#Salt's Stories

[shiocreator]

copy pasted but the summerized backstory and story arc of the fool i wrote out for some friends, artwork depicting Showstopper/Alec, who is the main character this is talking about that I've posted before, if your curious about this guy read under the cut

Uhhh i tried explaining abit better but im bad at that but if yer wanting elaborations would be happy giving em jsshjfjvvj

Alan Warren a guy who was raised as a human in an orphanage sorta ordeal who was never adopted, had no connections really, either ignored any potential ones or other kids were unnerved by him, gets out at 18, Was always very theatrical and into the performing arts, always immersed in stage plays fanfic and general fiction of all sorts, so he becomes an actor and gets a drama degree probably During when hes around kinda 19-21 he learns hes a shapeshifter, Terrified at first, has an identity crisis, and deciding to ya know do a reasonable thing. Disappears from society entirely and moves into an old abandoned theater, People assuming he was kidnapped, people search for him but the case just gets shoved away, no one caring at the end of it all. There was no one in his life in the end.

He just kinda uses a New human alter ego (Alec Glen) to waltz around after, morphing it to his preferences after figuring that out and probably staring at fashion magazines he stole

In the end larps as a villain, he commits petty theft both for survival and just cuz He's pretty good untraceable thief too, he ends up getting fancy with it and leaving a calling card for flair

And, he's online friends with MysticColors (my oc Scarlette Younge), commissions her time to time, and eventually commissioned her to draw what she assumed was a persona, but was really his jester mode, aka the thing he uses as a default form to lounge around comfortably in, cuz she can draw realistic enough for him to try and replicate it proper.

She doesn't know she designed a body for this man whatsoever and he would be mortified to tell her And since she was really his only interaction they ended up becoming friends, surface level Fandom ones but still friendly Showstopper always talking to her daily cuz he has nothing else to really do, at least to just say hi to her

Few years later, a Private Investigator stuck working with the cops in the area finds a missing person's case, shoved away. Deemed a lost cause And she can't help but want to at least try to find the poor guys whereabouts, dead or alive

Showstopper eventually learns about someone taking his first human identity's missing person's case up again to try and find him, maybe from overhearing her questioning his old coworkers or smthn, and gains a superficial crush on her due to finally feeling like someone's looking for him,

(he can even ignore that she's kinda boring and that he's not entirely a fan of the famous detective trope! (He views people 2D-ish, he scripts everything out and etc etc, he needs some development in how he first views everyone)

He's pulling shenanigans (crimes) to get her attention, he ignores scarlette and kinda just abandons her in favor of a crush unintentionally, and eventually Amara DOES connect the two together on Alan and Show however she thinks showstopper kidnapped Alan. Kidnapped himself. And showstopper is Aware but he doesn't deny or agree cuz if she thinks he kidnapped himself surely she's more inclined to hunt him down

In his human identity, Alec Glen, he's been interacting with Amara occasionally in person befriending her and this is how he gets actual development, because Amara is willing to interact with an at first stranger albiet hesitantly before genuinely vibing with him but also willing to explain what she means cuz she's blunt and doesn't want this guy getting the wrong ideas and all

Eventually interacting with her he genuinely grows as a person, realizes he's been hurting his online friend this whole time, rushes away when Amara says something reminding him of scarlette, and it in turn endears amara to him abit cuz he rushed off worried about a friend seemingly which she can admire well enough and he reconnects with scarlette again, and finally thinks of the person behind the screen, finally curious about her, and in the end both scarlette and Amara help him grow enough he realized he fucked with Amara bad but is in a hole so deep he just can't get out

When he finally stops digging it and ends up stopping crimes for awhile it leads Amara to be genuinely frightened and she hunts him down, tldr he's willing to fess up, actively tsking at amara for pulling such a dangerous stunt, shes really lucky he doesnt WANT to hurt anyone here

He fesses up to all of it and admits he is Alan Warren, who she was looking for, as well as Alec Glen, the guy who ended up friends with her, he hasnt hurt anyone on purpose and always targetted bigger stuff (guy actively commissions a small artist so??? He has some sets of morals about this i guess)

The ending is Amara helping him get a support system and helping him since she can tell he isnt neccisarily a Bad Person, monster or not, he's the last addition to the monster found family she's been accidentally accumulating in the process of tryna catch him wjdbgVj

A bonus i like to imagine is he ends up meeting scarlette in person and its incredibly awkward for both people, cuz Alec is making it severely more awkward and if he wasnt scarlette would have found the shapeshifter commissioning her thing neat if alarming

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Finally caught up with Apothecary Diaries. I can't believe they gave Maomao a gun.

