storybook-with-a-hug

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Marinette’s Closet Part 1

So I admit I’ve not been writing as much lately for my new chapter as I could have been. Suffering a writer’s block of sorts. However, while I haven’t been able to get into the mood to write, I have still been focusing a lot of attention onto my Fix-It Miraculously story. 

Instead of writing, what I’ve been doing is a bunch of character design. Now, this is both redesign of future heroes and new heroes that I don’t really want to get into at this point because major spoilers for my series, and also what I have the ability to share here and now with expanding what the characters wear. 

However, there are seasons and time passing and all that jazz so I’m dividing things up somewhat. Below is Marinette’s season 1 Fall wardrobe, ie, what she wears for the first few months of the story. Pajamas not included. I’ll talk about each outfit in more detail below the picture counting the top left outfit as (a) and then going across each row in order. Oh, and I literally googled “quick fashion base” and picked the first one that looked like it would work. The base was on really extreme highheels so I had to change the side of the foot in each one, but there you have it. I did it so I wouldn’t take forever worrying about posing and proportions and all of that and could just focus on the clothes.

(a) Marinette’s default outfit from the show. Cute and her, but also not much to say about it because we’ve all seen it a million times. I stated in the beginning of Origins that Marinette, the spring before the series starts, went through a “flower phase” where she was embroidering everything with flowers. So a lot of her left-over clothes from that time will have flower-print somewhere on them. Those that don’t are likely new additions to her wardrobe since spring, which I don’t think is all that unreasonable seeing as she’s a designer who mainly wears her own creations.

(b) Another official outfit of hers, though this one was from promotional art. I used it as her “dressing up” design for Adrien’s birthday when she was trying to give him his present. It’s a frilly-rimmed baby-t with red plaid dress and blue denim capris. I couldn’t make up my mind out of Marinette’s four footwear choices which one looked good with it so I didn’t end up drawing shoes in. But seeing as all pieces of this wardrobe are interchangable with the other pieces, she’ll probably end up wearing all the footwear with at least some combination of clothes.

(c) A top for warmer weather in a pretty pale teal with a pair of ripped jeans. The top is another carry over from last spring as she embroidered a bunch of flowers and leaves into the upper section. Her hair is also in twin plait braids instead of her normal pigtails. I mentioned her wearing her hair like that in a scene with Manon a few chapters back and while it’s not her usual hairstyle cause it takes time to get ready like that, when she is awake early enough and not otherwise busy, she can wear her hair like that as well.

(d) This is an example of her “business” look. It’s the sort of thing she wears when meeting with clients for her commissions, carefully selected to make her look more mature and professional and less like a little kid running a lemonade stand. She IS 13 and trying to start up her own business, remember, so to help people take her seriously, she has to dress the part. So a simple silver shirt and a jacket as well as a pair of black skinny jeans topped with wearing her hair in a bun instead of pigtails to help add to the professional look. 

(e) This one was one that I really hesitated on, because it’s not really her normal style. The colours aren’t her usual bright pastels and the aesthetics just don’t quite seem to match. But at the same time I was trying to look a little outside the box with the outfit as early teens is when a lot of people start shifting into the more niche styles as they try to define themselves and she is a huge fan of Jagged Stone, a rock star, rather than the teeny-bopper type music one would usually associate with a preppy/dreamy/hyper-feminine girl around her age. So I figured why not have her attempt experimenting a bit with her style and try a new look from time to time?

(f) In the Origins chapter, I talked about how Marinette really loves cute skirts and things, but because of her clumsiness she doesn’t want to wear them ever in public because she’s worried about tripping and flashing everybody. So instead she just has a couple of skirts that she wears only on the weekends when she’s not intending on going out anywhere because she loves them so much. This one here is a drawstring gathered skirt out of the same material that broomstick skirts are made out of, along with just a simple white blouse and a denim jacket covered in patches and embroidery. Including Jagged’s head-outline design that Luka wears on her right arm and her entire left arm being encased in a winding vine embroidery that she did last spring. There’s potential for more patches to be added in the future.

(g) Another cute skirt, this time a pink cotton skater skirt with a sleeveless blouse. On the white blouse there are embroidered a whole bunch of white flowers. 

(h) A pair of purple tights with sheer paneling on them and a top/hat that were inspired straight from Marinette’s concept art where she wore a cream off-the-shoulder dress. I changed the button on the hat to be a flower instead of a ladybug shell because Ladybug merch is only started circulating at this point in the series and Marinette purposefully is a little behind the curve on that trend because she’s trying to avoid drawing attention to the similarities. I also added some flowery embroidery to the top of the outfit. The tights were originally going to be more pink, like a sky magenta colour, but then it ended up becoming more purple when I coloured it in and at the time I was just eager to get on to the next outfit and figured I’d come back later and tweak the colour, then just never did and decided it looks fine as is. 

(i) This is just a white denim top and deep pink denim jeans. And another hat, but... the hats can go with many different tops, I just sort of picked which ones to show them on a little randomly. This hat is knitted, something Marinette made before Adrien’s scarf. 

(j) This one is a little more of a rock-and-roll look. No, that’s not a leather jacket, it’s a business suit jacket with shorter sleeves, a white tanktop and the skirt that it took me three hours to draw the little red flowers and golden vines patern on all the layers of. The tooth necklace is a real tooth and was a present from Noona Gina from her travels. 

(k) Not much to say on this one either, other than that in Origins Marinette expressed that she liked teal and pink together so that’s why I chose the colours I chose for the outfit. That, and apparently coloured denim was a big thing in the 2010s so that’s why all the technicolored pants.

(l) A chinese-inspired red jacket (look at the ties in the front) over the same white blouse as was in (g) only this time not tucked in and shorts. I know short-shorts were sort of the thing to wear with thigh-high socks during this time, but she’s also 13 so her parents didn’t want her wearing short-shorts and she compromised with mid-thigh shorts and slightly shorter thigh-high socks. Also a hat. 

(m) The grey striped part is a really thin, flowy material, the skiny jeans continue on the technicolored rainbow of denim. Marinette has multiple pieces of jewelry that she’s cycled through for longer than she’s had her earrings, she just doesn’t wear them with every outfit. 

(n) That cotton skater skirt from (g) is back with a denim shirt that she’s tied off. I strongly think there’s likely a big flower design on the back of her shirt, but I couldn’t make anything look good so I erased it and am leaving it up to the imagination of the viewers to picture what it could look like. 

(o) Same denim shirt, this time untied, and covered with a cream knit shirt and more skiny jeans, this time with flowers embroidered/silkscreened onto them. Not really sure if I like the necklace she’s wearing. Found it online and it sort of looked like the one she wore in the concept art and thought I’d put it on her here to make the outfit look less plain. Not sure it succeeded. 

(p) Just another look I found online that I thought might work. Mainly picked out because of the darker top and red scarf. I wanted her to have more coloured shirts than just those samey pale colours and this one had a nice accessory that came with it. 

(q) Black shirt covered with silver flowers and a denim skater skirt and leggings. Maybe something she’d wear outside the house because of the leggings? Still, more cute skirts and another 1hr+ to do the detailing on the top. 

(r) And lastly, a simple pink jacket over a white tanktop and skiny jeans. The jeans were meant to be the same ones as in (p) and the white tanktop was supposed to be the same one as in (j) though they ended up having different necklines when I actually looked at them together. But it’s more proof that outfit parts are switched and swapped to make different end results. 

So in grand total, that’s 16 shirts, 7 jackets (including one overalldress thing), 16 pants/shorts/skirts, and four shoe options. That’s a lot of ways to mix and match to cover three months of fall before we get into the winter clothes. Some of these clothes will carry over into winter with maybe just a change of footwear while other pieces will be put away until spring or gotten rid of as she rotates in new fashion ideas. I’ll be taking a bit of a break before starting in on her winter wear, but I figured I’d share what I had so far for anyone who happens to stumble across this and decides they’re interested. 

