The possibly unintended (though I doubt it) brilliance of Z.O.E.'s power-ups
With @zoe-oneesama's season 5 of Scarlet Lady slowly creeping to its big finale, I am sure anyone familiar with the AU knows how well written everything is, however something in particular caught my eye as a world builder, that being Marigold's power-up. In case my name didn't make it obvious, my entire thing is magic systems. The Miraculous as a system are immensely interesting, and part of the reason I dropped canon is that they didn't flesh it out as well as they could, leaving it feeling flat.
Why's there a five minute timer post-ability for underage users? They aren't old enough to handle the full power, but that isn't an in depth answer. There's no internally consistent logic to it, or if there is I can't find it. Why are the Kwami bound to their holder's orders if they're primordial basically-elder-gods that embody inherent concepts? What defines suitability for a Miraculous, or is it literally just personality? We don't get these answers, and while not the largest reason by orders of magnitude, it is one of the many reasons I don't like canon, and that's when they don't turn around and straight up contradict themselves.
Oh, underage users have a timer? Not if they "master" their Miraculous, but we won't define what that mastery is or how to achieve it, because that would mean admitting the writers are talking out their asses! Like yeah, we can infer that the Guardians were shit from the reason Feast came to be, but the Mage was supposedly borderline Saint like, so why would he force the Kwami to obey whoever holds their Miraculous?
A line from Plagg (known gremlin and likeliest to slag off on the Guardians) talking about it could have fixed that issue, just imagine! "Oh yeah the Mage was awesome! The problem was his students, who would go on to form the Guardian order. Once he died, they used his research to alter the enchantments on the Miraculous' to force us to obey them. Jokes on them though, doing that weakened the jewels by a ton!" Boom, problem solved.
Anyway, while some of these questions haven't been answered, and probably won't be (we have like five episodes left including Maledictator, plus it's at least a little bit a parody, it's job isn't to answer) there is a neat little thing that has shown up, specifically in the first episode of season five, Zombizou. And that was the introduction of Bee Balm.
This power introduces a lot of shit and does so brilliantly, foremost being actual requirements for a power-up. In canon, we have the introduction of the Akuma talismans that comes from... Maribug understanding her powers and believing she can do more? This isn't a bad way to do a power-up mind you, and she was absolutely due some level of recompense for the universe repeatedly kicking her in the metaphorical dick, but it doesn't feel like it fits in this situation particularly.
The Akuma talisman boost would work if this is Marinette finally getting past a mental block and we knew about it, but I can't find anything about that, so it feels almost like a payoff without a conflict. Compare that to the introduction of Bee Balm, where the heroes are constantly stressed due to having to simultaneously fight Hawkmoth and pick up Scarlet Lady's slack, so they're both near constantly stressed and training their asses off.
Then, Chat Noir is taken out. More than that, he's taken out defending her civilian identity, after being essentially betrayed by their incompetent partner, who's then taken out in turn. Bare in mind that this same sociopathic bitch is vital in stopping Akumas and preventing swarm incidents, and without her they're essentially fucked. She can't go get a Miraculous from where she is, and that wouldn't help anyway, meanwhile her partner and the dumbass they have to tolerate are out of commission. So what does she do?
She develops a power relevant to both her Kwami's concept and the situation at hand. If she can't purify the Akuma, then she'll purify the effect their having on others. And looking at Zoe's other power-up posts we see that the ability is clearly specific to her, because we also get to see Queen Bee's and Vesperia's power-up forms, and none of the three Bee users share a power apart from Venom.
This of course all made my little world builder's brain light up, and the fact that we get to see new forms for Carapace, Rena Rouge, Pigella and Purple Tigress did so even more, and not just because Nino's entry gave me more clues for my personal theory as to how they work. With all that out of the way, I think I just locked down the conditions for a new ability. First is the emotional component, a degree of anguish and desperation on the level of a mental breakdown. Marinette looked like she was a few seconds from a literal heart attack before the awakening hit, for god's sake.
Next is the affinity the user has with their Miraculous. A person who isn't suited for a particular jewel simply isn't going to be able to use it properly.
Third is the domain a given Miraculous commands and the way the user interprets that domain. Bee Balm is an application of Subjection, created when the horror toward Zombizou's powers and actions against people Marigold had sworn to protect reached a critical mass. Her subjects, if you will, were being forced into a state where they had no agency in the most literal sense possible, and thus she gained the power to free people from such an influence, both commanding the Miraculous magic affecting them to fuck off and bypassing a lesser form of her domain of influence.
Fourth is the environmental factor. That specific thing you can trace for exactly how the power formed the way it did. Bee Balm having no effects on the inanimate because there was no collateral damage factor, Carapace's theoretical waterbending power-up, they shape the power because they are exactly what was needed at the time. Nothing else would suffice, they have no more tricks in the arsenal, and even if they did none would work.
With all that in mind, I think I have an idea as to what set evolved!Pigella off in Z.O.E.'s last power-up design post, as well as a possible ultimate form(?) ability of my own which would give Hawkmoth a cold sweat.
The first (love chain's activation) would probably be a Scarlet Moth incident, possibly even the first depending on if the timeline the power-up happens in is closer to the Scarlet Lady one or not. Rose has the Pig Miraculous, she's got it active, and she's fucking terrified. People are getting mass akumatized, it's a known factor at this point that a Miraculous doesn't make you immune to Akumas and Rose had looked into Princess Fragrance enough to figure out that she was sandbagging, hard. Remember, this was the Akuma with airborne mind control and was likely capable of making any number of chemicals.
So Pigella is in the streets fighting Akumas and is stressed out her gourd. She has to maintain a positive attitude, while helping fight a what's basically a small scale apocalypse with a tambourine of all things, and she can't use her powers because they're one use a transformation, and only affect one person. So you can imagine the stress she's under.
As she's going across the city, she spots a swarm hit a group of people. None have been akumatized before so there's a small delay as the butterflies try to decide on the host forms, but Rose knows she's got maybe twenty seconds from the other end of the street. At this point the stress is at an all time high, a headache is forming, she has no idea if her friends and loved ones are okay, and...
Then it hits, that little piece to the puzzle. Loved ones, love, specifically how it can develop and relate to other emotions. Right now, Paris needs love very literally, it needs positivity to resist the swarms, and if Gift as it is can't help, then something new is in order. Grabbing the side of her tambourine with her free hand, Rose twists the handle and lets go, allowing her weapon to take its new form.
With a cry and a pull on the not-muscle that normally indicated her power, Pigella's new whip flies across the road and sinks into the nearest Akuma-to-be with a strange ripple effect, like the end of the weapon had dropped into a pond as opposed to hit a human being. A soft glow encompasses the civilian, before sparks leap off of them and onto the person next to them like forks of lightning, and the process repeated. In less than a dozen seconds the entire group was affected and in the face of such joy, the Scarlet Akumas were forcibly ejected.
While I don't have an actual story-bit for the ultimate form power, I do have a general idea how it would form. The power would be called Blessing, and befitting it's Ultimate moniker, it's absolutely cracked.
Blessing would be a support/empowerment ability formed when someone close to Rose (for this example, Juleka) was Akumatized again, and her sheer incandescent rage is enough to unlock an ability, turning her tambourine into a weapon not unlike the Voltron Bayards.
Blessing allows the user to purify an Akuma while it's still in the person, granting them a set of powers similar to that Akuma form, and also preventing them from being transformed into that state again if they have multiple forms. In other words, Blessing permanently eliminates options from Hawkmoth's roster while empowering the victim to let them better fight back.
