
Originally Posted by
Anonymoose
I've gotta chalk this one up to unanswered at this point. As I said before, it really looks to me like (in September 2010) the "unanticipated" primal-in-question was meant at the time to refer to the nameless dragon now known to be Midgardsormr. The fact that it was a primal that caused the Empire to remain passive was stated as a matter of fact, and we know that the Empire sure wasn't passive when they flew an armada to Silvertear Lake.
Now (in November 2012), we have new information. This dragon was Midgardsormr, who was not a primal; the empire had met real primals before this on other continents; and SE sticks to their story about a primal stopping the advance. This means that either they're changing it up, or that we were left to draw false conclusions in the past. I can't stress this enough: in 2010, the dragon was nameless and could have been anything. In 2012 we know he's not a primal - but did Square Enix know that back then? We don't know.
This can now be approached from two directions. If we approach from the real-world front, it looks like a retcon. It's not a blatant Lara Croftian in-your-face retcon, but a behind the scenes one that simply ripples through information we already had. The information given in September 2010 just linked too damn well to the opening cutscene to not be what they were referring to. However, this doesn't affect the situation if we approach it from a game-world front. Nothing was ever explicitly stated, there's no direct contradiction because we were only left to make inferences before. From the lore front, Midgardsormr is not a primal, and a primal halted this advance at Ala Mhigo. This is all we know and all we can infer.
Can we guess? ... Eeehhhhh, kinda.
We can whip out our map of Eorzea and write off Leviathan and Titan on the other side of the continent, can probably write off Shiva since the snowy areas are also to the West, can probably write off Ifrit since he's further south than even Silvertear Lake, maybe write off Garuda because it looks like they sailed around Gridania and Coerthas on their way to Silvertear... that leaves Ramuh, basically. Ala Mhigo is north-east of Gridania, which means that if they kept on their march, they'd have bumped into the sylph village first... which they do.
However, we see that the sylphs don't summon Ramuh in these years! BOOM! HEADSHOT!!!1! on that theory.
It's up to SE to make this one work. We don't have anywhere near enough info to say who it was if it wasn't Midgardsormr.