Lalafell's Ruined (For Me) By a Couple People

[Kacho_Nacho]

My general response is to be adorable AF

Cheeeeese

Claps! Adorable as ever.

I'll kick their ass.

With a flounder? I'd pay gold to see that.

I've found it's mostly Lalas and female miqo'te that are jerks, at least to me. I just tell them to *@&# off, and keep playing. :/

I'm sorry to hear lalas were jerks to you. That is unacceptable and you are in the right to tell them off. I hope you reported them.

After reading this makes me want change to a lalafell. I don't mind head pats but I dislike the potato jokes and them being food. To me think lala's is really cute.

I would love to have you join the lalafell community.

Getting serious for a moment. Playing a lalafell helps me fight my bipolar depression. There is something about the race which delights me.

I can't help but to smile. Also, lalafell have some of the best emotes in the game!

[Melichoir]

There use to be a guy here (on this forum) on a crusade, trying to get SE to delete lalafells and telling everyone who played the race that they were perverts. Some creepy people agreed with him, and even my ex-boyfriend made comments about it.

Meanwhile, I'm a 25 year old woman without any mental illnesses that just enjoys dressing up a chibi avatar (a potato with a head) in cute looking outfits. Back in the day I changed to miqo'te because of these men's disturbing claims; I didn't want to deal with being bullied by them anymore, and as someone who use to be a heavy forum-goer I experienced it almost on the daily. But just recently I returned to the game and missed the cuteness of a potato avatar and changed back to lalafell.

The issue is, ever since then I have had anxiety because of my experience of being bullied when playing the race. It's basically ruined the race for me... I've considered changing back, but I wanted to see if others have had similar experiences or if these creeps have cleared out from the forum.

Therse a few sides to this issue.

-If you consider lalafell children then theres other pressing issues here - such as the fact we then have a game with children getting into adult situations. And I dont only mean adult as in P**N, but also violence and other things. You know, getting blown up, frozen, falling to your death, carved up and spit out, etc. You cant be saying "Lalafell are children therefore people are perverts" without squaring away other aspects this position holds, like the violence issue. How many of the players who hate lalafells and call players who play them creepy are the very same who make jokes about cannibalism or violence.

- The game and its lore does not treat lalafell as children. Plain and simple. Argue what people might, they are canonically not children. You can argue about their design aspects and other things, sure, but that is ultimately just opinion that will vary from person to person. By the rules of the game and its established world, they arent children.

- Yes, there are perverts in the game who will sexualize lalafells. Denying that people like that dont exist is simply ignoring reality. That being said, just because people like that exist doesn't mean everyone is that way. It's literally saying an entire group of players is perverted cause an extreme subset play that race. Furthermore, if we want to get down to principles here, you can easily design some of the other races to appear under 18, resulting very much the same problem. Yet we let that slide cause subjective reasoning. If were gonna make this argument about children, then it better be applied across the board and not selectively.

- To further the above point, from my own observation the people who complain about the whole lalafell pervert thing are the same people who look for the most 'revealing' ERP-esque glamours they can find. So its very rich to be calling one section of the player base perverts simply because they play a certain race when theyre very explicitly sexualizing their own characters. Not to mention that it tells a lot about the person when their core view of lalafells is something sexual, where as the typical player plays them cause their cute, spunky, or just straight up different.

- Most important point: You do you. Who gives a damn what other people think. Ther'ye not you. If you wanna do scandalous things with your character, ok. Thats up to you. If you just want cutesy things, ok, thats up to you. There's a lot of super judgmental people who like to pass judgement on other players for some of the silliest things. It's one thing for people to have opinions, but its another to try and force your world view onto another player. If they call you a pervert for playing lalafell, just give em the bird and tell em to worry about their own character. It's no one's business why they choose to play a character or race. This last point is pretty much key to playing games in general. You want to have something set up in a certain way, who cares what other people think. Enjoy something your way and tell other people to buzz off.

[Barraind]

I changed to lalafel on what was basically a bet. I was never much a fan of them, and I tend to ignore short races in every game because hit box and sight lines tend to always be worse the smaller you are.

But then you do the ninja airplane run, and you have the silliest and most expressive facial expressions around, and its like, oh, ok, this is kinda cute.

And now I ride a twitchy blue battlesteed and look cute while hitting things with giant swords.

[CookiesNCreams]

FFXIV has the oddest community when it comes to roasting each other’s characters lol. For example, 90% of people make fun of anyone using a male miqote to be an ERPer. And a lot of people make fun of female midlanders and call them “generic” or “stupid dollface”. In my opinion, it’s entertaining, but I am sorry to hear about your experiences.

[Jandor]

The fact that these races have several viable options and are all copies of each other denotes a lack of personality. That is all.

Pretty good example of what I was talking about.

Excuses for yourself, insults for others.

[Reimmi]

/shrug once in a while someone gets a stick up their butt about me playing a miqo'te but i usually just laugh it off because their lives must be so boring if they need to hate on someone for their pixels in a video game

[Mhaeric]

I've had the cat boi thing said to me IRL once. I play with some real-life friends and acquaintances who I knew before I knew that they played FFXIV. Once I found out that they played too and were all in a FC together I moved servers to play with them. We were talking about our characters (main jobs, races, etc.) IRL before I made the transfer, and one of the acquaintances upon hearing that I played a Miqo'te immediately turned to me and said "Of course, you would play a cat boi" in a tone of voice that was clearly meant to be derisive. He's kind of that way with me anyway since we don't see eye to eye on a lot of things, so meh. It was just the ridiculousness of something usually done by in-game or forum keyboard warriors happening in RL that made it memorable. This was me at the time:

He hasn't mentioned it since.

[AriaEnia]

Well, Lord Gegeruju played a part to give lalafell an image of perverts.

[Taybat]

Tera, Blad and soul, a long list of mmo's out there with races that look more child like than lala's. Those people need to harass those game instead

[Pebbles_Jaeger]

Well i mean not going to lie I find lala's in bikini's / thongs weird or in panty hoses but that has more to do with how players dress them than the actual race itself. They are childish play like that and fine. Dress them up as a stripper and I find that weird. But I won't go out of my way to insult the person for that or make fun of them. I mean a Lalafel is great in a potroast with some garlic and thyme