Gender Locks Have Revealed the Worst in Players.

[TarynH]

"Since it seems like Viera is popular around the world we have been proactively looking into this, but since having a rabbit male might be kind of weird, maybe we’ll look into having a separate race for the male counterpart."

The word "weird" there could mean many things.

weird
/wird/Submit
adjective
1.
suggesting something supernatural; uncanny.

un·can·ny
/ˌənˈkanē/Submit
adjective
strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.

In context, he (Yoshida?) is speaking about a race that in all iterations of Final Fantasy where Viera exist, has been the same lore. They have a female-run society that live in tree tops. Their men live down below and protect the forest/jungle grounds. Their men stay hidden from view for this very reason. And every once in awhile, the men come up to mate. Then they go back down. Sometimes the women leave the forest/jungle and live in cities. Nowhere does it say the males do this.

FFXIV expounded a bit on this:
"Male Viera return to the village to collect the male children who reach puberty to teach them the ways of the hunt. They live in separate settlements and only communicate with the females when needing to mate, trade or collect the male adolescences. The male Viera are secretive, vicious, skilled hunters and are so well adapted to living in Viera forests no one aside from female Viera has ever seen one."

So given those facts, we have to look at his statement again. People want Viera, and the devs/company are looking(looked) into it. However, having males of that race might be weird, strange, mysterious, perhaps even baffling to add in their minds. Why? Because every single piece of lore from other games and FFXIV have stated how rare they are to even be seen. It could have been a company head that made the decision.

I take this as him expressing their dilemma from a development standpoint. I do not consider this to be calling the concept of male rabbits weird. Why even mention them in lore at all if it's the "wrong" kind of weird(taboo)?

I don't think SE, or Yoshida is fundamentally opposed to male rabbits, cats, pigeons, sloths, potatoes, or whatever. I think he was expressing the difficult decision they had to make, and even offered a possible solution at that time to counteract it.

Simply put, they tried to do a good/nice thing to add Viera in the first place. For reasons that we might not even know about, they added them as female only. So they offered another good/nice thing by adding another requested race to compensate. But they had to sacrifice the females of that race. They didn't have to add either. The game still would've been fine without them, or even having them as beast tribes. It would have played the same irregardless.

They could have spent that time making a healer job. (Another group that is upset, and has far more reason to be.) Or they could have spent it on a plethora of the many complaints people have registered against the game. Instead, they made a wager and created two races they hoped the players would enjoy. Maybe they'll add their counterparts later. They might not make another race, but they didn't completely rule out genders.

It's a shame that people would rather quit over this, than give the expansion a chance. Or support the company that worked on the other 95% of the content coming. Or stick with them, to see if they can help change it. But at the same time, it is their prerogative. Realistically, you do nothing to fix the issue that way. They'll probably gain way more subs than the ones leaving over this issue. And your voices will be gone from the crowd.

[J-Reyno]

So given those facts, we have to look at his statement again. People want Viera, and the devs/company are looking(looked) into it. However, having males of that race might be weird, strange, mysterious, perhaps even baffling to add in their minds. Why? Because every single piece of lore from other games and FFXIV have stated how rare they are to even be seen. It could have been a company head that made the decision.

I take this as him expressing their dilemma from a development standpoint. I do not consider this to be calling the concept of male rabbits weird. Why even mention them in lore at all if it's the "wrong" kind of weird(taboo)?

I don't think SE, or Yoshida is fundamentally opposed to male rabbits, cats, pigeons, sloths, potatoes, or whatever. I think he was expressing the difficult decision they had to make, and even offered a possible solution at that time to counteract it.

I'll say that I appreciate your response even if I disagree with you for reasons already laid out in other responses. Their history regarding the kind of sentiment I describe is unchanged.

At the very least, I feel like people should be able to agree that while we can't all have what we want, we can also strive to make sure everyone has a share of what's already set before us. I don't feel like keeping things equal is a big or unreasonable ask. Both races should have both genders, or we should have one race with both genders first, and then later the next race with both genders.

There's the whole "they can do what they want" thing, and we're just as free and more than justified in criticizing those decisions. I'm personally not unsubbing because of this, I mean I wouldn't be switching to male Viera anyway. My voice remains as long as I'm paying to play the game, and when I'm not it will mean that I have moved on and won't care about what the game has gained or lost.