Xbr’aal lore?

[ZooExorcist]

In the temptation to base my character on Xbr’aal over the Hrothgar of Bozja from the jumbled mess of lore the resistance instances gave us, I did every gold quest in the upper region of Yak T'el to learn.......nothing T^T

I recall "fighting" smilodons to train them and abandoned watch towers but learned nothing of their culture or society really. Like how Wuk Lamat's dad mentions that females are "rare" yet when you explore the map the ladies are everywhere....
Nothing on queens or leadership or why they're even in Tural in the first place (other than the obvious reason of putting hrothgal npcs in the game's overworld).

There's also Nitowikwe and Wawlika, who don't have Xbr'aal names but rather names similar to the other residents of Shaaloani.

I suspect a 4th lore book might be needed but are there any other quests in Dawntrail that shed any light on them?

[Cleretic]

Nothing on queens or leadership or why they're even in Tural in the first place (other than the obvious reason of putting hrothgal npcs in the game's overworld).

This part I can actually answer, and I think it's interesting just how... normal it is?

The Xbr'aal just don't do 'queens' or inherent matriarchy; Bruk Evu's the leader, and it seems like he got there by being a broadly really good hunter and respected community member. That line about female xbr'aal being rare does confirm that the biology of xbr'aal is the same as the hrothgar of Bozja, but 'rare' doesn't mean 'borderline nonexistent', there are ladies but not that many. And similarly, the xbr'aal don't put any greater value on their women than that; they're not common, so you celebrate when one gets born, but they're nothing more than that. You could make a case that we see more female xbr'aal than female hrothgar because the xbr'aal are generally less precious and protective of their women, but that's not exactly written down anywhere.

And of course if we want to talk narrative, the xbr'aal being really normal and down-to-earth about what we know is exceptional for them is probably supposed to low-key contrast with the Mamool Ja of Mamook breaking their entire society in pursuit of more Blessed Siblings.

[Pimsan20]

I'm honestly wondering how the Xbr'aal came to Tural. Since they are Hrothgars, and we know that they hail form Ilsabard. So when and how did they travel to Tural?

[Cleretic]

Since they are Hrothgars, and we know that they hail form Ilsabard.

Actually, we don't know that.

For every race on the Source, including the hrothgar, our knowledge of their history just sort of... blanks out, after a point; the hrothgar for example are earliest seen in the late Third Astral, in Bozja. That actually means there's about seven thousand years between the Sundering and that first hrothgar appearance that can best be described as '???'; we don't know where anyone was. For all we know, Tural is the birthplace of hrothgar/xbr'aal, and some migrated over to Ilsabard. Or that their actual 'homeland' is some entirely different third location that might not even still exist, and we're seeing the result of two independent waves of migration. Or that they evolved concurrently across both continents because the devs have said the spoken races came from sundered Ancients changing their form for survival, and two populations on two different continents landed on 'lion people'.

Every race in the game faces most if not all of these same questions; we just don't have the underlying anthropological answers, and chances are, the question's just not interesting enough to bother addressing by itself anyway.

[Ascended_Demon]

There's also Nitowikwe and Wawlika, who don't have Xbr'aal names but rather names similar to the other residents of Shaaloani.

There's actually a simple answer for this that we got before we even reached Tural. Races in Tural are named after the tribes where they are most predominate. Hrothgar in Tural are the most common race in the Xbr'aal tribe and that is why they are called that and the same goes for hyur being called Tonawawta in Tural. It is, in theory, possible for a Tonawawta to be part of the Xbr'aal tribe even though we do not see any. So given Nitowikwe and Wawlika's names we can infer they are, in fact, from the Tonawawta tribe and not the Xbr'aal tribe which tracks given that Tonawawta tribe originates in Xak Tural.

[MikkoAkure]

There's actually a simple answer for this that we got before we even reached Tural. Races in Tural are named after the tribes where they are most predominate. Hrothgar in Tural are the most common race in the Xbr'aal tribe and that is why they are called that and the same goes for hyur being called Tonawawta in Tural. It is, in theory, possible for a Tonawawta to be part of the Xbr'aal tribe even though we do not see any. So given Nitowikwe and Wawlika's names we can infer they are, in fact, from the Tonawawta tribe and not the Xbr'aal tribe which tracks given that Tonawawta tribe originates in Xak Tural.

