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miraculouslbcnreactions · 4 months ago

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@grimharuspex in the comments of that @zoe-oneesama post said it the best; Butterfly should’ve been Emotion and Peacock should’ve been Desire. I know that Zoe has a limit on what canon she changes for her comic which I respect/appreciate given the thought she puts into it (even when canon’s various nonsensical magic rules are especially grating like this) but how do you think things would’ve gone in-show if this was the setup from the get-go? On that note, do you think it’s a good setup for canon in the first place? Why or why not?

This is going to be a rather long lecture on lore and world building and how the peacock fails on every level, so before we get into that, let's start with the positives. I saw a few people pointed out the Desire idea - that being that the peacock's associated Force should have been Desire while the butterfly got Emotions - and I think that they're absolutely right. That one tiny change does fix the surface level issues and make the peacock make sense for its larger role in the narrative.

It would complicate the whole magical slave thing and also mean that you probably have to rework a few of the minor sentimonsters, but generally speaking, it makes way more sense for Desire to birth a fully realized human being. The sentipeople being people while also coming from a single emotion will always be total BS in my eyes.

At the same time, I blame no one for just sticking to canon's lore. Reworking the lore is a serious thing and even I only do it when I'm telling a lore-heavy story. There are plenty of stories where I just stick to canon's nonsense because the lore isn't important.

Now that we've done our positives, let's getting into the negatives! The issue of the day is this: changing the Force from Emotions to Desire doesn't solve the larger problems with the peacock. Problems that we'll now get into. Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one.

Issue 1: Power Diversity

While I would not call myself a superhero expert, I have seen a good deal of superhero and magical girl team shows in my time. Most of you probably have. If you think about the power sets that we see in those shows, then you'll notice that one thing is pretty much always true: every power is unique OR the powers are all closely related in some way. You never do both because the two concepts don't mix. It makes no sense for half of the characters to have totally unique powers while the other half have copies unless there's some sort of special thematic reason for this like siblings sharing a power.

Without that sort of explanation, it just feels weird and it also makes the characters feel redundant. You don't need two speedsters or two supermen! One is enough. Heck, Avatar the Last Airbender takes place in a world where whole civilizations have the same power and they STILL didn't duplicate powers for the core team because they understood that it's important to keep the characters unique.

Miraculous is pretty obviously supposed to be the type of show where the powers don't overlap. Every character gets a unique power that's uniquely suited to them. We even have this confirmed in universe during that confusing scene in the episode Destruction where Orikko - the rooster - tries to explain how his powers work:

Orikko: No, you're mistaken! Time travel is Fluff's power and I can't grant the power that already belongs to another Kwami!

This brings us to the problem with the peacock: it is not a unique power. It's derivative on multiple levels.

Derivation Level One: Akumas

The first and most obvious level is how similar sentimonsters are to akumas. In terms of how they're normally used in the narrative, they're pretty much the exact same power to the point that you literally can't tell which one you're dealing with until someone tells you. The narrative uses them interchangeably with some episodes using an akuma, some using a sentimonster, and some using both.

In fact, I thought that it was really weird that Gabriel didn't switch to maining sentimonsters back in season four. You had akumas breaking their bonds left and right, which is a thing that sentimonsters literally cannot do, making them the obvious fix to this new problem.

To really highlight the whole "indistinguishable power" issue, allow me to highlight some dialogue from Kuro Neko to show that this is very much an in-universe problem:

Cat Walker: You think that's Cat Noir? Ladybug: Of course it's Cat Noir! He must've been akumatized because he regrets having given up his Miraculous!

Ladybug: You'll see once we deakumatize him. (She runs towards Kuro Neko.) Cataclysm his bell, I'm sure that's where the akuma is! Cat Walker: Hang on! (follows her) Ladybug, what if that's a sentimonster? If I use my power on him, he'll lose control and become more dangerous!

Cat Walker: (cringes) What I mean is you're right to doubt, and I agree with you. Until we know for sure whether we're dealing with a sentimonster or someone who's been akumatized, we shouldn't make any brash decisions. (Kuro Neko leaps away.) Let's find out more.

This sort of confusion should be impossible unless it's the result of clever planning by the villain, but that's not what we're dealing with here. Kuro Neko was not about Gabriel tricking the heroes. He sent out a normal sentimonster having no idea that Chat Noir had just quit. And yet Ladybug had no idea that this was a sentimonster. She looked at it and saw an akuma.

Cat Walker also didn't know that it was a sentimonster. He just knew that it wasn't Chat Noir, which was probably the only reason that he thought to question Ladybug and warn her to be cautious. They only realize that it's a sentimonster once they learn that there's a child inside it.

This is canon accidentally telling us that akumas and sentimonster are just straight up indistinguishable unless you see then made or do some experiments to figure out what you're dealing with. That's not a good look if your claiming that each miraculous grants a unique power. It is, however, a great lead in to the second power that the peacock copies: the power of illusions.

Derivation Level Two: Illusions

I said above that it should take careful planning for a sentimonster to be confused with an akuma. While we never see that type of carefully planned setup, we do see sentimonsters used to successfully impersonate humans on several occasions. One example is the episode Optigami which gave us SentiNino and SentiAlec. Seemingly perfect clones of Nino and Alec who did whatever Shadow Moth told them to. We even see a scene where Shadow Moth is telling SentiAlec exactly what to say.

You know who else gives us this type of scene? Rena Furtive in Rocketear:

Ladybug: You said that if Nino could have heard what you were saying, there'd be no misunderstanding? Rena Furtive: Absolutely! Ladybug: How well do you remember what you guys said on the balcony? Rena Furtive: Every. Word. Ladybug: Do you think you could make... a sound illusion? Rena Furtive: Totally.

