So umm...let's talk about being a Lalafell for a second

[Exiled_Tonberry]

There is a obvious type of people that lalafells attract.

It's fair to assume that a fair amount of people will definitely find attraction or sexualize their Lalafell. Not even going to try and deny this, it's a thing.

What's bad is when you automatically assume this about someone playing a Lalafell and judge them for it without so much as saying hi to them first.

On top of that, I'm also of the opinion that you can dress up your video games character however you want really. There really shouldn't be any limitations on this.
I'm actually really glad SE stopped making those ridiculous Lalafell customized swimsuits and bikinis that were in ARR just to potentially stop any controversy. It looked so damn silly.
To this day I'm still hoping SE will go back and fix the coliseum shawl for Lalafell so it doesn't look like baggy clown pants.

I'd rather give Lalafell the option to walk around in a thong like everyone else over having something customized for them as a sloppy form of censorship.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

He was more than likely joking, especially considering it was coming from another Lala. Plus I sincerely doubt anyone is legitametly looking at Lalas as actual literal children when they aren’t said to be such in game. However, you can’t say Lalas don’t look incredibly childlike. Nothing gross has to be going on in someone’s mind to acknowledge that fact.

My character started off as a Lala and I do still like them, but just got tired of being so small and didn’t really care for the way a lot of outfits looked on them, especially more revealing outfits. It just looks weird to me to have that juxtaposition of a “sexier” looking outfit on a child shaped chubby body. If someone wants to go ahead and think I’m a perv for not preferring that look, that’s on them. I’m aware lalas are not children and I don’t really care how anyone else dresses their character, so seeing a naked Lala running around doesn’t matter in the slightest to me, but I wouldn’t have my character like that because it just looks weird to me.

At the end of the day who cares what others think of your character though. Opinions are like.... those things everyone has where the sun don’t shine. Hah. Shrug off stupid comments and enjoy your character however you like.

I do acknowledge that Lalafells do have some child-like quality in their appearance(their "Happy" and "Laugh" emotes extentuate that),it's just some people tend to take it into the extreme end where I saw a reddit user being called a pedo just for asking about the beach outfits when people found out their character was a lalafell.

Just to clarify tho,it's not that I'm offended that much cuz it takes more than just a dumb comment to make me change my character for it,I was more bothered by the examples I saw online when I was curious if someone had a similar experience to mine.

Nowadays if someone looked at me weirdly in-game I'll just moogle/harvest dance them with cheers screams xD

[Melichoir]

Hmm so my favorite race is actually lala, and its what Ive been for the longest time. I recently been phantasia-ing to other races (was a Fem roe a few weeks ago and now a male Aura) just for fun since the phantasia's are on sale and yeah, the weird aspect is some players do engage with you differently. Even had some FC members straight up tell me "Just stay this, or anything, as long as you dont go back to Lala." Now I dont think it's something to do with being perverse, I just think people dont actually like the lalafell look and model. And to some sentiment, I share that feeling. The in game model is a bit...odd, from a design aesthetic. I overall like the 'feel' of lalafells, but the look is a bit janky, and when I do my own fan art, I do modify the design a bit. As an example:



From my personal perspective, if the design was closer to what I did (and yes, Ill admit some bias), youd probably have more people be on board with Lalas rather than their current iteration. But that could be just me. I know plenty of people who are a-ok with how the design is now, and I will admit from a game point of view, Lala's are a bit different from the "Short dwarf/gnome" races we typically see in MMOs.

[Skivvy]

Nowadays if someone looked at me weirdly in-game I'll just moogle/harvest dance them with cheers screams xD

Time to step-up your game and start doing the lala-twerk.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

Time to step-up your game and start doing the lala-twerk.

Lol if I remember correctly there isn't a twerk dance....unless one of the beast tribes has it xD

[Skivvy]

Lol if I remember correctly there isn't a twerk dance....unless one of the beast tribes has it xD

I think for female lalas, the closest is /pray spam. I'm not sure if males get anything D:

Also, that's rather spiffy art! I like your take on them

[Kuzulo]

Yeah, I'm new but find it best to be "dressed" as this character.

