It is possible that all the very nice people who have given me “make comics about what you love” advice were not informed of my obsession over Paul Bunyan statues and Bunyan muffler man variants.
So I’m sitting here, thinking about the heroes we haven’t seen yet in light of Gloob’s constant teasing, and the possible themes and inspirations for them. A lot of the heroes we’ve already seen have themes connected to or entirely based off various mythology, and I’ll make a post about as many of those references as I can think of after s4 is over. So I’m using this train of logic to try and figure out something about the rest of them. And I feel something familiar at the edge of my brain about Stompp…
I have a straight up brain blast. All the way back to good ol’ American public elementary school where they drilled this into us for some reason. The United States folktale of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. (The art below is by Angus McBride)
Paul Bunyan is a legendary lumberjack, superhuman in size and strength. His best friend is a blue ox named Babe that he rescued from a snowbank and raised on his own, growing from a sickly “babe” into a strong giant as well.
I always thought it was interesting that they chose to make Stompp blue, at first thinking that they and Roaar were just changed to unnatural bright colors to avoid having half the cast be boring shades of brown-ish and orange-ish since Kaalki, Xuppu, Orikko, and Barkk take up umber brown, yellow, orange, and sienna brown. I bet this is a part of it too, but the choice of blue specifically for the ox paired with Ivan and Stoneheart makes me think there’s more to it.
Stompp is easily one of THE cutest kwamis imo,,, Anyways, Stoneheart’s power is growing in size when he gets hit. I’ve seen people theorize that Minotaurox’s power will also have to do with growing in size. It would parallel the akuma as well as Polymouse’s power that allows her to shrink down and Horrificator’s power of growing and shrinking in response to others’ fear. Before, I stayed away from theories like this because I thought it was too similar to the akuma. Most of the hero powers are tangentially related to their respective akumas powers, but usually not in a way you could predict. But, when you take the parallels and the myth into account, it admittedly does make a lot of sense. If this is true, then I hope there’s more to it than just super size and strength, like how Polymouse can clone, not just shrink.
I made a half-joke in one of my previous theory-type posts that I hope one of the heroes has a giant axe. If anyone would have one, it would be Ivan since Paul Bunyan is a lumberjack. That being said, the good guys so far all have tools you can’t really do serious damage with, like toys, musical instruments, and defensive weapons. Also sometimes they’re really random. It’s near impossible to predict these correctly.
One last thing. The shapes around Minotaurox’s torso and arms in the silhouette remind me a bit of his Kitty Section stage costume. This isn’t anything serious, but I think it’d be neat if he took inspiration from Marinette’s design for his hero costume.
I can’t wait to see him appear in the show, and let me know which other new heroes you’d like to see a separate theory post about!
Edit: I just realized that I never mentioned my theory for his theme. My favorite one I’ve seen is fortification.
