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You know what I find really dumb? The fact that they chose the names Amelie and Emelie which are french names that look and sound almost identical, when these women are not French.

They're British. Literally born British nobility. Why do they have basically identical french names, that are literally a single letter off.

Especially when the anglicized versions of their names are pretty different.

Emelie is a french variation on Emily, while Amelie is a french variation of Amelia.

So considering that these women are British and not French, why are they called Emelie and Amelie, and not Emily and Amelia?

Like it has to be difficult to differentiate the names being said for people who are hard of hearing, or just people who have to use subtitles.

Considering the names also look almost identical.

It'd be one thing if they were French, I'd think it's dumb that their parents gave them near identical names, but at least the names being french variations of the names would make some level of sense.

But they're not French, they're British, and Amelia and Emily would make way more sense to be their names than Amelie and Emelie.

So honestly if I ever write fic where they pop up or are mentioned, I'll most likely be calling Adrien's mom Emily, and Felix's mom Amelia. Because my mildly dyslexic, fully ADHD having, ass cannot be writing (and proof reading) Emelie and Amelie over and over again.

Like they might still have the same name meaning, but at least I can visually distinguish who the hell I'm supposed to be referring to without feeling the need to put something like [Adiren's Mom] every time I type it.

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Also, this is a chart for who Maribug apologizes to the most, so now we can end the “mAriNEtTe nEvEr aPoLoGiZes tO tHe fEathEr bOy” argument too, hopefully.

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I think like Audrey was introduced not to excuse Chloe, but rather, to excuse Andre, like “See? Chloe’s behaviour is entirely her mother’s fault, so Andre has nothing to do with it, even though he spoiled her!”

And was the one to raise her. By that sheer factor, that's why I blame him more for Chloe's outcome.

At the core, I think it just comes down to the fact that the writers just have more preference for guys than girls, and this extends to parents.

This is why guys have more thought put into their costumes, some looking like actual clothing attire vs the skin tight suits most girls get.

Why we got an all boys hero team vs the all girls villain team.

Potentially, as it's from what I heard, the guys are also better friends in contrast to girls, hosting a party for Adrien to perk him up while the girls will invade Marinette's privacy and try to pressure her to out a secret they feel entitled to. Also guys are more harmonious, never getting into petty conflict while girls will have various conflicts and rivalries (mostly over romantic interests).

And of course, to the topic itself, this just extends to the dad side of parents. I feel like I can list more dads from this show than moms, and dads feel more valued in comparison or get more attention. Like, Rolland got 2 eps to be the focus to Gina getting one, Sabine didn't really get any attention until... s4, I want to say? Tom though is decently present in comparison to his wife. Emilie is just a prop, not a character. We got more on Jagged than Anarka. We got more of Alya's dad than her mom. And those who are terrible fathers get "happy" ending, Gabriel gets a "redeemed" death and remembered as a hero, and gets replaced a teenage girl who is more "evil" than him. And Andre the "victim" of the Bourgeois gets to wash his hands of the monster of his own making and have/kidnap a "better" daughter.

And the biggest kicker is that you didn't need Audrey to add to Chloe's backstory. You saw how Andre treated Chloe and it explains enough. You could cut her and not miss much for Chloe's whole set up aside from she misses/wants to connect with her mom, but that only came to be s2 and only mattered a few times.

So this whole thing I just pass off to the show's gender preference.

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If I may throw my hat into the ring here, I think the source of a lot of problems in the writing of Miraculous can be boiled down to its confusion over its target demographic.

There are two very clear audiences the show is trying to cater to:

Grade school girls around 5-10

Teens/young adults around 15-20

And this results in some. unique conflicts in the show's internal logic.

Because it's a superhero show for little kids, it's full of fun, bright colors, wacky villain-of-the-week designs, and the characters are all very straightforward with exaggerated personality traits. The cheerful, clumsy, scatterbrained girl protagonist, her utterly charming and goofy (but slightly clueless) love interest, her cool best friend, her mean bully, etc.