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Fix-It Miraculously: Analyzing Alya (Season 1 focus)

So, with the next chapter in my story being another of the OC chapters, it gives me a chance to explore the supporting cast more. Though over-all the chapter is going to be Adrien-centric, one of the things I’m doing in it is exploring his relationships with other people besides Marinette. Particularly, this chapter is going to focus rather heavily on the budding friendship between him and Alya on both sides of his mask. To do so, though, I figured I’d take the chance to expand a bit more on my take on Alya and who she is as a character in the start of the series.

So I don’t think anyone would call it a stretch to say Alya is a very passionate person. She’s the sort to throw herself head-long and completely into every new theory she comes up with an exuberance that is quite admirable. She is fiercely loyal and always wants to do the right thing, even if she doesn’t always go about it in the best way. 

However, the problems of her character are so intrinsically linked to the best parts of her character that it’s more to say she takes her best qualities too far and hasn’t yet learned how to temper herself to an appropriate reaction. Which is not to say she’s strictly in the wrong or that she’s a bad character/friend/person, just that she’s a young teen (13 in my story, probably 14 in canon, but this is an analysis for my story specifically so I’m making her 13) who still has a lot to learn. 

As such, Alya has three glaring problems that over the course of this story she will learn to address. Her primary problem, which isn’t even so much of a “her” thing as it is an age/experience thing, is that she tends to jump to conclusions too quickly and then once she’s latched on she has a lot of problems letting go. This was her big problem with the “Chloe is Ladybug” theory in Lady WiFi, she made a conclusion and then set out to make her proof match her theory and disregarded everything that countered her foregone conclusion instead of letting the facts prove of disprove the hypothesis. If she had taken the time to step back and examine her facts, or listen to the advice of those around her, she never would have gotten herself in that situation. And while getting getting suspended and proven thoroughly wrong was a bit of a nasty wake-up call for her, she hasn’t quite learned her lesson yet. 

She jumped to conclusions again in Pharaoh, where she (rightfully) believed Ladybug was a student in her grade in her school and then (wrongfully) changed her mind to believe that Ladybug was an ancient Egyptian demi-goddess that’s thousands of years old. Now, beyond the fact that in the canon episode Alya apparently found the book, researched what schools used it and how many girls were in their school year, went all the way to Marinette’s house, and then all the way to the Louvre and spent all that time looking at the scroll without ever once even bothering to open the front cover of the book and see Marinette’s name written in it, the fact that she so easily believed this lie makes me think it has something to do with the quantum masking that protects their identities. That’s why in my rewrite of the episode I had Chat Noir start to fall for it before Ladybug reminded him of the facts and knocked him out of it. It’s also for this reason that I had Alya mistakenly believe that Chat Noir was the Fairy King of Cats after he started dropping names related to such. 

So, while she hasn’t completely learned her lesson yet, the first steps have been taken. She still has a ways to go on this point, this problem won’t start really being fixed until season 3-4 where she starts settling down out of fangirl mode and actually taking her journaling more seriously. By that point, she’ll be 14-15, have been a hero on the front lines of this war herself, and had suffered a few more wake-up calls that each move her a little further in the direction of a mature young woman who is competent at her job. 

Next real problem, which is also in great part due to her age, is Alya’s inability to get out of her own head. I don’t mean that in a mean way, but children are horrible at seeing the big picture and truly empathizing with those around them. They lack the experience and they lack the basic brain development that lets them get out of their own head and really understand other people and the consequences to their actions. Alya’s still very much in that place where she goes “well, I can do it with no problem, so you should be able to as well!” Especially where Marinette is concerned. She can talk to Adrien easily, so Marinette should also be fine doing so. She comes from a large supportive and loving family who like any family that has many siblings is full of teasing and banter and she’s fine with it, so Marinette should have no problem with her making fun of her either. She doesn’t know of any commitments to Marinette’s time, so therefore Marinette can’t possibly be busy and if she says she is it’s only with sleeping. 

The problem is that, in my story especially, Marinette’s past is that of a bullied child. And just like how Alya can’t get out of her own head to realize her and Marinette’s situations are different, children have a hard time getting out of their own heads to realize the long-term damage they’re doing to their target by bullying them. And as such, otherwise nice children can be downright cruel and torturous towards their target when swept up in the mob mentality and given basically a green light to do whatever they want to someone. Marinette is a very strong girl to be able to pull through something like that with an intact sense of right and wrong and a disposition of STILL wanting to help people. It’s why she was chosen as Ladybug, a hero to save the whole world from a megalomaniac. But it also means she’s not equipped to take friendly teasing. She is desperate to keep that one friend that she’s gotten after being alone for so long, so she’s not going to stand up for herself and tell Alya off for saying hurtful things, but for a self-esteem as fragile as Marinette’s is at the start of the series that doesn’t mean those sorts of things aren’t still counterproductive. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: in no way is Alya trying to be mean to Marinette or reaffirm the kinds of harsh words her bullies used. But Alya doesn’t strike me as someone who’s been the target of long-term bullying before, given how confident and brazen she is. She doesn’t have a frame of reference for understanding the sorts of things Marinette faced while she was growing up or how her words cold be misconstrued. To Alya, she’s just being playful and treating Marinette as part of her family. To Alya, Marinette is as good as another sister, with all the love and bickering that goes along with it. But Marinette is an only child and didn’t grow up with sibling banter, so being treated like that doesn’t hold the same emotions for her that it does for Alya. Not yet at least. 

This is further proven by the fact that in season 1, Marinette doesn’t ever really sass Alya back. She complains about Alya a few times behind her back to various individuals, but she’s not yet comfortable enough with the friendship to be snarky or put Alya in her place when Alya throws out a few lines like that making fun of Marinette over something. At this point in their relationship, Marinette is just taking it like a victim, and Alya doesn’t have the knowhow to be able to recognize this behaviour and alter her own. 

And this sort of leads into her third main flaw: disregarding others personal boundaries. Alya is almost notorious for not listening when people tell her “no” and pushing on anyway because she wants something. Be that to quell her insatiable curiosity about something or seeing her best friend achieve her happily ever after with the boy of her dreams. When Alya wants something, she is relentless and nothing anyone else has to say or think on the matter means anything to her. 

Ladybug’s life could be in danger because her identity was publicly revealed? Don’t care, I wanna know the answer to the secret so let’s all get excited together about figuring it out! Marinette’s on the verge of a panic attack, freaking out and spiralling because she’s not ready to take that next step in her relationship with Adrien yet? Don’t care, I wanna see my ship sail because it’s fun to get swept up in the drama of it all just like a real-life romcom so I’m gonna force it anyway! An akuma’s attacking and going near it could endanger her life and make Ladybug and Chat Noir’s job all the harder because they’re having to protect the kid that keeps running on to the battle field? Don’t care, I wanna live my dream and enjoy the excitement of seeing real lives superheroes fighting a real life supervillain and get loads of views on my blog while doing so! Marinette is being extremely insistent about a prior engagement that she’s trying very hard to keep secret? Don’t care, I wanna see my ship sail and any prior engagement is either a flat out lie or I demand to know all the deets because my best friend isn’t allowed to have anything in her life that is personal and private and I’m not intimately part of!

Admittedly, most of these sorts of problems stem from an honest desire in Alya to help out and make a difference in the world, mixed with her black-and-white morality and inability to get out of her own head, as well as her boundless thirst for knowledge about everything and anything that interests her. And while all of it (save perhaps the morality bit, but again, she’s still a child and kids tend to have trouble seeing the shades of gray between) it can be problematic at the levels she takes it to. 

