Miqo'te claws: Function or Fashion?

[Koosei13]

I've a question on miqo'te biology, and hoping others might also have put thought into it.

I've always headcannoned miqo'te to have natural claws, even though the in game character base has more Hyur like nails unless you glam a certain item.

My question is this: how strong would they be? Would they have the average strength of a nail, prone to breaking and chipping? Or would they be closer to a claw or Talon in strength, strong enough to reliably use as a close range "weapon" in the hunt/while fighting?

Claws would make more sense of they had something closer to a cat's paw, and the biology of their hands lens to them being more like a nail.

But I think evolution wise it would also make sense for them to have a natural weapon in the form of those claws, since they have such a strong history as a species as hunters. Maybe not as necessary in "modern" Eorzea with the advent of better weapons, but I feel like it might be a vestigial trait. (Or even still there and as effective as with their ancestors, just not used as much).

Thoughts?

[Iscah]

I was thinking about something similar a while back but coming from the opposite direction - toying with a (non-FFXIV) concept of a sphinx character and just how impractical that combination of human head and cat body would actually be. Cats are built to catch their prey with claws, but use their jaws to actually kill it. A human can't do that, and a human with cat claws isn't going to be able to hunt like a cat, unless they want to scratch their prey to death.

Additionally, cats' claws are only really useful combined with cat anatomy that lets them 'sheathe' their claws and keep them sharp. The claws don't retract into the toes, but the toes naturally sit in a folded position something akin to our fingers folding back beyond our natural stopping point to touch the back of our palm, and the claws only appear when the cat extends its toes out straight. (Compare the toe shape shown on these cat and wolf skeletons. Note that the elbow/knee joints are up closer to the body and the lower 'leg joints' are equivalent to our wrist and ankle.)

Since Miqo'te don't have that rather unsettling idea of hand anatomy, if they had claws they would be unretractable. In everyday usage they would either end up blunted, or have to be maintained very carefully to avoid that - but it would be extemely impractical, and they'd probably end up injuring themselves with their own fingers.

There's no evolutionary advantage for Miqo'te to develop claws instead of nails, any more than the other 'human' races. (Or real human hunter-gatherer tribes, which are a much better analogy for what Miqo'te people would have been doing over time.)

...but don't try to explain why they needed to evolve furry ears in a completely different position to every other race, if they're all supposed to have come from a common ancestor. I've put it in the "too hard, don't even try" basket.

Nails have advantages too - and I think would well outweigh blunted claws. They protect the soft end of our fingers, and help with precise gripping, scraping, and probably all sorts of everyday motions we don't even think about.

[ObsidianFire]

If Miqo'te (or any other race) were to have long nails, they'd probably cover them with nail sheaths to prevent them from breaking. Also nail sheaths were totally a thing historically, but for courtesans, not warriors.

If there's any class that could get away with long nails, it would probably be Summoners and Scholars. They don't have to be constantly gripping a lot of things that long nails would get in the way of. All the other classes do. Gripping weapon handles (or rods or staffs) is tricky with long nails. For most weapons in the game, they'd poke right into the palm of your hand!

That said, nail length has nothing to do with nail sharpness. You can scratch people just fine if you file average length nails down to a point. You'll also constantly be filing them since human nails dull really quickly. Thick nails probably wouldn't dull as fast though. The bigger concern is the nail breaking. Nails grow in layers and sometimes if the nail gets hit with enough force, it can break along the layers, specifically on the side of the nail. This can cause the nail to peel along the layer, causing the bit of the nail that extends past the nail bed to break.

The other thing to consider is that things like nail length are something you get used to after a while. My normal nails go a little bit past my fingers, but I often don't bother cutting them until they're like... 1/8 of an inch past. That's when they start getting annoying to deal with, mostly because that's when they start making it hard to type on a computer. And that is long enough to file a nail into a point that can be felt.

[LineageRazor]

Since Miqo'te don't have that rather unsettling idea of hand anatomy, if they had claws they would be unretractable.

Interestingly, the Mithra from FFXI DID have that hand anatomy, or at least squarish fingers that suggested it. Just one of the many ways that Mithra actually seemed like a unique race, rather than just the humans with animal bits slapped on we get in this game.

[CatStarPrime]

The question's answer certainly has a bearing on the handling of various anatomical bits, for pleasurable purposes...

[CaesarCV]

I imagine that they don't really have any claws for hunting. The Miquote tribes do not appear to have any sort of 'naturalistic' hunting abilities like melee or even the ability to eat food raw. Their culture emphasizes it, but they have traditionally been shown mostly with bows or spears, not unlike human ones. Others here have done a great job with the anatomical parts of the discussion, and I'll leave the rest to them.

[Shadygrove]

... cats' claws are only really useful combined with cat anatomy that lets them 'sheathe' their claws and keep them sharp. The claws don't retract into the toes, but the toes naturally sit in a folded position something akin to our fingers folding back beyond our natural stopping point to touch the back of our palm, and the claws only appear when the cat extends its toes out straight. (Compare the toe shape shown on these cat and wolf skeletons. Note that the elbow/knee joints are up closer to the body and the lower 'leg joints' are equivalent to our wrist and ankle.)...

Not all cats have fully retractable claws. All retract to some degree, but some cat's claws are straight, not curved.

[Koosei13]

Not all cats have fully retractable claws. All retract to some degree, but some cat's claws are straight, not curved.

This is more along the lines what I was thinking, not retractable, but still stronger and thicker than the average nail.

As an addenedum, it's definitely feasible for a people to have nails like that. I just passed the Azim Steppe in game, and noticed that some of the Au Ra npcs do have nails close to what I was imagining the miqo'te might have, even though the player model does not. Specifically every Oronir I could find had them, with the exception of Udutai, the storyteller. As well, the traveling mender, traveling material supplier, the milk vendor (?? unable to buy from him, but sells spoiled milk according to his pop up text. he's at 38.8x28.8) in Reunion all had the claw-like nails. Those three are all wearing white with brown accents, and as far as I can tell aren't associated with one of the tribes we met. I specify brown accents as there's two npc's in Reunion in with with blue that do not have the nails.

[ObsidianFire]

The Oronir's nails are just Claws of the Beast dyed Metalic Gold. You can get them for yourself in the Gold Saucer with MGP.

[Iscah]

As well as the Claws of the Beast that ObsidianFire mentioned, the Ehcatl gloves you get from the Ixal beast tribe also give you the long "claw" nails - and they are primarily (and very impractically!) used as NPC costume for the Elezen hunters in Tailfeather.

In both cases, they just look like human nails grown long and filed to a point. (You can have a look at the 3D models on the website that I linked.)