I don't believe a Tonawawta can be called a Xbr'aal or the other way around. Those seem to be the racial names of those people in Tural and not tribal names.

The simplest answer is that people change their personal names based on the dominant culture in the area. Besides seeing this in real life, we see Roegadyn, Raen, Namazu, Kojin, and Hyur with the same naming conventions together as a collective culture in Doma, Hingashi, and Nagxia, while Hyur and Raen in Werlyt and Thavnair use completely different names.

For some reason or another, the Xbr'aal NPCs in Xak Tural use Tonawawta names and appear to have completely adopted Tonawawta culture in their dress as well. Whether they were born into that or changed it after moving is something we'd probably learn from an EE4 but either way it was probably easier to change to fit in or just a personal choice they made.

[Zero-ELEC]

I don't believe a Tonawawta can be called a Xbr'aal or the other way around. Those seem to be the racial names of those people in Tural and not tribal names.

That is incorrect, Tonawawta and other Turali names are clan names, not a racial names.

Self-assured trader: Consider this: it is not uncommon for the various races to be referred to instead by the names of certain clans. For the Miqo'te, the Hhetsarro; the Hrothgar, the Xbr'aal. Not because every member of a given clan is of the same race, mind, but because many individuals of said race are associated with that clan. A fair assumption, in certain cases─but take care not to give offense.

Wuk Lamat: You might hear the Hyur in Tural referred to as “Tonawawta,” one of our major clans.

It's specifically stated that not everyone in a clan is of the same race. It's very possible that Nitowikwe and Wawlika are Tonawawta.

[Cleretic]

It's specifically stated that not everyone in a clan is of the same race. It's very possible that Nitowikwe and Wawlika are Tonawawta.

It's an understandable thing to get confused about, because Nitowikwe and Wawlika are basically the only examples of this.

If we saw some hrothgar casually hanging out with the Hanuhanu in Kozuma'uka that would bridge that, but the only places we see a diversity of races are in the places where we'd expect a bunch of cultural crossover anyway.

[MikkoAkure]

That is incorrect, Tonawawta and other Turali names are clan names, not a racial names.

Yet elsewhere Turali terminology is used directly referring to features of a specific race.

It was not widely known that male and female Shetona were indistinguishable from one another until the age of thirteen. As they were long-lived and few in number, outsiders rarely chanced to encounter a Shetona adolescent.

We also know the Shetona have their own language and we see them living among the Tonawawta.

And that’s not even getting into non-playable Turali races who all have racial features exclusively attributed to the specific clan names.

[Zero-ELEC]

Yet elsewhere Turali terminology is used directly referring to features of a specific race.


We also know the Shetona have their own language and we see them living among the Tonawawta.

And that’s not even getting into non-playable Turali races who all have racial features exclusively attributed to the specific clan names.

Right, the Shetona are said to be a clan of viera, so those are used interchangeably, as per the self-assured trader. Like Wuk Lamat says:

Wuk Lamat: You might hear the Hyur in Tural referred to as “Tonawawta,” one of our major clans. As for Erenville, he belongs to a Viera clan known as the “Shetona.”

But all that means is that we see two clans living together but still distinct from each other.

Like the self-assured trader says races are often called by the major clan name (so they're clan names used racially) but there can still be people from clans that aren't from that race. And we see two hrothgar which do not feature Xbr'aal names but Tonawawta names, I think the assumption would be that they fit in that already described exceptions, rather than a whole new set of circumstances that we've never heard of before. Nothing about Nitowikwe or Wawlika implies that they took Tonawawta names.

It's an understandable thing to get confused about, because Nitowikwe and Wawlika are basically the only examples of this.

If we saw some hrothgar casually hanging out with the Hanuhanu in Kozuma'uka that would bridge that, but the only places we see a diversity of races are in the places where we'd expect a bunch of cultural crossover anyway.

And that's fair. We also did technically see someone take a name of a clan that's not their own.... Apyaahi from the Passage of the Unbound, who is specifically an "old world" viera that took a Shetona name when she arrived in Tural, but also she was a very silly person.