[foldingfittedsheets]

My mom suffers from a critical salt deficiency. This is a lie. She just started her life at a baseline of salt much below the average person. Also untrue. She just fuckin loves salt. That one’s real.

My mom’s boundless hunger for salt manifests in a few ways but it’s almost always met with outrage and to be honest I can’t fault the people who serve her food for being infuriated. She even salts her watermelon.

The most memorable occasion for me was at a creperie in Paris. My mom ordered a ham and cheese crepe. Our food arrived, it looked amazing. My dad and I reached for our silverware.

My mother reached for the salt.

It’s critical to know that she did not taste the crepe before reaching. We had no prior frame of reference for their baseline saltiness. Nevertheless. She automatically went straight to needing more salt.

I looked up and saw our server watching my mother with a look of pure indignation and rage. “Mom,” I said urgently, “You didn’t even try it yet.”

She waved me off and salted the crepe before taking a bite and nodding complacent enjoyment. The server did not return to our table of his own volition.

Most recently for her birthday we went to the aquarium. They had a little restaurant on site and my folks got fish and chips. Mom specified she would like salt and ketchup then waited for dad and I to go collect our food.

I picked up our food and asked the cook, “Is there salt packets?”

His head shot up in confused annoyance, “It’s well seasoned,” he said.

“Believe me. My mom would add salt to a salt lick, I won’t be allowed at the table if I don’t bring extra.”

He looked into my eyes and we shared a silent moment of suffering before he pointed to a tiny hidden bin of salt packets. I thanked him and brought my mom her food.

She salted the fries before tasting them and pronounced them very pleasant.

[taraxippos]

I think people tend to assume that any criticism of worldbuilding is ultimately a demand for a story to grind itself to a halt and give the reader 20 paragraphs of exposition, and like. Most of the time good-faith criticism of this nature is coming from a core aspect of the story not being grounded in the setting in a way that outright detracts from the story's quality. You fix it not by Explaining but by Showing it passively in the makeup of the world.

Like the last instance I saw this critique in was like 'you can't expect an author to stop and exposit the nuances of gender roles/Queerness in a fictional society' and it's like yeah I don't, and in fact this is actually one of the easiest things to show in the text without exposition. If a society has gender norms to begin with you'll see aspects of these norms baked into EVERYTHING. You'll see it in its stories, its religion, its taboos, its etiquette, its clothing, its family structures, its language, its insults, its labor, its leadership, etc. It will have massive impacts on how characters interact with one another and how they perceive themselves. It will help Shape your characters.

If you do this legwork to begin with for the core facets of your story, you will find very natural places for these concepts to be demonstrated without derailing the plot and with little to no exposition. THAT sort of thing is what's being asked of you.

[i-gwarth]

btw we do *get* that the worldbuilding of DE parallels the character's arc right? We understand that, right? That Our Guy commits all but a sliver of himself to the oblivion of amnesia in a moment where the only alternative he could see was suicide. And at the other end of that tragic attempt at self-annihilation he gets the chance to reinvent himself and overcome the longstanding, persistent habits that brought him to the cliff's edge to begin with. And that the world itself is presented as approaching an equally definitive precipice, with one of the richest characters in the cast even remarking that Capital is dead, and everything else being 20-odd years away from being swallowed by the pale

And we understand that the pale is forgetting, right? Right? It's informational entropy applied to the world, facts and events and places and memories being destructured and obliderated, reduced to an indistinct soup of whispers, past present and future. That it emerges from humanity's collective inability to imagine a future beyond moralist capitalism, and that this inability to see the horizon inevitably metastazises into Mesque's accelerationist nihilism that ultimately destroys the world. [starts shaking you] WE UNDERSTAND THAT RIGHT??

That the game's splash screen is a view from the bay of Revachol, from the deserter's island. And we know what it shows, right? Revachol, in the distance. And beyond that what? A horizon? No! It shows Pale. Because that's his perspective. Because he has abandoned all hope, lost all sight of the future and has committed to self-annihilation. For him the entroponetic collapse is imminent. We see that, don't we?

