First of all, allow me to properly congratulate you for being
several months too late for the huge "Complain About Awakened Forme" party. For this great honor you are hereby presented with the prestigious...
Now with that out of the way, to your post.
~*~
For starters, Nintendo have (relatively) fuck all to do with the creative process of the Pokémon series. Re: that, you should take your complaints to the developers/designers/what have you, Game Freak.
Re: Mewtwo's original design. There is a significant amount of people who think Mewtwo is
awesomely designed, just as much as there's probably a significant amount of people who dislike its appearance (but I haven't seen a lot of these). That's the thing about opinions. But even if you don't like Mewtwo, it's probably a good thing to remember that Mewtwo
isn't meant to look pretty. It was
never meant to look pretty.
Appearance was never a concern in its design. It was genetically manipulated, experimented on, mutated and augmented to turn it into essentially the most powerful, ultimate fighting machine. It wasn't designed to stand there and sparkle, it was designed to
snap necks with psychic powers.
Personally I am neutral on Mewtwo. I don't love it nor do I hate it. I can appreciate some of the influences that went into its design (there's definitely more than a touch of Giegue of the Mother series - and I wouldn't be surprised if Freiza of DBZ fame also went into the mix) - but for the most part I think that it looks like what it is - a threatening-looking, genetically-augmented psychic creature that looks JUST alien enough and yet just similar enough to its primary genetic origin. That's good enough for me.
Of course, this is where you started your complaints - through the assumption that Mewtwo is being made to
suffer all these
horrible indignations against its person. Let's start under this basic statement.
Mewtwo is a bunch of fucking pixels. It doesn't care either which way. What the fantasies of certain fandoms attribute to it is just that. Its rights as a person aren't being violated. No privilege checks or trigger warnings are necessary. Mewtwo does
not give a shit.
As for the design complaints you've addressed in regards to the new forme. I'm by no means a fan of Awakened Forme (though I've gotten used to it by now) and I much prefer the original to it.
However, looking at it now and thinking about it makes me realize some things that honestly feel like they explain a lot.
The one thing that is particularly noticable about Awakened Forme is that it
further distances Mewtwo from its remaining similarities to Mew. The tail is gone, The general physique slightly changes as a result. The coloration alters as well. The increased head mass via the tail trans-location may suggest a change in the neural "circuitry" (Mewtwo originally had a neck tube connecting the base of its head with its back, widely speculated to contain nerve fibers and serve as a 'secondary spine' of sorts - who's to say the headtail isn't an expansion on that theme?).
Yeah, the purple jelly bean fingers are awkward and I have little to say in their defense. The spikes/halo/convenient carrying handle may (and that is wild mass guessing, not canon) represent the halo of an angel and the horns of a devil which may be symbolic or something or other. And re: the hip thing, here's a fact to consider:
Human secondary sexual characteristics do not necessarily have to apply to Mewtwo or any other Pokémon.. Larger hips on females are a human trait, but it's not universal to other creatures - not even ones that are anthropomorphic in design.
This particular brand of applying human secondary sexual characteristics to nonhumans is a HUGE pet peeve of mine - although usually I see it applied to things like male Gardevoirs and female Machokes - which makes my head hurt royally. Yes, they're anthropomorphic. No, they aren't going to subscribe to ALL the quirks of the human body. Same applies to Mewtwo.
Mewtwo, by the way, is canonically genderless and of indeterminate sex - and while it was voiced by males for the longest time, it was given a female voice in its newest anime incarnation (admittedly it's a low-register female voice often reserved in use for Fucking Bishies, but a female voice nonetheless - and who knows what the dub will do with it). To me, this voice change is even more bloody random and uncalled for than the form change - but only because its voice has been established for so long,
why change it now?
But anyway. Back to the forme. On the whole, Mewtwo's Awakened Forme seems to take it further away from its "animalistic" roots (as Mew is a cute fuzzy pink kangaroo rat creature), and further towards a stereotypical "enlightened", transcended psychic alien - which may, in its own way, be symbolic - both of stereotypical paths to 'spiritual awakening' and 'transcending the animal' - and of distancing itself away from its painful past and what it was
expected to be.
Mewtwo is often portrayed as a tragic character - It was created to be a fighting machine of ultimate power and suffered a great deal of physical and emotional pain through its augmentation process (although the ways this has happened varied between canons). It escaped and isolated itself. It had a lot of time for thinking and reflection. In some forms of canon this lead it to angsting about being man-made and unnatural and wanting to take revenge on humans because THIS CANNOT BE MY DESTINY HURRRRF - before snapping out of it and then having some time to think in spite of trust issues. In others it led it to seek quiet isolation where it might have done its own brooding and what have you. But clearly, Mewtwo spent a lot of time
reacting to what was done to it instead of
facing it, reflecting about it, accepting it and moving on, growing up and coming into its own as a being.
While we have no real indication that this is what happened to Mewtwo (as for now the movie/prologue episode/herp derp haven't been aired yet and we do not know how Mewtwo was handled in the X/Y games quite yet either) - the hints that we keep getting seem to suggest that this form change is not something that was
done to Mewtwo, but something Mewtwo has done to itself. The tagline for one of the trailers of the upcoming movie was "You have not seen the
true Mewtwo yet."
In other words. The Anime Mewtwo, at least, considers this its
true form. What it was meant to be. What it
CHOOSES to be of its own free will. It's a change, and there will indubitably be people who don't like it. But frankly, that's what it wants and it feels good with itself - and screw the haters.
Or at least, that's what the anime people say. Mewtwo itself, as stated before, has no opinion either way since it's a bunch of pixels. But if canon says this is what Mewtwo wants, it should bloody well be good enough for you.
PEACE OUT, MOTHER-EFF-ERS!
