Miqo'te gender balance on the First

[MikkoAkure]

Pretty sure canonically all the 26 Seeker tribes are hunter-gatherers. Keepers are up in the air.

Where is it ever stated that all seekers are hunter-gatherers? Seeker miqo'te make up 20% of the population of Limsa Lominsa according to the lore book so their population there is in the thousands. The book even states that they settled in the city. It's a bit silly to think that miqo'te living in a city are hunter-gatherers. It's more likely that most miqo'te are cosmopolitan, especially Lominsan miqo'te. One Lominsan miqo'te is mentioned as "leaving her parent's home", which at least to me implies a normal nuclear family. Then there's the J tribe, which live in one of the towns in the Peaks and are fully integrated within the town and one of them even romantically pursues a hyur. The most famous miqo'te in the whole game, Y'shtola, is from Sharlayan. That city-state is supposed to be the center of learning in Hydaelyn and I doubt the miqo'te there are living in the woods and subsisting on deer.

You can't make assumptions on an entire race of people based on 2 tiny villages we encounter.

[Vyrerus]

I mean, the tribes themselves can still all be hunter-gatherers. Just seems like it's common that seekers leave their tribes, but keep their tribal names/designations.

Kinda like how we know there's mountain village for Curious Gorge's Warrior roots, even though we never see it, or that there are fishing villages in the north of Sea Wolves, that we also never see. The lore behind races doesn't seem to pertain at all to the areas we go to in most of the game.

[Brightamethyst]

Yeah. The world is much, MUCH bigger than what we can see in game. "Ul'dah" isn't just the city and the handful of little nearby towns we see in game. It's how many thousands of square malms, full of hundreds of cities and towns and villages and farms, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people. We just don't see most of it because, well, it's a video game. The game world can only be so big.

[Jandor]

The Mystel probably had a similar dynamic to the Moonkeepers on the Source. Females live in regular society, males kicked out to go adventuring.

When the flood came along and wiped most of civilization from the face of the world, a large amount of the city-dwelling females were wiped out along with it. The wandering males of the species were better equipped to escape and survive, and as a result the gender ratio of the species is temporarily much more even than it normally is.

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Either that or someone on the dev team just really likes catbois and wanted to put loads of them in the game.

[Veloran]

They're called "city-states" for a reason. While what we see in-game is probably much scaled-down, I highly doubt Eorzea in particular has any settlements that are more relavent in terms of population and importance than what we see. Not to mention the calamity absolutely ruined trade and agriculture for five years, not to mention huge swathes of the terrain and environment. There is almost certainly not enough infrastructure on the continent to support the kind of population and locations you're talking about.

[pedromvilar]

Where is it ever stated that all seekers are hunter-gatherers? Seeker miqo'te make up 20% of the population of Limsa Lominsa according to the lore book so their population there is in the thousands. The book even states that they settled in the city. It's a bit silly to think that miqo'te living in a city are hunter-gatherers. It's more likely that most miqo'te are cosmopolitan, especially Lominsan miqo'te. One Lominsan miqo'te is mentioned as "leaving her parent's home", which at least to me implies a normal nuclear family. Then there's the J tribe, which live in one of the towns in the Peaks and are fully integrated within the town and one of them even romantically pursues a hyur. The most famous miqo'te in the whole game, Y'shtola, is from Sharlayan. That city-state is supposed to be the center of learning in Hydaelyn and I doubt the miqo'te there are living in the woods and subsisting on deer.

You can't make assumptions on an entire race of people based on 2 tiny villages we encounter.

This is why I said "the tribes" rather than "the people", I'm sure there are lots of miqo'te who live in cities, maybe even most of them. I'm just talking about the 26 tribes that came over to Eorzea after the age of frost and which apparently still exist.

With respect to Y'shtola, even though she comes from Sharlayan, it does seem like her family still respects traditions, what with explicitly having her half-sister Y'mhitra come from the same father (Y'rhul Nunh) but another mother.

That said, yeah the J tribe is a counterexample, they probably aren't hunter-gatherers. They too seem to have the "tia" designation though.

They're called "city-states" for a reason. While what we see in-game is probably much scaled-down, I highly doubt Eorzea in particular has any settlements that are more relavent in terms of population and importance than what we see. Not to mention the calamity absolutely ruined trade and agriculture for five years, not to mention huge swathes of the terrain and environment. There is almost certainly not enough infrastructure on the continent to support the kind of population and locations you're talking about.

Yeah they probably aren't hundreds of thousands of people, they're still city-states and their populations and infrastructure are probably more like akin to our Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages.

[MikkoAkure]

This is why I said "the tribes" rather than "the people", I'm sure there are lots of miqo'te who live in cities, maybe even most of them. I'm just talking about the 26 tribes that came over to Eorzea after the age of frost and which apparently still exist.

