noted
The dev is banned on most social media, forums, and imageboards (including here on f95), so I doubt he's much of a frequenter of anything.
But he apparently was associated with 4chan some 10~15 years ago, digging though what's left of his online presence back then shows he was drawing Warhammer 40k memes and some Skullgirls stuff. Maybe it's just my imagination but the way he used to draw Feng (one of Skullgirls side-characters) may be faintly reflected in how Lona looks.
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The caricature is certainly jarring, but I would not say it's necessarily out of place, in the sense that Noer includes whole bunch of other caricatures and references to pop culture, media, and real life groups or events, the merchant just happens to be the one most people come across first, but the full scale of it is pretty wide and indiscriminate.