#Gabriel Agreste’s A+ Parenting

[wield-the-mighty-pen]

Brb just going to think about how Adrien now potentially has access to the freedom he has been wanting this entire time, and how he must be relieved and excited about it, but how there must also be a small part of him that feels kind of empty. How a part of him got so used to having this rigid schedule and these strict rules, and even though they were frustrating and exhausting, they were still his life and they were what he knows, and now they’re gone. And he has to learn to live without them

Just thinking about, how at the beginning of season 5, when Adrien had a modicum of his freedom returned to him, he was thrilled, but he also went into a depressive-like episode, where he sat slumped on the couch in a uncharacteristically messy room.

Thinking about how Adrien doesn’t know what to do with himself, when he is given the opportunity to be himself, how he doesn’t quite know who he is, because he has never been given the chance to explore that on his own (or really at all). And how Adrien though craving individuality, is actually terrified at the thought of venturing into himself and his personality and would rather throw four different segmented identities in front of himself, than look at the person staring back at him in the mirror

[galahadwilder]

Look I’m a huge fan of “Gabriel is completely unaware of things happening in Adrien’s life after he moves out because Adrien went No-Contact” because Fuck Gabriel™️ but please imagine the hilarity of Gabriel picking up the tabloids one morning to find out that his child has boobs now

[burningstarfishqueen]

There are many more interesting things in Émotion’s endcard than Gabriel Agreste, but take a moment to look at his glasses.

A reflection in someone’s eyes of another’s face is common symbolism for love throughout the show. It’s always in their actual eyes, the image overlaid on their pupils and irises.

That’s how this symbolism is commonly used. It’s a nonverbal I love you.

This is very different, but far too similar not to compare them.

Gabriel’s eyes are empty. He has only disgust and frustration for Marinette. He may think he loves Adrien, but he hardly even knows him. He neglected him for months or a lifetime, depending what narrative you believe. A handful of bad breakfasts where he wastes their time together on manipulation and lies change nothing.

Why is Adrien reflected in Gabriel’s glasses? It’s a soulless mimicry of affection. It could symbolize how he abuses Adrien by twisting love itself, claiming his control as protection.

For Marinette, it’s a simple obsession. As Ladybug she’s been thwarting him since the beginning. Even without her powers she stood against him. His entire fight is focused on crushing her.

Gabriel doesn’t handle failure well. His repeated attempts to akumatize Marinette and her consistent resistance led him to develop a weird fixation on controlling her. It all comes back to control.

A reflection in someone’s eyes symbolizes their love, and that image instead at a distance in glasses represents an obsession with having them under control.

[yuttikkele]

OH I FORGOT GABRIEL SENSED ADRIEN WAS SAD WHEN HE GOT REJECTED BY MARINETTE AND HE’S ABOUT TO AKUMATIZE HIM AND THEN HE REALIZES IT’S ADRIEN AND HE GOES, “Adrien? Wait, Adrien doesn’t have an alliance ring! I better go give him one so I can give him Miraculous powers when I akumatize him. And I better pretend to be a good father even though I’m giving him a toy to distract him from the pain while I become even more distant.”

he pulled an, “all the better to akumatize you with!”

[dovelyanon]

Have you been keeping up with season five? It feels like Gabe and Adrien’s relationship has kinda gotten even more insidious with how he’s doing his manipulation schtick even more than ever. Before he was selling Adrien’s voice and body as a commodity in a technical way, using his image for his brand but now he’s literally selling digital versions of him who can say whatever you want and also be literally undressed for some kinda fashion app as shown in jubilation??? Adrien directly expressed his discomfort and Gabe’s response was nothing short of “i will go back to neglecting you unless you comply” I feel like dark angsters should be eating this up more than I’ve seen lmao

It is indeed an angst goldmine. I haven’t gotten a chance to peruse and see what other angsters are doing with Season 5 fic wise, but the angst potential is phenomenal. Gabriel has no morals and no rights.

If I have any energy left after my current fics, I might riff off the mess that is Season 5 Adrien’s life. Amazing how he manages to be both a Barbie girl and just Ken in the worst possible ways.

[trishacollins]

Male, 42 - am I the asshole for expecting my son to live up to his potential?

My wife died two years ago, while she suffered from a long illness and her death was somewhat expected it was still devastating and I have not yet come to terms with losing her. She was my everything and we were childhood sweethearts. No extended family as they did not approve of our relationship, save for my wife's twin sister (which makes things even more complicated) and her son (15m).

The problem is my son (15m) who has been acting out a lot recently. My son has a job with the family buisness, and has all of the tutors and special classes a brillant child should have to support them as they grow. My son is very smart, brillant. He's honestly perfect, his mother made him that way. But recently he has been acting out, avoiding his responsibilities, disappering whenever he gets a chance and demanding to go to public school.

I have recently undertaken a misson to find a cure to what killed his mother - this is a highly time consuming project and by necessity highly secretive. Only myself and my secretary know about it. And if I have my way, my son will never learn of it.