Do people occasionally need a push to get them to take the actions they really and truly desire to make their lives better? Sometimes, yes. But those pushes have to be situational and you have to be willing to listen to the person you’re giving a push to in order to understand if they really need a push or if they just need time. When Marinette was having troubles getting up the guts to actually hand Adrien his birthday present? Yeah, giving Marinette a bit of a push to get her actually out there and talking to the boy was the right call. Perhaps going out with her and helping lead the conversation might have made it easier on Marinette and actually guaranteed he got the gift, but she believed Marinette could do it on her own. Encouraging Marinette to stand up to Chloe in the Origins episode? Definitely okay, as Marinette more just needed to be assured that she wouldn’t be abandoned completely for putting her foot down than actually be pushed to stand up for herself as Alya more let Marinette take the lead and just followed her cues and gave her unwavering support in taking her chair back. Pressing the call button on Marinette’s phone when the girl is insisting she’s not ready to ask Adrien out yet and can’t read aloud the script she wrote her without even giving her the chance to read it over and prepare at all? Not cool. Dragging Marinette away from an actual job she’s supposed to be doing (babysitting Manon) in order to go out and stalk Adrien at his place of work? Again, not cool. 

But for Alya to start learning her lesson about how much is okay to push and when, people really have to start putting their foot down and refusing to budge and pointing out Alya’s bad behaviour for what it is. And unfortunately, Marinette really isn’t the sort of person who is able to do that short of being pushed too far and blowing up with her lashing out. Alya’s gonna need someone else to teach her what is and is not okay as far as pushing other people to get her way, and someone other than Alya is going to have to be the one to be there for Marinette to let her know it’s alright to tell Alya to back off sometimes when she’s getting too pushy about things. Thankfully there’s an entire girlsquad to choose from, but friendships between the squad have to develop a bit more before something like that can start really taking affect. 

So, basically in conclusion, while Alya may be a wonderful person on her own and even a pretty good friend, I don’t really think she’s the best friend a girl like Marinette needs. At least, not so early in their respective character arcs. With a bit of growth on both ends, they could develop into something closer to what each of them requires. Or they could diverge into a state of merely being friends instead of best friends as they each find other things to fill their time and other relationships to complete themselves with. 

So then what other things are there for Alya? Well, most blatantly for anyone who’s seen canon is her relationship with Nino. I don’t know about most of you, but I recall when my friends first started dating, that first relationship they had seemed to consume like 90% of their mental capacity. Their dates, what it was like to kiss, how fast should they be moving, that one funny thing he said last week that they just have to share, etc. Dating Nino would be a very easy and convenient way to distract Alya away from Marinette and give the other girl a chance to grow and develop. 

Another, rather obvious option, is to expand her social circle to include their other friends. The girlsquad already exists. It is there and waiting for the opportunity to interact. Mixing Alya with the others so that Alya can learn boundaries and such with characters that have more self-esteem like Alix or Rose who aren’t afraid to speak their minds and feelings to Alya over how she’s behaving towards them would be a good way to start her on the process of personal growth without leaving everything on Marinette’s shoulders to initiate. It would also let Marinette see that just because you’re friends you can still speak up for yourself without ruining everything, and that real friends won’t hold it against you or abandon you for doing so. It would let her see and know that such things are okay and she could then follow their examples to start building up some boundaries of her own that are then respected. 

Alternately, there’s also fulfilling parts of Alya’s desires in order to keep her distracted somewhat form other parts which is sort of what I start doing in this upcoming chapter using AdriChat. While Adrien Agreste (TM) had to grow up dealing with everything that was involved in being Adrien Agreste (TM) (*cough*Gabriel*cough*), he also grew up with having Chloe as his one and only friend. He’s shown as Chat Noir that he knows how to throw down in a verbal spar, and being poster boy for the Gabriel Brand I’d be very surprised if he was also not coached on how to talk to reporters and give an endless non-answers to any number of inane questions. So as Chat Noir, having successfully pulled the wool over Alya’s eyes and making her believe he was King of the Cat Fairies, he approaches her again for assistance in his investigations into the identity of Papillon. Now Alya, being Alya, as soon as she decided that Chat Noir was a character from Celtic Mythology, of course then went and looked up everything there was to know about dealing with fairies. Including rules of conduct and warnings about behaviour.

So when Chat Noir hands her all his combined data that he’s collected so far, requesting her to help him compile it all and to store it safely, but on the condition that she not tell anyone, she is both excited enough for the opportunity as well as scared enough about not offending him that she doesn’t dare refuse. I mean, gifts from fae are never what they seem and the rules of the contract are to be followed to the letter or else horrible consequences can occur. As much as she wants this, she can’t go blabbing and spreading the information around, it’s also filled with people’s personal experiences at their lowest moments and as much as she’s nosy, she does still seem like she WANTS to be respectful of others and be a good person. So now she’s his junior detective/sidekick and ripe for a friendship to blossom between the two. After all, they have so much in common, it’s shocking they’re not shown more in the show as being friends. They’re both huge geeks about superheroes, both huge Ladybug fans, both brand new students at the school, etc. 

[storybook-with-a-hug]

There was no Chloé Bourgeois  Redemption Arc

It’s time to for me to write about the so-called “Redemption Arc“ for Chloé Bourgeois, of Miraculous Ladybug infamy. Many people claim that such a thing existed. These people are wrong. While Miraculous Ladybug may provide the illusion of such an arc, that’s all it is - an illusion. And like all illusions, it falls apart once you touch it.

There’s also some questionable takes in regards to exactly how responsible Marinette is meant to be for Chloé’s “redemption”, which need to be tackled since they help feed into the illusion. And also because I find them deeply offensive. To me, personally.

A neccesary preface here is that I’m not saying Chloé is incapable of redemption. What I am saying, however, is that during seasons two and three of Miraculous Ladybug, the redemption arc people claim existed clearly did not.

Redemption 101

In the most basic sense, a redemption arc is a type of character arc where a bad character decides to stop being bad and start being good. Along the way, it’s generally accepted that they need to atone for their bad actions, and perhaps do something to reverse the damage such actions have caused. A critical component required for this to work is that the character both understands that their actions are harmful, and so decides to act in a better way.

Probably the most famous redemption arc in western animation is Zuko’s, from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Zuko begins the show as an antagonist, directly attempting to capture Aang, the Avatar and Last Airbender. Doing so will allow the Fire Nation to win the war, and also complete their genocide of the Air Nomad people. However, Zuko realises that supporting the Fire Nation’s bid for world domination is harmful to others, and himself. By the end of the series, he has rejected the worldview of his father, grandfather and great grandfather, and indeed helps Aang defeat the Firelord. Along the way, Zuko find a way to help not just Aang, but also Katara and Sokka, who are also victims of Fire Nation Imperialism. Zuko earns redemption not through the decision to be good, but by performing good, and in many cases, reparative actions.

Honestly, from this basic definition, I think it’s pretty obvious that Chloé hadn’t even started the first step of a redemption arc by the time she betrays Ladybug in Miracle Queen. She never accepts her actions are wrong, makes no attempt to change them without an ulterior motive, and generally continues to do bad things for bad reasons. But in spite of this, the claims of this mythical redemption arc don’t just exist, they are considered generally accepted. Why? It’s complicated, yet simple.

Chloé Who?

On a basic level, Chloé Bourgeois is fairly generic character - the “mean girl“ school bully, who torments the protagonist, Marinette Dupain-Cheng. In keeping with Miraculous’ superhero genre, Chloé admires Ladybug, Marinette’s superhero alter-ego. How ironic! Generally, Chloé acts as a minor, civilian-level antagonist to Marinette, who gets in the way, while being clearly much less of a deal than Hawk Moth. However, due to the mechanics of akumatization, Chloé’s actions often spiral into larger, supervillain-shaped consequences. Because while she may fit into the bully archetype, there is one thing that makes her somewhat atypical: a reach that extends far beyond the school setting.

