What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[aveyond-dreams]

I'm 100% on board of having more body types to work with, especially if it goes both ways and we start seeing more "amazon" ladies like female Roe, more female "beasts" like Kimahri or the Hrothgar, or (dare I say it) huskier body types like FF8's Ward. However, I do need to question the idea that the bishounen saturation was not prominent in older titles.

Pretty male protagonists has been the standard in the series since the beginning. Yoshitaka Amano's signature art style is all about making the central characters look as effeminately beautiful as possible. The default Warrior of Light template from the very first game is literally what Elidibus transforms into in 5.3.

There's a huge gap between pretty male protagonists (Aymeric, Estinien, Elidibus) who lean more towards the Amano style heroes and...whatever it is G'raha and Thancred are supposed to be. Overly animated catboys or colorless blobs of indistinguishable features. In my eyes, they are too different from each other to fit the same category. There's no otherwordly or beautiful look to them, they just look dated and off putting. One of the main reasons why I was so blown away by male Viera when they launched is because I could finally have a hero with the Amano/"high elf" type of look, which is as important as having some muscle in the party. Elezen do not fulfill this for a huge swathe of the playerbase for a number of factors, all boiling down to them just being too far removed from what people want in an elf race.

The pretty boys of older titles also were just nowhere near as annoying. Bartz and Locke were funny (I vaguely to this day remember some argument that Bartz had with Ghido the turtle and Locke saying something about the price is right), Cecil going from Dark Knight to Paladin was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen in a video game when I first played FFIV, and so on. Also, if you play those titles in their gameboy or pixel remaster versions then it's not really the same visual saturation since it's just pixel sprites at that point. When it comes to later titles, FFVII's most effeminate male is Cloud as you say but it's balanced out well enough by Barret, Vincent, and Cid.

Overall, the earlier titles just did a better job characterizing the male protagonists. Their looks were varied, but their personalities weren't as bad or stagnant as the current state of the cast. It does look like FFXVI will turn this trend around after the game passes the point where Clive's teen years end, I just wish we could get a similar character here in FFXIV. Let him be unfiltered, unapologetic, and defiant like Estinien used to be. Have them clash with each other and reignite the same kind of rivalry Cecil and Kain had between them. Just no more stoic nodding and "scholar types" please.