WIBTA if I distanced myself from his aunt because of how much it pains me to see her and refused to let him attend public school? I know that I can provide a better education and keep him safer at home.

if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.

[rwsdarw]

pretend this is a good caption

[talulagrimm]

You might want to emotionally prepare yourself for this one

Song: Spring and a Storm by Tally Hall

[jattendschaton]

Émilie Agreste purposefully giving Adrien an allergy to feathers to make sure her son would never be able to use the peacock miraculous in the future

[galahadwilder]

Adrien has perfect handwriting but it’s not natural to him and it actually causes him pain to make that much effort, and he only does it because his parents punished him for every wrong penstroke. When he’s not hurting himself and actually relaxes his handwriting is near-illegible to everyone but Marinette.

[wield-the-mighty-pen]

Don’t mind me… just thinking about how the last words that Adrien said to Gabriel were words in anger and how Adrien must carry that fight with him.

Thinking about how Adrien is undoubtedly filled with a grief-ridden guilt over what his last words, his last moment was with his father. And how his father died a “hero” yet, he was his “spoiled” “angry” son who could even bother to be happy when his father payed attention to him and did things to protect him.

Thinking about how Adrien has spent his entire life trying to live up to his father’s definition of “perfect”, has been made to feel like a failure time and again, and until his father’s very last moments has failed him. How he must think that his own anger must have reverberated in his father’s mind in his last moments. That his only comfort in his “noble sacrifice” was Adrien’s own selfishness.

Thinking about how Adrien wonders how he’ll ever live up to his father and his father’s expectations. Yet, has surpassed his father in virtually every way. How Gabriel’s final command to Marinette was not, to look after his son, to comfort him in his solitude, but to keep up pretenses, to ensure that his son remains living forever in a shadow.

[galahadwilder]

Things I will never get tired of

Gabriel: remember you have a photoshoot at 7 am tomorrow

Adrien: that’s impressive, because I don’t work for you, haven’t for two years, am in the middle of suing you for harassment, and have a meeting at my ACTUAL job at 8. Also, how did you get this number?

[burningstarfishqueen]

Something in the Miraculous movie bothered me. It took time to sort through everything, but I have it now. It’s the way the narrative handled Gabriel Agreste.

(trigger warning—discussions of abuse)

There’s a popular trope across media where an evil character carelessly hurts strangers but won’t harm their loved ones. It’s always annoyed me, but I never thought about it too much.

The show never uses that trope. Audrey’s generally nasty to everyone. She’s mean to strangers, awful to servants and staff, and abuses her husband and daughters. The closer you get, the more she hurts you.

The character I want to analyze is Gabriel Agreste. In the show, he’s a garden variety abuser. His obsession with Émilie escalated to the point where he ignored her wishes entirely, preserving her body in his basement while he fought to control death itself.

Control is the biggest factor in abuse. It’s woven all throughout his character, in every choice, every action, every word. Anytime Gabriel is onscreen with Adrien he is working manipulations to keep Adrien under his thumb.

The Butterfly is based on control. Perhaps not the powers as Nooroo wishes they were used, but the way the story presents them. Monarch sees a weakness in his victim and he takes over their mind, giving them a new name to change them into his puppet.

Gabriel started by abusing his son and trying to control his wife(it’s never made clear what Gabriel and Émilie’s relationship was like, but it wasn’t good). Terrorizing Paris was an escalation.

His love for Adrien could never stop him from hurting Chat Noir, because Gabriel’s love for Adrien isn’t enough to keep him from hurting Adrien himself.

Evil people hurt their families. Love has never stopped them. The kind of man who would terrorize a city, hurting countless strangers, would hurt his own child as well.

Statistics back up this take. There’s a reason murder investigations start with the spouse and continue through the rest of the family. The closer two people are, the more history they have. More reason to help and more reason to hurt. If someone tears down the boundaries stopping them from attacking other people, that applies to those they love just as much.

I have never met an evil person who was not hurting their family. Maybe they exist, but they’re nowhere near as common as fiction would like to believe. I guess it’s a nice fantasy.

Watching an abuse depiction I resonated with get swapped out for the fakest trope I’ve ever seen left a nasty taste in my mouth.

[galahadwilder]

It’s entirely possible he started blaming Adrien for Emilie’s illness

One thing that has always bothered me about the Agreste family dynamic are the weird honorifics. The few times when Adrien speaks of Emilie, he never refers to her as Mere/Mother. Always Mom/Maman. This is most clear when he finds her in Chat Blanc or mistakes Amelie for her and refers to her informally as Mom/Maman.

Gabriel, on the other hand, he usually refers to formally as Father/Pere. I have to wonder what Emilie’s thoughts were about this. Why would she allow the difference? Similar dynamics in her childhood household? Gabriel’s insistence?

