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miraculouslbcnreactions · 3 months ago

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Thank you for answering my Origins Dragon!Marinette and Turtle!Adrien question! Please don’t worry about disagreeing with the idea; I asked for YOUR opinion and analysis on why it would OR wouldn’t work, and that’s what I got. 😌 It also made me consider meta and in-show stuff that I hadn’t before, which is cool. You mentioned wanting all of the Kwamis to be part of some sort of set of two or more, and I’d love to hear what those sets are in your head going down the full Chinese Miracle Box list and why you’d pair them together with consideration towards both the Kwami themselves and their Powers.

(Post this ask is referring to)

Oh good, I'm glad that you found it useful and not discouraging!

Talking about how to pair the Kwamis is a little tricky because of an issue that I've discussed before. That issue being that the "Chinese" miracle box seems to be about as Chinese as fortune cookies. That makes me uncomfortable because - as far as I'm aware - the Chinese zodiac is a major part of Chinese beliefs and traditions. As such, I personally feel like the box should reflect those beliefs and traditions, but I also don't know those beliefs and traditions, so I can't tell you how I'd effectively group the zodiac Kwamis in order to honor their cultural origins. I can't even be sure if my criticism is valid or just me being overly cautious!

In an ideal world where I had money to invest in this sort of thing, I'd hire a cultural consultant to work with me to design a Chinese miracle box that feels Chinese (or to tell me that I'm overthinking this and to just do whatever I want). Assuming that I'm not overreacting, this would probably mean redesigning a lot of the powers and looks so that they honor Chinese lore and not Western lore.

For example, one thing that I know for sure is that black cats are not unlucky in China. They're actually symbols of good luck (all cats are), so a Chinese box would not have the implied good luck/bad luck thing that we get with Ladybug and Chat Noir. My limited research has also raised some doubts about ladybugs being a go-to symbol of good luck or creation in China, but I'm a lot less confident about that one being a bad choice as the association may exist. I couldn't find anything definitive one way or the other. This leads me to think that, if the association exists, then it's probably a bit obscure, meaning that a Chinese box would probably go with a different animal if we were trying to be culturally accurate to what a Chinese-inspired box would really look like.

I can say with reasonable certainty that Creation is associated with the masculine yang and Destruction is associated with the feminine yin, so Tikki should possibly feel masculine to feminine Plagg. At the very least, their spots in the miracle box should probably be reversed with Plagg in the black and Tikki in the white since yin is black and yang is white?

[Image Description: center of the original miracle box showing that ladybug earrings are placed in the black part of the yin yang symbol while the black cat ring is in the white]

I also known that white rabbits being associated with time, watches, and umbrellas comes from Alice in Wonderland and not China. Are you starting to see why I'm doubting the cultural accuracy of the miracle box?

The alternate way to approach this is to remove the possible issue of Chinese culture being treated as "mystical" or nothing more than ornamentation by making the Chinese miracle box into the miracle box of no specified culture. Since that's kind of what the box already is in terms of deeper meanings and cultural ties, I think we can go that route for this discussion since we have taken a moment to acknowledge the potential issues with the box's existing design and why that's leading me to take this route as - to me - this seems to be the only way to stick to canon's lore while avoiding potential further insults to Chinese culture.

If we went to my ideal extremes with this approach, we'd actually massively cut down the number of miraculous in the box because I think that there are way too many miraculous! Who needs nineteen "unique" powers to arm and fight one villain? This is extra true since there's no real theme to the miraculous beyond the initial setup of Creation/Destruction + five random powers followed by the addition twelve more random powers with no clear ties to any culture or theme other than the look of the Kwamis that grant the powers.

But that's getting real extreme, so for this ask, we won't go there. Instead, I'll talk about some general ideas for grouping the powers that we already have and some ideas for how you could fix the randomness of our current powers to make them feel like they make sense.

To start, I love the fact that our two main heroes are supposed to be a pair power wise. That's a lovely way to approach your lore and is why I think that they should have grouped the other miraculous, too. Why are Creation and Destruction the only set? Why aren't the others in any sort of group? Why do these miraculous have the powers they do? What ties them to this box and not another box?

