User blog comment:JediSpectre117/Regarding the surviving Prothean./@comment-76.84.49.247-20120222085644/@comment-1900300-20120222121519

No the issue is not the Prothean looks different from the Collectors. The issue is it looks too much like it and nothing like the statues we have seen of them. After the horrific fate they endured it may have been more impactful if they looked very different, like the statues, and chalked the difference to genetic alterations. That would have made clear the horrors the Protheans went through.

Also you have the procedure wrong. The Prothean did not "degrade" into Collectors from cloning. Indoctronated Prothean slaves were sent to work and cloned over several generations as they died. But the indoctrination was passed to each clone and grew worse and worse till the Protheans could not think enough to move or eat (the indoctrination did this, not cloning though it may have had contributed to the suseptablity). By this point they still looked the same. The true changes occured after this, as the Reaper gave them cybernetic implants and genetically altered them to compensate for their indoctrination. This is why they look different.