Hey, great character, seems kind of amiable, pixel potraits are always great.
I could offer some criticism: It seems to me that the shading could be more defined, I mean for example the shading on the shoulder armor looks vague, I had a blast doing a quick edit to show what I mean, (I did a quick note on the top right for myself to help imagine the light source)
later
..and I did a more more complete edit showing a shading approach(or lack of  ) with the same palette...

Hi, one thing I can add, is that I eyedropped your blue tones, ahh... the computer, beats eyeballing! I took a look at your palette colours in HSB values.
Anyhow, I noticed the saturation goes up for the brightness going down. which is a good practice. But, I find, for myself in my opinion that others may or may not agree with, and you may have already disregarded this approach but (*dislcaimer   ), that you can play with the hue value aswell. So as your cadet blue goes into the shadows, you can add more realism by tweaking the hue value, in effect maybe adding more red or green. Here's a ridiculously small but no nonsense example

Hi, interesting start! I could suggest speeding up the time between idle animations, also, maybe the idle animation timing on the hands could be offset, lke one hand moves a frame behind the other, to "jazz" it up...

my point exactly, surely this forum isn't for humilating users

Excellent thread, well worth the read for the insight into your creative process, but one thing I noticed is that out of the average post on this forum, there isn't much, in my opinion, difference between your first image and the last...just a thought, not that you need to change your image but for me, the waist still seems awkward, like the sketch below on the right, on the left I tried a more straight pixel painting...

one thing a life drawing instructor told me that stuck, is that you need to draw what you see not what you think you see, as an example, draw a smile not as a wide letter"U" but draw what shapes you observe.
peace!