What are these references? because Marco bears little to no similarities to the golden red Hou-ou
Is aesthetically designed after one (distinctive tail, pheasant traits, rooster comb, long crane neck..., and actually has more chromatic similarities to it than to the Western phoenix; Hou-ou is more of a multichromatic creature, not "golden red", while "phoenix" literally means "red"), his techniques refer to it both explicitly and implicitly ("Hoo-in" explicitly contains it; "Nashi no Tsubute" is a pun containing the kanji "hō
" as for
"feng
"; "Ongle" means "crane claw" and Hou-ou is stated to have crane legs...), he took the place of the rooster in Oda's zodiac colorspread (which is interchangeable with the pheasant and both represent Hou-ou)...
The only thing Marco has of a Western phoenix is the name of the fruit and the fire regeneration powers..., or he would if these weren't traits asimilated by Hou-ou in its modern representations as he's now called the Japanese phoenix (or Chinese if we talk about Fenghuang) and lots of other pop-culture Hou-ou appropiated their "Western cousin" powers.