>>52805753 >Gardevoir looks way more like a human in the Pokemon world than either Cinderace and InteleonI didn't articulate this very well, but the thing with new starters is they're basically specific-people-turned-fursonas, and appealing to that audience. Not necessarily that they're trying to be as humanoid as possible, but that they're taking a human, changing the design to be a real-world animal, and that's your "pokemon". Well no, that's just a furry.
If I had to define it, Gardevoir still has
1. Unique, unnatural elements like its chest piercing and bizarre hair that separate it from a simple fursona
2. Gardevoir specifically doesn't have a human-defined role, like "soccer player" or "m7 spy".
Gardevoir doesn't suggest more than "humanoid figure in a dress", it's not like they took a specific type of human and went bam it's an animal now. When pokemon have a role that is so overt like that, it makes it hard to see them as animals that could exist in the wild. Grafaiai has hints of the human role "grafitti artist", but this is blended into its overall design, and makes sense with its tree marking. Whereas instead of integrating its design, Cinderace/Inteleon just have a soccer player or spy uniform slapped onto it, it doesn't make sense as a wild pokemon.
It's the distinction between pokemon as a unique brand of animals that are very different from the real world, as opposed to your run of the mill furries. My personal preferences are definitely part of the equation, but these starters just feel like fursonas of real things/people, instead of starting with the animal (or a completely fictional creature) and modifying it with hints at its theme. I'm not much of a writer but I hope that makes sense.
tl;dr I hate furries
