Primals and Egis

[Anonymoose]

See, I'm already eyeballs deep in my own theory on the matter. Instead of seeing yours through my lenses, here's my theory on the subject. You can compare it to the two you've provided as you will or reject it entirely. ^^

So far, I'm inclined to say that aether is pure, formless potential for energy and life. If you focus on this energy and manipulate it in the correct manner, you can form life with thought. This would be how carbuncle comes to be. The Arcanist focuses on the mathematical breakdown of what carbuncle is and shapes the aether accordingly. If the Arcanist wants fierce, offensive Carbuncle, they shape it one way. If they want a stonewalling, defensive Carbuncle, they manifest it the other. We see something similar with the scholar, however the memories accumulated by the faeries they summon are stored in the job crystal they carry. Thus, if you use someone else's job crystal, you're using an already-established faery consciousness.

If my theory is correct, this would be how Louisoix summoned the power of the Twelve. He carved their symbols into stones and asked us to make a pilgrimage, praying to them and filling the aether of the land with the messages of our prayers and images of the deities we believed in - and then twisted it to his will like an arcanist and used it to attempt to bind Bahamut. Is it mere coincidence that we prayed to symbols on stone and they manifested as symbols in the sky? Who knows what they would have looked like if he summoned them fully - an amalgam of our own mental images of them and personalities we ascribe them?

If my theory is correct, this would be what primals are. The beast tribes develop a culture around their environment, where the aether naturally shifts towards a certain elemental aspect. In the hot deserts of Thanalan, where the aether more easily imbalances towards the aspect of fire (notice all those fire sprites hanging around?), they create a mythology of their god. When they, like the arcanist, gather a great deal of aether together and focus their prayers and hopes upon it (as the ascians, under the guise of the Paragons, taught them to do), the primal takes the form of their prayers. Think of it like an unnatural concentration that is a stark contrast to the natural, consistently diffuse nature of the aether. Their power and existence depends on consuming aether, so they consume and hoard as much as possible to become dominant and self-preserve against other primals and threats to those that summoned them. Killing them diffuses the aether back into the land, nourishing it, but the essences and prayers remain. Elder primals would thus be essences from long ago, not actively kept alive by the prayers of their worshipers, but either diffuse amongst the stream as memories or alive in the world, undefeated.

So what are Egi?

If my theory is correct, those who have fought primals retain memories of their power and abilities. The summoner calls forth blank aether concentrations, like with carbuncle, but inheres their memories of a primal's power into this creation and gives life to the puppet. However, they must first show that they can dominate it, or, like the primal it was born from the memories of, it will fight them tooth, nail, and claw. This would be why only those who have fought a primal can summon primal-egi... they have the memory, the experience, to inhere into the aether as prayer does. In the summoner storyline, then, what we saw was an Ascian giving Tristain the memories and experience required to summon an elder primal-egi, possibly empathetically taken from the Summoner job stones he had Tristain collect.

These are just my thoughts, though...

It wouldn't be the first time I came up with something that made a lot of sense and was totally wrong.