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Going by the black cat's symbolism, it would have been better if Gabriel had been the CEO of a sea-based company: black cats may be bad luck for land people, but cats in general and black ones in particular are good luck on a ship, and Plagg is indeed a bringerof of good fortune for Adrien.

I don't see what Gabriel needing to be a CEO of a sea based company would really do or need to be as Adrien doesn't get the Cat through him. He got it through Fu who's culture regards cats favorably.

But yeah, cats in general are symbols of fortune and protection. Japan they guide you to fortuitous routes. China they ward off evil spirits with a single look. Egypt they were loved and brought good luck to the homes they lived in. Celts viewed them as otherwordly but not in a malicious sense. They even have a Cat as part of their Zodiac (which sounds the most like Marinette personality wise: observant, but scattered energy, incredibly helpful and involved).

Really, the association of black cats being unlucky is only 400 years old, and only came to be in Europe when they were witch hunting zealots. For Cat to be the "bad luck" and negative one it really just works off a recent European view, but everywhere else it's been very positive and favored.

What might've made more sense for a "bad luck" rep would be Raven or Wolf. These two definitely have a negative association in China, and have a mixed reception in Europe.

The Raven is often a symbol of ill omens, a bearer of bad news and tragedy. For Europe, this association probably stems from the raven being Hermes messenger who reported to him that his current lover was cheating on him, and he burnt the bird's feathers black. In China, they had three legs and carried the sun, and there were multiple and they brought the suns way too close to earth, starting to burn it up and all but one had to be shot down by Huo Yi.

The Wolf often being a source of destruction and being an antagonist/villain in mythology and fairytales, like Fenrir the World Eater and the Big Bad Wolf.

Mindful, these two alternatives still wouldn't be ideal as part of the two most powerful of the Chinese set (truly the best would be Dragon/some sort of reptile and Tiger or Dragon/reptile and some sort of bird to truly represent yin-yang), but playing off the European themes that were included in miraculouses, these would make the most sense for a "negative" animal to counter the positive symbol that is Ladybug. Unlike the "unlucky black cat", these have been a negative view for far longer.

#ask Punchie #cat miraculous #animal lore #animal mythology #raven miraculous #wolf miraculous

AN INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL ART L MEDIEVAL NATURE III: EXCURSUS - THE UNNATURAL The medieval bestiaries, aviaries, herbals, and lapidaria purport to offer a comprehensive explication of the natural world. In general, the texts, the majority of which are are paraphrases of Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, do not waste time rehearsing basic, readily-observable facts about ordinary animals and plants. Instead, the extraordinary and esoteric aspects of a given subject are highlighted and the actions most amenable to allegorical interpretation summarized. Inscribed in the “strange but true” natural world is its Other, the Unnatural. Descriptions of mythological, legendary and imaginary flora and fauna such as the baleful manticore and leucrota, the deadly siren and the hapless unicorn are evenly interspersed among those of the real animals and presented with the same solemnity of tone. Copying passages from Isidore of Seville about weird animals and unlikely plants posed no problems for the scribes of the bestiary. The inclusion of the unnatural world, however, severely taxed the representational powers of its illuminators. With neither an iconographical tradition nor direct visual experience to fall back on, the professional artists assembled the details mentioned in the texts into quirky, highly-imaginative forms that are not always suave, but highly memorable. As for the readers of the bestiaries, they were scholars affiliated with monasteries, cathedral schools or universities. For this constituency, the book was an exegesis of the spiritual sense of the natural world, analogous to the figurative interpretation of scripture. Thus, the allegorical and moral dimensions were the work’s primarily source of interest. The bestiary was not a biology textbook or a handbook for identifying birds and flowers while gardening and the daily life and habits of mice and sheep were of little or no importance to urban theologians and intellectuals. Anachronistc expectations of a materialist, empirical approach to nature cause modern readers to valorize the literal and descriptive components of the book, while dismissing the allegories as irrelevant, tendentious impositions, a misreading that exactly inverts the book’s structure. Finally, there is no reason to assume that all medieval readers and viewers credulously accepted the accounts of the onocentaur and the peridexion tree as true or believed they would die if a wolf saw them first. Sceptical readings of aspects of the text were permissible, particularly those parts written by pagans. Doubts about the allegorical methodology, however, crossed the line of heresy. 1. Manticore 2. Siren and Centaur 3. Dragon 4. Leucrota 5. 6. Turtle 7. Woman Nursing Lion Cub 8. Griffin 9. Unicorn 10. Fish.  An Incomplete History of Medieval Art by C. G. Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://lostprofile.tumblr.com/copyright.

#bestiary #medieval science #nature #unicorn #animal lore