Thanks to lilvon for the inspiration!
“Deconstruction occurs when you take your standard tropes to their most logical & often most extreme conclusions.”
I wish moogles were in Final Fantasy XV. I didn’t need them. I could take them or leave them. But when I heard that they’d be in the “fantasy based on reality”. I wanted to see how they would look in a semi-realistic setting:
Oh.
So I guess in real life, they wouldn’t actually be real (whereas a Cactuar would be???). Or would they be? What if Moogles were real? Let’s break down the Moogle:
they are recognized by the small wings, usually pink or white fur, and a pom-pom hanging from their heads.
Moogles sprout a “pom pom”—a red ball of fur on a thin, wiry antenna—from their heads, which they are sensitive about being touched. A Moogle’s wings are most often of a dark, Gothic, or bat-like design, as to juxtapose their otherwise harmless appearance and bubbly nature. Moogles resemble small mammals, ranging from rodents to felines or marsupials.
First, if they were real, they’d be an animal race of the small mammal variety. But what type of animal might they look like? Well, we know from Final Fantasy II:
The Moogle was initially created as a race called クライオン (Kuraion?, lit. Clion) that lived in cold regions, but was scrapped along with several other races. Their sprite and race details became the Beaver race in the finished game.
So then here, we can guess they’d have a body of a beaver. We can’t rule out that it could be a cat. But in the actual Japanese, they were something similar to a mole. The wings we usually see look to be like anthropomorphic bat wings, as seen here. So they really are like “Mole Bats”.
But the wings don’t look functional. We can guess they evolved out of a flying creature eons ago. Maybe they were smaller and thinner, or their wings were quick and powerful like a bee’s. The probably needed wings to fly away from predators, but now can use magic and simply cast float.
It’s not a stretch to say that they have white fur, especially if their original habitat happens to be the cold regions, rather than the forest.
But in colder regions, how many flying animals are there? This is probably why they gradually lost the use of their wings.
What about the Pom-Pom on their head. Well, at the end of the Final Fantasy V PSX movie, it glows!
So then, maybe the Moogle would have a Pom-Pom like an angler fish? In their past, maybe the pom-pom was used to snare their prey, attract suitors, communicate or heal (in Final Fantasy V, they can speak through telepathy)? Probably not the former though, since Moogles seem to be strictly vegan vegetarian.
And what about their use of ‘Kupo’? Maybe they “purr” the sound, rather than enunciate it if they were real. To us, it sounds like ‘Kupo’, but the word would actually be an onomatopoeia. Their sound can most likely indicate a wide variety of emotions.