Gender locked race?

[artyport]

We're not a hive mind. There are many gay and bisexual men who do not conform to what is pushed as 'gay culture' and 'gay beliefs'.

This isn’t about being a hive mind it’s about the game having options for all people. Currently pretty lean yet adult looking male is missing from the line up of characters... more so than anything else.

Other than beast dudes with tons of fur which doesn’t seem to fit the aesthetics for playable races

[Theodric]

Currently pretty lean yet adult looking male is missing from the line up of characters... more so than anything else.

I assume by 'lean' you mean slim and lightly muscled?

It isn't an aesthetic that's missing, though. Hyur and Miqo'te can be designed to fit that look very well. Especially in regards to Hyur, given that they have a muscle tone slider and can be tweaked to be very short.

[artyport]

Hyur makes come pretty close and I played one for a while. But being hyurr is frankly boring and again the faces are just not it. I play miqote now because I’ve settled with cute.

But none of these give you beautiful male model style vibes.

This is what I see.

Midlander- average to very handsome young male with a average body type
Highlander -hot muscle dudes who will keep your butt
Roe- big burly bear men.
Aura- beastly dragon men
Miqo- mostly cute but also possible to be very masculine looking .
Eleven- tall nerdy to rude looking men with very sharp jaws

There simply isn’t a race that is designed to be beautiful modelesque creatures for any races.

Now the viera come and the women have beautiful runway model looks.
I want men to have that high fashion male model look. And that simply isn’t available in game

[Sehrina]

I assume by 'lean' you mean slim and lightly muscled?

It isn't an aesthetic that's missing, though. Hyur and Miqo'te can be designed to fit that look very well. Especially in regards to Hyur, given that they have a muscle tone slider and can be tweaked to be very short.

While the choices given appear to fit the "aesthetic" for you, they do not for some of us. It's a matter of differentiating opinions on it and what each of us deem to be "lean" or "pretty" enough. Each race seems to have a particular look that no matter how hard you try, is hard to deviate from. This is because of the limited face and body options for each race. TBH the devs just need to give us more customization options outside of hair, like for the body and face, but we aren't really seeing/getting that. So our hopes are put into a new race that fits the look that each of us want. While I have no issues with and even encourage a diversity of character types, I'm going to put most of my support into something that I'd rather play as, especially if that preference has, in my opinion, little representation in game.

[Fland]

If they didn't think male viera fit their vision of the game, they wouldn't have included them in the lore at all. They went out of their way to give us information about male viera from the dramaturge. We actually learned more about male viera there than we ever did in FF XII itself. They could have just as easily left the situation completely ambiguous and they didn't. If they were able to go all of XII without a single mention of them, I don't see why they even bothered to tell us about them in XIV if they knew we weren't ever going to be able to play as one.

Agree. We have concept arts and actual lore in-game on male viera. They definitely have vision about it.
While the concept arts might be early, they did show it again recently on Paris fanfest.

I think you're skipping over the whole "a Viera living outside her homeland was unheard of." There is little reason to specify female viera if it applies to both of them.

I'm wondering if the JP version also specify the feminine pronouns. It happened before when the gender neutral term in JP got translated into gendered pronoun in EN.

[Iscah]

I honestly can't think of any reason we won't be meeting [male Viera] if we will go to the woods in 5.0 without it being sound forced or ridiculous, like there's fire that's somehow eradicated the entire male even though they survived a Garlean attack before, which surely involved some fire.

From the lore we've been given so far, I can't think of any reason we would encounter male Viera in the woods. They're isolated and they either actively avoid other people, or shoot them on sight. They know the woods better than we do, and would slip away unseen.

The only way we'd see male Viera is if they have abandoned that lifestyle entirely.

Usually eleven would fit but they are kinda weird visually in this game. They are more the nerdy /accountant race of ffxiv. Most of their faces are too angular to be beautiful and kinda look mean. And the cute face is uhhhh odd. I normally play elf races but viera seem to be ffxiv beautiful race... so it’s sad we won’t get males... but we will probably get a 3rd masculine macho buff guy option

Hyur makes come pretty close and I played one for a while. But being hyurr is frankly boring and again the faces are just not it. I play miqote now because I’ve settled with cute.

But none of these give you beautiful male model style vibes.

This is what I see.

[...]
Eleven- tall nerdy to rude looking men with very sharp jaws

There simply isn’t a race that is designed to be beautiful modelesque creatures for any races.

Now the viera come and the women have beautiful runway model looks.
I want men to have that high fashion male model look. And that simply isn’t available in game

Have you had a thorough play-around with Elezen settings in the character creator? Or are you just going from the other characters we see in the game? They do tend to be a bit odd-looking - I think particularly since they've had to come up with so many unique combinations for NPCs, so not always using features that go together nicely. And the default characters in the creator don't do much to 'sell' either clan as good-looking.

I have an Elezen alt, and it's definitely a bit hit-and-miss whether he looks nice in cutscenes - lighting angles can do awful things to their features - but overall I think I got him within that "beautiful male" aesthetic. ( 1 2 3 4 )

For what it's worth, he's a Duskwight - despite their 'typical' grey colouring you can also give them normal human skintones, and (someone pointed out to me a while ago) they don't have the permanent dark edge around their eyes that Wildwood characters have. (For comparison, this screenshot I had on hand of a Wildwood character with the same basic face setting - a mockup of that hooded guy from the end of 4.3 that people kept trying to compare to existing characters.)



Also, to nitpick re. spelling - despite the connection to "elves", it's "Elezen" not Eleven.

[Bonbori]

I'm wondering if the JP version also specify the feminine pronouns. It happened before when the gender neutral term in JP got translated into gendered pronoun in EN.

I've not seen the JP version of that conversation, but I'm 95% sure it doesn't use feminine pronouns just because Japanese wouldn't use pronouns at all in this context. And I'm almost sure it wouldn't be singular - when talking about the tendencies of a race, I think context would demand the neutral plural "they" (彼ら)... but that's an unnecessarily roundabout way of saying "Viera".
Still, even assuming the sentence was the same (and that's not guaranteed either, playing with JP VO and EN subtitles I notice a lot of lines being worded very differently, in different order and with different terminology) it would most likely say something to the effect of "Until recently, Viera were not seen outside (implied Viera's) homeland" or "Until recently, (implied Viera) were not seen outside Viera's homeland". Pronouns do exist in Japanese, but context often makes them redundant. You're very unlikely to see a sentence that explicitly addresses the same thing twice unless it's for emphasis or clarification.