i feel like a lot of people who make lightfury redesigns never consider anything but aesthetic when doing so. what makes the nightfury in particular so believeable is how it is visually and behaviourally (in 1 at least >:/) based on real animals, it all comes together into something that feels very plausible. i think the lightfury is a little too smooth and boring but you can actually see a lot of cool concepts in there. definitely see beluga whale so maybe it hunts by using sonar to scout for schools of fish before diving into them with a plasma blast like a pelican, and then give it catfish barbels just because its cute and continues that lightning sorta thing. it just needed to go harder into what was already there i think
Even though it looks like it I actually don't think beluga whales were one of the animal inspirations for her/them - it's never mentioned in any interview/the art book/etc. and you can't really see it in any of the early/concept designs - but anyway yeah if you look you can see that the Light Fury actually does have some cool concepts/ideas behind certain aspects of her design, or at least originally did. They just ended up removing most interesting things from her design to make her more feminine or whatever and it sucks. Like they really should have kept things like the snow leopard markings, like you can't even really tell she's supposed to be partly based on snow leopards if you only look at her final design lol.