Quote Originally Posted by ObsidianFire View Post
That pretty much opens up to door for any group of people with the drive and aether to summon anything. Which I think is good. The "beast tribes are the only ones who summon primals" premise has gotten very stale and predictable (same pattern for three expansions). I'd love to see an expansion where a set of "Beast Tribes" are still there but it's everyone else but them is doing the eikon summoning.
To be fair, as you mentioned we already have at least three Primals (Thordan and his Ward, Shinryu, and Phoenix) who have been explicitly summoned by humans rather than Beast Tribes, and arguably others qualify as well (Odin sort of self-summons but uses humans to do it, Sophia came from a cosmopolitan society that was probably at least partly composed of humans given that all three of her Demiurges are humans, Enkidu was summoned by Gilgamesh who's... maybe human?). Beast tribes have several reasons that they are the usual culprit, but probably the three biggest: they tend to be more religious than humans, their technology levels tend to be lower which makes them feel that their gods are the only ones who can protect them, and they do not regularly execute their Tempered which means there's generally a core group in each tribe eager to summon again.

It makes sense that Beast Tribes should more often be Summoning than humans would, but I agree that shoehorning in new tribes of Beastmen just to have a source for a new Primal is getting a bit stale. Still, as long as there's player demand for more Primals to battle, in general it makes more sense to introduce new tribes (or utilize existing tribes that do not yet have a Primal, like the Amal'ja) rather than to have humans do it.