The Lore of Inter-breeding

[Calacitea]

How is it with the reproduction? If, as example, a Viera female and an Au Ra male are reproducing, which race does the baby have? I somewhere heard that it would always be the race of the mother, and so a Viera.

[MikkoAkure]

10 years... We're reaching new levels of necromancy.

How is it with the reproduction? If, as example, a Viera female and an Au Ra male are reproducing, which race does the baby have? I somewhere heard that it would always be the race of the mother, and so a Viera.

This was completely made up by RPers and has no basis in lore at all. If true, then Hilda wouldn't have pointy ears and Severa wouldn't have a dud third-eye. Genetics seems to more or less work how it does in our world from what we've seen.


A Viera/Au Ra would be some unholy jackalope thing, but it would be a mix of both. It's just that every single mixed race baby in the game has been half Hyur, and Hyur happen to be the most basic thing that everything else is based on. So that means that everything we've seen is just "non-Hyur parent, but less". If the game ever introduced something like you described that didn't involve a Hyur, the mixture would be more apparent and more importantly for the dev team, more expensive to model since it would need to be unique.

[Wyssahtyn]

This was completely made up by RPers and has no basis in lore at all. If true, then Hilda wouldn't have pointy ears and Severa wouldn't have a dud third-eye.

It was not "completely made up", it was an inference based on the examples we were shown in game over time because XIV's worldbuilding has all the depth of a puddle half the time. Furthermore, the full inference that the other person is unaware of that people referenced was that the hybrid would take primarily after the mother and have some secondary characteristic reminiscent of the father's race. The fact that some people present it as objective fact and not mere inference is a inherent problem to XIV's community, to say nothing of the inevitable, inherent distortion that can occur in a ceaseless game of telephone over long time spans.

[MikkoAkure]

It was not "completely made up", it was an inference based on the examples we were shown in game over time because XIV's worldbuilding has all the depth of a puddle half the time. Furthermore, the full inference that the other person is unaware of that people referenced was that the hybrid would take primarily after the mother and have some secondary characteristic reminiscent of the father's race. The fact that some people present it as objective fact and not mere inference is a inherent problem to XIV's community, to say nothing of the inevitable, inherent distortion that can occur in a ceaseless game of telephone over long time spans.

To me, that whole idea is blind "justification" and not "inference".

The idea that the child takes the mother's race is justification to play a hybrid race in-game because of how popular those types of stories are even in writing outside of RP. Anyone who spends more than half a thought on the topic who doesn't want to RP as a half-something character won't come to the same conclusion.


The only way to perfectly make Hilda a half-Elezen would be to ever-so-slightly change the proportions of her body and make her just a tiny bit taller than Midlanders could be. That doesn't sound like the effort the devs would do so they just gave her a unique head like how the Garleans, Ancients, and other important characters have unique heads. Otherwise, she's still a max-height Midlander when NPCs are very rarely made max-height. Other than their wacky proportions that don't even make it into official art half the time, the only characteristics Elezen have unique from Hyur are height and ears so I don't know what people would be expecting anyway.

Then there's the legendary tale of the Au Ra who had a child with a Hyur that looked like an Au Ra but with less scales. But again, Au Ra are just "Hyur with extra bits" so I wouldn't expect a hybrid to be anything different than "race that isn't a Hyur but with less of those extra bits".

"Takes after the mom, but also the dad" is kind of how genetics work so the idea of "mother's race completely, but secondary(?) characteristics from dad" sounds super flimsy. Calling things that aren't on a Hyur "secondary characteristics" is just admitting that every single race is just "Hyur but different" anyway.