This extends to the romance; the show is so comedic that Marinette's nervous crush and Cat Noir's flirting are played up for laughs. Their more "problematic" behaviors read as cartoon shenanigans first and foremost, which I do think was the intention - they're both shown as being more than a little ridiculous for acting this way, so they're not exactly trying to encourage people to emulate them. They're allowed to be genuinely wholesome, too, because it's nice to give the kids something to go "aww!" at, but it's not meant to be more complicated or deep than that.

And of course, it's gotta follow a sweet and simple episodic formula! A conflict in Marinette's civilian life, an inciting incident to get a side character upset enough for Hawk Moth to turn into a villain, Ladybug and Cat Noir show up, there's fun banter, Ladybug uses her Lucky Charm to figure out a wacky solution to the problem, and boom! The day is saved, Marinette and/or someone else learns a moral, and we get a cute little end screen showing all the key players of the episode.

The one aspect of the show's setup that's a little more serious is the fact that Adrien has a super controlling and distant father, but even this is something that doesn't necessarily break the kid-friendly tone for the first season or two. Superhero shows in particular like to put in some stuff that's a little more emotionally challenging for the viewers, even when they're mostly comedic, so it's not totally out of place here.

For example, while they tend to have more grounded tones overall, Spider-Man cartoons are aimed at kids and regularly keep the conflict between Harry Osborn and his father, Norman, intact; often including the plot point of Norman being the Green Goblin, a notorious villain. It's a similar deal with Adrien, and his dad secretly being Hawk Moth.

You can easily anticipate drama coming from this, but the show primes you to expect it to work out fine in the end because every other conflict so far has been wrapped up in a nice little bow once the episode's over. Though I will say, the choice to have Hawk Moth be Gabriel instead of his own, separate character is perhaps the first sign of the tone shift to come.

And, uh. it sure is a shift.

See, Miraculous does not start out with what you'd call a... plot. It vaguely alludes to there being more going on behind the scenes, but the only thing it really tries to get you invested in is the Love Square dynamic. Marinette and Adrien dancing around each other while fighting crime IS the plot, and it's clearly going to end with a cool final confrontation with Hawk Moth.

You expect it to end like... well, like the movie. Identities are revealed, Gabriel realizes the error of his ways when he finds out he's been fighting his son this whole time, and they may or may not make up but he almost definitely gets arrested. Marinette and Adrien kiss, roll credits.

This is not what happens, because the plot the writers actually had in mind is complex in a way that I would argue is meant for the same audience as YA novels. And with that plot comes a lot of darker, weightier traits to these otherwise silly characters.

Marinette isn't just scatterbrained and nervous, she has debilitating anxiety and an increasing need to be in control of everything due to the stress she's under. She has panic attacks on-screen. She's not just great at strategizing, she also knows how to manipulate people, and does so with increasing frequency - and to Cat Noir at times, no less. Her positive traits haven't gone anywhere, she's still loving and creative and sweet and doing her best to help everyone she can, she just. has all of that other stuff going on, now.

Adrien isn't just a charming, goofy, clueless love interest with a gazillion skills and a controlling father, he's like. actively being abused, and in some cases straight-up mind controlled. His tendency to heroically sacrifice himself so that Ladybug can do her Cool Protagonist Thing is gradually but unmistakably reframed as being a sign of suicidal inclinations. He has identity issues out the wazoo and he doesn't even know he's an artificially created human yet, because everyone in his life is keeping secrets from him and/or lying to his face about crucial information.

Information like, uh. how his dad died???

Yeah, so we're at a point in the story now where there was no satisfying conclusion to the Gabriel plot, no team-up, no moment where he realizes he's been fighting his son, none of that. He still has something akin to a change of heart, but he also still kind of gets what he wants - the Miraculous of the Ladybug and Black Cat, which he uses to rewrite the universe with a wish. It's just that instead of reviving his wife, he trades his life for Natalie's. Of course, he was already dying anyway, which was his own fault but he did force Cat Noir's Cataclysm onto himself, so, that's another thing poor Adrien is going to have to deal with at some point.