There are a few ways to approach pairing the other miraculous. You can come at it from a theme perspective such as the fact that both the snake and the rabbit are all about time. You can also look for opposites such as the turtle being all about defense and the dragon being more about offense. You can even go more broad and say that a given group of miraculous is all aspects of one type of power such as the peacock, the goat, and the ladybug all feeling like aspects of creation. There's really no clear way to go about this because the current powers are so freaking random!

When I approach this stuff, I don't just come up with powers. I come up with the lore and let that help guide the powers or I shape the lore around the powers I want to use until both things make sense. For example, it makes sense that Creation would have some magical being guiding it. It also makes sense that Creation would either create Destruction for balance or that they both popped into existence together so that there was always a balance. Once you have that, you say, "Okay, what other Forces would these two want in order to help guide the universe? What can't they do or what do they do consistently enough that they might want to hand it off?"

Going from there, you start to come up with ideas like maybe they wanted Time to have a physical embodiment so that they could get some guidance on the long term effects of the things that they were making, so that's Fluff coming online. But Time is a lot and they liked their balance, so maybe Sass was brought online too in order to balance Fluff with Fluff being focused on what was and what could be while Sass is focused on what is, thereby giving Fluff someone to ground her. Or maybe you even add in a third Kwami to be some sort of historian who remembers the past while Fluff is the future and Sass is the now.

Another thought path is that most things are not pure Creation or pure Destruction. You must destroy to create. When you make bread, yeast consumes sugar to create air bubbles. Creation and Destruction working together. So maybe Tikki and Plagg wanted to make "children" who could do what they couldn't do solo and that's how we got the peacock?

No matter how you go about this, I really don't think that there's a great way to explain/group all nineteen miraculous, especially if you add in the eagle and Fei's wacky prodigious with it's animal abilities. It's just too random! But I do think that there's a lot of potential in strong subsets of the ones we get in canon, especially if you're allowed to edit the powers or the Forces a bit to make them fit their supposed Force or granted power better. I've talked before about how I'd mess with Lucky Charm to remove the odd Luck association and focus on Creation and that's what I'd do with most of the miraculous because, right now, most of them don't make much sense.

For example, Ziggy - the goat - is supposed to be the Kwami of Passion and that somehow gives the power to create anything you want? I know creatives are passionate, but that still doesn't fit in my mind. It would make more sense for this to be an inspiration power like the pig or for the Force to change to Creation and Ziggy is just a lesser ladybug for some reason? And Stompp - the Ox - is Determination, but I'd actually label his shield power as an aspect of Protection, making him in some sort of pairing with the turtle. Self defense verses defense of others?

In short, the canon lore is a disaster that needs major work to feel solid which leads to lots of paths for fixing the mess. In my opinion, the best way to go about fixing it is to take the element that worked best - the Creation/Destruction pairing - and expand that out to make strong, logical lore for the other Kwamis and their associated powers. Lore that probably won't be rooted in any one culture because no culture seems to be a solid match for the lore that canon is using, which is only concerning because of the current obvious associations with China and that's not even touching on the whole Tibetan monks + Chinese culture issue. Go check out the post I linked at the start for my thoughts on that which basically sum up to, "I am not even remotely qualified to talk about this one, but it seems like a terrible idea."

(Once again, reminder that I'm not Chinese or otherwise deeply informed on Chinese culture. I'm just a person who tries her best to respect other cultures and the miracle box sets off a lot of warning bells for me. Those warning bells could always be a false positive, so you shouldn't take my thoughts as some sort of final say on this topic. Please feel free to look into this on your own and form your own opinions.

If you are Chinese or otherwise educated in these topics, then please feel free to reblog this or send an ask giving me some additional context as I really do love learning about this stuff, but it's near impossible to research! I spent a good hour talking to a local librarian trying to find books or articles in our library that talked about the Chinese zodiac from an academic perspective and we found nothing. I've got a few interlibrary loan requests out to academic libraries in our library network though and I'll follow up on this if those books end up having information that adds to the discussion.)

