The Owl Shack

SPOILER WARNINGS FOR TOH AND MLB

To be completely honest I’ve seen the leaks but I’m avoiding discussing any and all of them that haven’t officially broadcast. So this is mostly just info for miraculous up to “Exaltation” in season five. As for Owl House, if you’re new to the fandom, this is a major story spoiler, so avoid it.

I wanna talk about Grimwalkers and Sentimonsters, from the respective shows listed in the titles. For those who are unaware—

Grimwalkers are artificially made humanoids from The Owl House. They’re basically clones meant to be a replacement to Emperor Belos’ brother, Caleb, who the former killed and used this method to create someone who’d support his… “questionable” decisions.

Sentimonsters are magical beings created by the Peacock Miraculous. They’re formed by strong emotions, take on a variety of forms, and fall under the absolute influence of whoever is holding the object that contains an Amok, a feather imbued with magic that gives the creature being.

In this specific post, we’re gonna talk about these two blorbos, Hunter 

And Adrien

and how the Owl House handles their inhumanity almost perfectly, and how Miraculous fumbles the bag.

I don’t really support the theory of Adrien being a sentimonster but at this point you gotta roll with the punches. 

In "The Owl House," we're introduced to Hunter pretty early on in Season 2 tells his story as the Golden Guard, and when we meet him, he's a stuck-up, cocky little bastard that Xeno Robinson portrays PERFECTLY. The audience is groomed to have a sort of dislike towards him, but thankfully, Dana and the writing team make him just likable enough for a slow redemption. Zuko went from a character who's just a straight-up complicated antagonist to a great main character, and in this set of circumstances, Hunter's the guy who acts bad but as we come to find out, is doing it sheerly for a semblance of parental approval from this dick.

"Hunting Palismen" elaborates on his nature and personality and gives us a bit more insight into everything. He can't naturally do magic, so he relies on artificial staff mechanics and physical ability to match the strength of typical witches. He wants to look into Wild Magic more, showing a curiosity the original Caleb had towards the Demon Realm, which led to Belos wanting to handle him in the first place. He opens up to Luz, our protagonist, and for the first time in his life, he meets someone who legitimately wanted to know him not as the Golden Guard, but as who he really was.

"My name is Hunter."

And so we get a complicated character in both personality, motivation, and backstory! "Eclipse Lake" presents him more as an antagonist because that's the point! He's doing this entire convoluted search for Titan's Blood just for the sake of proving himself to his "uncle." It's not necessarily his fault. Philip Witterbane/Belos is a manipulative little piece of garbage that actively grooms the people who work for him into getting them to their full levels of usefulness and promptly trashing them once they've outlived it. Lilith literally references this in "Elsewhere and Elsewhen!"

And then we get the good parts of "Hunting Palismen" in "Any Sport in a Storm!" He meets Willow, Gus, and the rest of the Flyer Derby team. He makes friends! He legitimately gets close to them!

So naturally, the good times promptly die with the next major episode.

Hollow Mind.

*Heavy sigh*

Personally, this is one of my favorite episodes of the season. And in this context, it serves perfectly for the reveal behind Hunter's true purpose. He's not meant to naturally exist. He's a literal clone. We see him go from the pompous jerk putting on the front of maturity

and deteriorate into his true self; a scared, insecure little dude, brought on by years of being abused by Belos coming out like a tidal wave with all the wild revelations making him question everything so much that he has a panic attack.

But Luz and the others are there and support him and it's GREAT. The way the show handles his existential crises and with writing to support this effectiveness, we get arguably one of the most strongly written characters in the show.

Which is why Miraculous warrants this post.

"Adrien Agreste being a Sentimonster" was a theory I heard of when I first started getting into the show when season 3 was actively airing. I didn't like it! I thought it was ridiculous, cause Adrien being a literal magical creation makes this entire situation complicated and arguably unnecessary.

 And then they went there. 

And I was sad.

On one hand, the way they went about it is about as subtle as a bright red "F" on a test. Hawk Moth/Monarch/Shadow Moth/Jackass Agreste fiddling with the ring to manipulate Adrien and using words like "OBEY" made it pretty clear, and I feel like the show's track record isn't gonna be effective with proper reveals? Like even now Juleka and Rose haven't canonically called each other girlfriends before, but it's PRETTY OBVIOUS given the scenes we SEE WITH THEM! They're not gonna elaborate on this any more than we've been getting. 

The way the show handles this is absolutely abhorrent, especially considering there are so many interesting fanfictions/art pertaining to it. A prime example would be @buggachat and their works—Drowning(In plain sight)" or even the comics they've drawn(you know, the one with Luka and the others) about it. It handles the idea of someone having the realization that their existence being a lie pretty well! It can be related to the subtle themes of parental abandonment and complications pertaining to birth in quite an interesting way! 

And the icing on the cake is that with these two characters, it's a matter of their epiphany that their life and the value it holds isn't something dependent on where they came from, but instead, everyone around you giving you support and showcasing their love, independent of an abusive situation. Hunter has the Hexsquad, Luz, and Camila, all of them giving him the support to have a happy found family, far from the Sticky Icky here. 

But Gabriel and Adrien don't really have that dynamic. It feels like they're tangentially related. Like it'd be better if they had it be a circumstance where Adrien directly motivated Gabriel in some propensity, but nope.

He’s doing this for himself.

Gabriel could care less about his son or his personal opinions. He's a douche.

