Gender locked race?

[Crushnight]

Female monstrosities outside of the trials exist, but like I said, you won't always be able to tell if they're even female, because they lack many of the secondary female traits that human women have. Certainly, female dragons are monstrous beings by human standards.

Yep plenty outside trials have very monstrous females someone mentioned trials so i did pure trials as the basis some female monstrocities we know:

Titan may not be the most monstrous but he's certainly one of the ugliest trial bosses.

Agreed Byakko and Seiryu are much prettier than titan but are more monstrous as a whole can't just take the pretty faces had to consider the tiger and snakes too so that is why they are below titan

You'll have an uphill battle with that, because it'd require showing some tangible benefit to the game of doing so, like increased profitability. I doubt it's something that most players are even remotely concerned about. At least with male Viera, as it relates to a playable race option, you will manage to garner some sympathy.

Again agreed asking devs to go with something they are uncomfortable with is going to create friction so the demand must outweigh that safety the devs are human beings afterall and they are more likely to try it if their is enough people wanting something and are polite when asking for it every time.

[BillyKaplan]

Echidna and that CT boss

They still went out of their way to give them, er, certain female bodily features, if you follow.
Now, while we're on the topic of the beast tribe, all it takes is the one look at the female-locked beast tribe to see that this pattern actually continues. In many ways, the Ananta are much closer to humans than any other beast tribe you're going to run into.
As for female dragons, I can go for quite a while about how out of the three siblings, it was Ratatoskr who was basically fridged, off-screen, without any characterization, so Nidhogg can go on a thousand years of vengeance (overly simplified but her death was a big part of why he sought vengeance, and why Hraesvelgr helped him, while we learn the most about Ratatoskr herself in the short stories). But that's straying a bit too far, so I'll leave it with the very simple point that there's a very clear, obvious pattern in how the devs both design and write a lot of their female characters. And it manifests in other things too, like how people really wouldn't be surprised if we didn't get bunny boys... even though as the developers, they could've made them as mascular and beefy as they wanted them to be to avoid feeling... uncomfortable. But the reality of the matter is that far too few people would be surprised if they did ended up gender-locking them. many of the remaining people would just be disappointed.

[Tsumdere]

Some prime Waifu Material Here:
Tomamo no Gozen, Suzaku, Ultima the High Seraph, Tioman, Twintania.

And these are just off the top of my head. Easy to make your point when you just ignore all the examples that blow it out of the water.

I mean, we were talking about primals (at least I was) since primals are going to be the most commonly seen enemies for most and very iconic, but go off.

Suzaku is a human for 85% of her fight. She's definitely the least feminine out of all of the female primals, but she's still beautiful.
Ultima's top half is a beautiful waifu. Not that I have a problem with this design, it fits her.
Tamamo no Gozen walks around as a beautiful Au Ra before transforming in her fate.

Tioman and Twintania are cool bosses. No problems here.

[Lacan]

I'm just glad the thread has got as much attention as it has since that's one way of letting SE know that people want m viera. I'm still holding out for Japan fanfest. March needs to hurry up!

[DevilsDontFly]

I love that this thread evolved from theorycraft to court room.

wHerREs tHe eViDEnce?!!?!?!?!

[Lauront]

I love that this thread evolved from theorycraft to court room.

wHerREs tHe eViDEnce?!!?!?!?!

OBJECTION, YOUR HONOUR!

[Tsumdere]

I love that this thread evolved from theorycraft to court room.

wHerREs tHe eViDEnce?!!?!?!?!

You can't say anything in this thread without at least 10 academic sources.

I mean, if there isn't a single male Viera in Dalmasca, the biggest hub that's closest in location to their homeland, it doesn't paint a positive picture that there'd be others even further away.

I mean, people keep bringing this up, but we certainly didn't have any trouble getting to the Orbonne Monestary which is inside the Golmore Jungle. We weren't riddled with arrows stepping foot there.

