#chat: nemesis

[ask-alton-towers]

hello chat

[xxplastic-cubexx]

hello :D, don’t use ask box’s often but I wanted to share this with you because I found them funny:

im so happy youve used the ask box today because these are making me CACKLE

[elita-prime1]

Ok *puts hands together* Demelonzostrap and Bombatuggoffelees double date how would it go and how chaotic would that be?

[itstimeforstarwars]

Pros of drawing with ballpoint pen: forces you to acquire all sorts of good habits and makes you learn to live with mistakes due to not being erasable

Cons of drawing with ballpoint pen: there are fucking ink blobs everywhere and it will drop a blot precisely where you need it least every time.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

every time i remember "ingo is an ascian/ancient who literally forgot everything about that" it still kills me. so much staying power in the idea of the protagonists rocking up to ishgard having the worst day of their lives and there's a fucking ASCIAN just chilling waiting for them and they're like fucking dammit now we have to deal with THIS. and then he's not. like he's literally just chilling. he is so very much just some guy. and they're like why the fuck are you dressed like an evil wizard then and he's like they're comfy robes :(

[uptoolateart]

Adrien Agreste…and Data from Star Trek. The parallels kept leaping out at me. Then I started talking about it with my husband and a friend and it spiralled. Bear in mind, this whole post is full of Star Trek spoilers, including the films, especially Nemesis.

Unnatural Creations

Adrien’s a sentibeing and Data’s an android. They’re both created by ‘unnatural’ means – created by a human rather than God/nature/whatever you believe. Consequently, they both begin their lives as blank slates, with no childhood memories, and they long to fulfil their programming. With Data, this is more literal, while in Wishmaker Adrien tells us all he ever wanted was to be what his parents wanted him to be.

This lends them a similar sense of naivety, leaving them open to being fooled or even used. In a way, they are both Pinocchio, wishing to be ‘real boys’. Pinocchio even wears a feather in his cap, which is what led me to do this drawing a few years ago.

Data and Adrien’s ‘fathers’ (creators) have made other children, too – other androids and sentibeings – not necessarily to public knowledge.

Dreams

Over time, both Adrien and Data come to desire individuality. An integral part of this is having dreams. Adrien’s dreams come in the form of personal ambitions, beginning with his love for Ladybug. Data has ambitions, too, but his dreams also come in a more literal form, i.e. as he evolves, he starts dreaming like a real human.

'Evil' Twins

Another crucial part of being human is self-reflection, highlighted by Data and Adrien’s ‘evil twins’. For Data, this is Lore, made according to the same design but with his own personality. He obtains the emotion chip intended for Data. Where Data is all logic, Lore is all feeling without boundaries. He’s the emotional potential exploding unchecked.

Adrien has a few ‘shadow’ sides, which I’ve explored before. An obvious one is Felix, wielder of the peacock miraculous, i.e. the power of emotion. Then there’s Cat Blanc, who is all of Adrien’s darker thoughts and feelings bursting forth uncontrolled.

What Lore, Felix and Cat Blanc have in common is that they are abused sons, bitter and resentful that their fathers never gave them the love they longed for. They lash out from grief and trauma. Also, Lore killed his/Data’s father, while Cat Blanc killed Gabriel in an alternate timestream.

Data needs to face and deal with this ‘shadow’ side before he’s ready to receive the emotion chip intended for him and find the happy medium between the two extremes of the emotional spectrum. We see this when he is forced to deactivate Lore, thus inheriting the emotion chip, learning from the mistakes his brother made and trying to do better.

Likewise, Adrien needs to come to terms with his ‘shadow’ before he’s ready to face the final battle with Monarch. In Conformation, this played out as Adrien having the emotional maturity to recognised when he was out of control and make the decision to remove his miraculous, stepping away from the battle before he could do damage.

This is without even getting into the mirror universes in both shows, where Data has a much more direct ‘evil’ alter, and Cat Noir comes head-to-head with Claw Noir. (Sadly, we never saw Data hug Evil Data the way we saw our two Noirs accept each other.) There was also the very brief Copycat moment. Adrien’s had a lot of doubles.

It’s interesting to note that Lore believed he was superior to humans and had a genocidal plan, much like Felix snaps all the non-sentibeings out of existence in Emotion. Lore also dresses like Data and poses like him to fool their father and others on the ship, like Felix does with Adrien, attempting to fool Gabriel and others in Adrien’s life. A key difference is that Lore never really gets the chance for redemption, whereas Felix is only 14 and has his whole life ahead of him, with the opportunity for positive evolution. He discovers the love he’s lacked as a child and chooses to change.

At one point, Lore also implants the emotion chip in Data and uses it to control him remotely, inspiring anger and hate in him, thus weaponising him. Felix makes it very clear that he would never try to control Adrien. Instead, it’s Gabriel who controls Adrien via the twin rings, the Alliance, and magical dust causing him to live out his worst nightmare. In Cat Blanc and Ephemeral, we also see Gabriel akumatise Adrien, using his darkest feelings to transform him into a weapon.

Perfection

When Data first meets his brother, Lore convinces Data that he was created as a 'less perfect' version of him. When they are later summoned back to their father's secret home, Data learns this is untrue and is fascinated to realise that he is 'not less perfect than Lore'. Adrien, too, is repeatedly described as 'perfect'.

Cats

Data has a beloved pet cat. Adrien, of course, spends all his private time with Plagg. I also can't help but notice that Data and Cat Noir's eyes are similar in colour.

