Good God, I should not be doing this while I have a headache...



The Echo is not creation magic, nor is it ever stated to be so. Nor is it ever stated that everyone has the potential to unlock it. Here, the text:

What, am I to reveal my plans simply because you asked?
Nay, I think not─though the stars I acknowledge mine. A convenient illusion apt to awaken what little is left of the power that once resided in your sundered souls.

That which you and yours call the Echo.

And an echo it is. Of a symphony. But a fraction of what men, in their completeness, once possessed.

Even those among you who tower over others in the gift have only the faintest trace of it.

But though sundered and forgotten, through death and mocking rebirth, it has persisted. A whisper of our past, burned into your very aether─along with the sight of our end.

Through the rekindling of memory, I have awoken the ability─just as Hydaelyn is wont to do when She has need of new minions.


It seems fairly clear to me that not awakening to the Echo in that moment didn't mean that the majority present just needed to watch a few more star showers before Echo Puberty kicked in. If they don't have it, they can't awaken to it.

Everything primals
I doubt there's any correlation between individuals surviving their primal being defeated versus dissipating and those same individuals possessing the Echo or otherwise. To be frank, I think the whole "dissipation" thing is a stylistic choice. Ysayle dissipated because they wanted her death to look like she was "crying", so to speak. Thordan went out the same way because ceasing to exist out of sheer terror was powerful imagery. Yotsuyu didn't disspate—yes, I checked—because they wanted to have Goesetsu crying over her corpse.

But my point from the beginning is specifically centered on the Echo's ability to control primals, something we learned from Ysayle's summoning of Shiva. This was carried forward all the way to Shadowbringers, first with Zenos backing the creation of the Resonance Chambers specifically to give himself the Echo and then using his Resonant powers to hijack Shinryu, then with Misija using that same technology so she could copy this feat with Gunnhildr and Save the Queen, before copying Ysayle's feat by becoming Gunnhildr herself.

In all of the above cases, the writers are not subtle about the Echo's necessity. Without the Echo, they would not have been able to do this.

Where things get hazy is with the cases where the individual using a primal like this is not known to have the Echo: Louisoix with Phoenix, Thordan with Thordan, Yotsuyu with Tsukuyomi, and Ryne with Shiva.

Thordan and Ryne are both in the odd place of having never explicitly stated to have/not have the Echo, though given Thordan was able to temper the Heaven's Ward long before our fight with him, I'm inclined to believe he did have the Echo.

In Ryne's case, the only scene off the top of my head that suggests she has the Echo is her journey to Amh Araeng with us, wherein we have an Echo vision and Ryne is seen clutching her head just a moment before it. But since Ryne never comments on this after that fact, nor does she ever state that she's had strange visions like this at any point in the story, I'm inclined to believe this one moment is simple misdirection. And as I've also said, there is evidence to suggest she does not have it, some of which, such as her not being able to hear Hydaelyn, is pretty cut and dry.

As for Louisoix and Yotsuyu, they are an incredible mess. The former gets a pass because the whole Phoenix thing was written before they codified the interaction between the Echo and incarnate summoning, and the handwave they used to push away the issue is Louisoix saying that "Phoenix wasn't a real primal". That is a can of worms unto itself, however. As for Yotsuyu, the developers have gone on the record in interviews saying that Tsukuyomi was how Yotsuyu imagined she would be if she were a goddess, or something to that effect. It's a convoluted explanation meant to handwave away why Yotsuyu seemed to be in control, even though she couldn't have been. It would've been simpler to just say she had the Echo and nobody knew, but it is what it is.