Needs to be asked.....on Male Viera

[WhiteArchmage]

Over time I've been aware of a lot of requests for Viera. Not male or female Viera. Just Viera which lore-wise up until now... it's been exclusively female. I'm still wondering where this whole male thing came from.

Final Fantasy XII Ultimania. Page 62. Viera are so isolationist that Men and Women live in different villages. They're not female only. I'll be glad to link you the Viera request thread when people were asking for males and females.

Also, on your comment about the artwork: it was shown because Viera were considered as HW's new race, but Au Ra beat them out. So at one point it was considered that Male and Female Viera would feature in XIV.

[Schan]

okay let me rephrase that.

known / playable characters were female only.

edit: i do agree that Yoshi P has contradicted himself over the years. i'm just annoyed how people decide to ignore what he said when it doesn't align with what they want.

[Canadane]

They’re almost always idle threats. Not all mind you, but this is also why nobody (SE included) takes such posts seriously.

[WhiteArchmage]

Ok, I'm going to be a smart-arse here

Just Viera which lore-wise up until now... it's been exclusively female.

Evidence: lolno

okay let me rephrase that.

known / playable characters were female only.

The Lore argument? Non-existant now that he said they'll be mentioned in-game. Them not being available in previous games? Irrelevant for this game. No child models? Irrelevant thanks to Yoshi's own view of M!Viera's design. Not worth the dev cost? May hold some ground if one can produce legitimate proof that interest in said gender options would be low enough, until then it's just as much speculation as we're doing here.

[Senn]

Over time I've been aware of a lot of requests for Viera. Not male or female Viera. Just Viera which lore-wise up until now... it's been exclusively female. I'm still wondering where this whole male thing came from.

Not true. I've been requesting male and female viera for years.
Here is my original viera thread where I requested both males and females twice in my OP. The OP is not edited.

[Schan]

allow me to be a smartass as well




regardless arguing over lore is pointless. they have released a letter explaining why they have done things the way they have. If people are still unhappy that's on them.

I am very curious on this male thing however. what made people believe there would be males? why would they be "delicate" males and not another buff male instead? where has this perception come from?

edit:

Not true. I've been requesting male and female viera for years.
Here is my original viera thread where I requested both males and females twice in my OP. The OP is not edited.

you do realize your 2 requests are a drop in an ocean right? Granted I did not follow that thread religiously. the general feedback i got from there was... we want Viera and guess why peopl want Viera? cuz of Fran.

[WhiteArchmage]

The Lore argument has also been debunked (and yes, at this point it's just pointless, but there I go...): While in hindsight the Dramaturge was trying to warn us about the gender-lock, it follows the same Lore from Miqo'te, from the low birth rate of males (Miqo'te in general) to the isolationist nature of the males (Keeper of the Moon specifically). It wasn't a great leap of the imagination to think: "Oh, it's a way of explaining why males haven't been seen before." Because, well, Manqo'tes were previously non-existant and now they're obviously not, and in-story you won't see Male Keepers unless you go out of your way: the THREE I can name are the unnamed Keeper in the WP HM unlock quest (also, gay! btw), the CNJ from the 3.0 BLM quests and the guy from the Allied beast tribes quest (which you'll only ever see if you've done ALL BT quests).

Regarding XIV Lore:

Buuuuuut there's a nice thing in the descriptions that only mentions their opposite sex being "rare" (in both Viera and Hrothgar), opening them up for adding the missing genders later down the road. In fact, the male Viera even contradicts the dramaturge now. "Males of age are seldom, if ever, found within the bounds of any village" instead of "to us, they might not exist" the whole "prohibited from contact with the outside world" would apply to both men and women, as well.

Hrothgar on the other hand, handwaves it even easier, "rarely so much as glimpsed by the other races" still implies they've been seen and we know they exist, and since the PC is always an outlier that belongs nowhere, it's a decent excuse to bring them later down the line

There's a few reasons to believe males would be playable: Yoshi-P went back on the gender-locks in 1.0, there was Artwork of Male Viera and we knew they were considered for HW, the "delicate" male was an incorrect assumption on the grounds that we wouldn't expect them to be too different from the females ("indistinguishable until 13"), although with Yoshi-P imagining them as "elezen"-like, it hold some ground.

[Schan]

I still haven't found any information regarding that artwork though. was it something someone did on their free time? were they just brainstorming ideas?

Like I said. it's not the first time they show us stuff they have done for fun + on their free time. Why is everyone taking it as gospel? or is it just because if fits their view?

Also i'm pretty ure the WoL is older than 13 years old sooo uuuh... we don't know how much they change after that. Elezen range from mature to "delicate" as well. Sure they aren't the typical buff male but they are also not exclusively "delicate". Effeminate? maybe that's the word i want to use instead of delicate.

I personally don't find Ayemeric / Haurchefant / Bradien effeminate. So what exactly did Yoshi P mean when he said they would be like Elezen?

[CoolDad]

If i recall correctly the chain of events was: bunny men would be weird -> artwork of bunny men (i forgot the context of it and if it was something some people did in their free time which is not uncommon) -> Yoshi P saying that if people really want Viera he had to create a male only race since Viera are female

this was all years ago and people conveniently keep forgetting the bit Yoshi said Viera would be female only.

Over time I've been aware of a lot of requests for Viera. Not male or female Viera. Just Viera which lore-wise up until now... it's been exclusively female. I'm still wondering where this whole male thing came from.

This is why Yoshi P says we don't even know what we want. We as a community are terrible. We asked for Viera, we got it and still we're not happy because we want the males too.

No, he said "a rabbit male might weird" and that they might have to make another counterpart in 2013 (Source: https://www.siliconera.com/2013/02/2...baby-behemoth/). Then the heavensward artwork including the bunny men was shown (however Yoshi said he didn't like how they looked and was hesitant to show it off because of that, iirc).

People expected male Viera partly because of the concept art that came out for Heavensward as well as the widespread belief by the community in general that this game wouldn't have races locked to certain genders because of the change from 1.0 to 2.0. If you look through the gender locked races thread (which was created when the female Viera were shown but not the males in the second fan fest) you'll see a fair bit of this.

Truthfully there wasn't any more reason not to expect male Viera than to expect them at the time. In fact many people were reading that dramaturge lore dump pretty hopefully, believing that they gave so much information to set up an event that would finally make male Viera visible or something, or that they wouldn't lore dump anything related to male Viera if they weren't going to add them (I believe this discussion happened mostly in the original Viera support thread?). People only started getting worried after the second fanfest and a little more so after the Hrothgar name drop bug in the French version.

omg why dont you all wait for tokyo fanfast? what the heck is your problems? Overreactions, y'all gonna look super dumb later.

Edit:

I still haven't found any information regarding that artwork though. was it something someone did on their free time? were they just brainstorming ideas?

Like I said. it's not the first time they show us stuff they have done for fun + on their free time. Why is everyone taking it as gospel? or is it just because if fits their view?

The artwork was official concept art created during the production of Heavensward, shown during a FATE in Tokyo event. It also included earlier designs for Au Ra that caused a bit of controversy as well.

[Senn]

...

Ok but now you can't say you don't know where the request for male viera came from because one of the biggest viera threads on this forum for years was requesting both males and females in the OP.