Are shards different?

[MikkoAkure]

Mostly unrelated, but this one actually does have something resembling evidence, because the two most known examples of mixed-race children in canon (Hilda and Arenvald) are both their mothers' race with some visual traits from their fathers'. Granted, sample size of two there, but works well enough as an answer for 'which race do I pick when making a mixed-race character'.

I don't take limitations of the game in showing off characters as concrete evidence. It was definitely easier to plop a uniquely-made face on top of an existing body rather than make a whole new body by scratch. There's nothing at all to suggest that genetics work differently here than they do in our world (except for miqo'te and viera, which I'll get to in a second) so I wouldn't see why a "real life" half-elezen wouldn't look half-elezen instead of "hyur, but with slightly pointy ears". That whole thing was debunked in Shadowbringers anyway since we have Severa, a half-Garlean who looks 100% Garlean except her third eye is black instead of white and her mom is a hyur. Up until that point, we didn't even know half-Garleans could have third eyes.

Garleans themselves are another example of how you shouldn't take character models at face value because half of them use midlander bodies and the other half use elezen bodies and we're never told why that is and there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to it except that there seems to be more female characters using midlander bodies and more male characters using elezen bodies. Though there are some male midlander body users like Jullus and Midas (Cid uses a midlander skeleton under a unique model but he's still a foot and a half shorter than Nero and Gaius) and female elezen body users like Livia, Lucia, and Nael.

Being a mixed-race person in the setting is so rare to begin with that we don't have anything to go on except for character models and basing anything off that feels like an excuse to RP something a certain way more than something that's based in actual lore. Unless it's actually written down anywhere, I won't believe it.


Segueing into the main topic though, this reminded me that there is one unexplained difference between the people of the Source and the people of the First. On the First, the mystel (their version of miqo'te) have an equal ratio of male to female. That makes me wonder about how the miqo'te equivalents are like on the other Shards and if they're more like the ones on the First or if they have a really unbalanced gender ratio like the ones on the Source. It also makes me wonder if the writers treated this as another piece of lore from 1.0 (and carried over from FFXI) that they'd rather just retcon or at least just forget about and they're just doing their own thing now.