Artistry / Education

Data is a keen painter and violinist, and well-versed in just about everything, bearing in mind he was programmed with encyclopaedic knowledge. Adrien is a pianist and, thanks to his father’s programming, is also highly skilled in multiple disciplines and languages…and seems to know a lot of very random information, e.g. Morse code.

Undead Mothers and the Demented Fathers Who Can’t Let Them Go

Adrien’s father can’t get over the death of his wife and keeps her cryogenically sustained in the basement. Similarly, Data’s ‘father’ was married to a woman Data deems his ‘mother’. She, too, died long ago, but his father transferred her personality and memories into an android body. She’s the only android in the galaxy who can pass as completely human, even in medical scans.

Self-Sacrifice

Cat Noir is always sacrificing himself for Ladybug. We don’t know if he remembers those moments of death or not. He seems to throw himself in front of her on instinct, as if it were the natural order of things. He believes he’s not as valuable as she is.

In Star Trek: Nemesis Data sacrificed himself for Picard – although he did see himself as of equal value. In fact, he argued strenuously throughout the series for equal status with humans. And to all of us watching Nemesis…I can’t begin to tell you how hard his ‘death’ hit me.

On paper, it makes sense for an android – a robot – to sacrifice himself so a human may live. But we spent seven seasons plus several films getting to know Data. Android or not, he was a beloved character, he was a friend, he formed relationships. That’s why the crew gave him a full funeral and eulogies.

Likewise, Cat’s sacrifices hit Ladybug hard, something many of us fanfiction writers have explored in depth.

Programming

Perhaps the biggest difference is that Data knew he was programmed. He knew he was at the mercy of his microchip. He knew when his emotion chip was installed. He was wholly conscious of his developmental journey.

Yet, even after five seasons, Adrien has no idea. He doesn’t know he’s been programmed because he doesn’t know he’s a sentibeing. Like something out of Blade Runner – and like Data’s mother – Adrien would pass the Empathy Test and be deemed human yet still have no idea of his origins.

The fact is, you can’t break your programming until you know you’ve been programmed.

Data was given all the chances he needed to live a full life and make a fully informed decision about what he wanted to do with it at the end when he made that final sacrifice. Adrien has none of that. He was edging towards revelation, realising his father was controlling him somehow, but all of that was taken from him at the end of S5. It’s like if Data were given a hard reset.

Marinette’s choice to keep the truth from Adrien mirrors Data’s choice to keep the truth from his android mother. She believes she’s a human, the original woman she was made to replicate, and he chooses to let her carry out her life under that pretence.

'I want to be a real boy!'

As I said, Data and Adrien are both like Pinocchio, trying to be ‘real boys’.

At the end of Data’s life, it didn’t matter whether he was made by a scientist or by organic means. He touched people’s lives, and that made him real in all the ways that matter.

Similarly, if Adrien got snapped away, people would remember him. They would mourn him. It doesn’t matter if there’s a body left behind or not. He too has touched so many lives, and that makes him just as real and important as any organic human.

In these ways, I believe they both succeed at being 'real' regardless of how they came into being.

I bet I could think of more parallels if I tried, but this has already got long enough :)

[dany36]

i'm a casual fan so my opinion is whatever but like....what the fuck was that 3rd act of the story for mk1. like...seriously?? it started off so strong and i was genuinely interested in the characters and the story. i even had sympathy for characters i never even gave much thought to like baraka and reptile, given how they developed their backstories and such. and then...seriously after sindel dies, it all goes downhill so fucking fast? they take the same tired multiverse path and it all just felt like such a joke with that final battle at the end. like "haha look at all these fusioned characters...isn't janet cage so funny" and i was seriously just wanting it to end, whereas before sindel dies i was so into the plot and how the characters were developing. honestly it went from like a 10/10 story to a 3/10 at the end. the main reason why i got interested in mk1 was because i heard it was gonna be like a reboot of the timeline but turns out it was....whatever that 3rd act mess was. can we stop with the multiverse BS please like let's all be a bit more original!!!!

[boxenstopp]

i need you to know that tumblr thinks you're my crush so everytime you post i get a notification like 'look 🤭 who 🤭 posted 🤭'

and half the time i’m just going 🤓☝️nemesis is cute actually 💕 for the hundreth post

maybe tumblr doesnt think i’m your crush maybe it’s nemesis 🥰🥰

which should be entirely right by tumblr and if u don’t have a crush on him i’m disappointed that i’m not posting enough propaganda

[xenioi]

nemesis has finally had a tert applied (it’s just firebreather; i have a ton of achievement points i never use, nothing looked super good on her anyway, her son and grandson already had it applied to them too, etc) and i have bred her and nereus for the first time in years… when the babies are born i’ll compare the existing kids to the new ones

[dimensionzero]

I don't think we do enough with the fact that chat noir is the spitting image of émilie agreste

[mishtershpock]

.

[tankgotstuckinthecircusgate]

here's the idea.

leo's wife/lauretta . (gets stabbed to death)

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

"thought about episode 20 too hard again" incident 17 injured 3 dead

[the-acid-pear]

Honestly the English speaking circles and the Spanish ones too for that matter since I'm sure it stopped doing it would benefit greatly from adding "okno" to jokes. Okno beats any tone indicator and it's inherently superior because it does something they don't: give you the chance to keep going or move on.

To put an example:

Here's an extremely normal message I sent to my ex as a conversation opener. She's the only one I use "okno" with because we come from the same latine facebook circles and we get it. There's no amount of /j I'd add to this message to make it normal to anyone else.

/j is awkward, okno is swift. We need to start using okno more.

[sentfromwolves]

can’t wait to use polls to make all of my indecisive writing problems YOURS

[suguwu]

god i rlly did put myself in a Position with this fic i stg