A brief treatise on Eikons 2: Their unseen influence

Note: Eikon here refers to all summons, I don't much like Primal due to regarding it as theologically inaccurate.

So one question that I'm sure has been on people's minds regarding eikons is on the nature of tempering (or blessed, drowned etc) and such individuals coming about before the summoning of the creature in question.

Prior to summoning, many beastmen tribes kidnap people to be tempered with the implication being that more believers will assist in the summoning. Additionally there is a case in preventing soldiers from being drowned by Leviathan, with the serpent not summoned at the time and the process appearing to have a lower success rate.


My current theory is that the belief of the summoners in question creates a sort of body-less existance. Their soul is there but without suffecient aether they have no body to use their full abilities. In this form however they can grant boons to their worshippers, temper people, and possibly other things, with the effects seeming to center around objects of worship.

It also seems to answer the question of why an eikon when resummoned retains it's memories and original form. Only the body has been destroyed with the soul still existing.

Thoughts? Arguments? Counterpoints?

Well, it was explained in Minfilia and Urianger's lecture on the differences between mortals, Primals / Elder Primals / Eikons, and the Ascians. The Primals do keep their consciousness in the aether; more than likely it's tied to their worshipers. That is to say if a Primal is forgotten, or it has no tempered individuals to worship it, it will cease to exist. This is why "Elder Primals" are so rare and odd - they need worshippers to maintain even aetherial existence, but the civilizations that spawned them no longer exist. In the case of both Elder Primals (Bahamut and Sephirot) thus far, they had worshipers kept alive in stasis; the same can be assumed true of the other two. (Or is Sephirot an Eikon? I think he is... but that's not really the subject here...)

(Odin is an oddity, given he has no active worshipers.)

Pretty sure Primals can't temper people if they lack a corporeal manifestation. The tempered (etc.) Spoken we find are likely leftovers from a previous summoning. I'd need some hard evidence to believe otherwise.

Granting boons... possibly. Plausibly. Lots of Kobold skills refer to Titan, and the Amalj'aa do have the Ifrit's Beacons and such. I don't recall much else.

I do believe that primals need to be summoned first into corporeal form before they can 'claim' worshippers. The evidence is shown during our first primal encounter with Ifrit; the Amal'ja summoned him to temper us and the captive Flames, and it's only after we prove resistant to tempering that Ifrit decided to kill us, having apparently being warned by Ascians about us 'unbelievers'.

Ethys Asher made some interesting theory in the end of this video, which may explain the difference between primals and eikons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaAEXX6ZLsk

Which is actually different to how Ifrit's first encounter with the player in 1.0 played out, in that he was rather more obstinate and, after discovering his attempt to temper the player didn't work and that the Ascians had warned him of them, he also added a few extra tidbits that were not mentioned in ARR - that not only did the Ascians tell him to spare us (for some unknown reason), that also the 'godless blessed' were capable of summoning their own Primal, something that Ifrit found repulsive and forced the player to swear they would never do. Whether this is still canon remains to be seen though, given the fact that it was not mentioned in ARR, seems to lean more towards the retcon side of the scale though.

While certainly not its intended meaning at the time, perhaps 1.0 Ifrit's order to spare us was done with the having Echo-blessed repeatedly slay Primals to feed Dalamud. Naturally, I don't think the Paragons would've filled a Primal in on the whole plan, but the survival of those with the Echo might've been some kind of gambit in the Ascian's plan.

(If I remember rightly, we were the provocateurs vs Ifrit in 1.0 after the battle was actually released. Louisoix sends us to go slay Ifrit before he can do anything, which is different than, say, our encounter with Garuda in 1.0, who we seek out after she attacks Quarrymill.)

EDIT: I actually went and looked up the reasonings for each It Kills with Fire and each one is different, lol. For Flames, the Ossuary claims Ifrit is behind Dalamud's change and to test their theory you should go kill him. For Adders, the task of defeating Ifrit is meant to be an overture to the other Grand Companies in hope of restoring the Eorzean Alliance. And the Maelstrom? Wary of a Gridanian trick, they would have you seek out the visitor who claims to have the knowledge to slay Primals (Louisoix) and ascertain whether he's the real deal or not--Gridania wants to use the visitor as the beginnings of an Alliance.

So, it seems like, in 1.0 Lord Errant, Ifrit didn't kill us on orders from the Ascian because "reasons." In 1.19, the Echo-blessed adventurer who would become the Warrior of Light seeks out and destroys Ifrit as detailed above; and then yadda yadda Ifrit is aggressive in 2.0.

I have little doubt this is me attempting to retrofit Ifrit's dialogue, but it isn't unreasonable imo.