André Bourgeois is his daughter’s primary enabler. As a rich person and Mayor of Paris, he has a significant amount of influence. Influence he makes freely available to Chloé for basically any purpose. No grudge is too petty, no problem too small when it comes to indulging her whims, and no bridge is too big burn. Nobody who theoretically has the authority to say no to Chloé actually can, because her father is implicitly approving her every action. It’s hardly a shock that Chloé is consistently terrible when she faces no consequences for her actions.

But there’s one last piece in the Chloé puzzle - Audrey Bourgeois. Chloé really wants her mother’s approval, but her mother lives in another country. Audrey is also a terrible person, a character who is literally defined by her vileness. She has Chloé’s attitude, and André’s level of influence, and like her daughter, immediately throws a tantrum when she can’t get her way. The attention Audrey gives towards her daughters is primarily negative, and that’s when she actually pays attention to them. Thus, Audrey provides Chloé with a Tragic Backstory, and some much needed Sympathy Points. This, of course, forms the foundation of the Redemption Illusion.

The thing about Chloé’s relationship (or lack thereof) with her mother is while it explains her behavior, it doesn’t excuse it. The harm she inflicts is no less because of it, and many of her actions cannot be ignored due to it. I think there’s a pretty obviously piece of bad logic here. Many characters who undergo redemption arcs are often sympathetic villains. Chloé is a sympathetic villain. But that doesn’t mean that Despair Bear, the episode that introduces this sympathetic side is the start of, nor the foundation of a redemption arc. If anything, Despair Bear shows the primary reason why Chloé isn’t on the path to redemption - her attempts to be “nice“ are motivated entirely to maintain her friendship with Adrien, and once she has what she wants, she immediately reverts to her normal behaviour. This theme of apparently good acts being done for selfish reasons will be repeated later.

Marinette: Victim, Not Victimizer

An important part of the Redemption Illusion is how it ultimately revolves around not just Chloé, but Marinette. Chloé is nothing but negative towards Marinette, but at the same time admires Ladybug… who is Marinette. This isn’t Alya style “wow look how cool and heroic she is“ style admiration, however. No, Chloé, in a sense, wants to be Ladybug. First by pretending to be her, and later via the Bee Miraculous, which would seem to put her on the same level as Ladybug. But since Ladybug is Marinette, this can only lead to conflict.

While Chloé has perpetrated many on-screen acts that are selfish, obnoxious and downright cruel, something that manages to slip under the radar is her pre-Origins treatment of Marinette. Sabine’s comment about how long Marinette and Chloé have been in the same class indicates that the latter has been bullying the former for at least three years. This has evidently damaged Marinette’s self-confidence, since even after being Ladybug in part one of Origins, she still thinks she can’t do it, and tries to give it up. She also doesn’t dispute Alya’s rather hasty assessment of Chloé as evil, and immediately assumes that Adrian is a bad person because he’s friends with Chloé.

Marinette’s relationship with Chloé is already poisoned at the start of the show. And it’s entirely Chloé’s fault. She didn’t have to bully Marinette. Being cruel to Marinette wouldn’t earn Chloé her mother’s approval. All it achieves is making Chloé feel better, by making Marinette suffer. Three years of bullying isn’t something you can ignore. It’s not something Marinette can simply “get over”, even as Ladybug. She probably hates Chloé, and every drop of enmity is earned. But how can I know this all from the limited picture painted by Origins, and the glimpses into Marinette’s pre-Ladybug life? I don’t. This isn’t something I needed to find from the text or subtext of the show. So then, how do I know?

I know because I lived it. When I was Marinette’s age, I was bullied. A lot. It hurt. But what people don’t want to acknowledge is that being a victim of bullying doesn’t just make you sad. It’s deeper than that. It made me angry. At the perpetrators, and the staff who let it happen, no matter how many times it was brought to their attention. It’s took me years to realise just how much it affected me, how my aggressive behaviour in certain online spaces might be connected to it. In Marinette, I see a part of myself. So when I see people claim that Marinette is somehow to blame for Chloé’s actions, that “Marinette should have given Chloé a chance“, it makes me a little angry. If someone told me I should be responsible for making my bullies better people, I’d tell them to fuck off.

Attempting to shift the responsibility for repairing Chloé’s bad behaviour on to Marinette is simply victim blaming with extra steps. Yes, Marinette is Ladybug, hero of Paris. But Marinette is also Marinette, a long-term victim of Chloé, and someone who Chloé continues to try to abuse, even if the efficacy is no longer there. It’s also not really fair to Chloé, either, when you think about it. Marinette is positioned to think the worst of Chloé, meaning she’s likely to see any regression on Chloé’s part as proof that the whole endevour is pointless. For Chloé to escape her toxic behaviour, she needs help from someone she hasn’t caused significant damage to.

And as with the rest of the Redemption Illusion, you have to ignore a lot of the text to make the idea that Marinette is somehow to blame seem reasonable. Marinette shows more compassion to Chloé than Chloé does to anyone in her entirety. It simply doesn’t help, because Chloé doesn’t want Ladybug to be nice to her, she wants Ladybug to accept her as an equal. And when that isn’t given, Chloé isn’t above trying to take it, with disasterous results.

Bad Bee-haviour

A key point in Zuko’s redemption arc is when he joins Team Avatar. This is when he truly abandons the ideals of Fire Nation Imperialism, and chooses to work directly against them. It’s not the end, but a midpoint. And it’s not a reward - it’s a duty, a commitment to help Aang defeat Ozai. I think it’s worth noting that Zuko actually gets weaker due to this, as he can no longer draw on his negative emotions to firebend. Only by helping Aang discover the pre-imperialism version of Firebending does he regain the ability himself. Rejecting the negative brings Zuko so far, but to be complete he must embrace a positive alternative.

Chloé’s transformation into Queen Bee is her anti-Zuko moment. She doesn’t work to attain it - the Bee Miraculous is literally dropped into her path. It gives her power, yes, which she immediately abuses. Queen Bee doesn’t exist to do good, like the other four heroes at the time. No, Queen Bee exists to exalt Chloé. Becoming a hero doesn’t move her to toward redemption. If anything, it moves her away from it.

It all comes back to Chloé’s first act as Queen Bee. In an attempt to prove that she’s “exceptional“, she transforms and tries to find a problem to solve. But when she can’t find one, she chooses to create one. By paralysing a train conductor, which ends up creating a problem she can’t solve. If it weren’t for Ladybug and Chat Noir’s timely intervention, a lot of people would have been injured, or even killed. All because Chloé wanted to seem like a “hero”. It’s an act so callous that it should have marked the end of her career as Queen Bee. It’s instant, irrevocable proof that she can’t be trusted with a Miraculous, because she nearly murdered a bunch of people with it.

But even if you ignore the train incident, being Queen Bee clearly doesn’t make Chloé better. In both Stormy Weather 2 and Miracular, her cruelty is what triggers an akumatization. In Animaestro, she forms a truce with Marinette entirely for the purpose of harassing Kagami. These are not the actions of someone trying to be a better person. Indeed, they look very much like the actions of a person who doesn’t think they need to change, and is thus continuing as usual.

Yet in spite of the lack of actual progress, Queen Bee is perhaps the keystone of the Redemption Illusion. She wants to be a hero. So it is assumed that if she wants to be a hero, she must be good. I suppose this line of argument sounds convincing, if you only consider it on the surface level. The problem is that it falls apart when you actually examine Chloé’s actual behaviour after becoming Queen Bee. Which is mostly the same as her behaviour before, except sometimes she tries leveraging being Queen Bee for status or bullying. This is because her motivation for being a hero isn’t heroic - it’s selfish.