With respect to Y'shtola, even though she comes from Sharlayan, it does seem like her family still respects traditions, what with explicitly having her half-sister Y'mhitra come from the same father (Y'rhul Nunh) but another mother.

That said, yeah the J tribe is a counterexample, they probably aren't hunter-gatherers. They too seem to have the "tia" designation though.

The point I was trying to get across is that lifestyle is not the reason for there being fewer male miqo'te and that it's nature. You can still have names that call back to your heritage and culture even if you don't practice that culture anymore. Having tribe prefixes or "tia" doesn't have to mean anything. The 26 tribes that came across aren't necessarily all still hunters today. If they were, and looking at a quick google search saying hunter-gatherer tribes can't number more than 100, then the number of tribal miqo'te would only be around 2600 unless they split off into more tribes. Considering we don't meet any miqo'te with 2-digit tribal prefixes, that's probably the exception than the rule and the more likely scenario is that over time the miqo'te have mixed into normal hyuran culture. All Eorzean seekers are descended from those that came over in the 26 tribes during the Age of Frost, but that was many thousands of years ago, before Amdapor, Mchach, and Nym. That's plenty of time for most of the population to start integrating more, especially as the world began to modernize. Except for the U and M tribes, the closest we ever hear of nuhns is just the fact that Yshtola and Y'mihtra have the same dad and different moms (and only 10 other siblings), and the 2 summer event miqo'te have a single mother. That still supports the fact that is already stated in the game and the lore book that miqo'te just have fewer male births.

We can conjecture all we want based on the First, but we have nothing at all to go on in regards to the mystel. At this point I'm more inclined to believe that male mystel NPCs are over-represented because the devs wanted to show the players the Crystarium as being full of every single race and gender from the game, all working together in one spot. Trying to apply that to the gender balance on the Source doesn't work based on existing lore.

[pedromvilar]

The point I was trying to get across is that lifestyle is not the reason for there being fewer male miqo'te and that it's nature. You can still have names that call back to your heritage and culture even if you don't practice that culture anymore. Having tribe prefixes or "tia" doesn't have to mean anything. The 26 tribes that came across aren't necessarily all still hunters today. If they were, and looking at a quick google search saying hunter-gatherer tribes can't number more than 100, then the number of tribal miqo'te would only be around 2600 unless they split off into more tribes. Considering we don't meet any miqo'te with 2-digit tribal prefixes, that's probably the exception than the rule and the more likely scenario is that over time the miqo'te have mixed into normal hyuran culture. All Eorzean seekers are descended from those that came over in the 26 tribes during the Age of Frost, but that was many thousands of years ago, before Amdapor, Mchach, and Nym. That's plenty of time for most of the population to start integrating more, especially as the world began to modernize. Except for the U and M tribes, the closest we ever hear of nuhns is just the fact that Yshtola and Y'mihtra have the same dad and different moms (and only 10 other siblings), and the 2 summer event miqo'te have a single mother. That still supports the fact that is already stated in the game and the lore book that miqo'te just have fewer male births.

We can conjecture all we want based on the First, but we have nothing at all to go on in regards to the mystel. At this point I'm more inclined to believe that male mystel NPCs are over-represented because the devs wanted to show the players the Crystarium as being full of every single race and gender from the game, all working together in one spot. Trying to apply that to the gender balance on the Source doesn't work based on existing lore.

I agree with everything you said. To whatever extent I disagreed in the first place, which now I suspect at least in part miscommunication, you have convinced me :P

I would expect there must be still some other tribes but yeah I can believe very easily that the (vast?) majority of miqo'te are city dwellers now.

[Brightamethyst]

Yeah they probably aren't hundreds of thousands of people, they're still city-states and their populations and infrastructure are probably more like akin to our Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages.

Maybe. It's hard to tell, being a video game with minimal sense of scale (I doubt anyone really thinks you can walk the entire length of the continent in 15 minutes), but I get the impression that Eorzea is bigger than that. Maybe not as big as I implied in my previous post, but still much bigger than what we see in game.

[pedromvilar]

Maybe. It's hard to tell, being a video game with minimal sense of scale (I doubt anyone really thinks you can walk the entire length of the continent in 15 minutes), but I get the impression that Eorzea is bigger than that. Maybe not as big as I implied in my previous post, but still much bigger than what we see in game.

Oh yeah without a doubt it is bigger than what we're shown, but I expect it's still more like Middle Ages sized settlements, especially because of Amaurot: the devs clearly can show what a high-population city looked like even while keeping the actually accessible parts of it limited to video game scale, so I think the city-states and such really are meant to be reasonably small - thousands or tens of thousands of people per region, with most of them on the small villages and settlements spread around the bigger main cities.