Well, while we have seen a summoning done to temper people, a number of beastman quests involve foiling plans to temper individuals. If the eikon was being summoned again I'm sure that story wise we would be seeing more concern from the grand companies. There's also the tempered individual who was working to make summoning Ifrit possible before the fight with him, and the Sahagin quest where you have to rescue a bunch of soldiers before they are drownded with Leviathan nowhere in sight.

It seems to me that tempering without an actual summon is much more difficult and prone to failure

When they send us on quests to stop people from being tempered, I'm of the mind that they're going to summon the Primal in question. Story-wise yeah, it would make sense for the GCs to be more involved if that were the case... but if that were the case we'd basically be doing nothing but fighting Primals over and over (and over and over), which would make for a pretty boring story, neé?

I don't recall any Spoken being tempered before the Ifrit fight - there was just a corrupt Brass Blade and a thug who intended to sell us out to the Amalj'aa, but got double-crossed and tempered in turn. (And we were the only survivors of the mission thanks to the Echo... putting on the PTSD early!)

I thought the corrupt brass blade was tempered. Also, the quest I keep referring to you actually has you saving the soldiers in the middle of being tempered, with you being too late for most of them.

There was an official response somewhere about how people were being tempered without an actual summon. I think it was in the same article about "why tempered, drowned, etc." on Gamerescape.

I'd like the quest name and article for cross-referencing; I won't be able to get back to you until ~0230-0300 EDT though. ("Swing shift" is a bitch, and it's only going to get worse when we go to graveyard "alternate" shift in a couple months.)

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Originally Posted by Toranja

There was an official response somewhere about how people were being tempered without an actual summon. I think it was in the same article about "why tempered, drowned, etc." on Gamerescape.

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In regards to how to temper without a Primal, if I remember rightly Ferne personally answered this particular question at the first Fanfest, explaining that when a Primal is summoned, the surrounding area is bathed in it's elemental essence, which lingers even after the Primal is defeated. That essence is rather like an aetheric residue that is collected by the beastmen who summoned the Primal and store it, and then use it to temper more followers even without the Primal being present by immersing their prisoners ritually in it. Naturally this process is imperfect and may require several attempts to fully temper the unfortunate - this was shown during one sahagin beastquest where the player is racing against time to free a group of captured Maelstrom soldiers who are being 'drowned' at the water's edge - you can only save two as the other two have already sadly succumbed to the aetheric immersion and are now 'drowned' (and thus, have to be put to death as they attack you immediately).

This also explains why each beast tribe seems to have structures that harness that element (viz the amalj'aa beacon towers in Zan'rak/Zaha'rak, the crystalline orbs in the Sylphlands that spew out violet 'fumes' that are even stated as 'corrupting the forest around them with Ramuh's taint', the tidal pools and flats in Halfstone, to name a few, these are all used to contain the aetheric left-overs of each Primal for the purposes of tempering new followers even if the Primal is not around. Really, this Primal-residue is essentially the same thing that SMNs use when first evoking an egi form, it's just being used in a different way.

Well I guess that kinda blows my theory out of the water I think

I still have no idea what the distinction is supposed to be between a primal and an eikon. Are eikons essentially just super-powered primals, so all eikons are primals but not all primals are eikons?

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Originally Posted by Confidence_Trick

I still have no idea what the distinction is supposed to be between a primal and an eikon. Are eikons essentially just super-powered primals, so all eikons are primals but not all primals are eikons?

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We still don't know for certain what makes them different. The little information we have is that:

1) All eikons are primals but not all primals are eikons, as you said.
2) Eikons have all, thus far, been exceptionally more powerful than primals (though we don't know if this is actually because they're eikons).
3) Eikons don't seem to have the same rules regarding followers and faith to be summoned and maintain their manifestation.

Of the two eikons we've actually encountered thus far, Odin and Sephirot, the one commonality between them is that they seem to be attached to physical objects in some way. Odin, for example, isn't actually the eikon, it's his sword that is the eikon whilst his body is just an aetheric extension of it (or possibly the tempered host that picked up the sword after his last defeat). Sephirot, meanwhile, is explained to be an actual tree that his worshippers venerated.

The strongest theory we've seen so far is that eikons may be real objects that have been directly altered by a modified summoning ritual in some way, instead of creating a being out of pure aether. The result is a primal that does not follow the same rules since it has a material form at the core of its aetherial form.

We can only speculate at this point though. I expect the two remaining Triad members will give us more information on this subject.

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Originally Posted by Confidence_Trick

I still have no idea what the distinction is supposed to be between a primal and an eikon. Are eikons essentially just super-powered primals, so all eikons are primals but not all primals are eikons?

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Even in-game, there hasn't been much clarification on the difference.

The best theory I can come up with is that an eikon is a deified physical object. Odin, for instance, is not the actual eikon - he's just an extension of Zantetsuken, the actual eikon. Sephirot as well is a deified tree. If this is true, it would explain why the two are able to maintain their existence without active worshipers. The being we fight, no matter how powerful it may be, isn't the real primal - it's just an icon (eikon), a symbol of the genuine article.

