#in ml specific

[princess-of-the-corner]

The temptation to retcon my ML fics to have Miraculous Cure leave scars sometimes is really strong right now.

[roycelewis]

[cadenzarose]

Beach date shenanigans!

aka I never imagined we'd get a relationship pre-reveal and now there are so many Scenarios in my head

bonus:

(Also, special thanks to @ittybittytatertot for helping me brainstorm!)

[buggachat]

obviously. he should've guessed.

bonus:

[yunyin]

When I realized the akumatized Couiffaine family had a theme, I had to draw it!

[bbqnoir]

Chat is a feminist

[stars-obsession-pit]

Danny Phantom crossover setup idea

Danny has figured out a way to create portals to and from the Ghost Zone at will. He’s still not perfect at it, but he’s capable enough to use it to attempt to flee the GIW during an encounter.

However, it turns out their scientists had invented a device to briefly replicate portals, allowing their agents to keep pursuing any ghosts that try to teport away.

Thus began a chaotic chase between them, weaving into and out of the Zone with every jump. As things wear on, the locations Danny’s portals connect to get less and less accurate, spitting him out in increasingly random locations across the glove.

And, eventually, into other universes…

The story could take place in just one setting (kicking off with him collapsing from exhaustion there), or it could be a multicross of continuously scrambling through a bunch of different settings (spending only a relatively short time in each before he moves on)

[anna-scribbles]

i’m sure someone’s made a post abt this before but the idea of adrien potentially needing glasses is so funny to me bc he talks abt how the cat suit gives him super vision but what if it just like. corrects his eyesight to 20/20

[clawsoutspotsoff]

Fanwork Wars: Isekai

if you saw this post without the gif, no you didn't

stills under the cut!

[clemnoir]

what if i saved you from an akuma. AND we were both girls …

[descendant-of-truth]

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

[cookiedough77]

im liking this whole mlb fandom is all drawing chat blanc at this time.... keep it up...

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Watching Miraculous, I feel that the show is written that no matter what Marinette decides to do, she would be in the wrong - she is in the wrong for not telling Chat about Chat Blanc (ignoring her own trauma in the matter), but if she told him, the show would make it the wrong choice...

The head writer has publicly stated that one of the show's guiding rules is that Marinette has to do something wrong in every episode, so I'd say that you don't just have a feeling. You've actually picked up on one of the show's not-so-subtle core tenets. It's also a core tenet that I strongly disagree with because - as I said in the linked post - when it comes to shows like Miraculous, the only characters who are always in the wrong are the villains.

If Miraculous was a different type show and Marinette's blunders were more comedic, low-stakes, sitcom-type stuff, then it could work. Two examples that come to mind are:

That's So Raven - this is an old Disney Channel show where the main character was a psychic who randomly got visions of the future. A lot of the episodes focused on her having a vision, interpreting that vision wrong, and then doing something foolish as a result. So Raven was usually in the wrong, but she was wrong in a way that rarely hurt others. If memory serves, she most just caused herself unnecessary stress.

Phineas and Ferb - another Disney Channel show about two imaginative and inventive young boys who have fun doing crazy things like building a roller coaster in their backyard. They do these things without parental permission so their older sister - Candace - is always trying to get them in trouble. In spite of this, the general viewer feeling towards Candace seems to be one of amusement, not hatred. This is probably because she never causes pain for anyone but herself, making it hard to look at her as a negative force. If Candace was written more like Marinette, then people would probably hate her, too.

While we're on the topic, it's worth pointing out that, while Candace isn't a villain, she is the antagonist. Her presence causes much needed tension. Since she's always out to ruin her brothers' fun, every episode has the low-key stakes of, "Will the boys get caught this time?" Without Candace, you lose those stakes and Phineas and Ferb becomes a lesser show because even sitcoms need stakes.

Semi-serious magical girl shows don't need characters like Candace to add stakes to the story. This is because semi-serious magical girl shows have built in stakes from the presence of villains and evil magic. It is the height of absurdity to make a rule like "Marinette is always wrong" in a show with an evil villain who is out to steal Marinette's magical earrings and use them to rewrite the universe.

The presence of the "Marinette is always wrong" rule shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the type of show they're writing. You only make rules like that in low-stakes shows like the ones I listed above. And even those shows understood that, if you have this rule, then you also make sure that the only person who usually suffers is the one making the mistakes. The writers of Miraculous really haven't done that because of course they haven't! This isn't a low-stakes teen drama. Marinette has too much for responsibility and the narrative stakes are far to high for her mistakes to come across as minor.

This is especially true because they keep picking mistakes that should lead to character growth and then not actually writing any character growth. Once again, that style of writing can work in sitcoms*, but Miraculous has way too many serious elements to be written like a pure sitcom. That doesn't change the fact that the writers are writing it like one, but it does explain why the writing leads to so much frustration for fans.

*I wanted to note that even sitcoms often make the audience hate the leads because it's hard to write anything where the leads keep making endless mistakes without making the leads look awful and sitcoms run off of every episode containing a mistake. This is why long running sitcoms tend to have a good number fans who hate at least one member of the core cast. Ted and Lily from How I Met Your Mother are great examples of this and it happens because the mistakes they make usually effect others. If the show had only been two seasons long like originally planned, then they would have been fine.

[asukiess]

kuro neko

quote by richey edwards // washing machine heart by mitski // maud; a monodrama by alfred lord tennyson // seaside improvisation by richard siken // tumblr post by hurricaneforcefan // with sincerest regrets by russell edson // kuro neko transcript // this is how you lose the time war by amal el-mohtar

[yeet-noir]

Adrien walking into the kitchen in the morning knowing he is going to have to eat his father's shitty pancakes for the 157th day in a row

[hamsternamedmarinette]

Grownups in Miraculous Paris when middle schoolers tell them how to do their job