Is the U-Tribe at the Forgotten Springs an outlier with Nunh Leadership?

[Fenral]

I can't make much of a guess on whether leadership often defers to Tias or is a mixed bag of Tias, Nunhs, and perhaps even women by tribe, but I can guess that if your daily responsibilities include being studding out to miqo'te by the score, most days you'd struggle to manage a door handle without fainting, never mind a civil office.

One background NPC in Forgotten Springs remarks that U'odh cares more about politics than his "duty." My guess is that nunhs are typically prohibited from activities that keep them from their primary function, and U'odh is merely an exception.

He's still the only NPC nunh in the entire game, though, so I suppose the simplest explanation is that merely being available for interaction with PCs makes a male Miqo'te an exception, so we can't actually treat any of them as accurate illustrations of established lore.

tl;dr, most nunhs are too busy shagging to hand out quests and lore tidbits.

[Kaiser-Ace]

The way I see it, if the U tribe is a "Might is Right" society, regardless of patriarchal or matriarchal heritage, it only makes since that some one who had killed TWO GODS would be considered the best leader candidate but that in and of it's self ONLY works in a might based society.

If any other tribe where the arts of war (A Male Based Profession anyway historically) were shunned and looked down on as "Vulgar Qualities" then the war like breeding males would be almost guaranteed to be bared from leadership. Not to mention when you're THE Breeding Male then your death results in your killer replacing you.

So it's possible most wouldn't live long at all because by the time they got "Old" (30-40ish in human year) then a younger male in his biological peek would challenge you and (most likely) win the breeding spot for him self. But out friend U'odh has killed TWO GODS so the amount of people brave (or stupid) enough to fight him are few and far between and the few that do may infact end up losing because of his superior combat experience.

This occasionally happens in the wilds of Earth as well when a particular Male is capable of continuously winning long after their physical prime and only after that strength finally gives out are they usurped.

[JeniLinsky]

If any other tribe where the arts of war (A Male Based Profession anyway historically) were shunned and looked down on as "Vulgar Qualities" then the war like breeding males would be almost guaranteed to be bared from leadership. Not to mention when you're THE Breeding Male then your death results in your killer replacing you.

In Earth history, perhaps, but not in Miqo'te history. Remember that in FFXI the Mithra didn't even have males available as a character choice, and the same was true in FFXIV 1.0. It wasn't until the calamity came and disturbed things that male Miqo'te started being seen outside their home villages. Seekers have always produced more females than males, and one way this imbalance was dealt with was that many of the women of the tribe went out and performed roles that other societies might have given to males, such as adventuring.

Given that social dynamic, it would make a lot of sense if most Seeker leaders were female, as they'd be the ones who had experience with the world outside the village. In the case of the U, there's hints of a leader female (one of the Miqo'te standing over the drake corpses says that only one of the other women can kill so many large drakes), but putting another NPC in the village just to uphold the lore is a questionable use of resources. Plus, there's the factor other people have already mentioned... U'odh has in fact been out in the world, and participated in the defeat of two primals.

[Fenral]

In Earth history, perhaps, but not in Miqo'te history. Remember that in FFXI the Mithra didn't even have males available as a character choice, and the same was true in FFXIV 1.0. It wasn't until the calamity came and disturbed things that male Miqo'te started being seen outside their home villages.

That's more of a developer convenience than an actual lore point, I believe. It's much like how female Roegadyn and Highlanders have always existed and done stuff, and most even have backstories that place them in events even before the Calamity. Male Miqo'te are simply the only ones who maintained a lore-based excuse for their relative scarcity moving into 2.0, and that's mostly due to the great strides taken in the lore to enforce the Miqo'te as a seemingly all-female catgirl race to begin with.

If both models existed to begin with, I suppose they would have ended up like the Aurin in WildStar, a matriarchal society with mostly flipped gender roles that seems to be female-only from the promotional materials, but where in-game NPC gender distribution is actually relatively equal. (Unsurprisingly, most Aurin PCs at launch were male.)