's Gate before they learned about the upcoming attack on Azure City, so...
The issue is that what they were "planning on" doing can't be used to justify why X action had Y consequences. Shojo was willing to interfere with the other gates, and he recruited the Order to do so, but he never actually did it because other events intervened. Afterwards, he was dead and the Order was free to act on their own initiative.

You can go and change Shojo's dialog to say that he's explicitly forbidding the Order from going to Girard's gate and it doesn't change the plot. His gate still gets attacked, he dies, the gate gets blown up, and the Order is no longer under his command. They say "Okay, what's next?" and decide to go onto Girard's gate.