Miqo'te gender balance on the First

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Originally Posted by ItMe

Lol, then I guess your answer is "[f]or reasons yet unclear, female Miqo'te are as numerous as males, a common trait among Eorzea's races."

Seriously though... Your answer is that that quote is a meta joke. It's both a reference to the fact that players could only play female Miqo'te for quite awhile, and to the fact that there are many many more players rocking female Miqo'te than male ones.
It's in reference to player built demographics, not anything tied to game lore.

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It's definitely a lore thing considering that until 2.0, you could only play as female miqo'te. This being a hold over from XI which had the same lore that male Mithra were really rare. In fact, only one male mithra appears the whole game. They just backtracked a bit in XIV so that people could play male miqo'te if they wanted to, but lore wise males are still less common than females. It's even noted in Keeper of the Moon lore that they have up to 10 suffixes for boys that are born, but they rarely all get used because females are born much more often than males.

I feel like I heard or read somewhere that miqo'te were experimented on by the allegans? If I'm not imagining that I heard that, maybe their fertility rate was messed with for whatever reason. And as the First never had allegans, the mystel continued on as normal.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

(Again, "miqo'te have more girls than boys" is probably just a Doylist excuse as for why there were no male miqo'te in 1.x, just like "Hrothgar produce almost no females, so the ones that are born are always secreted away and kept safe" and "Male Viera exclusively live reclusive lives as forest protectors." Lore tends to take a backseat to mechanics, not the other way around.)

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If that was the case, then all the post-1.0 sources would have just retconned it. 1.0 didn't have female roegadyn or female highlanders either and there's nothing saying that there's a lower amount of those genders compared to the general population and both are equally represented throughout Eorzea. Highlanders even got a retcon. In 1.0 it was said that the only highlanders that made it to our part of Eorzea were the male mercenaries. But that tidbit doesn't exist anywhere from ARR-onwards.

I think this is one of those lore facts that you're not supposed to think about too much. As far as we know, male miqo'te could be over-represented in the NPCs that we encounter in Norvrandt just because a dev wanted there to be more of them. Not all miqo'te are necessarily tribal either, Limsa Lominsa has the greatest concentration of seeker miqo'te in Eorzea and we encounter none of them out in the wilds living like the U tribe. Of the 2 male Lominsan miqo'te we meet, one wanders the world and the other lives with his sister and one of them mentions having a normal family with a mom and dad living together.

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Originally Posted by Stepjam

I feel like I heard or read somewhere that miqo'te were experimented on by the allegans? If I'm not imagining that I heard that, maybe their fertility rate was messed with for whatever reason. And as the First never had allegans, the mystel continued on as normal.

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The only miqo'te we know for a fact was altered by the Allagans was G'raha's ancestor, who was given the royal Allagan genetic marker by Salina back in the 3rd Astral/4th Umbral Era. The Allagans apparently hated the miqo'te and kicked them out of their lands so I guess other stuff going on is possible but it's just speculation at this point.

It's been joked about that the Miqo'te were the result of Allagan experimentation. Same with Lalafell. Clearly that's not the case, as they've existed since the Sundering, although, notably, there doesn't appear to be a First equivalent of the Garleans...

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Originally Posted by Fenral

Wait, 1.0 had male Miqo'te NPCs? Why don't I remember that? I thought Merlwyb was the only non-playable race option, and she was only added after work on ARR started. (Never mind Minfilia, the female Higlander with a Midlander model.)

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I only said "fewer than 5" to hedge my bets because I didn't remember whether the U tribe was there back then or not, there might as well have been none :P

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Originally Posted by Cilia

That said I'm still sold more on the idea of Seekers / Keepers being based on lions / every other feline. Aside from the squick involved, the incest implied in Seeker societies would eventually lead to them all becoming sterile and the species dying out (not to mention ugly as sin). Just look at the Hapsburg dynasty to see what generations of inbreeding produces.

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The squick involved is purely a human thing, many other animals have no or very few instincts about incest. Also, given that in FFXIV matter is literally made of magic (aether), there's no good reason to believe their genetics have exactly the same problems and consequences ours does. Miqo'te may as well not have inbreeding genetic problems that would cause incest squick to evolve, or maybe they culturally just kill the genetically defective offspring or something (although I think that would've been mentioned before).