That the game is a thesis on hope. That the world has the chance to reinvent itself from the precipice of oblivion just like Harry does, and that the only thing that can do that is imagining the future. A future. Any future, and making it. Piece by piece, day by day, committing to it, and refusing to give in to despair and nihilism. We understand, don't we, that there must be no truce with the f-

you know what, nevermind...

[voidy-core]

[neon-zipperooni]

in light of the new costume implying some things.. boy howdy, here comes a hot take, the crk fandom needs to understand the prospect of shadow milk being redeemed is not the end of the world

cookie run rarely even does redemption stories, the only big example of villainous characters being redeemed is in ovenbreak with lotus dragon cookie's growth and lychee dragon cookie building up to a redemption, which while i think on lotus's end it was kinda rushed they've been handling lychee very well, so its not like redemption stories in cookie run are "overdone" (also im sick of the "nooo im tired of redemptions" argument when 1. not everyone is, i personally love a good redemption story and 2. there are plenty of villains out there who are plain evil with no redemption, it's not a dying genre)

also it would be way more interesting than the more obvious resolution to the beast storyline of just sealing them away again, i think finding a way to appeal to the shreds of.. humanity? cookiemanity? still within them is a much more interesting narrative and lends itself to more stories to potentially tell with these five very interesting characters. and there are implications that the cookies they used to be are still in there somewhere, especially with burning spice, given how he full on bluescreens for a moment when reminiscing on the first kingdom he [....] (my money's on watched over, but we dont know what he was gonna say) when talking w/ nutmeg tiger in the kingdom

i've seen a lot of people say they'll lose interest in shadow milk if he gets redeemed which baffles me because for me at least, while a decent chunk of the appeal of the beasts is how interesting and entertaining they are as villains, one of my favorite parts of them is the heroes they once were, what they could've been like during those days, and the tragedies that led to them falling so deep into villainy: witnessing the worst in cookiekind and becoming disillusioned and deciding nothing should exist, witnessing their denizens live grow and die over and over and to the point they get sick of it and end up embracing destruction to take control of the cycle, and.. whatever we end up learning about the other three and what corrupted them.

for me, i see it like this lmao

and like, don't get me wrong, i know all the beasts really aren't good people but a redemption story doesn't necessarily mean a slap on the wrist, a redemption story can be about atonement just as much as it is about changing for the better, it can be messy, a sobering moment realizing everything you've done and everything you need to do to make up for it, there is sooo much story potential in delving into their pasts and delving into a redemption story of the beasts atoning for their deeds and growing as people it's crazy.. and besides, they were heroes once before, who's to say the potential to be that again isn't still within them?

i personally really wanna see a beast redemption and i'll never fathom why so many people are so against it when it's so much better of a way to conclude their story as the current main threat than just sealing them away again, i just hope that if this really is the route the devs go they'll handle it well because it can just as easily be done wrong, i have faith though

also i've seen a lot of people say the shadow milk costume looks ugly and they're WRONG it looks amazing i love blue and gold as a color combo

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

I have a wicked good idea for a story, but I'm not sure I can execute it. Basically, Lillian is stuck in a time loop and has to watch Lena die every day before time resets and starts all over again. She tries everything in her power to stop, but the universe just finds different ways to kill Lena every time Lillian changes the parameters of the day.

In addition to finding the right tone to write from Lillian's pov, or even when to set this damn thing, I'm also trying to determine what Lillian does that releases the loop.

Killing Lex to save Lena seems a bit too cliche.

[emeraldgem10]

EVENT: Story Restoration

Next Prev

"Hey, its Croissant Cookie; Y/N's Best Friend. I'm logging this in case if the timeline alters with Y/N gone, when the search first started and no cookie knew where they went, I assumed the Director was responsible as she has done stuff like this before. But when I stormed into her office to confront her, she as usual, predicted what I was going to say, but the way she said it, I could tell that even she didn't know, and I dare I say that she was to some extent: Afraid. Afraid that she may have done something she shouldn't and soon be the only cookie to remember that Y/N had existed and... I'm scared too, I don't wanna forget Y/N... I love them..."

"The Director is putting her all into finding Y/N, and so are we, I'm making sure she doesn't do anything stupid. I haven't slept in the past 2 days... I... really don't wanna lose them."