And because there's all these astronomically messed up things in Adrien's life, and Marinette's the one who got to learn about all of it before him, she decides that maybe it would be better if he just. didn't know about it. Which is understandable, if I was 14 and had all this information about my boyfriend's life that he didn't, I wouldn't know how to begin telling him about it, either.

But. can you see how we've maybe lost the plot, here?

Here's the thing: starting with a simple framework and gradually getting more complex and subverting the audience's expectations for how the main villain is going to be dealt with is not a bad thing. The fact that it gets darker over time is not an issue. I actually think that all these developments are, themselves, pretty cool! I'm a sucker for angst and complex character dynamics and the show is absolutely giving me those things.

The problem is that it didn't just start with a simple framework, it started with the framework for a different demographic entirely, and perhaps just as importantly, it never actually... stopped.

For as much complexity and intensity they're injecting this story with, they're still working under the logic of it being "for young kids." We still get goofy villain-of-the-week designs with equally goofy motivations, and the supporting cast is stuck remaining two-dimensional no matter their circumstances. Chloe is the most blatant example of this - she was made to be a simple bully first, so no matter what else they do with her, she has to remain straightforwardly evil.

This, I think, is the reason that Gabriel is a more nuanced and "sympathetic" antagonist than her, and why so much care goes into Adrien's character as a victim of abuse while Chloe is just a Problem Child despite suffering similar neglect; she wasn't made to be interesting, and so the show is resistant to changing that. Gabriel and Adrien, however, were already made with nuance in mind, and so they're allowed to develop as characters. And at the same time, it's a kid's show! We need to teach the kids what kind of behavior is acceptable, and Chloe's home life isn't an excuse to treat people badly, so--!

...Oh crap we're supposed to be teaching kids about acceptable behavior. Uh. Um. Quick, bring back the ice cream akuma who cares way too much about his ships so that Cat Noir can learn about consent! Uhh, but don't change his character too much afterwards, he's only marketable because of his silly flirting, and we can't lose that.

Yeah, remember when I said that the romance having problematic elements to it used to work well enough because it was clearly just exaggerated cartooniness? It wasn't free from criticism or anything, but you could see how it was intended to be endearing and silly, right? You were supposed to point and laugh at Marinette's convoluted plans to spend time with Adrien, at Cat Noir's dramatic flirting attempts that Ladybug herself fondly rolled her eyes at.

The tonal shift into deep character exploration kinda paints the previous stuff in a worse light, and to an extent, I think the writers know that. It's hard to laugh at Cat Noir being flirty all the time when he's also supposed to be taken completely seriously, and the more Ladybug rejects him, the more it turns into harassment, and it. kinda just stops being funny, even with the comedic framing.

It's also hard to laugh at Marinette's crush being so all-consuming when they try to tell us (in what I can only assume was an attempt to get people to stop complaining) that she's like this because it's fueled by an event in her past, one that made her so scared of loving the wrong person that she now needs to know Everything about them before asking them out. Her cartoon antics aren't funny under that light, it's just concerning, but they're dedicated to keeping it up anyway.

The show runs on straightforward cartoon logic where you're not supposed to think about it too hard just as much as it runs on grounded, closer-to-real-life logic where people are messy and complicated and actions have consequences. It's so divided that you can hand-pick parts of the story that are influenced by one or the other pretty easily, and depending on the episode you can find instances of both in the same 20-minute time span. Maybe even multiple times!

Neither thing they're trying to go for is bad, and neither is a better approach than the other, but forcing them into the same show makes both sides suffer.

It's not just hard to laugh at the parts I mentioned earlier, it's hard to take Gabriel seriously as a villain whenever you rewatch an episode and remember that he has a once-per-episode pun-based speech that he says so self-seriously that you can't help but laugh at. It's hard to take him seriously when you remember that he repeatedly akumatized a Literal Baby and practically threw a tantrum every time it didn't work, or when he randomly steals (and enthusiastically performs) his nephew's musical dance number, or something similar that you would only do for a cartoon villain aimed at five-year-olds.