Either way it seems like "this squicks me" is a terrible reason to believe or not believe a thing; either it's true or it's not, how you feel about it doesn't matter.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

(Again, "miqo'te have more girls than boys" is probably just a Doylist excuse as for why there were no male miqo'te in 1.x, just like "Hrothgar produce almost no females, so the ones that are born are always secreted away and kept safe" and "Male Viera exclusively live reclusive lives as forest protectors." Lore tends to take a backseat to mechanics, not the other way around.)

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S...ure but that doesn't mean I'll go "I guess the game is lying when it says there are fewer female hrothgar born then males", just because the reason they decided to make that lore tidbit be the way it is is "mechanics" doesn't make it not canon. And the viera case is even more drastic because they even have a canonical ratio of boys to girls in, like, how many actually exist. It's canon lore.

As a final aside, here's a compendium on miqo'te lore including the sources of every bit of it (Keepers are there too). We seem to have a pretty overwhelming number of canon sources that confirm that males just are in fact way less numerous than females and no two ways about it.

Everyone is ignoring the big reason for the Mystel male/female ratio on the First: the Mystel we know about are part of an agrarian society, not hunter-gatherers. Perhaps it's been that way since the Sundering - social hierarchies are not written into our genetics.

Yeah, the first encyclopedia mentions that they were persecuted by the Allagans and mostly driven from Eorzea to Ilsabard, which is why they later had a migration back during the umbral era of ice. It also seems like they had a habit of conscripting male Miqo'te, as it's mentioned G'raha's ancestor and "his few brethren" were all forcibly enlisted. So if we combine this with the idea of the Allagans altering the Miqo'te genetic makeup, it looks like they were going for total population control.

Keep in mind, Salina also combined her DNA into the G tribe after the calamity and ruination of the Allagan empire, so it seems like they were well versed in tampering with Miqo'te genetics to have been able to do it with so few resources available.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Everyone is ignoring the big reason for the Mystel male/female ratio on the First: the Mystel we know about are part of an agrarian society, not hunter-gatherers. Perhaps it's been that way since the Sundering - social hierarchies are not written into our genetics.

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The only actual tribes we see as hunter gatherers are the U and M tribes. If this was the case, and all miqo'te are hunter gatherers, then why don't we see more men in any of all of the other miqo'te "tribes"? I don't think the city miqo'te in Limsa are moonlighting as hunters or are just the rejects from actual hidden tribes in La Noscea that we don't know about.

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Originally Posted by Fenral

although, notably, there doesn't appear to be a First equivalent of the Garleans...

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We don't know that. We only see what we see. It's entirely possible that there was a Garlean equivalent on the First and we just don't know about it because they all died in the flood. Same with goblins, kojin, vanu vanu, and all the others we haven't seen. There's a good chance all of Source races also existed in some form on the First, barring artificially created or enhanced ones like the ixali (and sylphs?) and outsiders like the dragons.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

The only actual tribes we see as hunter gatherers are the U and M tribes. If this was the case, and all miqo'te are hunter gatherers, then why don't we see more men in any of all of the other miqo'te "tribes"? I don't think the city miqo'te in Limsa are moonlighting as hunters or are just the rejects from actual hidden tribes in La Noscea that we don't know about.

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Pretty sure canonically all the 26 Seeker tribes are hunter-gatherers. Keepers are up in the air.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

12,500 years (approximately) have passed since the Sundering. While that may not be enough time to produce major physiological differences, I'd argue it's enough for genetic drift enough for Miqo'te to produce more females than males compared to Mystel.

That said I'm still sold more on the idea of Seekers / Keepers being based on lions / every other feline. Aside from the squick involved, the incest implied in Seeker societies would eventually lead to them all becoming sterile and the species dying out (not to mention ugly as sin). Just look at the Hapsburg dynasty to see what generations of inbreeding produces.

(Again, "miqo'te have more girls than boys" is probably just a Doylist excuse as for why there were no male miqo'te in 1.x, just like "Hrothgar produce almost no females, so the ones that are born are always secreted away and kept safe" and "Male Viera exclusively live reclusive lives as forest protectors." Lore tends to take a backseat to mechanics, not the other way around.)

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I mean, if you want them to be like lions, lions inbreed all of the time. Look it up. Seekers of Sun, functioning as we are told, inbreed. Keepers of the Moon might not? I'm not really too familiar with Keepers other than they live in family units based around Moms, rather than Male lead harems.