There’s also evidence that Gabriel used to allow Adrien to use Dad/Papa. It’s evident sometimes when Adrien refers to him as Dad/Papa when he is not around, but most evident in Stormy Weather 2 when Adrien strolls in without thinking, excited about his last photo shoot and speaks to him informally offhand. Gabriel glares at him and he immediately corrects himself, but the fact that he so easily called him Dad/Papa when he wasn’t thinking leads me to believe he must have been allowed to call him that before.

So what happened? Did Gabriel, after Emilie’s death, forbid him from using it and WHY? Was it a privilege that he took away one day because Adrien disappointed him somehow and he just never gave it back? Why would he distance himself from his own son to the point of not allowing him to refer to him casually? Is he really that much of a control freak that he is content to hold it over his head?

I just really have a hard time reconciling the kind man/father that Gabriel supposedly was prior with who he is now. It’s hard to believe he ever genuinely cared for Adrien in a healthy manner. I’m more inclined to believe he was faking being a decent father so Emilie would be happy, that he never actually felt the need to be compassionate toward his son. Especially after his thinly veiled blackmail in ‘Illusion’ but signs of this have been present since the Bubbler when he did not personally get or give Adrien a birthday present, couldn’t even spare him a birthday greeting and saw fit to target his best friend on that day of all days- his first birthday after his mothers death. Hell, even when Emilie was alive, it’s implied that Gabriel forgot his birthday multiple times. Sometimes I feel like the writers want him to be more humanized and sympathetic as a dad with these Marinette parallels, but he just heavily reads ‘sociopath’ to me. Instead of making me more sympathetic to him, the parallels make me nervous for Marinette. Like “so does this mean she’s going the sociopathic narcissist route too?”

I would love to know more about the Agreste family's dynamics when Adrien was younger, like you said there are some hints that they were once closer, but also that things have been... not great for a long time.

Personally I'm betting that Gabriel was a pretty decent father when Adrien was little, like the first 6 or 7 years of his life, when he had no idea that Emilie was in bad shape. Then from around when Adrien was 8 - 10, he probably was a bit antsier, a bit more worried, a bit more distant. And then after age 10, when Gabriel KNEW Emilie was gonna die unless something was done, I bet that's when he really started emotionally neglecting Adrien and putting up walls, insisting that Adrien call him "Father" instead of "Dad".

Emilie, on the other hand, I'm betting got even closer to Adrien in order to compensate, using what time she had left to be with her son. I doubt she'd ever want him to refer to her so formally, be kept at a distance.

As for parallels with Marinette, I'm not worried on that front. While Gabriel and Marinette have their similarities (it's no coincidence that they're both fashion designers for example), I can't see the show having Marinette go down the route Gabriel did. It's too dark, and I think Gabriel took a long time to fall this far, anyway.

[yuttikkele]

i absolutely love how there is a whole special tag dedicated to gabriel agreste’s failures as a father

[dovelyanon]

So I haven’t been actively watching the show anymore but I still update myself through Tumblr and insta on what’s going on in the show and … is it just me or is Gabriel acting very similar to the Gabriel from TMHTS ?!

Also I’m so scared and excited about the fic your working on . Darker than TMHTS?How ?! I can’t wait 😟👍

Haha! Well, to be fair, I've been 99% sure the show was going with the senti plot since Wishmaker so I expected Gabe to become considerably more heavy-handed with the ring to raise the stakes. A couple of similarities I didn't expect though? Gabriel turning up the gaslighting and manipulation to 100 by holding his affection over Adrien's head with his unsettling pancake schtick. Despite what I wrote, I thought canonically there might be a chance that Gabriel didn't realize the full impact his cold, apathetic attitude toward Adrien, that maybe he couldn't grasp how much it hurt him. But no. He does grasp it. He realizes how much it hurts him and is more than happy to weaponize that against him. Dad of the year, amirite?

I also didn't expect him to push Adrien toward Kagami. This happens small scale in my fic. Blink and you miss it. I think it only comes up in one chapter. And Feligami! I didn't actually write Feligami, but I was on the verge of it. It just had no place in the story. But fun fact: Felix was quite impressed by Kagami at the party. It was one-sided unfortunately. She was not impressed by him.

The new fic is darker depending on who you ask. On surface level, it's actually not nearly as rough as TMHTS, but emotionally, I find it a lot more challenging.It's funny. When I wrote my first fic for this ship, I said, "Ok great! I finally gave in and got that cursed idea out of my system. Time to write something else." Shortly after, I was attacked by a plot bunny for TMHTS and I said, "NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT!" and proceeded to write up an entire outline for it in my notes app at work under the delusion that I was "just writing it down to get it out of my head". And now I'm working on another one. And hey! Just the other week, a fourth Agrestecest plot bunny appeared. So basically, I opened Pandora's box here is what I'm saying.

At least my long fic is a nice break from that particular subset of pain. Adrien's still not having a good time, but things could clearly be worse...

Thanks for the ask, anon!