... but then again, Sephirot was noted to have worshipers in stasis upon his defeat, and we don't know anything about the Demon (Zurvan) or Goddess (Sophia) yet beyond their existence. It's what I'm going with for the moment, though.

The whole problem with working out exactly the whole 'eikon'/'Primal' thing is that the exact meaning has wildly varied since even 1.0, where the word eikon was used literally by multiple characters as simply a another synonym for Primal (specifically, it was stated as being a derogatory Garlean term for it), and that even Eorzeans often made use of the term (interestingly, it was also stated that the beastmen actually hated the term and would react violently towards those who did):

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Originally Posted by FFXIV version 1.0 Gridanian main scenario quest 'Whispers in the Wood'

Miounne: "Many think the recent influx of adventurers we've seen here is the result of the elementals of the Twelveswood calling out to you."
Miounne: "Whether it's the proximity to Garlemald-occupied Ala Mhigo, or the beast-tribes, or their damned eikons that prompted them, none can say."

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Originally Posted by FFXIV version 1.0 main scenario quest 'Toll of the Warden'

Shanga-Mashanga: "Perhaps you have heard of the primals, or as the Empire has branded them, 'eikons'?
Path Companion: "But of course. Just as we have the Twelve, the beast tribes have their own deities to whom they offer their worship."

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Originally Posted by FFXIV version 1.0 main scenario quest 'Toll of the Warden'

Path Companion: "Have the eikons truly the power to move the hearts of so many?"
Nananoby: "You had best not speak that name around the beast tribes, lest you incur their wrath. 'Eikon' is a derogatory term used by the Garleans to reflect their belief that the primals are not true gods, but mere beasts the ignorant tribes mistakenly worship."

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That seemed pretty cut and polished there that eikon=primal (even the beastmen thought as much), however, of course ARR completely threw all that into confusion, not only was the meaning for eikon called into question, the very meaning of 'primal' also had a big question mark raised (with Good King Moggle Mog). And with the most recent information revealed throughout both ARR and Heavensward, particularly that there was hints that the very origin of the word eikon may have had Allagan origins, only stirs the pot even more thickly, resulting in that carefully prepared broth becoming very mixed up indeed....

And I think I pushed the metaphor too far. :p

I wish that little kid or someone would pipe up about what makes an Eikon and Eikon. That said I'm wondering if maybe we can come up with a better term for these. While Primal works for the most part, the fact is that not only can entities other than gods worshiped by the beast tribes be summoned, but also the resulting summon isn't even actually the god in question.

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Originally Posted by Shadotterdan

While Primal works for the most part, the fact is that not only can entities other than gods worshiped by the beast tribes be summoned, but also the resulting summon isn't even actually the god in question.

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In all fairness, the Japanese version simply titles them all "gods." Ifrit is just "Fire God," Titan is just "Earth God," etc. The EN version, as per its particular idiom, just fluffs things up a bit, calling them "Primals" and giving them grandiose titles befitting a god such as "Lord of the Inferno," "Lord of Crags," etc.

I'm not sure if the distinction is or has been made in the Japanese version. Either way, I like finding things out and don't mind waiting, so...

... any summoned "god" is, implicitly, a false god. The only true gods known to exist are Hydaelyn and Zodiark, the latter of whom is "dead" or at least fractured. As much as I disagree with Garlean methods, I can't deny that Gaius may have had a point when he said the Twelve were just eikons. (By the theory eikons are deified objects, I have no idea what they'd all be. But hey, that may have just been the Garleans throwing around an appropriated Allagan term incorrectly.)

I usually try to avoid headcanon-on-parade threads (only because I like citations and examples and there aren't many, lol).
But I can contribute a little bit on this front:

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Originally Posted by Shadotterdan

That said I'm wondering if maybe we can come up with a better term for these.

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I tend to use the term "deiform". The Ascians refer to them all as "Gods" / "The Divine" with a tongue so in-cheek that it's a wonder they can speak coherently. Also, from a taxonomy point of view, these beings are [Kingdom] Transcendent [Class] Elemental, with aether having been given a corporeal form. Before we knew what primals actually were, I theorized that they might be "thoughtforms", so when that turned out to be true, I just tweaked it to "deiforms"; works well so far.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

I'm not sure if the distinction is or has been made in the Japanese version.

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The major distinction made in JP is along the same lines as English, but with different names. There are 蛮神 (banshin; lit. barbarian god) and 闘神 (toshin; lit. Warring God). Before you ask, yes, Odin is toshin; the Warring Triad are always prefaced with 三 (San; lit. three) to differentiate them.

