Summon Names

Sum1sgruj

Sum1sgruj

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Most of the summons in FF are named after deities. Yet,, most of them have no relevance whatsoever to them. So why not just have regular names?

For example: Bahamut. In mythology, it is a giant fish.
Or Shiva. The only relevance is that the summon is female, like her.

There are a few that make sense, however. Like Leviathan= big sea creature.

Am I the only one that finds this odd? Or am I the only one missing something lol
 
I had to upload a screenshot of the first bit of my post, as I was having forum issues and a thread glitch again... I couldn't be bothered to wait a month and to create hassle for loads of mods this time. Terrible glitch, but hey.

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Through giving them names and basing appearances (loosely, if at all) on our planet's mythology people can connect and recognise what these creatures are and what they are capable of.

Some of them are quite strange and barely represent what inspired them (Shiva, for example, is nothing like Shiva), but over the course of the Final Fantasy series they have made them their own, and they are now separate but recognisable characters in their own rights. Shiva is not Shiva, but is an FF Shiva, for example.

You'll find that most summons make sense to an extent, but they are not exact recreations of the mythical material, though they are often still very recognisable or can be connected to them.
 
In fact, Bahamut was actually not related to the Mythological version, but to a version seen in Dungeons and Dragons, in a sense, so was Tiamat, which actually does look like it's mythological version (a dragon/sea serpent, and a Babylonian goddess of the ocean) While summons may look different from the source material, over the course of time, it has evolved into becoming more a part of it's culture.

Essentially I just reiterated what Argor said.
 
Shiva is not a female in the Hindu religion. HE is the god of destruction. The female Shiva in final fantasy bears absolutely no resemblance to Lord Shiva.
 
I wouldn't say no resemblance whatsoever. They're all blue. Shiva's blue. :wacky:

...nowait that's Vishnu. :hmmm:

Bahamut was the one that threw me off the most. I always thought it came from an ancient lore of dragons and then what... it's a fish. 8(

Some DO make sense though like Leviathan, Kujata, Fenrir, Odin, Ifrit to some extent...
 
So why not just have regular names?
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What does that mean? ... Regular names like Tom? :awesome:

Hehehe. *Summoner summons Tom. Tom uses Mega Flare*

Though I guess it is possible to do that in Final Fantasy X, if memory serves me right. The party were allowed to name the aeons, no?

But moving back on topic, I don't actually bother so much about the relevance of the given name of the summons to their appearance in the game. I simply take it as a sort of name, and just left it be. All I thought about it was that it sounded cool. :D
 
strifehart said:
Shiva is not a female in the Hindu religion. HE is the god of destruction. The female Shiva in final fantasy bears absolutely no resemblance to Lord Shiva.
Click to expand...

See, that makes it even more ridiculous.

Summon names should be respected by what the summon is. There are sooo many gods/goddesses that basically represent everything from the fiery elements all the way to door jams and fingernails.

wth
 
Sum1sgruj said:
See, that makes it even more ridiculous.

Summon names should be respected by what the summon is. There are sooo many gods/goddesses that basically represent everything from the fiery elements all the way to door jams and fingernails.

wth
Click to expand...


I think in Shiva's case they struggled to think of an ice goddess that they could use. I don't think that there are many ice goddesses, or goddesses associated with ice. They could have used Skadi, perhaps, but (commonly known, at least) goddesses of the ice element are hard to think of. If they were to dwell too much into the obscure then any benefit of having the audience recognise and understand the significance of the names / appearances of some summons would be lost.

It's interesting why they even decided to go for a female at all, with all of this taken into account. Our image of the cold and intelligent ice-queen is quite a popular image for characters in our current age, I suppose.

Personally, as silly as it sounds, they may have picked Shiva because it looks a bit like 'shiver' (although not pronounced as such), and with blue being a colour for gods in Hindu art they thought it would make sense to have a Hindu-esque summon, but give her the name of a god with whom she has no connections with. The Hindu design of Shiva is very noticeable in some of her appearances, though the connection with the actual god is pretty much non-existent.

They could have used another deity, or even a male, but ice deities aren't that common, and they already had Odin from the Nordic pantheon as a regular summon in the FF series, and they probably wanted to add more variety.

What I’m getting at here is that they don’t always abide by the rules of making a summon look, act, or resemble in any way what they are named after. More often than not there is usually some sort of a tie, but it isn’t always obvious. There may be other reasons for naming a summon, and sometimes the reason for the references are only known by SE, and will likely never be revealed.
 
I think another important point to consider is the fact that summons weren't introduced into the series until FFIII. At this point, Final Fantasy had already established itself as a significant franchise. I think Square might have felt that throwing in names of various mythological figures and revamping what they stood for might have been OK. They might have believed that they would take on a presence of their own. Of course, that's a hell of a lot of foresight to have.
 
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