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Description
This one, and the two previous Yellow Eco acolytes, illustrate some thinking I had regarding how Jak & Daxter things might work. Following is a little pseudo-philosophical (more precisely, ontological) micro-essay.

I like to think that Eco in Jak & Daxter is more than just arbitrary pickups that exist because the game needs pickups, and that its colourful declinations correspond to fundamental aspects of physics and/or biological life on the planet. In that regard, most of them make sense but Yellow Eco always frustrated me. Green Eco is Life and thus replenishes health, Blue Eco is Motion and thus increases speed, Red Eco is a bit more ambiguous but could be Strength (as in the strong force that binds matter together, making things more solid, harder to break and logically harder-hitting), and even Dark Eco could be seen as some metaphor of extreme Entropy that breaks things or makes them decay – the parallel with nuclear energy, critical mass and radioactive waste being less than subtle in the games. But Yellow Eco is just… the Dakka stuff ? That makes you shoot fireballs ? And when you put types of Eco into a gun that shoots Eco ordnance that reflects aspects of the corresponding colour, Yellow is just putting "Shooting" into a shooty thing that makes it… shootier or some shit ? Come on ?

Until it dawned on me that Yellow Eco could represent Focus, and corollarily Precision and Range ; concentrated action towards a specific, premeditated goal. Think about it : if you want to catch an object, throw a stone, visually identify something, the actual gesture manifests a transfer of intention from you towards something else. And usually, the closer you are, the better the chances for success, while being further away usually hinders the gesture's efficacity ; greater focus then being one way to couteract how distance makes the action harder. Basically : Success is [Gesture x Focus] > [Gesture x Distance], Failure is [GxF] < [GxD]. Up from a certain point, if D is too great, its factor is too important for the natural ability of someone to focus their action to counteract it, and the action becomes impossible : ie, hitting a target too far, punching something that is too far (or too fast), identifying a sound too remote.
But, if Yellow Eco is a contribution to the Focus factor that makes it open-ended and virtually limitless, then it becomes possible to overcome the natural limit that is distance. Focus makes you able to accurately shoot things at a greater range, with less dispersion, a smaller margin of error ; but in the same way that smaller distance requires less focus, more focus gives more range to the point that Jak is able to "Punch" things that are out of punching ranges. The Fireballs are not fireballs, they're the prolonging of his range of effective action (in this case, punching things) outside of his natural limit, due to much increased focus. But this is also why the Blaster mod is the most accurate of the Morphgun mods and why it has the best range : its ammunition translates this absolute, almost infaillible focus of action. What you point it at, it cannot miss. In that same Vein, all Eco sages in the first game master a type of Eco and can apparently channel it into an energy beam, but the Yellow Sage is the only one who channels it through a specific type of tool : a rifle with a visor, again illustrating that overcoming of the natural range of action of the body.

The metaphor holds rather nicely when one tries to connect Eco types to elements of nature that seem to correspond. In the Green Sage's hut are plants (which are green and living) from which he seems to harvest surpluses of Green Eco. The Blue Sage's hut is planted next to a cascade (water being blue in the games, and giving motion that can be transformed through a watermill to harvets Blue Eco). The Red Sage's hut is located in a Volcanic Crater full of Lava, which could be seen as a very destructive thing, but it is also Lava's extreme heat that allows the formation of the hardest rock, the strongest steel ; the Lava mantle has such strength that it slowly but inexorably moves continents, quakes the ground, grows fire spitting mountains ; and on a smaller scale, such heat can also turn water into steam that has tremedous pushing power, once in a steam engine. It seems logical that Lava, the pushing strength of the mineral world, has a connexion to the Eco of strength itself.
And then we come to Yellow Eco, the production process of which is never seen, but might be related to fire, which again makes little sense to me (Fire not being a very focused thing, more wildly random, unpredictable and entropy-inducing), until… until you envision the sun, which is a great ball of fire but also produces light and heat that travel such a distance, they can reach us. Light helps us see and indirectly increases our potential for focusing actions. Sunligh can also be focused thanks to a lens, making it able to heat up a surface so mightily that it could catch fire. Yellow Eco could be a byproduct harvested from sunlight or firelight, once focused – a focus that it would retain. Going a little further, it could be very possible that Jak & Daxter's world's sun is nothing but a huge orb of Yellow Eco, but we're straying away from the subject. Yellow Eco now has a more fundamental theme than "shooting", and a possible natural source that could fit the newfound theme : focus.

This is when I started thinking that Eco acolytes should hold life philosophies that articulate with the type of Eco that they favour. The Green ones would have a conception of the world as ever-living, growing, thriving, wilting, dying and starting anew in an endless cycle. They might kill, but would mostly choose between "Heal and let Live/Die" (Life and Death being the same thing). The Blue ones would envision the cosmos as an everlasting sum of movement, and base their lifestyle on continuous motion, progress, never stagnating in the same place. The Red ones would focus more on which forces are stronger, which ones can be braved, tamed, or on the contrary to which forces one must submit, having no possible way to counter them. Say, the planet's motion.
Finally, the Yellow Acolytes would strive to increase their focus, precision, the perfection of everything they do, based on the argument according to which throwing a punch focused enough will hit even what it could not logically hit. Yellow Eco would then represent more than just "Shooting things". It would represent how absolute focus and perfection of execution overcomes natural limits, and could thus be an end in itself.

As of this Acolyte ? She's not a philosopher. She just has an eyepatch, a longcoat, a long whip and a pistol. Because pseudo-philosophical ramblings aside, Yellow Eco is still incredibly convenient for shooting things.

