Gabriel Agreste, born Gabi Grassette, better known as Hawk Moth (Le Papillon in the French version, which translates to "The Butterfly"), is the main antagonist of the Miraculous franchise. He is the father of Adrien Agreste, and the archenemy of Ladybug and Cat Noir, unaware that his own son, Adrien, is the current holder of the Cat Miraculous.
He is a fashion designer and supervillain obsessed with the Miraculous jewels, specifically the Ladybug and Cat Miraculouses, which he desires to steal and combine in order to change reality, with the ultimate goal of saving his wife Emilie by creating a new world for them to live in. He is the former holder of the Butterfly Miraculous, using its power of Akumatization to transform normal people into supervillains under his control. In Season 4, he unified the Butterfly Miraculous with the Peacock Miraculous, becoming Shadow Moth (Papillombre in the French version). In Season 5, he takes the new alias of Monarch after stealing the Chinese Zodiac Miraculouses from the Chinese Miracle Box with the help of his nephew, Félix Fathom. In the final episode of Season 5, "Re-creation", he successfully manages to get his hands on both the Ladybug and Cat Miraculous, and makes his wish to cure the sickness of Nathalie, who was affected after using the broken Peacock Miraculous, at the cost of his own life.
He was voiced by Antoine Tomé in the original French version and Keith Silverstein in English.
What Makes Him a Base Breaking Character?[]
What Do People Like About Him?[]
- He is given a hammy and entertaining performance by his voice actors Antoine Tomé and Keith Silverstein.
- He has a charismatic personality that makes his villainy memorable.
- As a supervillain, he has plenty of cool-looking costumes and powers, and the designs of the villains he creates through his akumas are unique and creative.
- He is intelligent and strategic, seizing opportunities to get the Miraculous he wants, succeeding in multiple gambits to take the heroes' suspicions away from him and using all of the Miraculous to their full potential as Monarch.
- He has many sympathetic qualities, like having his villainy motivated by his desire to resurrect his wife Emilie, caring about his son Adrien and his accomplice turned former love interest Nathalie. He also has many emotional scenes to showcase his desperation and inner vulnerabilities.
- At the end of the fifth season, he realizes the error of his ways and feels remorse for what Adrien would think of him so he redeems himself, making the wish to be with Emilie while recreating the world so that Adrien and all of the people he antagonized can be happy without him. His fans see this as an heartwarming moment and felt bad for him.
What Do People Hate About Him?[]
- Many consider his early gimmick of akumatizing people with his usual catchprases to have gotten repetitive over time.
- His detractors think that his inconsistent writing makes him appear as less sympathetic at times. Examples of this are when he endangers Adrien’s life despite being supposed to care for him and him being uncaring for Nathalie’s health in an episode despite otherwise not wanting her to keep using the peacock miraculous.
- His detractors don’t like him becoming worse in Season 5, feeling like it was all sudden and incoherent with his characterization earlier.
- A common criticism towards him is that he alternated between being a sympathetic villain and an unsympathetic one without any justification or build-up in some episodes.
- Detractors believe that his redemption was not enough to make up for all of his heinous crimes, being a terrorist, torturer and abusive father who was willing to shed his redeeming qualities in some episodes. After recreating the universe through his wish, he is given his own statue and is presented as a hero who sacrificed his own life to defeat Monarch for the sake of everyone's happiness, yet Marinette is the only one who retains memories of the truth and keeps it a secret, meaning that everyone forgave Gabriel because they're being lied to and had the truth withheld from them rather than him making up for his crimes.
- Since Adrien was not present during Hawk Moth's final fight against Ladybug, he was never able to find out Hawk Moth's secret identity and vice versa. As such, Adrien was never given any agency in the situation as he never got to confront his father or have Gabriel make up for what he did to his son, instead he has to live in the new reality being kept away from the truth for his own sake.
- Fans of Chloé Bourgeois think that his redemption is unfair, as to them her motivations are understandable and sympathetic but she's treated as being irredeemable, while Gabriel was redeemed despite being much worse than her in both villainous actions and personality.
- He was also successful with making his wish by combining Tikki and Plagg into Gimmi, which destroyed the universe and remade it with the attributes of the exchange. This exact scenario was shown to be a bad thing in "Ephemeral" (as the consequences of the wish were so dangerous that Sass had to use his powers out of desperation to stop it from happening) and was what Hawk Moth had been trying to do for the show's 8-year runtime. However, the story twists this into Hawk Moth giving his life to Nathalie and joining his wife in death, for the sake of his son, yet it is not portrayed as something extremely dangerous.
- His detractors also think that him redeeming himself after having become worse in later seasons is incoherent, and to them it feels like a bad attempt at making a villain both sympathetic and despicable.
Trivia[]
- His counterpart in Ladybug and Cat Noir: The Movie does not count as a Base-Breaking Character, as he remains sympathetic and likeable, while his writing is widely praised for doing Gabriel's character right in comparison to the show.
External Links[]
- Hawk Moth on the Villains Wiki
- Gabriel Agreste on the Miraculous Ladybug Wiki
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 Base Breaking Characters
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Major Characters | ||