Malicious Queen

Of course, the Redemption Illusion eventually collided with reality in the form of Miracle Queen. When Hawk Moth offers her the Bee Miraculous, Chloé doesn’t hesitate to take it, and is then willingly akumatized. While I do think this could have had a little more setup, it’s an action that’s entirely in-character for Chloé. She’s selfish, she’s cruel, and she’s unwilling to change. But Ladybug couldn’t be bullied or blackmailed via Chloé’s normal methods. So when Hawk Moth offers her a way around Ladybug’s No, of course she takes it. She accepts akumatization because she believes that the best way to prove her superiority to Ladybug is by harming her. The same way she harmed many other characters up to this point. (Including Marinette, who is Ladybug.)

Some people attempt, in the usual poor manner, to deflect Chloé’s responsibility for her actions onto Ladybug. Gotta keep that victim blame train going, I guess. The logic is that because Ladybug chose Kagami to help fight Heart Hunter for selfish reasons, Chloé is magically absolved of her guilt. I can’t disagree that picking Kagami in order to break up her date with Adrien was a bad thing, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that bad. The fact of the matter is that Ladybug probably wasn’t going to bring back Queen Bee, no matter the situation. It’s not her job to make Chloé a better person, and it’s not her responsibility to stop Chloé from making bad decisions.

Marinette made a dodgy decision because of a teenage crush and suffered massively disproportionate consequences. Chloé decided to help a terrorist because she felt entitled to the Bee Miraculous, and could still go back to her incredibly privileged life afterwards. It’s Marinette who had to live with the consequences of both their actions, becoming Guardian far earlier than she should have. A consequence that only occured because Chloé decided to help Hawk Moth. Once again, Marinette is not the problem; Chloé is the problem.

Ultimately, Miracle Queen is entirely in-character for Chloé, because Chloé has never been a good person. The Redemption Illusion persists, however, because people seem to have blended her few sympathetic traits with her occational (and temporary) good actions to create a version of Chloé who doesn’t exist within the show. Along with one last act, that really isn’t as heroic as it might seem on the surface.

The One Where She Isn’t Akumatized

In Miracular, Hawk Moth tries to akumatize Chloé and fails. Up to that point, akumatization had been presented as 100% effective, with no attempts to resist being successful. This is occationally used to suggest that Chloé is becoming good, which ignores basically all information the show provides about akumatization.

Throughout Miraculous Ladybug, succumbing to akumatization is never considered to be an immoral act. Indeed, the reasons for akumatization vary, from completely unjustified selfish reasons, to justified selfish reasons and more community-minded reasons. But no matter what a victim’s starting intentions are, Hawk Moth twists them around until he can make them into a supervillain. People are even akumatized over stuff like “kids don’t respect panthers“ and “ice cream was wrong“, which aren’t really things you can appy a moral judgement to.

Since being akumatized is not a moral failure, it follows that resisting is not a moral success. While breaking the akumatization is impressive, with very few people achieving it, that doesn’t mean Chloé gets merit points for it. Indeed, Chloé resists akumatization on the basis that she believes she can still be Queen Bee. She rejects Hawk Moth’s offer not because it’s the right thing to do, but because she thinks she doesn’t need it. Which is why once it becomes clear that Ladybug won’t be giving her the Bee Miraculous, she willing accepts akumatization.

But the real killer problem is that Sabrina is able to be akumatized into Miracular because of Chloé’s actions. When Lila’s fake Ladybug dance fails, Chloé takes it out on Sabrina, in a way that’s just, look, here’s the exact quote:

PLAY? With you!? Who are YOU anyway? You don’t have any powers! You’re a nobody! I’m a superheroine, okay? I’m Queen Bee! You and I have NOTHING in common! Go away!

That’s a horrible thing to say to someone, especially a friend! She explicitly ties Sabrina’s worth (or lack thereof) to having powers. And the real kicker? This is the last thing she does before the failed akumatization. Out of context, Chloé resisting akumatization might seem heroic. With this context? It’s anything but.

The Overdue Conclusion

Ultimately, a Redemption Arc is a narrative process for developing a character. It’s a trope, a storytelling pattern. The key element of such an arc is change. A static character cannot undergo a redemption arc (or indeed any arc), because the arc is the process of transformation, of becoming a better person. Not just on the surface, but in a fundamental way. A post redemption character is, in some ways, a different person to who they were before.

During seasons two and three of Miraculous Ladybug, Chloé does not change in such a way. She’s just as cruel and spiteful after becoming Queen Bee as she is before. She does bad things for bad reasons. Her motivation for being Queen Bee is entirely selfish. Indeed, while there is some feeling of a divide between Marinette and Ladybug, Queen Bee is simply Chloé with superpowers. And while she may be a victim of abuse from Audrey, that doesn’t mean she is excused from abusing others herself.

Chloé’s tragic flaw is her desire to be exceptional, in a way that places her above other people. This is why she fails to change. In the narrative of Miraculous Ladybug, the exceptional that matters is to be exceptionally kind, exceptionally couragous, exceptionally selfless. Character traits which Chloé displays sparingly and insufficently, because she believes she is above them. But without humility, there can be no change. Without change, there can no redemption. And while others might provide a catalyst for such a change, ultimately it must come from within.

The concluding point is that I still don’t think there was a Chloé Bourgeois Redemption Arc, but I can sort of see how you’d fall into thinking one existed. But when you actually examine the character’s behaviour, the illusion quickly crumbles. At this point, the whole thing has clearly taken on a life of its own beyond the source material, and is perhaps unstoppable. Will my long, somewhat rambly Tumblr post make much of a difference? Perhaps not.

But there are harmful ideas attached to it. As long as people try to make Marinette responsible for Chloé’s actions, it adds, however slightly, to the notion that the abused are responsible for the actions of their abusers. In many respects, I don’t care that strongly about these particular fictional characters. Yet other people do, and in doing so I see how they distort the role of victim and victimizer, and I care about that. I understand that it’s not a big serious issue, but it matters to me. So I’ll say my piece, and move on to other thoughts.

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Are there gender-designated schools in Paris? Like, all-girls schools for parents who don't want their daughters being exposed to boys or something? I know it's a thing in Canada in large cities--usually religious schools--and I think it's a thing in the US and UK, and there's a number of them in Japan... I'm asking cause in my story I was intending to send Kagami to one but wasn't sure if it was actually a thing in Paris or not and google isn't helping me.

Hi!

It's not an easy topic to find info about even when you speak French and know what to look out for 😂

I found one all boys school in Paris in my search, but no all girls schools; gender-designated schools have indeed become very rare since the 1970s, when a law made mixed education compulsory (the Haby law). All public schools nowadays are mixed gendered, and the very few private schools that aren't seem to be religious schools.

There do seem to be a few more private schools that are mixed in the sense that both boys and girls attend, but have gender-assigned classes, but they're still a rarity; again, those all seem to be religious. An example in Paris is Stanislas, which gives the option of being in a mixed class or not in collège (but not in primary school or lycée).

Hope it helps!

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Oooh neat! As someone growing up in Canada, my mind goes to flannel outdoorsy work gear when I see plaid, but it’s nice to see they at least put something of her culture into her character design. 

So far, without outside input, I’ve decided Alya grew up in  Le Carbet, a town of ~3.5k people only around 3km from  the Zoo de Martinique, which seemed like the most logical place for Otis to have worked prior to moving to Paris. Haven’t settled on where Marlena worked, other than just general beachside restaurant, or maybe in a tourist hotel or something. But yeah, general information about Alya’s life before moving to Paris would be nice. 

Looking for help...

Does anyone happen to be from Martinique or know someone from there? I’m looking to find a brain to pick in order to help me flesh out Alya’s backstory a bit more. Nothing super detailed, I don’t think, but just like… a general overview of what her childhood would have been like growing up in the Caribbean. Like, what are some common things for kids there to spend their time doing? I tried looking up activities for kids there, but all I got were tourist destinations and not the sort of things local children do for fun. 

