Everyone hates the elf race?

[Arrius]

Their Proportions stretch too much on certain clothes. Too long legs and neck and wide shoulders, giving them a awkward inverted triangle body shape.

Many outfits work with open neck areas, which give the elezen a bit of a jarring view.

And, well, the animations. Especially the male runs in walking and running.

[Anarnee]

Male elezen are one of my favorites! Bury me in Elf boys~

[ElazulHP]

[Jaywalker]

I think people generally don't hate 'em but the proportions can be tough to pull off. The old man elezen face kind of eliminates an option for a lot of people if they're looking for a more conventionally pretty look, and with the wide eyed face option that sometimes can look a bit jarring against the tall and angular male elezen figure. It's definitely not a guarantee, but without addressing it the effect can be kind of like putting a baby's head on a grown man's body lol. That basically makes two male face options if you're not ready to work for dat aesthetic, and even with those different choices in hairstyle or glamour will effect how proportion reads.

Female elezen still have oddly broad shoulders, and the dark lipsticks can be a little visually limiting at times depending.

[Valdima]

I have an alt thats an elezen (duskwight) and I can say he doesn't look good in very many things. arms and neck always seem a bit weird. its also hard to make a nice looking one, surprisingly.

[KikoriL]

Just gonna say, if I didn't have a KotM Miqo'te specific last name generated by the game from day one, I'd have turned she-elf quite some time ago.

[Wynn_Storm]

I don't hate Elezen, i just think their models don't look the best. But i have seen some very pretty Elezen.

[Spiriel_Basanda]

Elezen is my main race! I'm really like elf races in games, so I tend to roll them all the time. I was an Elvaan in FFXI, a Newmen in PSO and PSU(Probably would've made one in PSO 2 as well, but they region locked that game, soooo I don't have it), and some Night/Blood/Void elves in WoW. I do have a number of Hyur and Miqo alts, but none of them get as much attention as my main.

[E1N]

I don't hate them. I just don't really play them.

[Iscah]

I love my Elezen alt. He looks really elegant in a lot of costumes, and I like his face. The body proportions do look a bit odd sometimes, but I can deal with that.

Their Proportions stretch too much on certain clothes. Too long legs and neck and wide shoulders, giving them a awkward inverted triangle body shape.

Many outfits work with open neck areas, which give the elezen a bit of a jarring view.

Oh dear, that definitely doesn't give them the best look! But at the same time, it just means you need to pick different styles of outfits. High collars work much better.

All the races (except maybe the really human-proportioned ones) have gear that doesn't work for them, and you just have to find the things that suit them. Personally I find my male Au Ra and female Roegadyn much harder to find nice outfits for.

Also, putting them in different shirts isn't exactly fair for the comparison picture. For what it's worth, here's a screenshot of my Elezen wearing the same shirt the Highlander is wearing, though the pose isn't the best for comparison.

But what amazes me even more is how there's never been a forum cleanup. I've never seen a forum that kept threads from 6 years ago. Just imagine... years from now, all the silly stuff we say today will still be around, a treasure trove of blackmail material someone will be a quick search away from using against us. Huh... I guess the internet never does forget.

That's normal for forums, as far as I'm aware. Ideally they'll get archived at some point so people can't dredge them up from the depths, but can still link back to them if they want to revive the discussion.

They're still valuable information, and keeping the threads alive means that it remains available if people want to refer back to them. Ideally they stay in roughly the order that the discussions took place in, and then it acts a bit like a time capsule.

I'm interested in the story, so as soon as I'd worked through the game and was caught up to the current point in MSQ, I went digging back through the Lore forum - not to reply or bump up old posts, but just to read what people had been talking about over time.

What I'm trying to say is: I don't "hate" Elezen, I just don't find them as interesting as the other options we have available. I feel like elves in a lot of fantasy settings have kinda become as ordinary and generic as humans. I guess you could call it Tolkien fatigue.

I feel like FFXIV has stepped away from that stereotype, at least to some degree. They've still linked the 'elves' to the 'forest city', but it goes beyond that - Ishgard isn't a typical fantasy-elf city at all, and they're being used more like just another variety of humans.

And Duskwights seem interesting, although are regrettably under-explored. I would love to see a proper underground settlement sometime - not in ruins like the parts of Gelmorra that we've seen so far, but a functioning city in a cave setting. Not a dark and dingy place, but lit up and beautiful.