We flew in, had Fran with us, and immediately walked into a gigantic monster-riddled building. That's a big difference between just waltzing around the jungle solo and picking some flowers to make crafting tea.

-snip-

I typed up something and then realized it was useless because you obviously are arguing for the sake of being a contrarian. There is some real stubbornness if you refuse to see that Suzaku and Ultima are beautiful women, especially when you look at their male counterparts who have been monsterized far more than they have. With Tamamo no Gozen having lore that says she chose the form of a beautiful woman to walk among humans and you can see her wandering around sprouting lines of dialogue in Yanxia. One person brought up other enemies when the conversation was clearly about primals as one with a little critical thinking could figure out when we were talking about Sophia/Lakshmi/Zurvan/Ramuh. This is because primals are the enemies seen far, far more often than anything else and have a lot more visibility than Poroggo #507.

AND LET ME MAKE THIS VERY CLEAR, there is nothing wrong with making hot female enemies. I like them a lot, but it's just a very interesting trend (and honestly, you would have to be really stubborn to not acknowledge that you can probably name far, far more hot female enemies in this game than you can male) to look at. There is an interview where Soken flat out said that Yoshi-P wanted him to make Lakshmi's music more youthful since Yoshi-P didn't like THICCshmi (despite others seeming to like her) and made the art team change her to what we have now.
I don't know how much clearer you can make this.

inb4 I'm told I can't pick and choose when the original conversation was one of my making and I specifically said primals

[Gwenorai]

Aye, in FF12/Tactics Ultima was the 'Holy' primal and the balance to Zodiark. I always did wonder if Hydaelyn was Ultima's 'pure side' - eh, who knows, guess we will eventually. Nice spot though, hmmm.

[redcurrant18]

The people want male Viera ♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪ and we won't shut up until we get them ♪٩(✿′ᗜ‵✿)۶♪

[Shippuu]

You can't say anything in this thread without at least 10 academic sources.

Do you have a source for that rule?!?!

We flew in, had Fran with us, and immediately walked into a gigantic monster-riddled building. That's a big difference between just waltzing around the jungle solo and picking some flowers to make crafting tea.

I mean, there was plenty of story threads left by Fran such as who she serves. That person couldn't possibly find reason to invite us into their woods with a special sanction like we've gotten time and time before with all kinds of places normal people/outsiders couldn't tread.

There is some real stubbornness if you refuse to see that Suzaku and Ultima are beautiful women, especially when you look at their male counterparts who have been monsterized far more than they have.

They still had monstrous forms. I took umbrage to the comment that implied SE makes no female enemies with monstrous forms. I should have read more into the context of that discussion but I didn't as the topic in general doesn't interest me on how SE models female enemies. I only commented because of the broad statement that there were no female "enemies" with monstrous forms because there are, and they're more than just "poroggo #55" tier of enemies.
I'll back out of that discussion though since I wasn't invested into the intended context/scope of it.

Yea dw lotta games i never played ff11 but when i saw garuda in ff14 i had to look back to see where the female type came from as only saw monster garuda prior XD Lakshmi is a weird one the only other instance of Lakshmi is ff6 The goddess of the painting that the demon Chardanok took over we have that in Sigmascape so ff14 Lakshmi is actually unique in ff series hence why her full name is Sri Lakshmi but despite saying she has a snake tail we never see it a design change that Yoshi wanted it does make you wonder how much has been changed due to his opinion suddenly little more scared for male viera reveal :S

Yeah, Yoshida often does a lot of things that are his own personal tastes, even going against Final Fantasy staples/history if he feels strongly about something. Samurai was a solid example of this, especially fleshed out in a recent interview where he basically said his favorite movies regarding Samurai was always the ronin type and that it was why he made Samurai in 14 follow that archetype when they've been typically depicted as being the armored versions in the vast majority of Final Fantasy games. He definitely picks and chooses when he wants to be faithful to the franchise etc and isn't above putting his personal tastes above other things (which I can't blame him for, he's human after all and the director of the game, he gets to make those choices even if I disagree with them).