Like, I looked up the zoo in Martinique and it’s placed in around what looks like small little towns on google maps. So would she have grown up with that small-town vibe where packs of kids of multiple ages go out on their bikes together all over the place and no one cares because everyone knows everyone else? Would she and her friends have spent their time sailing? Or surfing? Or running wild in the mountains? Would it be realistic to believe Alya knows enough CPR to save a person who was drowning (think, like in the Syren episode)? That she’d have been swimming since she was in diapers? 

How much time do kids there spend inside vs outside? What are some popular childrens shows she may have been into? Who are the popular bands she might have grown up listening to? Just… general stuff so that there’s more to her character than just what she fangirls about in the show (superheroes and Marinette’s lovelife). 

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Looking for help...

Does anyone happen to be from Martinique or know someone from there? I’m looking to find a brain to pick in order to help me flesh out Alya’s backstory a bit more. Nothing super detailed, I don’t think, but just like... a general overview of what her childhood would have been like growing up in the Caribbean. Like, what are some common things for kids there to spend their time doing? I tried looking up activities for kids there, but all I got were tourist destinations and not the sort of things local children do for fun. 

Like, I looked up the zoo in Martinique and it’s placed in around what looks like small little towns on google maps. So would she have grown up with that small-town vibe where packs of kids of multiple ages go out on their bikes together all over the place and no one cares because everyone knows everyone else? Would she and her friends have spent their time sailing? Or surfing? Or running wild in the mountains? Would it be realistic to believe Alya knows enough CPR to save a person who was drowning (think, like in the Syren episode)? That she’d have been swimming since she was in diapers? 

How much time do kids there spend inside vs outside? What are some popular childrens shows she may have been into? Who are the popular bands she might have grown up listening to? Just... general stuff so that there’s more to her character than just what she fangirls about in the show (superheroes and Marinette’s lovelife). 

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Collège Françoise Dupont Layout

This is based off of notes that I wrote for myself during the writing of my story that I’m shifting and reworking to be more accessible to everyone and not full of my random side tangents about what I can do in my own story. It is long and pointlessly nitpicky about things that make no sense. You have been warned.

So, let’s open with a bit about the school and its real-life counterpart. The school itself is named after the first French superhero character, the 12 year old Fantômette, who first appeared in 1961, written by Georges Chaulet and published by Hachette Editions. The series ran for 52 volumes, which are still in print today, and has had many adaptations over the years. So it would basically be like naming a school “the Clark Kent Institute”, a nod to the famous first that almost everyone in the native country would recognize the homage to.

Now for the actual real-life counter part: this school is based off the design of  Lycée Carnot, a school of ~2200 students within the 17th arrondissement. It was built back in the 1860′s and services both collège and lycée students, boasting several famous and influential people having attended there throughout history, and even hosts fashion shows during Paris Fashion Week. You can find more about the real school here: https://fr-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Carnot_(Paris)?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

While the school proper takes up the entire block, the one in the show seems to have only taken the iconic Eiffel Hall which is 80mx30m and surrounding classrooms and made that the entirety of the school, and then made it shorter than its counterpart and also made it no longer roofed...

Due to the smaller size of the school building as a whole, and the fact that it’s referred to as a collège and not a lycée, I would argue that Françoise Dupont is indeed not a joint school and instead just a collège, plain and simple. That means, for those of you who do not know, that the school houses four years worth of students, starting in Sixième (aged 11-12) and ending in Troisième (aged 14-15). Now, while canonically Marinette and her classmates are in Troisième, as stated clearly by Alya in the episode Pharaoh, the fact Marinette is still 13 at the start of the series and I wanted the kids to be in collège for more than just the first year of the story lead to me lowering their age in my story specifically to Quatrième. So if I mess up and talk about that instead, know that’s where my head is at.

Anyway, in the episode Pharaoh, Alya states that there are 44 girls in their year that the textbook she found could potentially belong to, so 45 girls after Lila transfers into the school. Assuming there are an approximate equal number of boys to girls in their grade, that means about 90 students in their year. In Paris the average class size is 25-30 students, however in the show the class size is only 15. Now, I had an interesting conversation not too long ago about limitations to the animation department and not wanting to write 30 unique children and give them enough screen time to make them meaningful. We discussed how the show short-hands crowds, that a place with what should be a crowd of hundreds or even thousands would be represented by a shot of maybe 20 generic civilian models and the show leaves it up to the viewers to extrapolate that to fill in the extra bodies. And in that same venue, the class sized 14-15 could be read as “only the important people are shown” and the other half of the class that is missing are supposed to be extrapolated as “there, but unimportant to the plot.” In that case, there would be 3 classes per year across 4 years, or 12 classes, which would technically fit in the size of the school, but that would also assume that there were double as may students in the class as we ever see and that half the class is made up of phantom students that exist without ever interacting with anyone else in the class on camera. 

Alternately, there are only 15 students per class like the show presents us with, and 24 classes total in the school, which means the school is less than half the size it ought to be. Given that I don’t much like the idea of someone of Marinette’s personality (or Adrien’s for that matter) and ideals just ignoring half the class for however long these 5 seasons have taken to the point they never even appear in the background or are mentioned by anyone in the story, and Mme Mendeleïev’s class photo in the Reflekta episode was similarly sized (both of them, apparently she has two home rooms? Or more realistically they just didn’t want to model another teacher…) so I’m more in favour of the smaller class sizes and bigger building approach. It also fits better with the Principal's comments in that episode about it being lunchtime and still so many classes left to get class photos of. 

But even if the school had more students per class and fewer classes needed all around, there’s still some inconsistencies and things that don’t make sense about the school, and that’s a big part of what I’m here to talk about. That, and figuring out exactly where each room we *are* shown are in the school proper. Let’s start with basic layout and the easiest rooms to identify the location of.

Here you can see the school as viewed from the rear of the building. As you can see, there is no room for more than a single row of classrooms anywhere within the school building. There are two floors, save for the library on the front of the building that is on the third floor and is itself two stories tall on the inside. We’ll circle around back to talk more about the library later, but first I’d like to draw your attention to the doors at the bottom of the library stairs. The door shown on the left of the library is the Principal’s office, as seen in the episode Reflecta (below).

The Principal’s office is rather spacious, especially for the kind of money people pay in Paris for square footage, being wide enough for a comfortable walkway on either side of his desk, a row of shelves lining each side wall covered in books, one of which is a false wall for whatever reason as it can pull away to reveal his Owl costume and supplies. Why a school would install a false wall in a principal's office is beyond me, but it’s there on the right-hand side as you enter the room. Straight across from the door is a single large window that takes up most of that opposite wall, along with a few paintings of owls around the room. But here’s where the start of our problems start coming in. 

The front of the building clearly shows two sets of windows facing the front of the building on each side of the upper layer, but there’s only one door facing that direction on either side of the library, and the office is shown to only have one window. So, what takes up the other window’s space? And furthermore, the front of the building shows the office is flush with the library, there’s no overhang to have a bigger library on the third floor. And the reverse side shows that the stairs that lead up to the library are the only things sticking out on the other side of the wall. Meaning the depth of the principal’s office and the depth of the library are the same. But when you actually look at the interiors, they don’t match up. And we know that the principal’s office opens straight into the hall/courtyard without any other rooms between them. 

Also, on a few side notes: these ceilings in this school are ridiculously high for no reason other than to be ridiculously high and for camera angles to not be running into ceilings that they then clip. Also-also, that second picture is of the “impassible barrier” that Dessinateur/Evillistrator put up so he could flee the library after his initial attack. The heroes jumped to the second landing and were hopping around on top of bookcases all fight long, but yes, this little square of glass blocking the walkway stops them. They can’t possibly go over it, or around it by a) crawling over the railing and stepping around it before climbing back over; b) jumping down to the bookcases or even floor below and coming back up the other side; c) going down the stairs behind them and coming up the stairs on the other side; or d) running around the entirety of the perimeter of the room. We will now return to our regularly scheduled broadcast.

