Quote Originally Posted by Februs View Post
The dev's made it clear that the Garlean's adopted the word "Eikon," so we can assume they were using the whole, "when in Rome" attitude. Especially because the Dev's stated that they used it as a derogatory term. This, also, would likely be an adopted attitude towards all Primals that they inherited from Allagans.
They definitely did make it clear regarding how Garlean uses the word, and also made it clear that the word was the "a term used long ago by the Allagans to describe the powerful summons."

On the other hand, we should be careful with fully attributing characteristics of the Allagan empire based on the "Allagan wanna-be" Garlean Empire, and by extension the full original nature of the term eikon and the beings to which it refers.

For Eorzea in the present time, and the Garlean Empire trying to take over, Primal and Eikon respectively currently refer almost exclusively to an entity created by the coalescence of aether in the presence of a sufficient amount of aether as a result of the worship/belief/will of a specific group that is almost exclusively the practice of the "beast tribes" of Eorzea (Shiva being the first major known exception - Louisoux/Phoenix is much less known to characters/NPCs in the game world, and it was really her that first began to change our understanding of how primals worked in the first place - followed by King Thordan), and such a process requires sufficient amounts of both requirements listed above and resummoning by that same process or continued sustenance through feeding of aether (usually in the form of crystals, concentrated as it is).

When Eorzean's and Garleans speak of primals, that's what they are talking about.

When Unukalhai mentions the eikon threat, that's what our character immediately assumes he's talking about - which he then corrects us on his intended meaning, and that he's using it as the Allagans apparently did...

Which, at this point, leads me to one of two conclusions:

1) The summoned beings called eikons by the Allagan empire all fall into a general category of "beings created by a coalescence of aether" that is likewise occupied by the primals we know and have faced, and so they are fundamentally the same, but details of their summoning, continued existence, dissipation, etc. are different and can deviate from what we currently have seen (still making them summoned beings, but not fully equivalent to primals, as in you wouldn't be able to exchange the name of one for the other and be totally accurate)...

Or

2) When Unukalhai corrects us, his intent was to point out that he's not talking about the primals we've already faced, sans Odin, but other ones that exist that were faced and imprisoned by the Allagan empire, but are otherwise identical in how they work when compared to the primals you have met.

Which does kind of bring me back to my first point - if we knew that we could rely on how the Garlean Empire has taken the information and used it to be an accurate representation of the Allagan Empire used it, then we could almost certainly see the second conclusion as being correct...but we already know that there is much that the Garlean Empire doesn't understand when it comes to the Allagan Empire, and so while they are taking on the "when in Rome" attitude we can't, with certainty, say that their attitudes and beliefs represent what the Allagan Empire likewise believed...at least so far as fully defining and understanding a specific word is concerned.