#the back and forth of both events makes it so thematically gripping

[penderbend]

going back to s3 malevolent and good LORD this shit is so good. forgot how absolutely insane it is. easily my fav season (though i do love me my medieval jaunts) this just has something mixed in it thats so damn captivating

[dishwater-blondie]

Why I drink that sweet, sweet Fuck Emilie Juice and you should too

I woke up this morning and immediately wrote this whole-ass essay. At this point, I’m sure y’all are sick of me grasping for evidence that Emilie is gonna be a villain when and if she comes back. I apologize. 

But also, if you haven’t already, read To Stand Among Ruins by Windcage, because my conversation with her about this show (which slowly evolved into us writing full essays back and forth to each other) is where all of this speculation originated from. 

Anyway, here’s what I manically wrote earlier today: 

I present my speculation so confidently sometimes that even I forgot it’s just that - speculation. But evil!Emilie is the one thing that I am convinced about. I’ll don my wig and clown nose if I must when the time comes. I don’t understand wanting/expecting Emilie to be without considerable agency and without a major objective. Here is a woman we know next to nothing about. Of her, we have seen nothing but a motionless body, the beginning of a film where she didn’t speak, and countless depictions of her ranging from family photos to idols. This creates tension that won’t be satisfied by the revelation that she was exactly how everyone expected her to be. 

Emilie will be a thousand times more interesting if she is intelligent, ambitious, and the driving force of this miraculous agenda. We already know Gabriel didn’t activate the butterfly until after her disappearance, so unless they were both using the peacock, which I highly doubt, Gabriel was definitely less involved in their goal than Emilie. If Gabriel is the sole “evil” spouse, then either Emilie remains asleep and the audience accepts this use of the fridging trope and determines she had no control (which is boring), or she comes back somehow and attempts to usurp power from her tyrannical husband - a struggle we won’t have time to care for because we haven’t gotten to know Emilie, because we have only ever seen this relationship through Gabriel’s eyes. It’s a relationship framed as his struggle to overcome.

In fact, one can argue that she already has agency on a thematic level despite being hidden away in the coffin. Gabriel is totally responsible for his own choices, but beneath the surface, Emilie permeates everything he does, even the things that have nothing to do with Hawkmoth (his fashion designs on his screen bear a striking resemblance to his wife). She’s not at fault for his decision to terrorize the city, but his unhealthy dependence didn’t spring out of nowhere, and it is not a coincidence that it is her portrait, her eyes that loom over his shoulder in nearly every shot of this man. Gabriel is imprisoned in the past, and though the door is open, Emilie is the cold, dark cell that seems so warm and inviting because it has become comfortable. He’s to blame, yes, but I think it would be naive not to consider that there’s not more to this story that we are deliberately not exploring, three seasons deep. 

Also, as much as Emilie made Adrien happy, the audience is not made to root for her return so he can find happiness in her once more. The show makes it evident that a reunion with his mother is not what Adrien wants. He wants to be with Ladybug. He wants to go out into the world and make friends. He wants his father to be happy. This he expresses in Felix, when on the anniversary of Emilie’s disappearance, he doesn’t lament to Gabriel, “I wish mom was here”, or even, “I miss her.” He says, “If Nathalie can make you happy again, then she’s already part of the family.”

If Emilie is coming back, she’s not here to stay. Adrien knows exactly what Gabriel has to learn, that it’s okay to move on, and that moving on will ultimately make him happier. The narrative doesn’t exist to disappoint Adrien. 

And everyone has said it already, but Emilie certainly is just as much to blame for Adrien’s isolation as Gabriel. And I know this because Gabriel is disobeyed more often than he is listened to. Adrien, Nathalie, and the bodyguard have all deliberately defied Gabriel’s orders. At least on Adrien’s end, we can’t believe this was a regular occurrence when Emilie was around because he only started sneaking out after she left. Perhaps he had other ways of rebelling when he was younger, but we haven’t been made aware of these, aside for him and his cousin pretending to be the other, but that’s less rebellion and more joking around. 

Personally, I refuse to believe that the primary reason for Gabriel’s looser grip on the house is that it’s simply less convenient for him to be a tyrant. That’s a weak writing choice. It’s in every way more interesting if Gabriel is a man trying to maintain power over something that was never in his power to begin with, because it was always in Emilie’s. It’s in every way more interesting that Emilie - the mystery character, the idolized woman -  is not just an object for Gabriel to obsess over, but the authoritative and ambitious force at the heart of this plot.

Not to mention, the most recent webisode suggests that Nathalie’s advisements regarding Adrien are genuinely in the interest of helping Gabriel be a better father, and this would include the decision to let him go to school. She helps him be a better Hawkmoth too, but first and foremost, Nathalie is a catalyst of change, not a perpetuator of events that set Gabriel’s development backwards. If she managed to convince Gabriel to let Adrien go to school because he’d have more time to be terrorist, that contradicts Nathalie’s thematic purpose and mars the authenticity of the “affection” Nathalie herself feels her Adrien. It also makes any sort of positive development in Adrien’s life from there on out inherently linked to his father’s inability to be present. And that challenges the optimistic tone of every scene in which Gabriel and Adrien manage to spend quality time together.

All that said, evil!Emilie is not so much a justification for Gabenath as it is the conflict surrounding the damaged father-son relationship, and possibly the means through which it can be repaired. Obviously, none of us can say for certain if Emilie is in any way directly responsible for either the tension or the existence of Hawkmoth, but she does represent a disparity between Gabriel and Adrien’s response to loss and change. I argue that having her be the “evil” one, having her be the character at the forefront of this miraculous agenda, results in a more compelling story and more compelling character development down the road.