I still feel "cute", even in full coverage armor. Glamour gear is insanely expensive, too (as a new player.)

[alimdia]

Where are you getting that from? It doesn't sound accurate to me (and I'm on a Japanese data centre). I'd be very surprised if Roegadyn are outnumbering Au Ra, unless it's skewed by a number of 'joke alts' that don't actually get used much.

Also possible that having a choice of Miqo'te and Au Ra (and Midlander) splits the 'cute girl' population into multiple races, instead of one really popular one.

I know there were actual stats posted a while ago, which had pie charts of races on each data centre. Does anyone have the link to that?

If I remember correctly, the proportion of Lalafell was higher in JP than other countries, but everything else was fairly similar. A few percent variation between each one.

I think the pie charts per data center were part of the official census which doesn't exclude bots, so it sends hyur to the top in NA/EU.

But if you check luckybancho for each of the top JP servers the graph tends to look like this

Whereas in NA/EU + JP servers with many English players like Tonberry Au Ra is swapped with Lala.

In NA/EU people will assume all sort of terrible things about you if you say lalafells are cute, but that's not the case in Japan.

[Iscah]

Thanks, that looks like a more likely distribution. I’m guessing the four colour stripes are the genders/clans?

I’m surprised to see male Raen are quite so rare... I guess everyone wants to play the dark and edgy version.

[Melichoir]

I dont know if its the art OCD in me or something, but Ive never viewed Lalas as being super 'childlike' in appearance.

Rather, what gives them a childlike feel is the demeanor and emotes they have and how glamour is applied. I say this because of a few reasons. First, the game itself actually gives you examples of children in game. Children of virtually all the races (save Lalas. Maybe Lalas just pop out of the ground). When you look at the features and designs of children in game, they feel more in line with actual child proportions, particularly in relation to the art style of the game as a whole. But when viewing Lalas, they arent. If anything, Lalafells design wise fall outside of the games 'look and feel' from an art standpoint. They still have many features that make them inclusive broadly, but they are drastically different stylistically from every other race.

You can see this because lalas really do come off as exceptionally 'cartoonish' compared to any of the other races. This is also exacerbated by the fact htat Lala's proportions and ratios are childlike only at a very broad sense, but when given actual thought, it becomes pretty apparent. You can tell this by any cutscene where a Lala interacts with children NPCs. Headsize, body ratios, so forth make them stand out drastically in comparison to actual in game children. Again, as I stated above, some of the design aesthetics used Im not exactly fond of. For a point, the Triangle shaped body with no distinction between hips and ribcage. Other aspects are the overly rounded faces, overly miniturized facial features (nose, mouth particularly), and "tall" eyes- Eye shapes that are more vertical than horizontal. These aspects are more of a caricature of child features from the most basic standpoint, but if you saw an actual child with those features, theyd look heavily distorted to you.

So from a physical aspect, they never really struck me as being super childlike in appearance. Their body shape and what not is to distorted for me. Atleast in the context of teh FFXIV aesthetics. Because of that, I feel that what promotes the child like look of Lalafells isnt the physical appearance so much, but rather the demeanor of emotes, and how glamour is handled. Its also probably why I design them a touch differently in fan art. Theyre definitely more gnome/dwarf like in appearance when I draw them, rather than the Lalafell look in the game.

But then again, maybe Im just overthinking everything. I will say that due to the design choices of Lalas, that a bigger issue does arise. A very common thing Ive noticed since Ive been using Phantasias is that Lalas are actually pretty restricted in their emotiveness. There is a lot of really nice subtlety and nuance to the other races when running, walking, or doing other emotes, where as Lalas emotes are a lot more simplified and broad. Its a bit unfortunate because I think that this issue actually arises directly from Lalafells design. Since they are more blocky in shape, it limits the actual range of motion the model can do before getting distorted. For example, since there is an actual waist line on most models, that creates a natural bend/rotation point, but on Lalas, since one does not exist, how they bend and rotate can look odd and distorted in certain poses. This goes for Arm and Leg movments as well. Having actual body shape and definition would actually help provide the necessary room to animate more nuance and subtlety in poses.