Male Viera names?

[WhiteArchmage]

Agree with most of your post but just be be pedantic here; he also says they came up with it during XII's development, and that his reasoning for saying it doesn't apply to XII is only because he left that game's development before it had the chance to be published somewhere.

My bad, then! Must've missed that part.

The thing is, where are they going to get that concept of gender from, and form that identity upon, if the only thing they know about men is that they're not allowed to live in the village?

And apparently the women do everything that the men would do anyway, besides the additional ultra-survivalist skills that need to be taught from warder to apprentice.

At most you'd have some kids showing a preference about what role they'll have to take up, but that isn't necessarily tied to gender even in a culture with the normal concepts of male and female.

That's basically my understanding, their concept of gender would be different than ours, and children not thinking of themselves as either male or female; and probably the rest of the village not thinking of them as either but just as a nebulous gender-neutral "children". Or they may think of them as girls until proven otherwise, who knows.

I don't think the idea is supposed to be easy to swallow. It's meant to be a harsh strict societal rule based on tradition over practicality. That's the only way a system like that can stay intact. If you start making an exception for the clumsy man who is good with kids and the woman who wants to be a warder, pretty soon it stops being a gender-based system at all.

Indeed, and I don't believe the intention is we're supposed to overthrow their traditions or anything of the sort. If anything, it serves as an easy way for player characters to leave said society. For any reason from "dislikes the role the Green Word gave them" all the way to "Gender dysphoria is a <kupo!> in a society with a heavy emphasis in a sex-based-binary." (though, of course, since backstory headcanons are JUST headcanons, it can also be as innocent as "the Will of the Woods said we'd be better off protecting the Jungle from X/Y/Z event")