>>53404630Tajiri didn't design those Pokémon but Pokémon designs are very tame. On their own there's nothing particularly attractive about them hence why "off model" art is very prevalent in that community. As I have stated many times compared to other adjacent series Pokémon critter design is the tamest of the bunch. And that pretty much applies to any design inspiration, as Masuda said Pokémon can be based off scary things like death masks but they're conceptualized as friendly and charming and not scary. Which is why I mentioned how in the anime they ignored Banette backstory about coming to life over a grudge in the anime because as Sugimori said they're very peculiar in the way Pokémon are portrayed.
As for the Latias bit it doesn't matter because I keep hearing conflicts over it. In the end Latias isn't a romance partner, it's simply a Pokémon and thus exist in the same framework as every other Pokémon.
And it goes beyond "shock". People also recognize Vaporeon as the Pokémon people want to fuck too, Ludwig Aghren was talking about "wet vaporeon pussy" to millions of people. And by clout I mean things like memes produced, which have a clear visible impact, and people spreading it means it actually has the effect of people finding vaporeon attractive. Like the latest YouTube video about the copypasta reaching a million views, there's even a scene of a trainer making out with a chibi regular vaporeon in it. We can also see the impact it has even in "normal" spaces, like the amount of upvotes it recieved in a subreddit with over 2 million subscribers who upvote the most vanilla pictures such as cosplay pics and in the context of Pokémon mostly the human characters. Verily so these Vaporeon pictures rank around the 20s while the Gardevoir pictures rank in the 40s and the rest are all the human characters.
