Ah, but you didn't ask the wrong questions. It's just that the story still hasn't presented definitive answers for them.

Are the primals, as we see them, the physical manifestations of the omnipresent consciousness of the six elements of fire, water, ice, wind, lightning and earth?

Or do they appear the way they do simply because that's how their worshippers imagine that they'd look?

The exact definition has been greatly muddied since the appearance of Good King Moggle Mog XII, the "primal" that wasn't actually a primal.

His summoning demonstrates that — with sufficient crystals and a huge amount of collective faith — a group of people could literally cause aether to coalesce into physical form and, more miraculously, the manifestation would even have a mind and personality of its own.

Which leads me to wonder if arcanists with sufficient crystals and willpower could turn an animal-like aetheric entity like carbuncle into a "primal".

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On a side note, I just realised that all these metaphysical questions are similar to Immanuel Kant's musings on phenomena and noumena. Go watch the video and knock yourself out. I know I did, years ago, when I tried to bend my head around the theoretical limits of what is "knowable".