>>52113214You are correct. I feel from what I see people don't care if it takes inspiration from a real life animal or not, after all Pokémon are essentially conceptualized as fantasy animals and taking inspirations from real animals is to be expected. In fact originally Pokémon were primarily inspired by real animals until Satoshi Tajiri decided to expand the base of designs.
We can look at polls and popularity like Pokémon of the year and see how popular they are. Indeed the complaints are more so about how "humanoid" designs are because of how artificial they feel to the *loud* minority who complains about them. Popularity polls show that Pokémon like Lucario, Greninja, Zoroark, Gardevoir, Toxtricity, etc are popular despite being bipedal and being based off a concept.
When you take a look at people's complaints I mostly see people complaining that these critters feel like characters and not natural living creatures. Again this is a byproduct of Pokémon context, the designers have gone on record stating that they aim to create believable ecosystems and one of the headwriters of the anime stated they aimed to mirror the relationship between humans and animals unto the Pokémon. Games like New Pokémon Snap also aim to create a believable fantastical world by showing living creatures living in fantastical ecosystems. So I feel the root of the problem with bipedal designs lie with how artificial they feel among the loud minority that complains about them.
