Quote Originally Posted by Catapult View Post
Well that's easy enough. It would [kupo!]ing murder you. You'll have cheesed most of them off in the main scenario by the time you get to unlocking the Summoner job, after all.

More exposition and personal theorising:

Through the Scions of the Seventh Dawn quests surrounding Ifrit (and tidbits from version 1.0), we learn that the primals are, in their natural state, part of the aether stream. The elemental aspect itself as you will. The act of summoning essentially causes that aspect to manifest itself.

And once it is manifested and worshiped, it likes staying that way. Their power is directly linked to the volume of faith in them, which explains why Ifrit goes out of his way to "temper" people (read: brainwash) into blindly worshiping him.

This tells us that a primal exists only through what sentient creatures believe exists. My conclusion is that if you believe Ifrit has a personality, or more specifically, if you believe in that specific Ifrit with that specific personality, if you will it to exist, then you are contributing to the wilful summoning and sustenance of that entity. Before you know it, you have a self-propagating cycle of thought creating reality creating thought.

A smart summoner would be sure to act on the summoning of a different manifestation. Perhaps we can't help ourselves by envisaging a form similar to what we know, but we sure as hell don't want the crazy harpy-lady to show up so she can slice open our necks. We want something we can have dominance over and control.
My one beef with this idea, is if the primal exists through what the summoners believe... Why are the Sylphs so scared of Ramuh? He shouldn't come out crazy under them like Ifrit or Garuda do for their tribes.