Below the library is a giant archway that we know clearly is the entrance into the school, and on either side of it is a small door. Now, in the original blueprints of the school, during the conception phase, this area was its own proper room enclosed in walls where there was a reception desk among other things, and the principal’s office was in there. When they took down that extra wall and made it an archway instead, one could conceivably believe that the administration office had been moved to behind the door on the left. In season 1, that door only had a wheelchair symbol hanging beside it, while in season 4 it was changed to be the nurse’s office with a sign hanging on the door. Now, given the size of the space allotted, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that it could be both behind the door, with the nurse’s office tucked away behind admin as I’ve seen in a few schools I attended in my youth. 

Across from that door is what is clearly the boiler room from the indication of various episodes. The fact that the students have apparently constant access to the room and the layout of the room itself makes no sense, but the location is quite clearly the room opposite the admin/nurse’s office. 

The place that we see beyond that door goes immediately down a flight of steps, and then a pointless hallway long enough for several children to run down at once, before opening up into a two-story room that is mostly open with an overhead walkway and the strange blue glowing thing in the middle of it. There is no sign of the windows shown either to the inside or outside of the building, and they’re not far enough down for the two-story room to not be cutting into at least one of the classrooms. It was clearly a room designed to be ambient, not accurate or able to actually fit in the building it was supposed to be a part of. I agree that the boiler room would have to be large in order to heat the whole school building in winter, but it doesn’t need to be a cavernous two-story warehouse. It would be cramped and full of equipment and plumbing, which honestly would have been more freaky with a sense that something could be around any corner and there’s nowhere to run to because you’re trapped in a dark maze underground. 

So on to the rest of the school building, classes line the two sides, three on both top and bottom, making 12 rooms total with the cafeteria and locker rooms on the wall opposite the main entrance. While there’s no shots showing the students entering the cafeteria from anywhere in the building, we can figure out where it is placed by the distinctive windows shown in the background of the scenes taking place there, which are only shown along the roof of the back wall. I would almost say that the cafeteria was on the third floor like the library is, but unlike the library there’s no way to reach the third floor of the back of the building so it clearly has to be on the second floor or else everyone just teleports in. 

Below the cafeteria on the ground floor are the locker rooms, recognizable by their unique brown doors that lack any windows. Even the bathrooms have windows to them, and the locker room itself has windows all around it. The room is a mirror image for the two sides of the locker room, divided by a brown curtain up between the doors to enter. Along the dividing wall there is a row of 13 lockers, then two sets of benches, and then two rows of 13 lockers back-to-back with each other, then another two rows of benches and an empty wall where the bathroom is at. It appears as though when facing the doors from the courtyard the right-hand side of the locker room is for girls and the left is for boys, given the placement of the bathrooms and Marinette and Chloé’s lockers, but that isn’t 100% consistent and both genders are shown interacting around the lockers more than once. 

In season 1, Marinette’s locker is shown to be the third (or second?) from the end in the row along the dividing wall and Chloé’s locker is fifth from the end, by the curtain, but which row she’s in is inconsistent. Sometimes she’s shown to be in the same row as Marinette, other times it’s the double-row of lockers. In season 3 Marinette’s locker is moved closer to the middle of the row. And Adrien is shoved into all sorts of lockers to transform/hide across the seasons, but the one time that I found a clear shot of his locker that’s definitely his and not just any random open locker it was when Marinette was stealing his phone and it was the 4th locker in on one of those double rows and apparently on the opposite side of the room from Marinette and Chloé, but then he’s always shown walking in on the ‘girl’s side’ when entering and sits over there during his talks with Kagami after fencing. Also, when Marinette was looking for his phone in the first place she came in on the ‘girl’s side’ and searched there first, and one time post-fencing Marinette opened that side of the locker room and all the fencers were standing around on that side of the room with everyone who was out of uniform being males. I know this is just being nitpicky, but this is also me trying to figure out where everything is in this school. Who’s locker is where and where the people on the sports teams go to change is concerning, seeing as there are huge windows that everyone can see through and both genders just mill around casually on either side of the divide.

So now that just leaves the classrooms, of which I have managed to pinpoint the location of two of them. The classrooms line the two sides of the building, each containing a door with a glass viewing window in it to the courtyard and divided by a noticeable wall in the design of the courtyard wall. Each room has a wall of windows looking out into the courtyard and opposite it is two large windows facing out into the streets outside. Inside the classroom there is a door at both the front and the back of the room, presumably leading into adjacent classrooms. There are four rows of desks, each seating two students with walkways between and to the outside of the desks. The art room is different, but it’s also a much bigger room in the show and so doesn’t really fit anywhere else in the school. 

This door right here is Mlle Bustier’s classroom. Narrowing its location down was surprisingly easy. It was obviously a room on the top floor from countless episodes, and I had more or less worked out which room it was off of some minor clues, when I saw a shot from Rogercop where Adrien was outside the class trying to make a phone call to Gabriel that proved the class was a corner room. And then I found an image from Imposteur/Copycat that very clearly shows the windows pointing into the courtyard from their classroom and shows the back wall where the cafeteria is being *right there* next to their classroom and no further deduction needed to be made. 

Mme Mendeleïev’s class was a little harder to pin down because it’s not as commonly used in the episodes. But in the episode Reflekta, when Chat Noir is first sneaking around the school to figure out what’s going on, Nino spots him under one of the staircases and calls out to him. What’s important about this is that behind Nino is clearly a picture of the periodic table, and what room *other* than the chemistry lab would need a poster of that hanging up? And to further prove that I’m correct in my assumption there’s pictures of the window showing not only the ground-floor view of the metal stairs Chat was hiding under, but also the same poster in the back of her classroom. “So which of the four sets of identical metal stairs is this?” one might ask? Well, it’s the one outside the boiler room, proved not only by the episode itself and what happens in it, but also by the pattern on the wall behind Chat in that first picture. The back wall doesn’t have that orange brickwork going on for it, and no arches like you can see the beginning of in the image, and if it were the one on the by the hospital/principal’s office, everything would have been swapped to the other side. 

So that just leaves the art room. It’s clear it’s a bigger room than normal classrooms, and it was also rather clear that it was on the top floor somewhere, but after quite a bit of studying and scouring backgrounds, and with some help from season 4, it seems clear to me that the art room is one of those two doors at the back alongside the cafeteria. And further looking at screencaps, it seems clear it’s the one next to Mlle Bustier’s classroom.

And beyond that, some things I’ve noticed that don’t fit anywhere else, like the number of steps different stairwells have (going up one floor is generally 21 steps), or the fact that there’s a wheelchair accessibility ramp going to the main entrance of the school, but once inside you have to go down steps to get into the courtyard and there’s no ramp there, or to any of the upper-floor classrooms. The fact that we still don’t know what’s opposite the principal's office, or what is in the four corner rooms in the building. The two in the back on the ground floor are obviously the bathrooms for girls and boys respectively, but other than that the rooms don’t appear to have any purpose or way into them.  Why are there so many chimneys in a building with no fireplaces? And why do they have a CCTV of the principal’s office just up and playing for anyone to see in the library? Or, well, any CCTV showing for anyone to see in the library. I wonder how many times one of those cameras caught Ladybug and Chat Noir transformation? Definitely in Lady WiFi when Marinette transformed right in front of M Damocles while he was paused, that’s for sure…

And lastly, can I just take a moment to talk about scale? Like, I mentioned earlier about the ridiculously high ceilings, but that at least served a purpose. But when you look at this picture below and see the size of the school and its windows compared to the buildings around it, and hell, even the cars they put on the street… The window to an office should not be bigger than the front door to the building. Not that it’s not pretty to look at, but seriously. Can you imagine if they scaled the building to be the same as the ones around it, how much more could be done with the space? It would even be believable that way to imagine a full collège/lycée joint school teaching a thousand or so kids, instead of this tiny little establishment for collège kids only with not even 400 students attending.

