Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[jake200135]

I'm in the camp of the lore for female Hrothgars being...... Well, just down right bizarre. I read the lore and it just felt...... Gross.

[Lauront]

They could've handled it through much better lore than that, really. The imbalanced ratios for each sex are getting a bit tired/tiring now. In both cases, but certainly the Hrothgar scenario is much worse than even the Viera's case. At least for Viera men there's a separate explanation to their rarity. I wish they'd just limit the highly imbalanced sex ratios to miqo'te and leave it at that. I don't think they really thought this through too well.

[Theodric]

I suspect that no matter what the lore justification happened to be, many within this thread would be picking it apart. I'll concede that it's a little weird by our standards, though I'm of the firm belief that fictional races in a fictional setting do not need to conform to the same norms as humans in the modern day in the real world.

[BillyKaplan]

fictional races in a fictional setting do not need to conform to the same norms as humans in the modern day in the real world.

I mean, that sort of works for Miqo'te. But at the same time those fictional settings do not exist in a vacuum, and it's so easy to take the Hrothgar gender disparities to pretty bad places real quick.
At the very least, it would be nice to feel like some effort was put into it, and not just use the exact same justification to everything they want to genderlock. They're few, and they're loners. Which doesn't even hold water given some of the race-gender combos with that lore are already in the game. And yeah, biologically speaking that would work better if it was talking about the males, if the females are fewer you're going to have to add more to that lore for the race to even continue, let alone avoid horrible implications.

[Lauront]

I suspect that no matter what the lore justification happened to be, many within this thread would be picking it apart. I'll concede that it's a little weird by our standards, though I'm of the firm belief that fictional races in a fictional setting do not need to conform to the same norms as humans in the modern day in the real world.

I'm all for that, but only when devs take a holistic approach and work through the chain of consequences. In this case, I don't believe they have - seems likelier that it was just used as a convenient wrapper to stick onto the Hrothgar gender-lock, to mirror the Viera one. The lore could work if the race had some peculiar features to it, like the females laying a great number of eggs, or something, but by all accounts the Hrothgar do nothing of the sort. Maybe they have worked out the implications but I doubt it.

[strawberrycake11]

Great, we know there's female hrothgar and male viera. The races don't reproduce asexually, they aren't molded into existence from clay by some god or another. So make them playable!

[WhiteArchmage]

I'd like to believe that lore was hastily rewritten after the... feedback to be ambiguous enough to "justify" both the lack of mViera/fHrothgar at launch, and the possibility of adding them in the future. They may have meant for the Hrothgar to be fully male like the Galka and not reproduce as such, more "resurrect"... like the Galka, and were too busy to realize the implications.

Of course, it all conjecture but as I mentioned before, it's flimsy enough to allow the missing genders further down the line, be it in the 5.x cycle (unlikely, but I'd go with 5.4 at the earliest) or 6.0 (however, I wouldn't like them to be locked behind 6.0 purchase, talk about rubbing salt in the wound).

[Rokke]

Of course, it all conjecture but as I mentioned before, it's flimsy enough to allow the missing genders further down the line, be it in the 5.x cycle (unlikely, but I'd go with 5.4 at the earliest) or 6.0 (however, I wouldn't like them to be locked behind 6.0 purchase, talk about rubbing salt in the wound).

The new tidbits would still have to fall in line with what appears in game thats been translated already (how we got the french leaks). I'm actually quite glad its as thin as it is- a more solid defense past "they're just rare" would have been a far larger an issue in petitioning the missing options as it'd involve significant rewrites in addition to the conceptualizing/modeling/animating/testing.

From what I read, it says male viera are "seldom, if ever, found within the bounds of any village". That doesn't necessarily mean the males number lower in population. It just means they are seldom found. Is there anywhere else that states the males number fewer than the females? Maybe I'm missing it.

The only real things we know about them involving numbers is that they're born at a less frequent rate and once they leave their village they are subjected to training that kills a number of them.

I interpreted that bit as it just explaining that outside potentially very rare cases, all males will leave their birth village at one point or another once they come of age. It actually makes me curious about the potential conditions that keep it "seldom, if ever" vs. "never". Like, would a sickly youth be allowed to stay? Or a aged forest master that's been maimed to an extent he can no longer serve the wood?

[Senn]

The only real things we know about them involving numbers is that they're born at a less frequent rate and once they leave their village they are subjected to training that kills a number of them.

Can you link me to this? I must have missed it or just don't remember.

[CoolDad]

Can you link me to this? I must have missed it or just don't remember.

The dramaturge mentions it.



The "It is estimated that upwards of eight in ten Viera are born female", and "More than a few will perish during this brutal rite of passage, further thinning the tribe's males" lines.