Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
Except that, again, neither continent actually believes in the Auspices/Tural Vidraal as deities in the way we understand it. Some Auspices are incidentally worshipped more as an after-the-fact thing (specifically the Four Lords, probably because of the whole Tenzen story), but there's others that are completely unknown, and the Tural Vidraal don't even have that; they're treated as a natural threat, like an apex predator.

There's no aspect of faith in either Auspices or Tural Vidraals, except in the sense that we have faith in something like gravity; it's an observed fact, a Thing That Happens. The Pilgrim's Traverse has put forward a way that itself could be influenced by belief, but that's not even a proven fact about the subject that idea came up about. Applying it to the Auspices and Tural Vidraal is just supposition on top of supposition; it can't be treated as agreed-on supplemental evidence.

That quote is literally too vague to make anything out of, especially given it was part of an unscripted interview from seven years ago. It should not be treated as gospel above what the game itself says.
You're conflating Religious belief with Faith. They're explicitly not the same thing. I would remind you that Enkidu during the Gilgamesh fight on the bridge during the Hildibrand questline was, by all measures, a Primal born solely of Gilgamesh wanting to see his friend that badly. zero deification involved in that case. (And ridiculous as the hildibrand questlines are, they're still canon.) The only thing that's required is collective belief in a thing strong enough for it to begin to have effects, even on things that are not already primals. This capacity to influence non-primals is something we also see in the Archbishop, who explicitly tempered the Heaven's Ward even before he took the eye they already had out of it's resting place, empowered by the collective faith of Ishgard in the Archbishop's post within the church. Similarly, Bahamut wasn't a god, but a Dragon, and was the single most powerful primal we've seen aside from the big two

Belief in a deity does make it easier to concentrate Faith, certainly, but it's not required that the target be believed to be a god or similar for Faith to influence them, only that there be enough belief in a thing to pass some sort of threshold that we can't fully quantify presently, (and we know that said threshold exists because it took the accumulation of three artifacts of Susano coming together for him to manifest without ANY deliberate summoning effort. He just MADE HIMSELF when enough targets of faith in him came together.) It's mentioned in many places, including the lore books, that the Far East has widespread belief in the way that Auspices come to exist, (explicitly, they believe in the process that Auspices go through as part of their local religious beliefs and mythology, along with belief in basically everything else ALSO having spirits.) which would absolutely qualify as collective Faith for the purposes of Primal manifestation.

This all lines up with what we see from that explanation in the interview, as well.

I should add a note though that when I refer to Faith in this context, it might be more appropriate to call it Belief.