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screamingintothestarss · 4 months ago

Text

winner!

summary: you go to an arcade with crosshair

pairing: crosshair x reader

rating: 16+

warnings: light swearing, banter, slightly suggestive content, crosshair being a gremlin, light fluff?

word count: 3.1k

notes: so sorry for the lack of content, school is eating up all of my time rn but we ball regardless. enjoy!

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

“You coming?” A low voice drawls, its serpentine timbre rattling around in your ears.

A carton of mantell mix is plopped into your hands, and you flash the vendor a pretty smile before turning to the voice’s owner.

“Thought you weren’t excited,” you quip, popping a piece into your mouth.

“I’m never excited.” It comes out flat and lifeless, but you know him better than that. Like the popcorn crumbs on your shirt, you brush him off and head towards strobing lights and neon signs.

He’s like a shadow, you’d say: a silent protector–an assassin. He remained in the shadows so your light could shine. Wherever you went, rest assured he was somewhere nearby, keen eyes clear-cut and focused. You remained in his scope, and if someone else dared to come into the picture, he wouldn’t hesitate to take the shot. He took pride in it, silently puffing out his chest and putting on a show for you, and you loved it.

Deft fingers snake their way toward the carton, breaking the shadow, and you quickly pull the box close to your chest.

“Nuh-uh, you said you didn’t want any!”

“Well, I do now,” he counters, a playful lilt to his voice.

“Crosshair, you do this every time. You always say that you don’t want anything, and when I get something, then, and only then, do you want it!”

“Maybe I just like you,” he drawls, and you hate how it has you reeling, stripping your head of all logic and replacing it with cotton candy and heat. You sharpen your tongue, but before your words can spear him, the carton of mix is plucked from your hands, and you groan.

“Are you kriffing-”

A large hand digs in and pulls up a handful. He’s full of smug, lithe body craning down to your ear only to shovel it into his mouth, and then he’s crunching into your ear–loudly. Bleeding behind the eyes, you’re seeing red, and you shoot him a withering glare. He stares at you; your brows knit together and lips all pouty–he thinks he’s fallen in love for the fifth time today.

You’re not having it.

You shove his face away from your ear and try to retrieve your snack, but he’s dodging your attacks with infuriating finesse. You’re flailing around his lean form, arms swinging this way and that without avail. It’s almost like a game: you go left, and he’s going right; you step forward and he’s stepping back: going up? Well, he’s coming back down. Your simmering frustration boils over, and he laughs, the sound burrowing into your ears like a parasite.

This is the most fun he’s had all day, he thinks.

He activates his finisher: holding the mix in one hand and raising it straight into the air. You were done for.

“I swear I’m actually going to kill you!”

“Mhm.”

Then he’s staring at you, and he has to keep himself from getting lost in your colors. He figures red doesn’t suit you though, and sets the box into your hands with a dull thunk. He stalks off, dripping with audacity, and you try not to slip on the puddles.

“You’re such an asshole!” It’s venomous: slick and corrosive, but non-lethal. A part of you knows it’s all in good fun, but it doesn’t assuage the feeling of wanting to rip his head off. You stick an indignant hand into the mix, and your eyebrows shoot up.

It’s nearly empty.

“Your mother’s a droid!”

He ignores your insults, a sly smile smudged across his face. His arms are loosely folded across his torso as he uses his side to keep the door propped open for you. You smack his stomach as you brush past him, and he laughs through his nose, staring at your backside as you fade into bright lights.

A cacophony of strobing lights, sounds, and smells override your senses as you try to gauge where to go first. Familiar blue and white lights catch your eye, and you make your way over.

You stand before a skeeball machine, setting your snack down to run a hand over its console. You’re about to lay a heavy hand on the start button, but realization hits you.

