Faith, Dynamis, Aether, Summoning

[SannaR]

I would like to think Hope and Faith are emotions of a sort. However this is a touchy subject as there are many who just don't want to talk about Dynamis at all and would rather hide it under the rug. Pretending it doesn't exist just because something the game sort of hinted at at various times only got a name at the 11th hour. Their bias against anything related to Dynamis is so palatable that you can taste the bitterness while watching their videos. Or when you read their posts. No, Cleretic I'm not talking about you.

I think there had been a discussion about what summoning and other things are made up of and I am on the side of a lot of things are probably a mishmash of both.

[Eisi]

I would like to think Hope and Faith are emotions of a sort. However this is a touchy subject as there are many who just don't want to talk about Dynamis at all and would rather hide it under the rug. Pretending it doesn't exist just because something the game sort of hinted at at various times only got a name at the 11th hour. Their bias against anything related to Dynamis is so palatable that you can taste the bitterness while watching their videos. Or when you read their posts. No, Cleretic I'm not talking about you.

I think there had been a discussion about what summoning and other things are made up of and I am on the side of a lot of things are probably a mishmash of both.

To be honest I am confused because of the Endsinger fight and I may have extrapolated too much from that. I personally understand that Dynamis isn't well liked, because I just don't understand it at all. I couldn't write a story with dynamis in mind, because I just don't understand how it works, when it works and when not, the rules it's based on.

Regarding summoning, maybe it is so faith based in almost all cases because creation magic works on a kind of law of attraction basis? So you imagining things so strongly that you believe them entirely is what makes them possible? So creation magic is basically faith as well?

[Cleretic]

Their bias against anything related to Dynamis is so palatable that you can taste the bitterness while watching their videos. Or when you read their posts. No, Cleretic I'm not talking about you.

Wait what? I'm very confused, I don't know how I connect here.

I think the community has a tendency to over-connect things to dynamis and try to explain everything with it, regardless of actual logic or evidence. To an extent, not really anyone's fault--dynamis is deliberately written to be very vague, and it exists in close conceptual proximity to other things that were a little loose and vague, or did have explanations that were kinda hard to find. But other times I think it's just people desperately wanting the cool new thing to connect to absolutely everything, when it just... doesn't.

Primals are, I think, actually that last one. We got an exact explanation of what faith does in that equation--MikkoAkure pretty much nailed it, it forms the 'blueprint' of what's summoned rather than any of the energy. It was explained in that scene outside the Ragnarok with Livingway; it substitutes the exacting, specific requirements of creation magic with the more loose but no less fervent requirements of faith. When you think about the actual nature of primals, it makes sense why that works better; primals more often need to be a group summoning, and while it's hard to get an entire group on the same page regarding something like 'where the liver is', it's very easy to get a group of believers in a collective faith on the same page of 'our god is an awesome god'. Also remember that primals don't need to pass a crucial requirement of lifeform-creation magic as we know it: fitting into the ecosystem. It doesn't matter if Ramuh's biology doesn't make any sense, because nobody needs Ramuh to live as a normal life form.


While not related to this thread, my personal bugbear with dynamis is people insisting every single LB is and always has been dynamis. Sure, some of them might be; that one against Lahabrea in the new 2.0 ending, that tank LB3 against the Endsinger (although everything in that fight was dynamis-fuelled, so it's not special). But there's multiple that can't be; the Seat of Sacrifice boss' LBs, the Ktisis duty support. Almost all our LB3s already have explanations, most of them excluding dynamis, although they're only in the Encyclopedia Eorzea and to my knowledge haven't been written down anywhere else, official or not. But despite all this, 'LBs are dynamis' keeps getting pushed just because it seems cool. In fact I think it genuinely stifles discussion on what dynamis actually is doing; I think Manawall's description sounds exactly like it's dynamis-fuelled, but that gets ignored because saying that Meteor is dynamis is way more exciting, even if its description says it's not.