Hello!
If you'd like to share, I'm curious about what your ideas were about:
"The Agreste's aquiring the miraculous is far more morally complex, makes sense, and was not done for explicitly selfish reasons"
(really liked your reverse crush set-up (￣︶￣) )
(Post that spawned this ask)
There are so many ways to do this, but I personally like the idea that Fu had nothing to do with the miraculous going missing because there was no real reason to do that in canon. Yes, it made Fu paranoid, but the show keeps insisting that paranoia is good and Su Han has basically the same rules that Fu did, so this is just a needless complication. I don't think anything would change if Fu was a fully realized guardian. I don't want the guardian order to be a thing, though. There's just a single guardian.
With that in mind, somewhere along the line, the holders of the peacock and the butterfly went rogue. In the resulting fight, the peacock got damaged by whoever was wielding the black cat because that should be the only way to damage a miraculous. None of this drop it and it breaks BS. In spite of the damage, the peacock and the butterfly escaped. They've been missing ever since and no one has even heard of them being used.
These long ago rogue holders end up being Emilie's ancestors or the ancestors of someone she gets close to or even just people she gets close to because she's nice and does stuff with the elderly. Whatever the path, it leads to Emilie getting her hands on the miraculous. You could even match canon and replace the rings with the miraculous since canon went the family heirloom route already. The setup is there!
If we keep the good Emilie read that canon so clearly wants us to have, then we can have Emilie become a world traveler specifically because she wants to figure out how to fix the peacock. She uses her wealth to go all over the place, looking for clues on the guardian, but without the guardian order, there's no specific place to look. On these travels she meets Gabriel and they end up getting married. Gabriel enjoys traveling with her and helping her in her quest, but it's just a thing they do on the side. This keeps the world traveler element and explains how these two know about the miraculous since they no longer need to magically find out about the miraculous on their own AND KNOW WHERE TO FIND THEM???
Mini rant time: the fact that Gabriel, Nathalie, and Emilie were able to successfully find the miraculous is such total BS. They weren't lost in the ruins of the guardian temple. They were lost while Fu was running away! How would they even begin to know where to look unless Fu told them? Even then, he dropped them into an open cavern! That's like finding a needle in a haystack. And why did they find the miraculous, but not Feast? Wouldn't they be in the same location? It actually makes more sense for them to find Feast as an indicator that this is the right spot since it's so much bigger! None of this makes sense. As an amature historian who knows the basics of how archelogy works, this plot point infuriates me. It's so dumb.
Anyway, somewhere along the line, a situation pops up where Emilie is forced to use the peacock even though she knows the consequences because she should ABSOLUTELY KNOW THE CONSEQUENCES!!! I do not believe for a second that Nooroo didn't warn them. I could possibly buy Dussu being too out of it, but then that raises questions about where Nooroo was and there's no good answer to that. It's nonsense. Emilie not knowing is a copout and so lame! It ruins all the drama of her using the peacock. If her getting sick was an accident then just give her cancer or something.
Why she uses the peacock is up to you. Have Adrien be sick and she picks saving her son over a long life. Have her and Gabriel get into trouble on their travels and so she transforms to save him (oh the guilt! Makes Gabriel's obsession make even more sense, doesn't it?) Whatever you choice, make sure it's not explicitly selfish and you've got a wonderful complex situation where Emilie's death really wasn't deserved and Gabriel's obsession truly feels like a man trying to right a wrong and not like an egomaniac trying to stop the consequences of his own bad actions, which is one of the main reason I keep saying I like good Emilie. The story is so much more interesting to me if Emilie is good. It doesn't justify Gabriel's actions, but it makes them more compelling. Canon went the most boring route possible for this backstory and I hate it.
