Shifting and Concerning Moods Regarding the Writing

[Alec97]

You're just super-imposing your fascination with religion/real life religious lore over the game world where in literally dozens of cases the writers/characters specifically state that eikons aren't gods, I dunno what to say if you want to ignore this. And yes, FF14 has an extremely hard/scientific magic/mythology system. Magic is the subject of scientific study, its measured by instruments and quantified in textbooks, aether may as well just be electricity or dark matter or whatever given the level to which it is analyzable, compare this to other magic systems in other settings which are entirely mystical or spiritual where magic comes from spirits or actually gifted by the gods. On a comparative scale FF14's magic system is EXTREMELY codified and is essentially an adjunct to science, ceruleum engines are used next to aether-burners not to mention all the magitek and Allagan magic technology, you really can't get more systemised.

No I'm not nor did I say Eikons are gods, I said the summoning method is summoning a god and therefore it's a distinction without a difference. The word Eikon means representation. If I'm summoning the physical representation of a god I'm therefore summoning a god. If I chose to do it with a fork I would get a fork. It's that simple I don't need super impose anything on it.

What you are doing is saying that because the people in the setting can do summoning magic what they are summoning isn't a real representation of the idea which is false because they still manifesting the being in question it's just a matter of how limiting they are as individuals. The more powerful and intelligent the individual, the more flawless the representation of the idea will be.

Also no FF14s magic system isn't that codified you almost know nothing of how anything works, what you have done is take items which affect everyday peoples lives, weapons of war and resources with select properties and therefore you stating its really codified when the reality is you have no idea how any of it works because it's not important to the setting. In LOTR for example its magic system is soft and its even more detailed than FF14s is. However in Starwars for example it has an incredibly hard and rigid system with documentation on how almost everything functions from starships, shipyards, lightsaber parts, ideologies, species, their anatomy etc. Ff14s lore isn't really explained upon because it's not that important for you to know the minutia of how things operate.

Electricity is a form of aether in the setting because electricity as we know it doesn't exist because it's inherently magical in nature. Also, dark matter isn't provable yet even in our world so we don't even know if it exists, it could be completely made up. Science is derived from the scientific method to help us understand the natural world the setting is inherently different and therefore it doesn't exist. This world has aetherology and it is a source of academic study but it's not science and has very little in common with it philosophically because the rules of the world don't conform to ours. This is why I said it's closer to occultism because that's the closest real-world representation we have to it.