>>55068968You're asking this on 4chan.
But to give a more serious answer than most of these - it's just far too over-designed. It can be hard to pin down what exactly makes a Pokemon a Pokemon, but the use of relatively simple shapes and colours to create iconic designs (from OGs like Mewtwo all the way to popular modern luminaries like Tinkaton) has been a consistent element across the series. It's one of the biggest things that separates Pokemon from Digimon, which uses extremely complicated designs for almost all of its higher evolution levels. Good Pokemon designs are, I feel, readable at far greater distances than Digimon designs and are much easier for inexperienced artists to draw. This doesn't necessarily make them superior (that's more a question of taste, I think), but it does make them Pokemon, at least as I see it.
Quaquaval (and Skeledirge to a lesser extent) didn't get that memo. At all. Its 2D art is already complex and difficult to read, with a very busy silhouette, and then you have to add the weird floating peacock tail (it's hard to even describe, which is never a good design. Bulbapedia calls them "water feathers", which are apparently ejected from its actual tail when it goes into battle. Sure, dude) on top of that. It's just way, WAY too much.
Comapre that to Meowscarada. Whatever you may think of Meowscarada, it's undeniable that the shapes, silhouette, and use of large sections of relatively flat colour make the design BY FAR the simplest and most readable of the gen 9 starters. This gives it an automatic leg-up over the other two in terms of its "Pokemonness", I feel, and may go some way to explaining why there are so many Meowscarada threads beyond just the furrybait aspect, and not so many for Quaquaval and Skeledirge (I swear I see more Typhlosion threads than threads for either of those two).
So yeah. I don't hate Quaquaval for its "gayness" like many here do, but I do see the design as problematic on an artistic consistency level.
