>>20984991Great! I was hoping you'd ask.
Samurott's design is wholly incoherent. It has no strong central theme, and is instead a mishmash of unrelated subjects with no stronger association than "it comes from the sea." Most people remark upon the fact that Dewott suddenly goes from an otter with shell blades (coherent, as otters are well known for their interaction with clam shells) to a sea lion for no particular reason, and this is a good point. Sea lions don't carry around shells, and in fact are incapable of gripping things with their flippers, yet Samurott retains blades. This might be slightly acceptable given that its prior form uses shell blades, but Samurott doesn't use shell blades- it uses strange, tan-colored arrows. The original theme has become completely obscured at this point.
Instead of being stored on the torso (evoking how otters carry things on their belly), the arrow-blades are stored in strange, scaly formations of the same materiel on Samurott's flippers. This has no basis in anything natural. It might be meant to evoke a samurai's shoulderpads -it is named Samurott after all- but pauldrons aren't used as sheaths in anything but World of Warcraft.
Samurott does have a shell, though. It wears a strange hybrid between a conch and a narwhal tusk on its head. This doesn't resemble anything, except in the most basic sense of samurai wearing helmets and shells existing in the ocean. Creating a shell-helmet that resembles a samurai helm would have been quite easy, but instead this happened.
And then there's Samurott's tail. Seals, as I'm sure you're aware, have flippers which are often fused with their tail. In cases where the flippers are more individual limbs, the tail is nearly nonexistent. Samurott has fully articulated rear flippers, and on top of that has the tail of a porpoise or whale- with another scaly shell-protrusion stuck in it for good measure.
Objective analysis reveals that its theme is incoherent. Anything else is subjective!