“Kriff, I forgot the-”

“Tokens?” That slithering tone wraps itself around your ears again, and you swallow the annoyance bubbling up your throat. You lazily whirl your body around, and find that same smirk you wanted to wipe off of him earlier. He’s leaning against the body of a machine, little gold coins clinking in his palm as they shift. He’s devilishly alluring, and it's the effortlessness that has you perplexed. He’d be doing the most mundane of tasks, and it would have you fiending, your eyes tracing long fingers and even longer legs.

Cool brown eyes slide up and down your frame, stripping you bare on the arcade floor. You have half a mind to smack him, a staccato tch tch tch snapping off your tongue, but instead you redden, the tips of your ears ablaze.

“T-thanks.”

He slots a coin into the machine for you, and the start button blinks to life. You turn towards him, a question waiting behind your lips.

“You’re not going to-?” The words die in your throat as he gives you that look, and you huff.

“You’re such a buzzkill, you know that?”

He tuts. “You’d lose.”

Oh. Oh.

So that was the game he wanted to play.

Crosshair loved to goad you on, pushing your buttons to see what made you tick. You both were in a constant game of tug of war, and he wasn't cutting you any slack. If this was the hill he wanted to die on, fine: you just had to pull on the end of your rope a little harder.

You flutter your eyelashes at him and shrug. Fronting nonchalance, you lay your hand on the start button with a smack. Blue and white lights snap to strobes of rainbow, and balls dispense from the holder with a hiss.

It's on.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

You're moving like a well-oiled machine, gracefully rolling smooth little balls up the lane into little holes.

75 points turn into 100, 100 quickly turns into 250, and 250 shoots up to 500.

Crosshair stands behind you with folded arms, feigning uninterest, but the way you're looking right now chips away at that mask as your points rack up.

The timer runs down, and you get a few more tosses in before flashing red lights put you to a stop. A cheeky grin lines your face, and you saunter over to him, tongue slick with audacity.

"Read it."

"What?"

"My score."

He stares at you for a moment and scoffs. That smug he'd been dripping with earlier was drying up, and you were loving it.

Wordlessly, he strides over to the machine and cranes his head to peek at the purple 8-bit font.

"25,000." The number rolls around uncomfortably on his tongue, and he isn't sure he likes the taste.

Then you're at his side, laying an insincere hand on a broad shoulder.

"Remember it when I wipe ass with you."

Your warm breath fans in his ear, igniting the sparks in his chest. His sharp eyes slide over to yours, oozing with challenge. He straightens, and the glow of the machine highlights that familiar glint in his eye.

He reaches into his pants pocket, retrieving two tokens, the cheap metal slotted between his pointer and middle finger.

"The bet?" And the way it rolls off his tongue has you short-circuiting.

You don't break eye contact though, keeping that grip on your rope. You pluck a token from his fingers and the number falls from your lips with an enviable coolness.

"One hundred."

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

"Your balls were coming out faster."

"Well maybe if you focused on your own balls instead of mine, you'd have won," you snark.

"Don't have to, you give mine enough attention already."

"Crosshair!" you hiss, a confusing blend of heat and embarrassment settles at the base of your stomach, and you're unsure if you want more.

He's laughing again, and that bug in your ear buries itself even deeper, and you wish you could snatch it out.

He may have been down one hundred credits, but he'd gladly throw them to the wind if it meant he could keep drawing reactions like these from you.

But you didn’t need to know that just yet.

He was having too much fun right now.

Your annoyance dissipates as wide eyes lock onto your favorite fighting game: Star Fighters 6. His gaze follows yours, and that smirk plays across his features again. You turn to him, but he’s already staring back at you, and he feels that familiar fullness in his skull; those flowers you’d planted up there all those years ago were beginning to bloom.

He knows you feel it too, and he’s tempted to hook an arm around your waist and lug you through those doors, but you made a bet.

“Crosshair…” you say tentatively, debating giving in to that heady feeling in your gut.

He hums, your voice like a hook in his ear, and he’s being reeled in. He hears his name slip past your lips again, and he’s about to make a break for the surface until he feels something being shoved into his hands. He looks down, and you’d placed the mantell-mix-carton-turned-ticket-bucket into his hand, moving on to play your video game. Like the sun shifting behind a cloud, your warmth had disappeared, and he’d claw his way into the stratosphere to find it again.

