Quote Originally Posted by Lauront View Post
What is ambiguous about it is that it gave an indication of how they would design them, and that this came after the 2013 interview where Yoshi had said he felt they'd be weird. I never said concept art guarantees much, but to just brush it aside, say nothing about it, when people were actively bringing up this material put out by SE when discussing the topic, is indeed very ambiguous. Throwing some glib "there's a lot of things in the art books that never made it into the game", as if this is the same, is disingenuous.
Just because Yoshi P says something feels weird to him once in an interview doesn't mean that it's never going to happen or that they're purposefully being ambiguous or giving us mixed messages. He's changed his mind on things before. If he didn't, then we wouldn't have had ungenderlocked wedding or bunny outfits. Even without changing his mind on things, the dev team has gone behind his back before, like when they added glasses and other things after Yoshi P said that the new races weren't getting any form of headgear at all.

What probably happened with this artwork, is that sometime between the race poll and the beginning of HW development, the director put out a request to the art team to draw concepts for different types of race ideas based on those from the poll. After that, they were presented to the director or whoever else may be in charge of that specific project. Specific designs are approved or declined with input given and they go back and forth until the final product is formed. You can see the whole process in this art book for the au ra as they evolved from multiple different concepts, but ended up having a lot of the more difficult or exotic parts shaved away until they were more human looking. Everything else, including the concepts that didn't lead to the final product, gets dropped or tucked away until someone wants to recycle old ideas as something new.

Obviously viera were rejected at the concept phase. We don't know what conversations happened behind the scenes except for a comment I think I remember where Yoshi said that they wanted something original. It could totally be that he still thought bunny boys are weird, but that still didn't stop him from asking for concepts to be created as a part of the au ra project.