Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Veis_Alveare]

Yeah, lore similar to male mooncats... which did not suffice to rule out their addition. People invoking the lore cannot have it both ways.

I'm not talking about the Miqo thing, though - I'm addressing you saying that this game's lore would somehow need to be "twisted" to support a primarily female Viera race. The lore in this game is clear as day in that there will not be male Viera. That same series of quotes cautions people from even looking for them because they'll only find disappointment or death.

You're fine to invoke the whole Miqo lore thing as a way to dismiss arguments centering on lore but you aren't being intellectually honest if you're presenting the idea that the lore of XIV is in any way supportive of your request... really it's quite the opposite.

Twisting lore is what we would need to do to include male Viera, nothing needs to change in their lore to keep them a mystery. I'm down for twisting lore in your favor as well but we should be honest about what that means.

[Anvaire]

I'm not talking about the Miqo thing, though - I'm addressing you saying that this game's lore would somehow need to be "twisted" to support a primarily female Viera race. The lore in this game is clear as day in that there will not be male Viera. That same series of quotes cautions people from even looking for them because they'll only find disappointment or death.

You're fine to invoke the whole Miqo lore thing as a way to dismiss arguments centering on lore but you aren't being intellectually honest if you're presenting the idea that the lore of XIV is in any way supportive of your request... really it's quite the opposite.

Twisting lore is what we would need to do to include male Viera, nothing needs to change in their lore to keep them a mystery. I'm down for twisting lore in your favor as well but we should be honest about what that means.

Except that lore is not a static thing and the lore we have from the wandering dramaturge is already outdated at the point of delivery, it is herey say. Which is how the Devs usually place lore so that they can change it if they need to. The "to us they simply do not exist line" is referring to seeing them outside of their forest home, in that they are so rare that few if any have ever seen them. Taking this further, we are also told that they do exist by the female Viera. Who provide majority of the information around the Viera males.

Together all this provides is confirmation that they do exist. What we do not know, is what would motivate them to leave their forest homes. I think if they are added, the devs will add lore to make this plausible. One motivation i can think of is a calamity level event... kind of like a fire that is shown in the trailer? that would most likely displace the males from the woods. I think i did read somewhere from an NPC that the empire was rounding up "the hares" which could refer to the male viera. I cannot remember which NPC says it.

Thinking on it and this literally just sprung to mind, it could simply be that there are other Viera settlements in hydealyn where the status quo lore we have doesn't sit their culture. Or you know, the fact that we are going to a world that has the same races but which have developed differently... who knows maybe that culture is different too.

To summarise, i don't think it would be a twisting of the lore, but rather a development of it, or a reaction to something that changes our outlook.

[Duskane]

In XIV the only Viera we've seen is female, the playable race is female only (at this point) and the guy on the airship who talks about Viera during the Ivalice raids literally talks about seeing "all manner of wondrous creatures" but "[male Viera] did not exist to us."

Will say though that line does not void there existence,it was just a poor way to hint they are not playable and they do described the lives of male Viera,
Really that line isnt too much of a issue.

[Gwenorai]

I mean, to be frank regarding the lore it has always been like that. The males have always been away from the females as they are shadow protectors who go one step beyond in regards to protecting the woodland.

Considering how much they change their lore to pander, we all know that the lore argument is a straw man argument. You can't hide behind lore when I'm riding along on a Rathalos or about to take part in some Nier automata. Information regarding the Males can be seen in both the game and in the latest Eorzea encyclopedia. As Duskane said, that line 'they simply do not exist to us' isn't much of an issue, it's just dramatic effect. No one other than female Viera, intruders and perhaps the few survivors of an imperial unit have seen a male Viera. To the ordinary person who isn't part of that particular group, they don't exist.

Now that females are now playable they have most definitely seen a male once in their lifetime - so they do exist to them and of course, they now exist to us. The lore is there, and the evidence is there. All we need is an actual physical appearance which isn't merely secondary evidence such as 'this young Viera exists - therefore the males exist since they don't reproduce asexually' or what we're most likely to see in SB where we will be told the males are watching us, or that some NPC has just come across one etc. Shadow Bringers will cement the fact they exist - that's for sure seeing as Yoshida mentioned they would be talked about quite a bit. Though at this point I'm just frowning - we already had Fran mention they were watching us in the 24man. We already know that an entire imperial unit was killed by them barring a few poor sods they let go.

Why are people still clinging to the whole 'nuh, they don't exist - they're female only' when there's so much to the contrary?

[MintnHoney]

heh.
Inb4 Squeenix decides to implement limited Male Viera like the Housing system, and nobody wins.

[zeylos]

heh.
Inb4 Squeenix decides to implement limited Male Viera like the Housing system, and nobody wins.

But how do you implement limited male viera?

[Lihtleita]

But how do you implement limited male viera?

they dont have a running animation, they tpose through the woods in search of prey

[NekoNova]

Maybe they should do Male Viera like they did Jedi originally in Star Wars Galaxies

[Lauront]

I'm not talking about the Miqo thing, though - I'm addressing you saying that this game's lore would somehow need to be "twisted" to support a primarily female Viera race. The lore in this game is clear as day in that there will not be male Viera. That same series of quotes cautions people from even looking for them because they'll only find disappointment or death.

You're fine to invoke the whole Miqo lore thing as a way to dismiss arguments centering on lore but you aren't being intellectually honest if you're presenting the idea that the lore of XIV is in any way supportive of your request... really it's quite the opposite.

Twisting lore is what we would need to do to include male Viera, nothing needs to change in their lore to keep them a mystery. I'm down for twisting lore in your favor as well but we should be honest about what that means.

They’re not using the lore to rule out their addition, so objections based on it are a non-starter. The lore simply states that they exist but are currently not seen out of their woods. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it preventing them from ever being seen. As far as the dramaturge is aware, they don’t venture out and that’s the end of it. So already, there's no real basis to exclude them as a playable option.

I bring up male mooncats because the lore on their numbers is exactly the same, and yet it still does not suffice to rule them out as a playable option. WHM lore is such that WHMs are even more prohibitively rare (similar to a few other jobs), but you can play one. I could make the argument that this "detracts from their mystique", but ultimately that's subjective and I don't think it's a valid reason to not add a job or race.

For the lore to suffice to rule them out it’d have to go much farther. It did not even suffice to do this in Ivalice, where in all but the non-canon version Viera males are a presence - just not seen, and apparently in one of the games Matsuno had intended to add them but ran out of time. It's more that given those games' age, it's not like they're going to go back to add them in, so they preserve that sense of "mystery" for the male Viera, whatever it's worth.

Strictly speaking, fViera should not be seen outside their forests either... they’ve just chosen to violate that commandment. Unless you want to deny that the males have free will, there’s no reason one could not do the same.

So I do think it requires twisting the lore to categorically rule out mViera, in the way Zeonx is trying to imply, because it's not written in that way. It's more that the lore is written in such a way as to cover for a pre-existing decision (which we know is based on resources), but is still not definitive to the point where it would rule out the males being playable... almost exactly mirroring the situation we're in. Quite the coincidence!