Garlean vs Elezen models

[Iscah]

Aurelie, you should visit that massive airship, the one that's used to get us to ridorana from kugane - there are at least four pure-blood garleans, and they all use the midlander model.

I'm quite serious, it's two of the dancers and one of the engineers. The fourth one being Jenomis himself.

Okay, I must be going mad, I could have sworn Jenomis was standing in an Elezen idle pose... but yes, on actually checking (both database and visiting in-game), he has a max-height Midlander model.

He still has rather strange proportions though, but in a different way. There could be something off with the size/shape of the customised face, or it could just be that really puffy hairstyle making his head look bigger, combined with the coat that gives him extra wide shoulders.

The other Garleans are a funny mix of Hyur models and Elezen features. From memory, the (Midlander) Thespian is wearing the Elezen version of the hempen underwear set, and the Dancer has a Duskwight tattoo. Plus there are some actual Elezen in the troupe as well.

My (likely wrong) theory, is that garleans might count as their own distinct race, purely based on the fact they have that third eye and can't manipulate aether - and maybe not unlike the hyurs, they have two clans? Where one is tall, elezen-shaped and the other is midlander shaped?

I like that theory!

The Garleans are certainly a distinct race by lore, it's just at a game level that they 'cheaped out' on the models and repurposed other races instead of building an equilvalent-to-playable-race level of customisation for only a few characters.

For now, my theory is: They use the fact they never gave the garleans an actual race in the system to display a greater amount of diversity within it. Alternately, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is up to when they make garlean NPCs. Either or.

Also quite possible. ^_^;

Wait, wait, first this might be a better post for the lore forum, but aside that what if the elezen-like model is used mostly for military garleans? If someone can confirm this (because I don't remember them all) maybe it'll means that the reason there's this dimorphism might be related to the military training and what not

Interesting - or perhaps a heavily enforced split between "upper class" and "commoner" Garleans to the point that they're practically different races because they're not mixing at all.

I agree Nero falls into "uncanny valley", I'm glad I'm not the only one. I've always wondered why he was given far more realistic facial features and bone structure (lord, that heavy brow and shadow cast beneath it...yikes) than all other NPCs and player characters which are far more stylized and semi-realistic.

He's also really not helped by the fact you can barely see his eyes at a distance. (The shaded glasses are an improvement!) The character designers seem to have a liking for very pale eye colours and it doesn't work well.

The heavy eyelids seem to be a common trait for the Garleans we've seen. Eg. Lucia, Ramza, Zenos. But yeah, it's more about the degree of detail they've put into his face - perhaps because he was one of their earlier 'custom face' characters and they wanted to do a good job on that unique face, rather than thinking about how well it matched the other standard faces?

Nero isn't the only insanely tall one though... he IS a giraffe of a giraffe but there are other 'tol' Garleans. Lucia uses the Elezan body with the more Hyur head model and is 'tol' in the Elezen way as well. An older 'chart' I found with someone who did a bit of 'digging' is here that ponders about it. [...]

I don't get why you're using 'tol' instead of 'tall'. Is that supposed to mean something in particular?

The height list you linked to is guesswork (and is going to be affected by poses, positioning and characters wearing bulky helmets) but you can actually get the NPC heights by looking them up in the database (to get their height setting in the format 0-100) and then checking that against the character creator menu which actually states the height that translates to. They got pretty close to the right answer for the 'standing NPC' characters.

Listed heights:

For male Elezen:
Gaius: 50 = 202 cm
Nero : 50
Regula: 100 = 209.8 cm

For female Elezen:
Lucia: 50 = 191 cm
Livia: 50

For male Midlanders:
Cid: 50 = 175 cm
Jenomis: 100 = 182 cm

They're... not all that creative with their character heights. (Although I did go looking up the various members of the Ishgardian high houses at one point, and there was a bit more variety across heights there - always at simple 0, 25, 50, 75, 100 intervals though.)

Meanwhile the settings for Ramza and Alma are very strange: both have height "255" and Alma isn't marked as having a 'child' model (as is used, of course for children, but also for characters like Alphinaud, Alisaie and the Padjals). They're not super tall or anything. Jenomis is taller than Ramza.

Also another curious thing from the character data - Livia's settings have the same skin and eye colour, and similar hair colour, to Urianger. Weird coincidence? Character builder bored at work and making genderswitched versions of NPCs (then 'throwing it in' because nobody's going to see her face anyway)?

I don't think Aulus (the mad scientist) is supposed to be Garlean though - at least, he doesn't have a customised face and I don't remember seeing he had the third eye.