This is going to be a doozy for me to handle as I didn't really intend for this be how it is now. X(

But I'll try! Wish me luck and see ya!

[afterthelambs]

i adore Maruki as a character because he's simultaneously the most relatable depressing character that will make you cry with empathy, and the goofiest wettest cat loser in the game like what do you mean youre a licensed therapist and your first response to trauma is to brainwash a girl, project ur relationship issues onto a 17 yr old boy, and then rule the world in a golden leotard? bro went from 0 to 100 so fast??? anyway he's like 30% of the reason why p5r works as well as it does

[shiocreator]

Im thinking about shattered identities again and about to make it everyone's problem this bitch needs a Revamp

Gotta love stories where someone is insane enough to keep diving down into the abyss to save the one person shes wronged and the one rising from it only diving back in after learning his friend is down there

And the warehouse is alive

[meltedmush]

i really love your svsss art!! do you like the other mxtx danmeis also?

WAAAHHHH THANK YOU 🥺🫶💖💖💖💖

My answer is such a disappointing one,,, I thought MDZS was okay, and I didn’t like TGCF 😭😭

I TRIED MY BEST TO LIKE THEM AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE 😭💥💥

For MDZS, I’ve read the novel, finished the manhua, donghua, and watched the live action.

For TGCF…. I couldn’t finish it… before anyone asks me to give it another go,, I TRIED MY BEST TO LIKE IT,,,,

I’ve read TGCF’s novel up to around chapter 100, I caught up to the manhua, and watched both seasons of the donghua. Even after all of that, I couldn’t find anything I liked about it. 😭

I think the one major thing that destroyed my enjoyment of TGCF was that before I even tried TGCF, is that I heard so much hype about it being one of the best Chinese series out there that when I actually started it, it didn’t meet any of my expectations or hook me on anything.😭

I’M SO SORRY

[nonas-third-tantrum]

locked tomb fans if you haven’t read Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield you’re missing out:

woman’s wife goes to sea and comes back wrong? check

horror elements? check

grief? by the bucketful

people who are only mostly dead haunting the narrative? you betcha

women who are insane about each other? YEAH

[randomfandomss]

I'm literally not saying anything but Eric's brain must have really, really short-circuited after that comment from Assad...

It's an excerpt from Eric's book 'Perforated Heart'.

[kroosluvr]

welcome to the phantom express (?!)

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Keep hearing people say maribug keep asking adricat if he's ok and he keep saying he's ok instead of telling her his problem but I don't remember it happened more than once in s4 in Rockettear but even then the circumstances of that episode did warrant the "nothing" answer he gave her unless he want to tell her that "nino tell me you let nino and alya know each other identity" which will reveal adricat identity. So when else did she ask? about the thing in hack-san, I think another credit goes to alya since she's the one who bring the topic to maribug who seems to be blissfully unaware that her leaving without telling adeicat that she send subtitute would be a problem.

I didn't get into this side of things in my other post because it was long and I wanted to focus on why Chat Noir's behavior was so frustrating, but this ask brings up the other big reason why the season four conflict was such a frustrating and terribly written plot line. Specifically, the part of your ask where you point out that Maribug seems blissfully unaware that her actions are having a negative impact on Chat Noir until someone points it out to her.

Yes, she is presented as blissfully unaware of this and every other interpersonal conflict we're given in season four. Your ask treats this as a failing on Maribug's part as if she should have obviously realized that she was in the wrong, but that's the whole problem. Telling kids - telling anyone really - that they should just magically know what others need is a frankly terrible life lesson as that's just not how the world works. You cannot just assume that everyone will have the same view of the world as you do and instantly pick up on the same issues as you do. That is the path to easily avoidable frustration and conflict. It also teaches people to assume that their view of the world is inherently correct when that is rarely the case. We often don't know the whole story and the other person's point of view may end up being equally or even more valid. This issue is extremely present in season four as Marinette has legitimate reasons to behave the way she does, which I'll get into in a bit.

If Marinette were written as feeling guilty about how she was treating Chat Noir, then this would be a different story. She'd be way more in the wrong and would shoulder a much greater portion of the blame. But as is? She has no idea that she's doing anything wrong. And until someone takes the time to tell her that her actions are causing harm, she is going to continue causing harm because she has no idea that she's causing harm.

