The whole point of a character's design is to convey something. Namely how you want them to be seen. An ordinary person who is an unorganized klutz may look normal but with a character they tend to have haphazardly thrown together attire, some injuries and the like because the author wants to convey what that character is. You can look at a character like the Heavy from TF2 and immediately get a good idea of what the guy is like before he says a word.
Now, there
are some occasions where you might find a character design that completely goes against who they really are. In other words the obviously nice/evil looking guy who's not. Or something similar like Persona 4's Naoto if you want an example revolving around gender.
But here's the big difference: when people look at characters like that and make a wrong assumption, the creators don't throw a tantrum and kill off characters because of it. When most people make a totally misleading character design, it's on purpose
. Heck, even shitty mary sues have better designs because at least you can tell that they're sues. PK just might be the most incompetent character designer I've ever seen. No matter how sparkly the art is or anything else, if nobody can easily tell what in the heck they're looking at,
you fail.
