what do you imagine antonio grown up
Thank you for the ask! This ended up being a little long so I put it under a cut. Just a quick warning, my ideas of what Antonio is like as an adult might not be everybody's cup o' tea, that's not to say I think he grows up to be a jerk. The exact opposite. I just figure the guy is going to be the least traditional in his family due to the influence of the animals around him.
I like the common headcanon that Antonio grows up to be really tall. I figure he ends up taller than Pepa but still a little shorter than Luisa. Despite his height, Pepa still insists on calling him her baby even once he's a grandfather himself.
I once saw somebody reason that because Antonio hangs out with a carnivore, he gets pretty comfy with the circle of life. That makes a lot of sense to me, but I imagine it's his association with jaguars that makes him such a stalwart advocate for animal rights. Jaguars might eat other animals but they don't put them in tiny little boxes and forget to feed them. The circle of life is a part of nature, cruelty for cruelty's sake is not. So, Antonio goes around to the farms of Encanto and does what he can to ensure that the livestock are all being treated fairly. And considering he's followed everywhere he goes by at least one jaguar, he can do a lot.
In the same vein as him being comfy with the cycle of life and death, I imagine that Antonio learns what sex is basically the first time mating season comes around. He sees one of the birds preparing a nest, asks if this means they’re about to have babies and gets a frank lesson on that bird’s courting rituals. The bird doesn’t see any reason not to explain how new birds are made, and the talk is given so matter of factly that Antonio just thinks of it as a new science fact. One day his parents are reminiscing about when they were young and Antonio asks his Pá if he built Pepa a nest, the adults chuckle and say no, only birds do that. So Antonio asks if sex is also something only birds do. The silence is resounding and would have lasted forever if Camilo hadn’t broken out laughing. When he grows up he's the easiest adult in the family to talk to about puberty and wedding night jitters.
We know the warm color side of the family has game, Dolores had Mariano asking for marriage within one conversation, and despite having a very minor role in the movie Camilo has so many fangirls. Antonio is no exception. The little dude grows up with all the charisma of Félix and all the emotional intelligence of Mirabel, and there’s a roughly 7 year period between Camilo getting married and Dolores’ eldest coming of age where he’s the only single Madrigal of marrying age. Needless to say, he’s super popular with both men and women, but he’s also pretty content to just hang out with the animals all day. Until a girl a couple years younger than him gets caught kissing another girl by her parents. They are furious at her, and plan to force her to marry the first man they find that'll take an unwilling wife. Antonio finds her crying by the river, gets her to tell him what’s wrong, then says he’ll marry her and she can keep seeing her girlfriend. She asks multiple times if he’s sure, and doesn’t he want to fall in love, marry his soulmate? Antonio just shrugs, he’s happy as he is. So she agrees, her parents jump on the chance to marry her off to a Madrigal, and they get hitched.
This next part is the reason I put the warning up at the top, you can interpret it as Antonio and the girlfriends all wanting kids and going for the obvious solution, or you can interpret it as polyamorous Antonio. I sure as hell haven’t made up my mind which it is. But, he has two kids with his wife, then her girlfriend moves into Antonio’s room and they have two kids too. Nobody is sure what to think, but at this point the family is getting pretty big, and both women love cooking so whenever somebody asks Alma what she thinks of the situation she says “Not only can Antonio have as many wives as he wants, but if Isabela has another son, I’m sending Antonio to culinary school with a bag of engagement rings.” Nobody knows whether or not she’s joking, but it’s hard to argue with that. (Side note, I figure each generation has an average of three kids per Madrigal. So, factoring in spouses, by the time the youngest grandkid is having his third child that's roughly 36 mouths to feed. Which leads some people in the village to argue that Alma is serious and rightfully so.)
His kids are close enough in age that people sometimes forget what child came from which woman, and all of the kids call both women Mama and Mami. He’s pretty happy with his small army of offspring, he’s a pretty chill dude and after spending most of his life dealing with wild animals he takes to parenthood like a duck to water. This makes it even harder for anyone to complain about his strange situation, because all of his kids are so happy and well behaved.
He ends up with a pack of domesticated jaguars that follow him around. The one time a dangerous gang got into Encanto, Antonio sent some jaguars after them and that pretty much took care of that.
Even once his own kids are all grown “Tío Nio” can be found with a pile of children on top of him while he calmly reads a medical journal. There are more healers in the family than just Julieta by now, but none of them can completely heal disease, and pregnancy is still a complicated process for all species. So he reads up as much he can in order to help the animals of the village.
He is the best person to go to for relationship advice. There are plenty of people in the family who can tell you the most charming way to behave in a relationship, and Mirabel will tell you the most mature way to behave, but Antonio blends charm and maturity like no other. For example: at one point one of his nieces accidentally rubs salt in the wound that is her husband's bad day, she apologizes but he is still visibly upset. She doesn't know if he's still upset about his bad day, or if she hurt him more than she realized and needed to give a bigger apology, so she turns to her Tio Nio. He tells her to set up a day out they'll both enjoy, that way if she needs to apologize she'll have a whole day of meaningful gestures prepared, and if she doesn't she still gets the chance to spend time with the man she loves.
Thank you again for the ask! Hope you enjoyed some of these.