Is there any doubt in your mind that the peacock can do anything that the fox can do? What's even worse is that the peacock does illusions better than the fox! Fox illusion vanish in a puff of smoke if you touch them. SentiNino was real enough to wield a miraculous because he was a fully corporeal illusion that would have kept on going if he hadn't been snapped away. This brings us to derivation level three: the power of creation.

Derivation Level Three: Creation

The peacock doesn't just outshine the fox, it outshines the ladybug! Lucky charms vanish as soon as Ladybug detransforms. Sentimonsters last forever. The ladybug is only useful in battle as it requires a super villain to cast its cure (which is asinine, but let's not get into that here). The peacock can be used at any time. The ladybug doesn't give you what you want, it just gives you a puzzle to solve. The peacock can fulfill your deepest desires and even create life.

Outside of the extremely specific circumstances that the show gives us - aka an ongoing battle with a super villain - the ladybug is kind of useless. If you want the power of Creation, you're going to use the peacock. This brings us to our second main issue: power balancing.

Issue Two: Power Balancing

The ladybug and the black cat are supposed to be the two most powerful miraculous in existence, but it really doesn't feel like that's true. Sure, if you put them together they rewrite the universe, but that's not part of their individual base power sets. At an individual level, they don't actually feel all that powerful when compared to the butterfly and the peacock. It's more like Marinette and Adrien are smart enough to make their very limited powers work while Gabriel and Nathalie are dancing along easy street and making fools of themselves with every step.

I've mentioned before that I can forgive the butterfly's overpowered nature because this is an episodic show. They want each episode's fight to be unique and interesting and so we have to give them room to have one power set that should be an insta-win card, but isn't because plot.

I can give them that grace once. I cannot give it to them twice.

There is no reason why both the butterfly and the peacock need to feel more powerful than the supposed most powerful miraculous in existence. I've even talked to one person who is rewriting canon with the assumption that the peacock and the butterfly ARE the most powerful ones because they are! Nothing proves this better than the fact that they've both made creations that can copy the powers of the ladybug and the black cat (see: Copycat, Strikeback, Ladybug, Sandboy, Miraculer, and probably a few others that I'm forgetting).

They're also the only miraculous that don't require an active user. You can create a sentimonster or an akuma, then detransform and have a snack while your creation does whatever you need it to do. That's so incredibly broken and such a terrible move in terms of power balancing. Either have all of the powers require active users or, at the very least, have more of a mix of active and passive powers. Why do Mirage, Shelter, and Lucky Charm vanish when their caster's detransform while akumas and amoks stick around? There is no in-universe logic to explain this. It works this way because that's what the writers needed these miraculous to do. A fact that makes it impossible to get invested in the lore of this show.

When designing a complex magic system, you generally don't want "because plot" to be the only answer to why things work they way they do. You want your magic system to feel real and organic to the world. That's how fictional worlds come to life! If Miraculous' magic system was well designed, then you could take it and use it to tell a wildly different story set in the same universe, but you can't. Everything about it is designed around making canon's story work and not around making an immersive world that you can almost believe exists.

There are stories that I wouldn't hold to that standard, but they're mostly short form stories. Anything as big and complex as Miraculous needs to have a solid lore system backing it or else you lose all sense of stakes. A great example of this is the Bunnyx problem where you know that she can show up at any time and reset the timeline even if things are happening in her own past, so why do we need to worry about bad things happening? And how are the ladybug and the black cat the most powerful ones when you have nonsense like time travel and the power to create human-like creatures? Early canon lore was decently solid, but the longer the show goes, the more nonsense the lore gets and that makes me sad because I love good lore.

Some Final Thoughts

You may have noticed that I didn't really talk about the sentikid issue in this post. That's because my dislike of the peacock came long before that fun little twist. While sentiAdrien is yet another great reason to dislike the peacock, it didn't need to be a thing for the peacock to be a terrible idea. Take away the sentikids and you still have an incredibly derivative and lore-breaking power set that never should have made it into the show.

I actually completely redesigned the peacock for my own rewrite which I start plotting back when I was first watching season three, long before sentiAdrein was even on my radar. That's not something that I usually do in my fix it stuff. I usually try to stick close to canon and make more minor tweaks, but the peacock is so fundamentally world breaking that I had no choice but to do a total overhaul. This is already an incredibly long post, so I won't go into that here. I'll save it for another ask that's sitting in my inbox. I'll schedule them to post back to back.

For this post, I'll just end by pointing out that switching the peacock to Desire makes it derivative of and arguably better than the pig, too, since the pig can only tease you with what you want. The peacock actually gives it to you. In fact, I'd say that the peacock may be a better pig even without the switch!

You can also argue that the peacock is better than or at least equal to the rooster and the goat because they're also just variations of the butterfly and the ladybug's power. Like there is legitimatly potential in taking those miraculous and doing an AU where each Kwami's power is an aspect of creation because the powers are so awkwardly intertwined. Probably make the peacock the master and all others spawn from that one or something like that.

Anyway, this is why you can't design powers around characters if you want good lore and a large team! You have to start with the powers and go from there! It's why I edit Nino's character to be more of a protector since that's his supposed True Force! Also because I want him to be more narratively important but that is a rant for another day.

#anon ask #ml writing critical #ml writing salt #peacock salt #lore discussion #Has anyone noticed that I try to schedules posts with the same theme together?#Because I 100% do #I have my queue post 2 times a day and sometimes up it to 3 to keep a theme together #I'm nice like that

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