I feel like this stems from my personal gripe towards his characterization cause they flip-flop between him being a (slightly) sympathetic dude and a sociopathic nutcase who repeatedly endangers children and threatened to start WORLD WAR THREE just to bring back his wife. 

I feel like Emilie Agreste as a McGuffin works, but if it actually affected the family in some way. If Gabriel was actually concerned about his son's happiness and doing what he's doing for HIS SON, then he'd be legitimately concerned about his well-being. Present the circumstances reflecting an actual broken family, not a straight up abusive situation.

Y'know, doing what he does in Season Five, but out of the legitimate goodness of his heart?

Adrien as a Sentimonster adds no value to the plot whatsoever. I feel like a better method of writing him would have him be human, but just really dependent on the idea of a parental figure, which is why he's really subservient to his dad, which would warrant him listening to what he says and getting akumatized all the time in the bad timelines. So, naturally Nathalie and the Dupain-Cheng family are more welcoming to him!

And as a PARALLEL to him Felix is the actual sentimonster, explaining why they happen to look super-similar, and giving a bit more of depth to this show's writing- The boy who is free to do what he wants but doesn't out of fear of disappointing his father, and the boy who desires his true freedom but is at the risk of getting eviscerated. It would make lines like Felix saying "You always do what your father tells you?"  Matter more and hit harder. What we got is like if in My Hero Academia or something there was a character who had some super overpowered ability like Time manipulation or something and the story never used it.

And I know I said "No Spoilers" but this is the closest thing to one- Adrien doesn't have a role in the Finale, that's all I'll say. It'd make sense if he DID stuff! It's Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir, not "Just Ladybug." 

Hunter's a deep character and the fact that he's artificially made makes him all the more interesting! 

Adrien's a shallow dude with barely any personality and a "tragic backstory" that doesn't bring anything interesting to the story. He’s a prop.

@skeksiliswatching subjected to me to this movie and I've been buzzing about it since.

Jimmy Mouthwashing is inherently a better bad person than Bear specifically due to the merit of the former choosing to do SOMETHING about his situation (even if that is making it worse). When Jimmy does stupid shit, he committed to it, even when it got everyone killed. It was still HIS decision, as immature and dickish as it was. Despite being a delusional rapist, he still finished the shit he started, even if it meant killing himself in a selfish fashion.

Bear’s literally just a “Nice Guy (TM)” where he lacks the substance and maturity to even be consistent with his actions, yada yada, we talked about it all yesterday. Even with the potential to kill himself and at least make things normal for Nicky, he couldn’t even go through with it.

BUT HE’S NOT IMPORTANT. I GOT MORE THOUGHTS.

Ian sucks, and I’ve seen a lot of discussion on how the ideas he gave to Bear to confess were deliberately bad in the sense that it would make him look better by comparison (seeing as he had the weird on/off relationship FWB thing with Nicky), and the whole implications of Nicky quitting the job might be related to that (her wanting to find love elsewhere feels like Ian came on to her and she didn’t reciprocate). It also helps to demonstrate how bad Bear’s wish was (we’ve been over how it’s wrong to use the love magic but the phrasing is key regardless), seeing as he was able to just… get rich off it. I will say his death was dumb seeing as it doesn’t make sense for him to go to the house of the dude he just screwed over further. I was heated about how the men were versus the women in the film, and I think it’s best reflected by Sarah.

Unfortunately, Bear is her Nicky— she’s down for him (god knows why) but he’s not seeing her like that. She seemed more well-adjusted seeing as she had something to live for, but the way she went out was a genuine tragedy just based on the whole college thing, but her death felt a bit more earned in the sense that it’s another person Bear’s actions and lack of responsibility screwed over. Nicky’s complicated to me since the script definitely changed in how they conveyed her relationship with Bear because YEESH it’s so obvious that she knows and is just trying to get him to say it so she can rip that bandage off and they can go back to being normal-ish. Bear doesn’t even like Nicky in a healthy fashion— he basically wants someone who’s nice to him but with the potential for sex (note that even when possessed, Nicky’s doing shit for him but he doesn’t even like get her flowers or whatever, it’s even shot down as an idea at the very start of the story).

Hell, even when he claims the whole "her dad has cancer" thing both Ian AND Sarah are like "dude she hates her dad"

he's literally just clinging to some weird idealized version of her in his mind that does NOT exist. Some childhood friend he is.

we don’t get a whole glimpse of her character outside of secondhand accounts and snippets here and there (something something “haunts the narrative”), but we’re able to see she wants out so badly which makes the ending that much more fucked Freaky!Nicky (I’m sorry) is the similar tragedy of “I was made for this express purpose and can’t carry it out” and I KEPT GETTING STEVEN UNIVERSE VIBES FROM HER my god I love this trope But genuinely it’s done so well to emphasize that she doesn’t understand social cues or societal conventions in a healthy fashion since it’s basically all of Bear’s unhealthy traits cranked out in eldritch horror form (watching Nicky’s insta reels/her watching him sleep, him dragging randoms into his goal of sharing how he feels/her just hitting those intense Public declarations of love like at the party, etc)

and then the ending hits where she finally has meaning and is able to exist in absolute bliss for like 5 seconds before Bear drops dead and I HATE that the original script had her shoot herself and it was phrased like this:

As depressing as the final ending is, it works narratively, cause yeah: Nicky's life is ruined, and even when she gets control back of herself what happens next is still out of her hands.

Best case scenario is she kills herself on her own terms.