In fact, I'd argue that the Alya thing in Hack San is a point in Maribug's favor. Throughout the episode, we see Marinette sending Alya messages on ways to be a good partner to Chat Noir, proving that she does in fact care about him. And then, as soon as Alya says, "You need to talk to Chat Noir," what does Maribug do?

She goes and talks to Chat Noir, giving him a pretty good apology for the problem she now knows she caused. Because, shockingly, Maribug doesn't actually want to hurt her partner. She also clearly cares about his feelings, making me want to take the season four conflict and tear it into itty bitty pieces because what is the conflict even supposed to be when you write shit like this?

I want to briefly step away from Miraculous and talk about this issue in a broader context via this YouTube short:

This short is from a Vietnamese woman who moved to Germany. Her YouTube channel is about her experiences there, including things like the short above which goes into the differences between what it means to be a dinner guest in Vietnam and what it means to be a dinner guest in Germany. In Vietnam, it's apparently standard for the guests to cook dinner with you where as, in Germany, you're expected to have the meal ready when the guests arrive, making this a situation where it's super easy to come across as rude just by doing what you think is normal.

Society is relatively aware that these types of culture clashes are a thing, but you don't have to be from different cultures to have these types of situations. Every person has their own unique needs and ideas of what "normal" is. The culture they were raised in will affect this, but so will their family, their personal needs, and many other factors. Two people can be raised on the same street and wind up with wildly different world views even though they supposedly share a culture. This is extra true when you add in compounding factors like neurodiversity, which is why it's an exercise in futility to say, "But Maribug should have realized..."

Well, she clearly didn't. And you can't change that she didn't realize whatever you're mad about. All you can do is have someone tell her what she's doing wrong. If she then continues the behavior, go ahead and judge away. But if she immediately corrects it like she did in Hack San? Doesn't that just prove that she truly didn't know that Chat Noir was hurting and would have probably fixed all of his problems if someone just pointed them out to her?

This is only exacerbated by the fact that Marinette's behavior in season four is largely unchanged from her behavior in previous seasons. The only major change is that she revealed her identity to Alya, but as soon as that's pointed out as a problem, she course corrects with an apology. After that, she thinks that everything is okay because why wouldn't she? Chat Noir said it was fine and everything else has been business as usual.

Bringing temp heroes into help as needed? That's been going on since season two. Having these additional members has been vital in multiple battles and there have been plenty of times where Chat Noir took a background role to the temp hero of the day like in Sapotis, Rena Rouge's season two debut. So why would Maribug suddenly think that this dynamic is a problem when it's been working fine for so long? We even had a whole episode about how Chat Noir was still needed in spite of the new heroes back in season three! Or, at least, I think that was Desperada's message? This show is shockingly bad at giving clear lessons.

Keeping guardian knowledge from Chat Noir? That's also been going on since season two and was even treated as a conflict that supposedly got resolved in the episode Syren which was the episode that ended with Master Fu coming to the mansion to talk to Adrien after everything was over.

When I watched that episode, I assumed this meant that Chat Noir was going to be more involved in things like picking the temp heroes. I actually thought this was how we were going to get Queen Bee because I knew she was going to be a thing, but it made no sense for Marinette to pick Chloe for a miraculous. Of course, I was wrong. Nothing changed after Syren. Chat Noir remained nothing more than the comic relief while Ladybug got all the insider info.

To be clear, I think that was a terrible move writing wise, but it doesn't change the fact that this is what they went with. This is the established dynamic. I can't even say that Alya learning Marinette's secret led to something new. She's just taken Marinette's old role while Marinette has taken on Master Fu's old role. This show loves it's status quo and Chat Noir has been at least tolerant of that status quo since Syren, so it's not surprising that Maribug doesn't register that this is a thing that should change and no one bothers to point it out to her even though she has a mentor in Tikki (and Su Han, I guess?) and a confidant in Alya and a whole slew of Kwamis who could also provide insight if they were allowed to do that sort of thing. (Sass and Wayzz were robbed of mentor roles.) Additional blame goes to Plagg because he should absolutely have told Adrien to talk to Ladybug. What is the point of giving these characters mentors who never mentor? It's aggravating in the extreme.

To circle back to the first part of your ask, outside of Hack San and Rocketear, I don't think there are any times when Ladybug invites feedback from Chat Noir unless you want to give credit to the end of Kuro Neko:

Cat Noir: (lands next to her) I've been a really temperamental kitty, m'lady. I didn't realize how much trouble I'd make for you by giving back my Miraculous. Ladybug: (sits closer to him) Just because I don't need you all the time doesn't mean that I don't need you at all, Cat Noir. No one could ever replace you.

