A brief treatise on Eikons 2: Their unseen influence

[Shadotterdan]

Note: Eikon here refers to all summons, I don't much like Primal due to regarding it as theologically inaccurate.

So one question that I'm sure has been on people's minds regarding eikons is on the nature of tempering (or blessed, drowned etc) and such individuals coming about before the summoning of the creature in question.

Prior to summoning, many beastmen tribes kidnap people to be tempered with the implication being that more believers will assist in the summoning. Additionally there is a case in preventing soldiers from being drowned by Leviathan, with the serpent not summoned at the time and the process appearing to have a lower success rate.


My current theory is that the belief of the summoners in question creates a sort of body-less existance. Their soul is there but without suffecient aether they have no body to use their full abilities. In this form however they can grant boons to their worshippers, temper people, and possibly other things, with the effects seeming to center around objects of worship.

It also seems to answer the question of why an eikon when resummoned retains it's memories and original form. Only the body has been destroyed with the soul still existing.

Thoughts? Arguments? Counterpoints?

[Cilia]

Well, it was explained in Minfilia and Urianger's lecture on the differences between mortals, Primals / Elder Primals / Eikons, and the Ascians. The Primals do keep their consciousness in the aether; more than likely it's tied to their worshipers. That is to say if a Primal is forgotten, or it has no tempered individuals to worship it, it will cease to exist. This is why "Elder Primals" are so rare and odd - they need worshippers to maintain even aetherial existence, but the civilizations that spawned them no longer exist. In the case of both Elder Primals (Bahamut and Sephirot) thus far, they had worshipers kept alive in stasis; the same can be assumed true of the other two. (Or is Sephirot an Eikon? I think he is... but that's not really the subject here...)

(Odin is an oddity, given he has no active worshipers.)

Pretty sure Primals can't temper people if they lack a corporeal manifestation. The tempered (etc.) Spoken we find are likely leftovers from a previous summoning. I'd need some hard evidence to believe otherwise.

Granting boons... possibly. Plausibly. Lots of Kobold skills refer to Titan, and the Amalj'aa do have the Ifrit's Beacons and such. I don't recall much else.

[RobinMalvin]

I do believe that primals need to be summoned first into corporeal form before they can 'claim' worshippers. The evidence is shown during our first primal encounter with Ifrit; the Amal'ja summoned him to temper us and the captive Flames, and it's only after we prove resistant to tempering that Ifrit decided to kill us, having apparently being warned by Ascians about us 'unbelievers'.

Ethys Asher made some interesting theory in the end of this video, which may explain the difference between primals and eikons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaAEXX6ZLsk

[Enkidoh]

Which is actually different to how Ifrit's first encounter with the player in 1.0 played out, in that he was rather more obstinate and, after discovering his attempt to temper the player didn't work and that the Ascians had warned him of them, he also added a few extra tidbits that were not mentioned in ARR - that not only did the Ascians tell him to spare us (for some unknown reason), that also the 'godless blessed' were capable of summoning their own Primal, something that Ifrit found repulsive and forced the player to swear they would never do. Whether this is still canon remains to be seen though, given the fact that it was not mentioned in ARR, seems to lean more towards the retcon side of the scale though.

[Rocl]

While certainly not its intended meaning at the time, perhaps 1.0 Ifrit's order to spare us was done with the having Echo-blessed repeatedly slay Primals to feed Dalamud. Naturally, I don't think the Paragons would've filled a Primal in on the whole plan, but the survival of those with the Echo might've been some kind of gambit in the Ascian's plan.

(If I remember rightly, we were the provocateurs vs Ifrit in 1.0 after the battle was actually released. Louisoix sends us to go slay Ifrit before he can do anything, which is different than, say, our encounter with Garuda in 1.0, who we seek out after she attacks Quarrymill.)

EDIT: I actually went and looked up the reasonings for each It Kills with Fire and each one is different, lol. For Flames, the Ossuary claims Ifrit is behind Dalamud's change and to test their theory you should go kill him. For Adders, the task of defeating Ifrit is meant to be an overture to the other Grand Companies in hope of restoring the Eorzean Alliance. And the Maelstrom? Wary of a Gridanian trick, they would have you seek out the visitor who claims to have the knowledge to slay Primals (Louisoix) and ascertain whether he's the real deal or not--Gridania wants to use the visitor as the beginnings of an Alliance.

So, it seems like, in 1.0 Lord Errant, Ifrit didn't kill us on orders from the Ascian because "reasons." In 1.19, the Echo-blessed adventurer who would become the Warrior of Light seeks out and destroys Ifrit as detailed above; and then yadda yadda Ifrit is aggressive in 2.0.

I have little doubt this is me attempting to retrofit Ifrit's dialogue, but it isn't unreasonable imo.

[Shadotterdan]

Well, while we have seen a summoning done to temper people, a number of beastman quests involve foiling plans to temper individuals. If the eikon was being summoned again I'm sure that story wise we would be seeing more concern from the grand companies. There's also the tempered individual who was working to make summoning Ifrit possible before the fight with him, and the Sahagin quest where you have to rescue a bunch of soldiers before they are drownded with Leviathan nowhere in sight.

It seems to me that tempering without an actual summon is much more difficult and prone to failure

[Cilia]

When they send us on quests to stop people from being tempered, I'm of the mind that they're going to summon the Primal in question. Story-wise yeah, it would make sense for the GCs to be more involved if that were the case... but if that were the case we'd basically be doing nothing but fighting Primals over and over (and over and over), which would make for a pretty boring story, neé?

I don't recall any Spoken being tempered before the Ifrit fight - there was just a corrupt Brass Blade and a thug who intended to sell us out to the Amalj'aa, but got double-crossed and tempered in turn. (And we were the only survivors of the mission thanks to the Echo... putting on the PTSD early!)

[Shadotterdan]

I thought the corrupt brass blade was tempered. Also, the quest I keep referring to you actually has you saving the soldiers in the middle of being tempered, with you being too late for most of them.

[Toranja]

There was an official response somewhere about how people were being tempered without an actual summon. I think it was in the same article about "why tempered, drowned, etc." on Gamerescape.

[Cilia]

I'd like the quest name and article for cross-referencing; I won't be able to get back to you until ~0230-0300 EDT though. ("Swing shift" is a bitch, and it's only going to get worse when we go to graveyard "alternate" shift in a couple months.)