Until SE makes male and female glamours equal...

[Serilda]

Somebody needs to stuff a dude character into the 110 PVP BLM gear, stat. I need me some bushy tail.

It's my main caster PVP glamour and has been since the day I got it. Unfortunately I'm not very good at taking pictures so hopefully someone else can improve on my attempt!



The animal PVP sets are some of my very favourites in the game. You have hyper-masculine armour options and super-cute dresses all in one range, and if you don't like any of them you can just glamour something else on top. Love them or hate them, there's so much creativity in each of the designs. Far more so than most gear sets. Every single time I go to a starter city in my BLM gear I get /tells from new players praising it and asking how to earn it!

I love everything about the BLM set. The creepy mask. The sexy lingerie-style cut of the top. The insane heels. The claw-like gloves. The 'door knocker' shorts are a fun fashion statement on their own, too.

They come from a very traditionalistic culture, even more so than the puritannical one that seems to pervade evangelical regions of North America.

Then why do they keep giving us stuff that isn't locked? It's very arbitrary; a lot of the locked items are inherently genderless (wrist cuffs, if anything, are more masculine than feminine traditionally) and we have the exact same skirt model as one that is locked but without a bow stuck to it. I could fix the bow version for males for them in about five minutes given that the rigging and models already exist, and I'd wager their team is a lot more skilled than some freak on the Internet. They don't even have to add the bow at all; even unlocking the same model we already have with a different dye pattern or texture would be enough to satisfy people who just want to buy a glamour skirt and can't because the one for their gender is out of stock.

(Edit: I thought of another point I wanted to make here. The thing we're complaining about most is the unfairness of handing out extra in-game glamour sets to female characters, not that we cannot equip all of the exact same items - though I would certainly enjoy that too. Nobody is complaining about getting the male-only Justaucorps instead of the female-only Bustle, because the male-only version looks fantastic and the items were distributed fairly. We're complaining about things like the female-only Thavnairian Bustier where rather than letting guys wear it too with some minor removal of fabric to accommodate their lack of breasts, they added breast-covering fabric to the Thavnairian Bolero and made that unisex - literally performing extra modelling work explicitly to favour one half of the playerbase. The counter argument to our request is invariably a double standard that guys should wear clothes for guys, which is why Lukha has made this thread to illustrate that such a stance is nonsense in the world of FFXIV.)

If they had a hardline 'men are men, and women are women!' stance already, nobody would be this confused and annoyed because it would obviously seem pointless. The fact that they don't makes the arbitrary locking nonsensical. For example, men generally cannot wear stockings in this game (full tights are fine, but thigh-highs are not). That seems like a fairly consistent rule. Except they have already modelled stockings for males and let one or two sets slip through anyway. I don't usually dress like this (the gloves were a mistake...) and don't especially love the texture/look of this piece, but I would love some prettier thigh-highs some day. I think they would go beautifully with a bunch of other male-friendly items that already exist.



Meanwhile, female characters are showered with stockings and panty shots from a very early level. I feel for the poor Lalafell who probably see nothing but underwear most of the time. It would be nice if men could choose more stockings (the models exist) and women could choose to cover up more if they don't want to look like a wannabe teenager all the time.

I think it's more about how it would be used by certain players :/

I think this is a fair comment, but as S-E themselves have made fun of gender issues in this game (Hildi, certain characters which use the 'okama' stereotypes to various degrees depending on which language you play in) yet also been remarkably positive (opening up Eternal Bonding to same-sex couples, allowing guys to equip some very sexy gear, hinting at more than one perfectly healthy same-sex relationship), I don't think it's right to blanket ban all people with male characters from messing around with gender just in case a minority of people abuse it to run around in skirts deliberately ridiculing trans women. Female characters are allowed to dress like strippers - my wife certainly aims for that aesthetic - and that, too, has a lot of real life baggage associated with it. I don't think it's right to dictate fashion rules for everyone just because some people are awful.

Being gay and effeminacy is not synonymous nor mutually exclusive to each other. It's just being ignorant.

A thousand times this. People often round on the guys asking for less genderlocking by calling out the LGBT+ community. Clothes don't affect your sex and they don't affect your sexuality. These are all completely separate topics. Whether the people campaigning are male, female, straight, gay or identify somewhere outside those traditional categories, their opinions on aesthetics and gear are equally valid.

I'll just finish off with a picture of my guy wearing a bunch of male-only pieces along with a couple of unisex ones to celebrate his rugged masculine appeal. It may not be someone else's aesthetic, and I respect that preference, but personally I think guys look great in androgynous gear.