Are some jobs 'too feminine' in aesthetics?

[Aelin_Ashryver]

So much attacking of this friend for not being a fan of the more feminine aesthetic. What's wrong with y'all? You can be perfectly secure in yourself and still not like something. You wouldn't catch me putting a beard on my female character if it were possible, ew too masculine.

WHM and DNC are for sure a more femme aesthetic. I really like the WHM style but I am also female and into typical female things so.. I do wish healers and casters had more leather or armour based gear sets to choose from. It gets old having nothing but robes to wear. Would love a more badass battle healer for a change rather than the classic soft gentle looking healer.

[Xirean]

So much attacking of this friend for not being a fan of the more feminine aesthetic. What's wrong with y'all? You can be perfectly secure in yourself and still not like something. You wouldn't catch me putting a beard on my female character if it were possible, ew too masculine.

WHM and DNC are for sure a more femme aesthetic. I really like the WHM style but I am also female and into typical female things so.. I do wish healers and casters had more leather or armour based gear sets to choose from. It gets old having nothing but robes to wear. Would love a more badass battle healer for a change rather than the classic soft gentle looking healer.

The reason people get hyper defensive and may some times come off as attacking is because it's only ever "this is too feminine" as opposed to "this is too gendered". Are people going to complain that Warrior or Dark Knight are too masculine? No class is "too much" of something. The class is just the class.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

The reason people get hyper defensive and may some times come off as attacking is because it's only ever "this is too feminine" as opposed to "this is too gendered". Are people going to complain that Warrior or Dark Knight are too masculine? No class is "too much" of something. The class is just the class.

The shoulder pads in WoW, and a couple of the REALLY massive super broad giving shoulder pads in this game are too masculine for me. I don't like how comically broad it makes the character, it's hyper masculine like Jonny Bravo from the old cartoons, not my taste. So I would say it's not only ever "too feminine" but sure majority of the time it is, but this is also due to male clothes overall being more gender neutral in the first place than woman's clothes. The men's section in a store I worked at had plenty women buying the stuff in that department, the reverse was not so true apart from a few very skinny dudes needing some smaller skinny jeans.
The class can definitely swing more one way or the other. In aesthetic especially.

[Burmecia]

So much attacking of this friend for not being a fan of the more feminine aesthetic. What's wrong with y'all?

Hmm. Designer who genderlocks class in RPG - e.g. healer female characters only - if more likely to be the... just that? Person with that sort of opinion. Feminine aesthetic < masculine/neutral aesthetic. Of course I do not have any ironclad evidence, other than we are imperfect human being with our biases and those biases colour whole bunch of stuff for us.

FFXIV community is lovely and tolerant and all that nonsense. I am not even the kind of fem!boy glammer some of my friends are, mad respect to them btw, but there is some fragile sensibilities walking around too. E.g. when it come to masculine characters showing even little bit of skin (coliseum set for DPS, republican steel speedos).

Female character bikini tank is so normal sight to us all, yet people writhe and coil in horror whenever male character of any job with exactly same amount of clothing armoring passes by?? If anything, this I find kinda banal in our community.

Some fun topical pictures:

My former static was confused, bemused and amused by my barbarian aesthetic glam. Question about shirt was made. While our AST looked like that. No one had commented on her glam.


We have glamour system. It can make your character look unique and intereting, in best case scenario. Grab pictured glamour from here


Bikini tank male version.

[Iscah]

We have glamour system. It can make your character look unique and intereting, in best case scenario. Grab pictured glamour from here

Thanks for the mention – this is one of my alts.

So yeah. Fully armoured healer is possible, even if there isn't a huge variety of pieces to choose from. I also made a version of the same set in more healer-ish white and gold.

Someday I would like to get around to making a big compiled list of all the healer gear with pictures. I think there's more variety than people claim.

[KizuyaKatogami]

In the end, it seems like the devs take a very lazy approach when it comes to healers. Both balancing wise and gear design wise. They barely alter glams from the female version to the male version and in many cases you can tell the gear was designed purely with a female in mind. Probably doesn’t help that the main dev plays a female but that’s besides the point. It seems there’s always more feminine gear to go around and with the healers it’s even more prominent. Hopefully the next expansion fixes this issue but considering how detached the devs seem from their playerbase who knows.

[Xirean]

In the end, it seems like the devs take a very lazy approach when it comes to healers. Both balancing wise and gear design wise. They barely alter glams from the female version to the male version and in many cases you can tell the gear was designed purely with a female in mind. Probably doesn’t help that the main dev plays a female but that’s besides the point. It seems there’s always more feminine gear to go around and with the healers it’s even more prominent. Hopefully the next expansion fixes this issue but considering how detached the devs seem from their playerbase who knows.

In what way are the devs detached from their player-base? That's a very bold claim that doesn't seem to follow with the overall experience of the game.

[Snorky]

In the end, it seems like the devs take a very lazy approach when it comes to healers. Both balancing wise and gear design wise. They barely alter glams from the female version to the male version and in many cases you can tell the gear was designed purely with a female in mind. Probably doesn’t help that the main dev plays a female but that’s besides the point. It seems there’s always more feminine gear to go around and with the healers it’s even more prominent. Hopefully the next expansion fixes this issue but considering how detached the devs seem from their playerbase who knows.

I don't agree with your statement at all.

[MikkoAkure]

In the end, it seems like the devs take a very lazy approach when it comes to healers. Both balancing wise and gear design wise. They barely alter glams from the female version to the male version and in many cases you can tell the gear was designed purely with a female in mind.

So there's nothing wrong with masculine outfits that were designed for a male in mind that are ported over to female characters without much change?

If we're talking about fantasy mages, they almost universally wear robes across all types of media from books, film, television, and video games. That's just the trope we have to deal with and it probably has its beginnings, like all things fantasy, with Lord of the Rings. Knights in fantasy wear armor, mages wear robes. Sage doesn't wear a robe though, but I'm not sure if that was brought up in this whole conversation because it doesn't fit the narrative that the OP and others are trying to push that everything is feminine and the female version of Sage AF looks like it was based on the male version with no change.

As far as whether healer outfits are specifically feminine, it may look like that to a modern eye, but garments similar to what we would now call "robes" were a common clothing choice for both men and women throughout all of history. Medieval noblemen wore robes and tights much more colorful and extravagant than anything we have accessible in the game, so FFXIV is actually toned down from history. Real men's clothing from back then, especially for nobles, was covered in flowers and frills and decorative trimming. Lace was first invented as trimming on the robes for Catholic priests and spread in popularity among normal well-to-do men as collar decorations and cravats even after European men started to dress in duller colors.

And that's just Europe. Men in the Middle-East and Asia continued wearing brighter colors and fanciful designs as well as robes for much longer than Western Europe and in Japan, kimonos were still the normal wear into the early 20th century until Westernization increased. Even nowadays all Saudi men wear robes and a man wearing a kimono in Japan wouldn't be as odd as a man walking around in a robe and hose in Europe.

Probably doesn’t help that the main dev plays a female but that’s besides the point. It seems there’s always more feminine gear to go around and with the healers it’s even more prominent. Hopefully the next expansion fixes this issue but considering how detached the devs seem from their playerbase who knows.

Yoshi-P plays a lalafell. Almost nothing looks good on a lalafell to begin with and he permanently wears the same Minfilia one-piece outfit all the time so I highly doubt that Yoshi-P's character influences internal opinions on clothing in this game.

[BaconBits]

Almost nothing looks good on a lalafell