Hawk Moth

* Hawk Moth
* Gabriel Agreste

* Staff wielding
* Cataclysm

As Monarch:

* Swordsmanship
* Akumatization
* Mirage
* Shell-ter
* Venom
* Second Chance
* Voyage
* Elemental transformation
* Burrow
* Uproar
* Multitude
* Gift
* Clout
* Fetch
* Resistance
* Genesis
* Sublimation

**As Monarbug**: (formerly)

* Yoyo-wielding (presumably)
* Lucky Charm (presumably, but never attempted)

**As Nightormentor**:

* Nightmare inducement

Use the power of the Ladybug and Cat Miraculouses to revive his wife Emilie and create a new world for them to live in.
Discover the identities of Ladybug and Cat Noir.
Destroy Ladybug, Cat Noir and their allies once and for all.
Retrieve the Peacock Miraculous from his nephew.
Fulfil his deal with Tomoe Tsurugi.
Ensure that Adrien and Kagami Tsurugi become a couple (all abandoned).
Protect Adrien from harm at all costs (mostly succeeded).
Prevent Ladybug and Cat Noir from discovering his identity (succeeded only with Cat Noir).
Find the Guardian of the Miraculous.
Make Chloé Bourgeois become his ally.
Steal the Miraculouses from the Chinese Miracle Box (all succeeded, but later abandoned the Miraculouses and his wedding rings after making the wish).
Cure Nathalie Sancoeur's sickness (succeeded at the cost of his own life)
Destroy every Ladybug and Cat Noir in existence (abandoned)

### Why Do Some People Hate The Character?

He becomes more cruel and unsympathetic over time, making him harder to sympathize with.
He abused his son Adrien and has been shown to throw away his care for him several times.
Many believe he got off too easily with his redemption, as well as the fridge horror implications of the ideal world he created with his wish.

### Why Do Some People Love The Character?

His personality, costumes and powers make him a memorable villain.
He has a sympathetic motive to revive his wife and shows his inner vulnerabilities because of it.
Despite abusing him most of the time, he does care about Adrien and sacrificed himself for his happiness.

### Type of Base Breaking Character

Mishandled Mastermind

**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.

## What Makes Him a Base Breaking Character?

### Why Do People Like 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.

### Why Do People Dislike Him?

* Many consider his early gimmick of akumatizing people with his usual catchprases to have gotten repetitive over time.
* While he is meant to be sympathetic most of the time, some episodes depict him more heartless and cruel than usual. As "Cat Blanc" and "Ephemeral" have shown, should there be a timeline where he finds out that Adrien is Cat Noir, he will throw away his redeeming qualities and sympathy to akumatize his own son.
* He was an abusive and neglectful father to his son Adrien, grooming him to be perfect and preventing him from having any freedom or having friends. While he did show standards against involving him in his villainous plans at first, as the seasons went on his abuse towards Adrien worsened and he had no problem putting him in harm's way.
* Detractors believe that his redemption was not enough to make up from 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 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. Furthermore, it also gives the horrifying implication that all of the characters unaware of the wish were killed by Gimmi's universal reconstruction and replaced with exact copies of themselves unlike with the powers of Made in Heaven Stand in *JoJo’s Bizzare Adventure* where every living being unaware of its effect is teleported to the recreated universe.

## 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

Supporting Characters