You slip a coin into the slot and tinny theme music sounds. It’s balmy and familiar: a blast-to-the-past wave of nostalgia that swaddles your ears like a warm hug. You never held onto your credits for long, laying them in the hands of some moody teenager for tokens in a heartbeat. You made it your own little mission: rocketing up leaderboards, dismantling high scores, and leaving some poor kid in tears. Times were a lot simpler then, so you kept the memory tucked close to your heart, eventually giving him access to that little corner too.

“C’mon, let’s do this one!” You’re beaming, and Crosshair commits it to memory. He almost tells you to stop, wanting to cover your pretty face and lock that smile away for himself. Selfish–he’s selfish.

He nods and slots himself next to you, his frame brushing against your own. You pay it no mind, your head swimming in the bloody waters of combos and finishers. The character selection screen blinks up on the monitor, and you click-clack away at blue buttons; selecting your favorite character and adjusting her stats like it’s second nature.

Crosshair hesitates for a bit, the grip on his rope slipping. He’s like a fish out of water when it comes to stuff like this, flip-flopping around and mouth hanging open after you’ve knocked the air out of him. He was privy to what went on inside that pretty little head of yours: you had the advantage. He’d allow it, for now.

He selects a character and does whatever with the stats before pushing a slender finger down on the start button. You don’t even try to hide the snicker tickling your nose.

His expression is incredulous, a silent what the hell? that has you nearly keeling over, your knees knocking together.

“Nothing,” you sing, and the melody has him suspicious.

He’d picked the worst kriffing character, you thought.

You mash the start button and your characters blink into existence, standing across from each other in some type of natural arena. Their stances exude battle readiness and you lock in, colorful lights fading into black and gray.

You grip the joystick and jerk it to the left, mashing down on the buttons simultaneously, hitting Crosshair’s character with a lethal combo that has him floored. You’re merciless–decisive. If he liked to come at you with all teeth and fangs, then you wouldn’t hesitate to bite. Your moves are devastating; each one leaving his ego all bloodied and purple–but he’d patch himself up later. He wasn’t finished with you yet.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

To say you were shocked was an understatement. That tick tick ticking in your head comes to a full stop, a creaking and crackling of nerves that has you sick. You’re short-circuiting, a droid in disrepair, all of your bells and whistles are going off and Crosshair’s reveling in the chaos. The thought is like poison, something you’d use to silence some unruly senator.

He’d beat you. And he cheated!

“You’re such a-!”

“Winner?” You want to grab that serpentine tone of his by the tail, wrap it around his throat, and pull.

Your eyes flit to the monitor, its bright chromatic screen flashing winner, winner, winner! in the same shade of red you’re seeing right now.

“You pushed me over so you could get the power up! I had you!”

“You would have lost anyways, your health bar was too low,” he shrugs, loose and nonchalant like throwing credits at a dancer. He’s staring at you, feasting on your reaction, and he’s far from satisfied. He’d pulled you over to his side, your feet skidding in the mud, but you had no intention of falling over.

You didn’t want to admit that he’d picked up on the mechanics rather quickly; what took weeks of memorizing a myriad of move sets and tactics for you only took a few rounds for him. You let the salt in your head settle in on the fact that he was a super soldier, learning and adapting quickly was in his genetic code.

It didn’t make it sting any less, though.

“I want a kriffing rematch!”

“Fine.”

You kick his ass this time.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

Tickets spill from the bucket, the papery material stringing down the container like vines on a tree. They sit up high and bouncy, and you try to gauge where you’re even walking by peeping through the holes.

“You're sure you can carry all that?” He asks for the fourth time, and you have half a mind to chuck it at his handsome face.

“I told you, I got it-”

You collide with something firm and unmoving, and the bucket slips from your palms.

“...sorry,” you’re muttering into his back.

