Realisations about the Anima (Anima weapon spoilers, some incidental 4.1 spoilers)

Now, it's been a while since the anima weapon questline was relevant, and many players may not have done it at all or may not have finished it.

For those who haven't, I'll briefly summarise - in the anima weapon chain, our characters spend inordinate amounts of time and resources and slaughter innumerable people, creatures and automata across Eorzea and beyond in order to imbue a weapon with a soul and sentience, culminating in its being granted an automaton body of its own so that it can accompany the character even without the weapon itself. One of the final stages of this requires the character to fight every single primal they've encountered prior during the main story, with the anima weapon in hand.

Recently, it occurs to me that this has some interesting implications. Firstly, the House of Splendours is actively promoting the creation and proliferation of a great number of these living weapons, to the extent it seems peculiar that our creating what are, essentially, potentially independent people hasn't had more of an impact or at least drawn the attention of those concerned with Allagan research in a similar direction. One would imagine eventually anima would begin to consider going their own way, separately from adventurers. One day, something I'd love to see is the anima gaining larger-scale bodies or perhaps even becoming a playable race, though I can't imagine something like this would be likely to happen. Even without, since the developers are taking more of an effort to mention sidequests in the main scenario, I'd expect the anima to be mentioned at some point.

Secondly, that the anima weapon is used safely while fighting primals has interesting implications. Since tempering does not seem to care for the particulars of a being's nature, only their having intelligence and a soul (Dragons in particular come to mind as beings not even native to Eorzea), it seems unlikely to me that the anima would be exempt from that by essential nature. Why, then, are they able to accompany us against primals? The revelations of the most recent patch offer a potential answer. We now know that it's possible to reproduce the Echo by duplicating aspects of a being's aetheric makeup and structure. Since the process of the anima's formation draws fairly heavily on its wielder's aether, is it possible that by an analogous process, the anima wielded by the Warrior of Light, who possesses the Echo, might also have the Echo?

Well, in the first place, we never fight the primals in the last quest. The quest text specifically says we're remembering all those fights in our head and the anima weapon is remembering them with us. If anything, it's the other way around. The anima weapon compares itself to the primals and all but says there's very little difference between them and it. Which is pretty much correct. Both are aetherial beings made stronger by supplying them with aether and are fueled by the desire of the ones that made them. Only we have a very different idea in mind for what we want out of the anima then what most people want out of a primal...