#ml writing critical #ml writing salt #anon ask #lore discussion #I kept thinking I should bite the bullet and do more serious research on this topic since the box really does bother me #So thanks for getting me to finally do that anon!#There's a good chance that this will go nowhere though #I've heard elsewhere that it's really hard to research this kind of topic in the west #Most of the good resources supposedly come from China and are not translated #If they're even available in the west

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bonefall · 1 year ago

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if jake isn’t firestar’s father, is tallstar still just as obsessed and parental with firestar?

imo, the funniest headcanon in warriors is that jake isn’t firestar’s father but tallstar is such a pining idiot he looks at any orange cat and sees his former crush. if he was alive to see all the fire spawn he would absolutely lose it.

noooOOOO I know everyone likes that but (quickly pauses to check ur pronouns, sees no pronouns listed) FRIEND i don't like that retcon at all, not even a tiny little bit

In TPB, Tallstar doesn't softball Fireheart until he's proven himself as someone very different from a standard Clan cat... even after he goes to fetch him from exile, he's standing firm that WindClan cannot forever be in ThunderClan's 'debt'. He even repays ThunderClan's "kindness" by attacking them over not executing a blinded Brokentail.

He ISN'T obsessed with Fireheart, he barely even speaks particularly nicely about him until Fireheart goes against Bluestar's DIRECT orders to stop war with WindClan, trying to rally ThunderClan for peace and broker a peace deal. I think it's actually a very good, touching development that Fireheart's actions end up causing peace with WindClan in a way previously unseen by Forest Four.

What sucks most about TPB is how they pivot, in the end, to say "status quo good" when the whole arc before that is a testament to how Bluestar and her protege Fireheart challenge that idea. Dethroning Brokenstar, fetching WindClan, feeding RiverClan which Blue only slaps Fire on the wrist for...

But it makes it a better story that Tallstar was always going to have a good opinion of Fireheart because he looks like a gay lover he had in his 20s???

I feel like it makes TPB worse and makes the WindClan Rebellion pathetic

Why couldn't it actually be that Tallstar truly wanted peace, but misjudged Onewhisker because he barely knew him? Why are we stripping away the tragedy that is Tallstar making a hasty, naive decision in the hopes of a better world, only to plunge his Clan into even more chaos? Not realizing that friendship is only easy when it's not under pressure, forgetting to consider how insidious Clan culture can be, and what sorts of horrors he was about to shackle Onewhisker to?

Why do we have to turn this into Tallstar trying to giving his ex-lover's son a political freebie, because they're both gingers? I don't like it at all. I don't like Pining Idiot Tallstar. I like it most as a naive choice which, up in heaven and far away, he now deeply regrets.

Thinking about it, you could say that BB!Tallstar's theme is naivety. Naive to think that he always understands the rules, and that he can 'have his cake and eat it too.'

He couldn't bring his son Fly to the Clan and expect him to stay innocent. He couldn't end the Shadow/Wind War while claiming the Mouthermouth Moorland. He couldn't wait until the last minute to change his deputy and expect the new leader to be what he wanted.

ANYWAY YEAH lmao sorry, got carried away. TLDR no. I know it's a popular headcanon and I don't knock on folks who like it, but it's not my cuppa tea. I very intentionally am retconning the retcons. Retconception if you will

#Thinking about it... I think I want to like #Have people in the universe think he was very wise #But towards the end. Somehow. He's able to speak to someone (maybe onestar. I think onestar deserves an apology)#And say #''I've heard it said now that the more you know. The more you know you don't know''#''I was a naive cat and I made very selfish choices''#And if it's onewhisker he finally says to the poor fucking dude ''I never should have thrust that upon you.''#Maybe include some kind of Clanmew pun like #''Just before you became (whole amount)whisker... I forced you to become (just one)star.''#Arrahussk/Ularrashai #Oogway ass moment #Cat Oogway #Since BB!AVoS is about breaking cycles and redemption this would actually be a very nice end to Onestar I think #Also also (Autism) I am not mad I don't know if I came across as mad in this reply #what's tone

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