Confusing Fact about the Races/Spoken

[Strongfat900]

Well, remember that there aren't actual distinctions between the 'spoken' races and 'beast' races, it's 100% arbitrary and fueled by social desire to designate a 'lesser' class of people. In fact, remember that in the First the Amal'jaa equivalents were treated equally and it was the lalafel equivalents that were treated as 'the beast tribe'.

But I do think that it's entirely possible that there were people who, when trying to define this new form for themselves, landed on one that they had some memory of rather than completely out of whole cloth. I mean, if you decide you wanna be a wolfman, and you remember seeing a wolfman before, your resulting image is probably gonna resemble that wolfman you saw.

Btw, could we say that the term, Humanity, can be used for any sapient races of FFXIV including the more beastly looking races like say the Amaljaah? I know that the term is very arbitrary and etc, but since a lot of people here still use the term so I'm wondering about that.

[Cleretic]

Btw, could we say that the term, Humanity, can be used for any sapient races of FFXIV including the more beastly looking races like say the Amaljaah? I know that the term is very arbitrary and etc, but since a lot of people here still use the term so I'm wondering about that.

Oh, absolutely, it applies to them as much as it applies to hyur or roegadyn in the greater sense of the definition. I personally avoid using the term because it's so easily misinterpreted as being more narrow, though.

[Strongfat900]

Oh, absolutely, it applies to them as much as it applies to hyur or roegadyn in the greater sense of the definition. I personally avoid using the term because it's so easily misinterpreted as being more narrow, though.

I think it's better to say that they're the Spoken(sapient) races instead. Using the human label here is pretty..well, yeah. I'd also like to think that the Hyur aren't "human" like us either despite their appearances sort of like the Xandarians from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. It's a trope called "Call a Smeerp a Rabbit", and as you expect, those names are very broad and loose including in FFXIV where the term, humanity, can mean any bipedal sentient creature and etc.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...ASmeerpARabbit

Do you know the manga, Biomega? People there call anything mountable as a "horse". Even the main protagonist calls his motorcycle as such as well.

[Selvokaz]

By "humanity" do you mean all of the Spoken including the "beastmen" tribes? Cuz even the Eorzea encyclopedia considers the "beastmen" as mere men or "humans" if you will(any race that is sapient really).
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...encyclopaedia/

I'd say that the best term for the most human looking races is demi-humans. Not to forget on the fact that these terms are never used in the First to begin with, and we do know for a fact that these terms were first used in Ul-daah for political reasons. Same for the Garleans who call anyone who isn't them as "savages" and "barbarians". I do agree that the aether did play a big role in shaping the sapient races of the world among other things though.

Nah, im pretty much talking about anything that can reason higher than, eat, sleep, mate. XD

[Strongfat900]

Nah, im pretty much talking about anything that can reason higher than, eat, sleep, mate. XD

And "beastmen" can't? rofl. The "beastmen" are as sapient as the "wandering races" of Eorzea, my dude. The term, humanity, in FFXIV is pretty loose of a term really which is why it's replaced by terms like the Spoken.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...ASmeerpARabbit

Eat, sleep and mate are things that all animals do, but there's a difference between Sapient and non-Sapient creatures including in RL like with humans and non-human animals. I remember Yoshi said something that he wanted to abandon these terms in the FFXIV from some live letter in the past, partly because he wanted to remove FFXIV from FFXI's shadow when he became director of the game.

[Elladie]

Yoshida has said in an interview or q&a that the speciation we’ve seen has evolved since the sundering. I assume Oda agrees? It makes little sense to me precisely bc the idea of humanity on each shard branching into the same subspecies due to random evolution beggars belief, but it seems to be the answer. At least for the moment. I mean it’s not actually specified in the game yet, so I think it’s up for changes till it is.

I just wanted to point out that Yoshida's assumption here isn't at all far-fetched. The Sundering happened only twelve thousand years ago. Homo sapiens had appeared on earth as long ago as two hundred thousand years. So twelve thousand is barely any time at all in evolutionary terms. All the species and races most likely existed pretty much as they are now on Etheirys before the Sundering and would have evolved only slight differences since. Obviously cases like the Dragons and the Ixali are exceptions and won't appear on the other Shards

[Strongfat900]

I just wanted to point out that Yoshida's assumption here isn't at all far-fetched. The Sundering happened only twelve thousand years ago. Homo sapiens had appeared on earth as long ago as two hundred thousand years. So twelve thousand is barely any time at all in evolutionary terms. All the species and races most likely existed pretty much as they are now on Etheirys before the Sundering and would have evolved only slight differences since. Obviously cases like the Dragons and the Ixali are exceptions and won't appear on the other Shards

It all depends on your personal headcannon really. And besides, the laws of magical evolution would obviously be different from actual real world evolution.