Taking Takanuva as example, we know that an attack of a shadow leech at least will change the mask shape and darken the victim armor. Shadow Matoran were further mutated by Mutran to give them claws and wings.
But 2008 Takanuva set has claws like hand, are those claws in the history or just a building choice? Asuming those Shadow Takanuva were exactly the same as 2003 Takanuva before their light were drained, do they look just like a black (or gray) 2003 Takanuva with a 2008 Avohkii? or do they have a more monstrous form?
The claws are likely added to make Takanuva have hands with correct proportions, as he’s a titan set. Also, I believe that his mutation to be giant happened upon entering Karla’s Nui. But I may be wrong.
You’re correct on this, it’s the same mechanism that makes the Av-Matoran so big.
I think I vaguely recall a Greg quote that indicates some minor mutations do occur due to the shadow leech and that accounts for the mask shape. I may be off the mark on that, though.
In separate quotes, Greg has confirmed that the Shadow Takanuva are (probably) black and gray, and that they all look pretty much the same, but he has also said that their Avohkii would look like the one released in 2008:
Thanks, that was the answer I was looking for. At first I thought that the Shadow Matoran were like that, just because of the shadow leeches, but when I found out that they were mutated, doubts assailed me.
I’ve just found a quote which implies that the claws were actually part of his Shadow Leech mutation, but this is one of those iffy sources where a person uses an assumption as an example for a question, and then Greg answers the question without addressing that the example wasn’t necessarily correct:
I made a similar question some time ago. What I found out is that, though the books say that the shadow leeches give av-matoran Makuta like appearances (Tanma describes how Gavla’s hands fused with her weapons, how wings grew from her back, claws from her feet and fangs from her mask), this was intended if the books ever got a movie adaptation. In actuality, Greg said that Shadow leech-induced mutations are limited to the color of the armor and personality. All the monster-like mutations we see in the shadow Matoran are experiments made by Chirox and/or Mutran after they were already infected. That explains why Vican still looked like a shadow Matoran after being cured by the Klakk’s scream.