>>46970233>In the 2018 artbook, EVs, Motofumi Fujiwara revealed that Eevee was inspired by vague childhood memories of an unknown creature he encountered in the forest. Though it wasn't based on any distinct animal, Fujiwara mentioned that Eevee reminded him of a fluffy cat or dog-like creature.No mention of fox. Eevee is supposed to be a generic mammal whose whole gimmick are it's various evolutions.
In a way, it's kind of like the Miacis who was also a generic mammal that evolved into other more well known mammals after millions of years (correct me if I'm wrong, I know jack about biology), but sped up after one interaction with it's current environment.
Now this sounds like a good idea on paper, a mammalian pokemon who is meant to represent an early mammal that evolves into different animals is a very interesting concept you can make from pokemon, and you can see this clearly with the original trio (rabbit, fox and cat).
However, I feel like this motif was lost when all the eeveelutions from gen 2 and above have been blatantly cat-like, with the exception of Sylveon I guess, since they wanted to play around with the moon bunny thing it has going on.
