Primal Belias?

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Originally Posted by Okamimaru

Perhaps belias and ifrit are based off the same pre-allagan monster/primal... perhaps there was a variation in language... look at things like dragons in mythology...

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That was a pet theory of mine for a long time but now, I'm not so sure.... (given his full appearance at Ridoronia). I'm not sure if Ifrit was ever truly an actual god worshipped by the pre-tempered Amalj'aa: certainly the Brotherhood of Ash regard the Primal Ifrit as a sham and never mention anything about a 'real Ifrit' or any kind of religious figure they themselves worship (they instead come off surprisingly as atheists interested only in furthering themselves in battle), so it's likely then that the Ascians were the ones who put the 'Ifrit is your god' idea into their heads originally.

But this is all just idle musings so please pick that theory apart. :p

The Ascians are probably not the people who put the idea of Ifrit into the Amalj'aas' heads. The lore book has him empowering the Amalj'aa as the reason behind almost everything in their society, most of which we never get to see. The Almaj'aa have a lot in common with the Xalea of the Steppes. They're both nomadic warrior peoples who are divided into tribes and herd animals across grasslands. The Amalj'aa we encounter in the game are primarily their warriors and nothing else.

As far as Ifrit's role in everything... it sounds like it could be a dramatization of something that happened all the way back in the 3rd Umbral Era. The 3rd Umbral Calamity was when the sun burned hotter (or got larger) for a period of time and it's speculated that that is when the Saigoli Desert was created. In any case, Ifrit and the Almajaa's "origin story" has Ifrit giving the Almaj'aa's ancestors the gift of reason/consciousness because they were the strongest living things that survived the world of fire the longest. There were 14 Almaj'aa that survived Ifrit's gift and they went on to found the seven different Almaj'aa tribes.

Considering why the Almaj'aa are said to have gotten Ifrit's attention in the first place, I find it very ironic that Ifrit is being summoned because the Almaj'aa think they're weak...

For what it's worth, it's suggested that the primals are called The Primals in the first place because of a long-held pre-existing belief within the beast tribes that they were created by primordial elemental gods aligned with the dominant element of the biosphere in which they thrived. For example, the Amalj'aa thrived within a fire-dominant desert, and were thus the chosen children raised by a primordial fire elemental god dubbed Ifrit, Lord of the Inferno. (Back in 1.0, one of the visiting newspaper authors even seemed to hint that the devs considered having Shiva be the goddess of the a race of giants (the gigants?) at one point.)

Like faith in the Twelve, the faith in the Primals had divine messengers known as Paragons rather than Archons, and that in times of great need these messengers would come and lead them to their patrons. In fact, it might not even be accurate to call other primals... well, "primals" - we're just overgeneralizing the word because it's what "we" (Eoreans) know.

While the Ascians surely posed as the Paragons and taught the beast tribes a summoning spell that raised twisted shades that mimicked their faith as part of a long-con that would tip the scales towards calamity, I'm relatively certain that these specific primals weren't invented by them wholesale. Rather it seems that "seeds of myth" have been floating on the winds of time and taking root in different places, growing, mutating, and evolving, for... in mortal terms ...ever.

I clearly remind Yoshida on one of the fanfests saying that we might get to see eventually incarnations of existing primals done by other cultures, which honestly I found extremely interesting