He turns and peers down at you with a pointed look. You don’t even need to meet his eyes to know that it’s there; you’ve seen it plenty. Whether you spilled something, tripped, or stumbled over your words, he’d either laugh or give you that look, a pointy silver brow and the pretty little corners of his mouth downturned ever so slightly. He’s steadfast; severe and unyielding, as Tech had once put it. He was stubborn, sure, but you’d grabbed him by the horns and steered him into your orbit. He was always there for you, like air to your lungs, he’d given you life. It didn’t matter how much shit you spilled or how many times you fell, he’d be there waiting, a rag in one hand and the other reaching out to you.

He’s taken the ticket bucket from you now, and you pretend you’re not grateful.

You shift in your shoes, that familiar ache bleeding into the soles of your feet. You’d both made a day of it, bouncing from game to game like that pinball machine Crosshair whooped you on. You both came to a draw, but the game was far from over. You’d pick it back up another day, you thought.

He feeds the tickets into the counter and that familiar crunch crunch crunching has your ears tingling. You peer over at him, your eyes rolling over the steep slopes and angles of his face, and you think maybe if you were some mathematician, he’d be a perfect object of study. He’s like your favorite meal, you think, you know what he looks like, feels like, tastes like, but you’d never grow tired of him. Never him.

“Take a holo, it’ll last longer,” he drawls, not even having to face you and your shamelessness.

You’re snickering, and he strolls up, handing you a coupon for 2,500 tickets.

“That’s all?” your voice is incredulous, dripping with suspicion. Surely you’d have more than that, considering how you both had nearly gutted the place.

“Mhm.”

You blow, laughing to yourself. You weren’t one for the prizes: a cornucopia of cheap plasticky gizmos and doodads that crumbled like Tatooine sand as soon as you forked over your fortune. You figured a special someone would appreciate the gesture, though.

“Maybe we can get Omega something?”

“We’d have to get Wrecker something too, you know how he is,” he says, and it’s that faux annoyance in his tone that has you chuckling.

“I know just the thing!”

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

“Why’d you get two?” you prod at him, and he bats you away with a hip. Wordlessly, he extends an arm, holding out one of the cartons of mantell mix up to your face. Your eyes narrow, and you see a serpent tempting the unassuming, its tail wrapped around something forbidden and primed to strike.

“You’re screwing with me, aren’t you?” The question is cautious, wrapped in suspicion with a pretty little bow of skepticism on top. You weren’t exactly too keen on having an instant replay of today’s earlier events–served with a side of embarrassment and a bruised ego.

He shakes his head and a small smile splits his face; it should be something sacred, a rare jewel coveted by some royalty on a faraway planet, but instead, it has you narrowing your eyes even further.

You reach a tentative hand out, and ease the box from his hands, ready for him to attack at any moment.

He doesn’t, but instead waves a white flag of truce, and you delightedly munch away.

You both make your way towards the ship, the Mantellian sun making its final descent into the horizon, and Crosshair stops for a moment to watch you glow in its light.

You’re perfect, he thinks, and he feels his heart melt into putty. It was as if the galaxy had compressed itself into your form, lighting a path his gaze could always follow. He chuckles to himself, remembering when he’d first met you, all starry-eyed and pure mischief. He’d readily admit that he found you rather annoying and cumbersome at first; like a raging Wookiee in a cantina, you’d made a mess of his carefully crafted space–a mess he slowly grew fond of. Like ringed ripples in a pond, you created movement within the stillness of his heart, and one day he’d pluck one of those rings from the surface and place it on your finger.

“You coming?”

Lost in the weeds, your voice pulls him back out again.

“Mhm.”

✦ . ��⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

#i swear i'll start adding more fics #i'll try and keep myself on a schedule lol #crosshair x reader #tbb crosshair x reader #the bad batch fanfiction #star wars fanfiction #clone x reader #tbb x reader #the bad batch x reader #tbb crosshair

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miraculouslbcnreactions · 5 months ago

Note

@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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