I like your theory about deified objects being eikons, but it meshes better with English than Japanese. In fact, English is actually the only language that hints that "Eikon" has any greater meaning than "an old name for what we'd today call primals" with an implication that 5,000 years has subtly changed how we think of and summon deiforms in a way that we've yet to fully pin down (and that there are a lot of toshin).

Now, I rarely try to predict the future these days; it's extraordinarily time-consuming on the research front and either serves only as something to link back to like SOMEONE PICK UP THAT PHONE or otherwise collapses like a house of cards with one random line in a far-off patch. I tend to focus more on archiving and properly understanding what we already have, and thus I've struggled to move my assumptions beyond...

The difference is that "primals" are deiforms believed to be of the primordial forces of nature (elements), while the eikons are a broader, more variable set. The distinction serves to allow the dev. team to make 50 new trials without ruining the majesty of the mysterious demigods we struggled to make sense of for several years and were our original understanding of an in-world threat, that the Land itself had turned against man's irreverence.

This is probably insufficient. I've never seen Bahamut called a toshin. I do have some quiet, nagging theories that go beyond that. If I can ever articulate them well is another matter entirely.



SIDENOTE:
I went back through in JP and only now realized that, every now and then, Unukalhai just goes, "Fufufu...." That's... ominous, lol.

Senpai noticed me! Sorry for making you do all the legwork... but I don't understand Japanese. S'ppose I coulda found the text somewhere and plugged it into Google Translate or summat though.

Aaaaaaaanyway, I usually avoid indulging in this sort of thing myself because I know it's mostly pointless (given said "theories" are wont to collapse), but I do have an actual theory on the distinction between Primals and Eikons and the question was asked.

Bahamut has only ever been called "Elder Primal" in the EN version, so I wouldn't expect him to be in the same classification as Eikons (toshin). The dragon Bahamut and the Primal Bahamut are... more than likely two significantly different beings beyond their mindset, given dragon Bahamut's physiology was likely similar to the other Celestial Wyrms while Primal Bahamut looks nothing like them. What the exact difference is, then, is still beyond me - but I have a theory somewhat rooted in evidence.

I'm probably not right.

[Incoherent Rambling]

Ahh, whatever! This is like playing darts with a spinning Wheel of Fortune... and I should probably stop before my nemesis shows up with a flamethrower...

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Originally Posted by Confidence_Trick

I still have no idea what the distinction is supposed to be between a primal and an eikon. Are eikons essentially just super-powered primals, so all eikons are primals but not all primals are eikons?

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You know, some times there is little point in asking these things, because even the writers aren't too sure themselves. Even know, it looks like they are trying to tidy things up from the Yoshida Meteor.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

The dragon Bahamut and the Primal Bahamut are... more than likely two significantly different beings beyond their mindset, given dragon Bahamut's physiology was likely similar to the other Celestial Wyrms while Primal Bahamut looks nothing like them.

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I personally think the difference is rooted in the mindset of those involved in the summoning.

Much like how the Ifrit the Amal'jaa summon is based on their conception of Ifrit, the difference in the physiology of Primal Bahamut could have been a result of Tiamat's emotional and mental state at the time.

The result - a larger deiform (assuming it was summoned at it's size we saw during the Calamity) with strong legs, a broad chest, and a singular but powerful set of wings in contrast to the multi-part wings of the original's kin. Something more war-like, possibly as a result of a desire for vengeance from Tiamat, goaded on by the Ascians involved?

If you don't mind me asking, is it confirmed that the first brood all had the same body-type?

Considering Middy has shown himself in 3 forms ranging in size and wildly different shapes (dragon pup form verses miles long serpent) and the different dragon sizes and shapes from the individual broods, I wonder if Bahamut was just genetically predisposed to have different appearance, or if a dragon's appearance directly correlates to their current level of aether/power.

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Originally Posted by Ametrine

If you don't mind me asking, is it confirmed that the first brood all had the same body-type?

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Hraesvelgr, Nidhogg, and Tiamat are all extremely similar and share the same skeletal base (model-wise), so it's more of a safe assumption than anything.

If you remove Tiamat's default pose, she looks just like her brothers.

But no. No confirmation.

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Originally Posted by Ametrine

If you don't mind me asking, is it confirmed that the first brood all had the same body-type?

Considering Middy has shown himself in 3 forms ranging in size and wildly different shapes (dragon pup form verses miles long serpent) and the different dragon sizes and shapes from the individual broods, I wonder if Bahamut was just genetically predisposed to have different appearance, or if a dragon's appearance directly correlates to their current level of aether/power.

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During the Final Steps of Faith, Nidhogg assumes a pose very similar to Bahamut while the shadow dragons are attacking. By comparing Bahamut Prime with Nidhogg, I noticed that Bahamut's body actually has a morphology similar to his siblings, but more robust and with distorted proportions (enlarged torso, elongated wings, relatively small head and forelimbs).