And I can only imagine this whole show is a marketing nightmare, too. Hey, little girls, here's your cool role model! She's cute and smart and talented and powerful and can fix anything by shouting the title of the show! Hope you're having fun watching her tell her boyfriend that his newly-deceased father (who used deepfakes of him to sell merchandise that's built to enslave the population and then locked him in a solitary confinement chamber in another country) was actually a hero who sacrificed himself to stop the main villain instead of, y'know, being the main villain! Aren't you excited to watch her wrestle with the guilt of this lie for the next season or so? Doesn't it just make you want to buy her merchandise??

Like. what is even happening right now. what am I watching. how did we get here and why did we start where we did if this was what the story was going to be about

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Bro had the biggest glow down and even got redeemed

I know the writers tried to give him depth, but he ended up as a laughable, pathetic antagonist with barely any complexity. He cared about his son, but he didn’t mind using him to further his own goals. That wouldn’t have been a problem if it had been handled well, but it wasn’t. Sure, he supposedly loved his son, but he barely showed any internal conflict over his actions. Simply saying he loves Adrien without demonstrating it in meaningful ways isn’t enough. Gabriel made no moves toward redemption, either. He could’ve had a complicated relationship with Adrien, loving him deeply yet losing his humanity in his pursuit of power. In that case, a redemption arc would’ve felt forced, as his descent would be intentional. So, to me, Gabriel didn’t truly love his son, came across as a weak villain who the main characters didn’t even fear, and somehow got redeemed without putting in any effort to change.

Now, comparing this version of Gabriel to the original concept for him, Richard Sphinx, makes it clearer. Richard might not have had much depth initially (he wasn’t even related to Chat Noir at first), but at least he looked and felt like a genuine menace. Just look at his design! He’s clearly someone to fear.

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Imagine Adrien as Bruce Wayne’s son, and no one would’ve guest cause he favors his mum so well. So you just have this blonde sunshine among a bunch a raven headed emo’s and Dick. Then there’s just Damian going around like “please excuse my brother, he has a genetic disease called Blonde.” Like Damian loves Adrien….but he’s so damn Blonde it puts Steph to shame.

Then the if Marinette shows up the entire Batfam just thanks the heavens cause at least she’s here to make sure he doesn’t get himself killed

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i legitimately cant go to sleep until i get this au out of my head, shoves this into the world so i can rest

extra notes: -gabriel pulled a swap because Emelie was getting increasingly unwell after her pregnancy/birth, so he traded his sickly kid out for a healthy changeling in an attempt to sway her mental health in a positive direction ("look honey your son isn't dying") in the hopes it would make her recovery physically -it didn't work and Felix grew up among weird magical people who made him acutely aware that he wasn't like them -Marinette is not immune to magical charms and magical persuasion but her clumsiness offsets the power they have on her, so as long as she's awkward she's virtually unaffected -once Adrien finds out about Felix he just instantly sees Felix as a brother even tho Felix is actively trying to do him a murder (he will not succeed. victorian ass sickly boy trying to kill a magical being lol lmao even)

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instead of telling the batfam he's alive again Jason just sneaks into the cave and starts reguarly changing the plaque on his memorial case to see how long it takes before anyone notices.

Dick, glancing at the case as he walks by: ok seriously who's doing this?! last week Jason's memorial plaque said 'I pissed in the ice maker two days ago' and now it says 'dicks the one who broke the golden vase'!

Tim: don't look at me, it said 'I still don't know what a post mortem is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask' a few days ago and I was so confused I got distracted on patrol and got shot in the arm

Dick: it's really starting to freak Bruce out, who could it be?

Damian, not looking up from the computer: it's Todd. I've been helping him sneak in every few days since he came back to Gotham.

Dick:

Tim:

Dick: what the FUCK are you TALKING about-

Tim: why the fuck-

Damian: I was told to partake in more 'child friendly activities'.

Dick & Tim:

Damian: I thought it was obviously Todd. Last month he changed it to 'btw I already tried, the costume doesn't fit anymore :(' who else would that be?

Dick: SOMEBODY WE DIDN'T THINK WAS DEAD?!?

