Quote Originally Posted by Rongway View Post
That's the point? He looks nothing like me. So why should anyone else's appearance indicate whether they are a WoX fragment or not?
It's a meta bridge between your character and Ardbert. You could make the same argument about Azem, why would their appearance/gender indicate a connection to the WoL? Yet still they follow our gender.

I got into this frame of thought after arguing with Cleretic about the same thing. I argued there was no reason for Azem to share our gender in light of Ardbert or potential other shards unless they were literally us, she argued Ardbert was meta-connected to us via appearance, so Azem was meta-connected in a different way, because the writing is just pretty gut based and has to establish connections like that to not fly over our heads. I actually agree with that line of thought now, XIV's writing counts on the players being relatively simple-minded and not think about it too much. So the same would go for Golbez, their appearance would be a secret to allow us a better means of identification with or sense of agency over them by allowing us to imagine them however we like.