Which isn't Maribug inviting him to tell her what's up, but she is clearly willing to listen to him and reassure him, further backing up my point about this conflict being some of the worst writing I've ever had to suffer through. If Maribug always fixes the issue as soon as she learns about it, you are not writing a situation where she's clearly in the wrong. You are writing an easily solved communication issue where she gets blamed for something she clearly doesn't realize she's doing wrong and it is so frustrating!!! I feel so bad for her. The next episode is Penalteam, btw, which starts the battle with this gem:

Ladybug: (laughs) Nice scare tactics, but it's not gonna work. Cat Noir and I are the best at soccer! Cat Noir: (Whispers to Ladybug) I don't know a thing about soccer M'lady. Maybe it's time to call the real team?

And basically just spends the whole episode making Chat Noir seems like a worthless partner while Maribug tries her best to make him - and everyone else - feel special.

Oh, and the episode before Kuro Neko? Well, it's technically Ephemeral, but that got magically overwritten so let's go one further back and we get to Dearest Family, which ends with this:

Cat Noir: (grabs a golden paper crown on the coffee table) Since I'm the king, (wears the crown on his head) would you be my queen, Ladybug? Ladybug: With pleasure, kitty cat! Tradition is tradition!

Oh yes, these two are in such conflict and Maribug does nothing to validate Chat Noir. He's in pain every episode and she's just totally oblivious to it.

If that was what they wrote, then I'd probably agree that we needed more instances of her asking if Chat Noir was okay. But it's not what they wrote. If you look through the list of season four episodes, you'll find that less than half of them deal with the supposed conflict of the season (by my count, only 8 of the 24 episodes before the final actually showcase the conflict and they are not in a logical order in terms of escalation as I tried to demonstrate above). The rest of the episodes flat out ignore it or even straight up work against the conflict like when Ladybug says this to Chat Noir in Guilttrip: "I probably don't tell you this enough, but I couldn't do this without you. And it'd be a lot less fun too."

Seriously, what even is this season? What is the conflict supposed to be? Because it sure as shit isn't Maribug undervaluing Chat Noir, if memory servers, season four sees her validate him more times than any other season. And it isn't her guiltily hiding things from him like so many fanfics claim because we have multiple points of evidence that prove that she's completely oblivious that there even is a conflict. So what conflict are the writers actually trying to write?

What's even more baffling is that none of this logically leads to the loss at the end of the season:

Maribug's new secrets didn't lead to her downfall. The only reason she lost was because of the secret that's always been there - a fact that's never revealed to her - and a freaking evil twin! So why did it matter that Maribug was keeping secrets? This is made even worse by season five maintaining all of the secrets, once again begging the question of what lesson were we trying to teach here???

Chat Noir wasn't needed for the final fight of the season, Maribug only needed the powers of a few of the temp heroes to win, a baffling ending to a season whose focus was Chat Noir feeling unimportant. You could scrap that conflict entirely and the ending would not change. In fact....

Adrien quitting to be nothing more than a good little boy who obeys his father would have actually saved the world from eventually being rewritten. If you think about it, the season four final actually punishes Adrien for being defiant. So does season five as, if Chat Noir had quit, his father would still be alive. I thought this show was supposed to be a romcom, not a tragedy. Why is Adrien being punished for being a hero? Is this supposed to be karma for lying to Ladybug with the whole Catwalker thing?

This shit is why I say I'm a writing salt, character sugar blog. I can't get mad at the characters when they're in such a nonsense story where things never logically tie together. They all deserve so much better.

None of this is meant to imply that ignorance is a blanket excuse for hurting others. Nor is it meant to imply that you have to forgive someone who hurt you just because they didn't mean to. There's a ton of nuance around these topics. But season four acknowledges none of that nuance while creating a situation that desperately needed nuance because there was no clear right and wrong here. Should Maribug work to be more aware of others feelings? Sure, but that journey can only start after she's made aware of her faults and no one ever points them out to her. Does Chat Noir need to work on clearly communicating his needs? Desperately, but no one is teaching him that lesson so he remains a terrible communicator who suffers in silence. What impressively bad writing.