>>56644614Talking about this seriously for one sec, some of the looks were kept like she's still wearing hot pants, most of the character was scrapped. The old character was heavily influenced by her being ethnic and using a non-official language, has a full family which is no longer around, etc. All of the other gym leaders, barring Clay as the outlier, similarly had their respective ethnicities pretty much unused. My theory is that when they started with conceptualizing gym leaders the initial plan was to make it a "global" roster a la Street Fighter with someone from every country because B/W was the first "international" game, but ultimately decided to focus more on the specific job roles for their characters instead. This is why the waiter trio do not have any references to British culture, Burgh no longer has any Italian references, Elesa is no longer French, Skyla does not reference anything Spanish, so on. They had an opportunity already with Elesa and the waiter trio in particular as those respective regions showed up, but still there was nothing, so I think it's fair to say the idea was, for the most part, scrapped and that only the aesthetic was kept. Except for Skyla of course whose beta design looks completely different so clearly if you're not an obsessed latinx fetishist its easy to see her entire character was changed as she was no longer an "ethnic" character.
But hey, that's just a theory.
