Just here throwing out my support as well. I was very much looking forward to male Viera. It also sucks that there's now two races locked by gender. My guess is there's a reason other than lore for this, perhaps the original creator didn't want males to ever be shown, so it comes down to a respect thing. Regardless, FFXIV is not FFXII, or tactics, or any other game in the series. We've all been waiting a very long time to play as Viera, and there are some who just don't like playing female characters, for one reason or another. Part of what made FFXIV so great, in my opinion, was the freedom to be any job as any race, and which ever gender you wanted. Now it feels like that is falling away for a fairly meaningless reason.