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:) 🖤

@mlsecretsanta gift for @thequeenofspace! happy belated holidays and apologies for the delay, had a serious family emergency followed by sickness! I had so much fun making this though, was so excited to finally draw these two 🖤 hope you enjoy!!!

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aged up christmas reveal with a baby!! happy holidays to the world's coolest person @frostedpuffs!!!

comic about frostedpuffs' minibug au for ashville's secret santa

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alt to the villains au: lets make tom a supervillain lets go lads lets go

main notes: -Marinette doesn't have any memories of the OG timeline, and is totally in the dark about what her dad is up to -Adrien remembers the last timeline and in this one figures out that he's Hawkmoth/Cockmoth/Monarch/fuckface/worst father of the year -Tom also DOES NOT remember the last timeline, but deduces through Nooroo that someone caused Sabine's illness and death, and that's his motivation for supervillain'ing things up

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I just wanted to showcase a doodle of how much bigger Viceroy is than Gabriel. I'm sorry, Hawkmoth is a good six inches taller than Gabriel, what makes anyone think that Tom using the butterfly miraculous wouldn't gain another foot and he's already built like a shit brickhouse. not to mention he's a working man so he can already lift a house

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how would Feralnette react to Shadybug and Shadynette?

who needs eyeliner when you can shatter mandibles

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i hope adrien fell first and i hope he hates his dad and i hope marinette thinks its sooo cute how much he hates his dad

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I love when ppl make posts about adrichat being allowed to get mad and it’s always directed at maribug for things that either aren’t her fault or are extreme plot contrivances

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Dolls AU: Streamers

Adrien and Marinette couldn't take the Dolls with them all the time.

Sometimes Chaton wanted to nap in his sunny spot.

Sometimes Littlebug wanted to color in her nook.

...and sometimes, the two wanted to play video games.

And much like their parents, they were good at it!

So good apparently that they started streaming their playtimes.

....and also apparently got popular.

Because somehow, despite being unable to speak, the Dolls and their expressions and their gameplay really endeared them to a number of people.

Chaton plays horror games and makes people melt at the way his ears perk or flatten and how he jumps when he's scared.

Littlebug plays simulation games and board games. People think she's adorable even as she's beating her opponents or torturing her villagers.

...then comes the day that Alya brings up the viral account to Marinette.

Alya: And it's just amazing how real they look! Whoever set it up did a great job with the virtual setup. (Holds up phone so Marinette can see) Marinette: (Sees the video and recognizes Chaton playing FNaF) GAH! Alya: (Completely oblivious as to why she's freaked) I know! Impressive, right?

Needless to say, Marinette rushes home and finds the two playing Minecraft.

Marinette: CHATON! LITTLEBUG! Dolls: (Jump and glance back because uh oh! Mama sounds mad!) Marinette: You are grounded! Both of you! Dolls: (Pout)

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Dolls AU: Streamers

Adrien and Marinette couldn't take the Dolls with them all the time.

Sometimes Chaton wanted to nap in his sunny spot.

Sometimes Littlebug wanted to color in her nook.

...and sometimes, the two wanted to play video games.

And much like their parents, they were good at it!

So good apparently that they started streaming their playtimes.

....and also apparently got popular.

Because somehow, despite being unable to speak, the Dolls and their expressions and their gameplay really endeared them to a number of people.

Chaton plays horror games and makes people melt at the way his ears perk or flatten and how he jumps when he's scared.

Littlebug plays simulation games and board games. People think she's adorable even as she's beating her opponents or torturing her villagers.

...then comes the day that Alya brings up the viral account to Marinette.

Alya: And it's just amazing how real they look! Whoever set it up did a great job with the virtual setup. (Holds up phone so Marinette can see) Marinette: (Sees the video and recognizes Chaton playing FNaF) GAH! Alya: (Completely oblivious as to why she's freaked) I know! Impressive, right?

Needless to say, Marinette rushes home and finds the two playing Minecraft.

Marinette: CHATON! LITTLEBUG! Dolls: (Jump and glance back because uh oh! Mama sounds mad!) Marinette: You are grounded! Both of you! Dolls: (Pout)