Do primals have souls?

[Anonymoose]

In THE ANCIENT LORE, a primal's crystal core contained the "essence" of a thing that once was - beckoned forth the Lifestream. So - in a sense - they all had souls...just pieces of them, borrowed and warped and plugged into an arcane entity that had no true soul of its own. One entity cannot authentically recreate another via summoning; they always "came back wrong". Even Tiamat's primal Bahamut was a twisted shade of the real thing. The essence of Garuda once belonged to an Allagan general. Ysayle's fantasy of Shiva incorporated motifs borrowed from Halone. The Lambs of Dalamud could even theoretically summon the lesser moon and without knowing it evoke a fragment of the essence of Bahamut.

These concepts partly tie into how the Ultima Weapon and Azys Lla worked. If you contained the part of the shattered soul/memory that responded to a particular summoning, it could not be resummoned. (Yes, if different summoners with a different idea of what they were summoning succeed in getting a shattered fragment you hadn't contained to respond, they might be able to pull it off, but the chances of that actually happening were slim.)

But also primal and soul lore evolved a lot over the years so maybe some of these details aren't quite the same today.

[Cleretic]

In THE ANCIENT LORE, a primal's crystal core contained the "essence" of a thing that once was - beckoned forth the Lifestream. So - in a sense - they all had souls...just pieces of them, borrowed and warped and plugged into an arcane entity that had no true soul of its own.

Everyone please be aware that 'THE ANCIENT LORE' is different from 'the Ancient lore', which in this case vary wildly in their conclusions.

Primals are one of the things that I'd love to hear the original 1.0 plan for. I know that's never going to happen and quite possibly can't (I don't know how many notes from that time even still exist), but it's definitely something they had a vastly different plan for. Possibly not even a big one, too, it's entirely possible they just planned primals to be sort of a low-key sideline thing that comes up every so often.