Description
This one, and the two previous Yellow Eco acolytes, illustrate some thinking I had regarding how Jak & Daxter things might work. Following is a little pseudo-philosophical (more precisely, ontological) micro-essay.

I like to think that Eco in Jak & Daxter is more than just arbitrary pickups that exist because the game needs pickups, and that its colourful declinations correspond to fundamental aspects of physics and/or biological life on the planet. In that regard, most of them make sense but Yellow Eco always frustrated me. Green Eco is Life and thus replenishes health, Blue Eco is Motion and thus increases speed, Red Eco is a bit more ambiguous but could be Strength (as in the strong force that binds matter together, making things more solid, harder to break and logically harder-hitting), and even Dark Eco could be seen as some metaphor of extreme Entropy that breaks things or makes them decay – the parallel with nuclear energy, critical mass and radioactive waste being less than subtle in the games. But Yellow Eco is just… the Dakka stuff ? That makes you shoot fireballs ? And when you put types of Eco into a gun that shoots Eco ordnance that reflects aspects of the corresponding colour, Yellow is just putting "Shooting" into a shooty thing that makes it… shootier or some shit ? Come on ?

Until it dawned on me that Yellow Eco could represent Focus, and corollarily Precision and Range ; concentrated action towards a specific, premeditated goal. Think about it : if you want to catch an object, throw a stone, visually identify something, the actual gesture manifests a transfer of intention from you towards something else. And usually, the closer you are, the better the chances for success, while being further away usually hinders the gesture's efficacity ; greater focus then being one way to couteract how distance makes the action harder. Basically : Success is [Gesture x Focus] > [Gesture x Distance], Failure is [GxF] < [GxD]. Up from a certain point, if D is too great, its factor is too important for the natural ability of someone to focus their action to counteract it, and the action becomes impossible : ie, hitting a target too far, punching something that is too far (or too fast), identifying a sound too remote.
But, if Yellow Eco is a contribution to the Focus factor that makes it open-ended and virtually limitless, then it becomes possible to overcome the natural limit that is distance. Focus makes you able to accurately shoot things at a greater range, with less dispersion, a smaller margin of error ; but in the same way that smaller distance requires less focus, more focus gives more range to the point that Jak is able to "Punch" things that are out of punching ranges. The Fireballs are not fireballs, they're the prolonging of his range of effective action (in this case, punching things) outside of his natural limit, due to much increased focus. But this is also why the Blaster mod is the most accurate of the Morphgun mods and why it has the best range : its ammunition translates this absolute, almost infaillible focus of action. What you point it at, it cannot miss. In that same Vein, all Eco sages in the first game master a type of Eco and can apparently channel it into an energy beam, but the Yellow Sage is the only one who channels it through a specific type of tool : a rifle with a visor, again illustrating that overcoming of the natural range of action of the body.

The metaphor holds rather nicely when one tries to connect Eco types to elements of nature that seem to correspond. In the Green Sage's hut are plants (which are green and living) from which he seems to harvest surpluses of Green Eco. The Blue Sage's hut is planted next to a cascade (water being blue in the games, and giving motion that can be transformed through a watermill to harvets Blue Eco). The Red Sage's hut is located in a Volcanic Crater full of Lava, which could be seen as a very destructive thing, but it is also Lava's extreme heat that allows the formation of the hardest rock, the strongest steel ; the Lava mantle has such strength that it slowly but inexorably moves continents, quakes the ground, grows fire spitting mountains ; and on a smaller scale, such heat can also turn water into steam that has tremedous pushing power, once in a steam engine. It seems logical that Lava, the pushing strength of the mineral world, has a connexion to the Eco of strength itself.
And then we come to Yellow Eco, the production process of which is never seen, but might be related to fire, which again makes little sense to me (Fire not being a very focused thing, more wildly random, unpredictable and entropy-inducing), until… until you envision the sun, which is a great ball of fire but also produces light and heat that travel such a distance, they can reach us. Light helps us see and indirectly increases our potential for focusing actions. Sunligh can also be focused thanks to a lens, making it able to heat up a surface so mightily that it could catch fire. Yellow Eco could be a byproduct harvested from sunlight or firelight, once focused – a focus that it would retain. Going a little further, it could be very possible that Jak & Daxter's world's sun is nothing but a huge orb of Yellow Eco, but we're straying away from the subject. Yellow Eco now has a more fundamental theme than "shooting", and a possible natural source that could fit the newfound theme : focus.

This is when I started thinking that Eco acolytes should hold life philosophies that articulate with the type of Eco that they favour. The Green ones would have a conception of the world as ever-living, growing, thriving, wilting, dying and starting anew in an endless cycle. They might kill, but would mostly choose between "Heal and let Live/Die" (Life and Death being the same thing). The Blue ones would envision the cosmos as an everlasting sum of movement, and base their lifestyle on continuous motion, progress, never stagnating in the same place. The Red ones would focus more on which forces are stronger, which ones can be braved, tamed, or on the contrary to which forces one must submit, having no possible way to counter them. Say, the planet's motion.
Finally, the Yellow Acolytes would strive to increase their focus, precision, the perfection of everything they do, based on the argument according to which throwing a punch focused enough will hit even what it could not logically hit. Yellow Eco would then represent more than just "Shooting things". It would represent how absolute focus and perfection of execution overcomes natural limits, and could thus be an end in itself.

As of this Acolyte ? She's not a philosopher. She just has an eyepatch, a longcoat, a long whip and a pistol. Because pseudo-philosophical ramblings aside, Yellow Eco is still incredibly convenient for shooting things.