Personally, I’m a fan of making the school narrower but longer, putting the sides into proper perspective and adding more in the back beyond the locker rooms and cafeteria, making it more interesting looking like how the school it’s designed after looks with all the extra branching pathways, but that’s just me. It would also make fighting akuma inside the school more interesting if everything wasn’t in just one big open square.

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Numeric/Pixelator

I know the rest of the internet is all off busy theorizing about season 5 and what’s to come from it, but in my little corner of the internet, I’m going to take a bit of time to talk about season 1, because that’s what I’m at in my re-write. 

I got a couple thoughts on the episode, and no real structure yet on any kind of posting, so I guess just start off with the broadest stroke and then go on from there? 

It’s no secret that in Miraculous there’s the formula of the day of “Marinette learns a lesson”. There are people out there that have documented what each “lesson” is supposed to be, but in this episode especially it feels like the lesson of the story is all mixed up, like the writers themselves weren’t sure what message they were trying to convey. 

Like, so Marinette’s sent out to get Jagged his glasses, and Tikki scolds her for doing a half-assed job of it and picking up something that doesn’t match what Jagged requested at all. She doesn’t care, she just wants to spend her day with Adrien. 

But then when they go to hand in the glasses and she gets chewed out by Jagged and sent away to do the job right this time, Marinette whines about how this means even less time with Adrien. And Tikki then pipes up that that’s what ze was saying earlier, to get the job done right the first time so that she’d have time to play rather than going back and re-doing it to fix it up to a presentable point. But... ze literally said none of that? All ze said was how the glasses didn’t match what Jagged asked for, ze didn’t mention a single thing about Adrien or free time, that was all Marinette after Tikki had finished talking. 

And, I mean, isn’t Jagged Stone supposed to be one of Marinette’s all-time favourite musicians? Like, she’s a huge enough fan of his that she “gets his style” despite their age gap. She has a life-sized cutout of him in her room during season 2 when he comes over. And isn’t she supposed to be an aspiring designer? Shouldn’t she be, like... actually *excited* about the prospect of being commissioned by someone like Jagged Stone? Not have to be talked in to doing the job the right way by Tikki after trying to skirt the duties of helping him, a famous rock star that she’s a huge fan of, because she’d rather spend her day hanging out with a boy that she sees every day in school anyway and can’t even talk to when she is around? How is this the same character that goes out of her way to make banners and presents for her classmates with little to no prompting from anyone, just because it’s the nice thing to do?

But then there’s the akuma that has absolutely nothing to do with the message of the episode and is just another stalker!akuma (seriously, there’s been a bunch of those throughout the series.) And so we fast forward to the end of the episode where four lucky individuals are awarded free back-stage passes to Jagged’s concert THAT NIGHT, and of course Marinette is one of the four, as is Alya, Nino, and Adrien despite the fact that we literally only saw one frame of Nino at work and Alya just vanished from the episode as a whole until now, and Adrien spent at least a good portion of the day stuck in white limbo with Chloe, and then immediately ran off the moment he was transported back. But the message of the episode had changed AGAIN to “work hard and do your best and your efforts will be recognized and rewarded.”

So that’s three so far semi-related morals in this one episode all vying for the right to be the true meaning. But it doesn’t even end there. If you take into account the next episode Jagged Stone appears in, Guitar Villain, you get yet another possible read on the moral of the episode in “you never know when opportunity will present itself, so don’t turn your nose up at anything and always put in a good day’s work.” Because if she had just left the glasses as “good enough” instead of going that extra mile the second time around, she never would have had her talents recognized and never would have been commissioned to make the album cover that basically launches her career. With something like that to put on her resume or into her portfolio, she’s sure to be turning heads.

And still, none of them have anything to do with the akuma of the day.

And on a semi-related note, what did Alya *do* to Chloe to get her stuck sorting trash all day? I mean, Marinette, Chloe’s favourite target that she never fails to take a jab at, just got stuck running errands for people. Sure it might not be fun or what Marinette wanted to do, but in a 5-star hotel like Le Grand Paris there’s bound to be loads of important people staying there, not just Jagged Stone. If they’re putting a 13-year-old in charge of running errands for their most important guest, they must not have any other staff available to run goffer for the other patrons. So then why did Alya have to sort trash instead of helping out with the cleaning or in the kitchens with her mother, or as a bellhop, or as another chasseur... 

And then there’s Jagged himself. Is it just me, or is he a lot more of a jerk in this episode than he normally is? I mean, most episodes he’s shown to be friendly and lovable, if a bit eccentric and idiotic. But here he was spoiled and entitled and unreasonably demanding of a little girl on a school-run career day. I mean it would be one thing if she was actual hotel staff getting paid for the work they’re doing, but she’s rather clearly not. And then when Ladybug gets him out of the akuma’s grasp he whines about where she took him to hide. He sort of redeems himself by coming and playing distraction so it’s not too big of a complaint, but still.

And on a further note, where are all of his band mates? Are they all still just back at the other hotel? And why did Alec have a room at the hotel? Doesn’t he live in Paris?

And talking about where characters live, what about Vincent Asa, the guy that gets akumatized this episode? Ladybug looks him up on her yo-yo and goes to his place where all the photos are being stored... only he’s been following Jagged around to all his concerts and sightings for months now (the last 30, Jagged says) and digs through his trash and even follows his mother to her weekly poker games and Jagged is from the States (or Britain if you’re watching the English dub) and clearly hasn’t been around Paris in at least a while or else he’d already have a hotel he knows could accommodate Fang’s needs and would just have booked there. 

So the options are: Asa has been paying for a house in Paris, one of the most expensive places to live in the world, for over a year without actually living there as he stalks Jagged and his family; Ladybug traveled to the States and back over the course of this episode just to look for clues without the use of the Horse or her Cosmobug powerup; Asa rented a place in Paris and updated all his official documentation in preparation for stalking Jagged during his stay in Paris; or the Miraculous can track people so exactly that they can find what room a random person has booked in a hotel at a moment’s notice. 

And if it is a random hotel room, he sure put up a bunch of photos of Jagged in there awfully fast. And I hope the hotel staff don’t mind all the holes he had to put in the walls for it. 

[storybook-with-a-hug]

Fix-It Miraculously

https://archiveofourown.org/works/26067214

This is my baby, a rewrite of the series where I try to correct some of the issues I’ve seen in the show. Things like pacing of the seasons, character investment and growth, relationships, and more. This story was started in response to the problems I saw developing in season 3 that the writers weren’t addressing, and that with greater observation I found to be baked into the story from the get-go. 

Problems like the relationship between the main LoveSquare, how Marinette is dismissive and even rude to Chat Noir, instead of supportive and caring like she’s shown to be with everyone else, even people she barely knows. By season 3 she’s hitting him and telling him he’s a waste of space and basically treats him like if he’s not doing what she tells him to do then he’s just in the way. But those seeds took root in season 1 where she looks down at Chat Noir as being useless without her and basically treats him like a joke. As Ladybug, she may treat him as more of a partner and a friend still, but outside the mask she openly insults him  following their interactions. 

On the other side of the mask is Marinette’s inability to hold a conversation with Adrien, despite supposedly being one of his best friends. Yet somehow, in specific episodes, she could talk to him? And then couldn’t again the very next episode and for the rest of the series all the way into season 4? Sure, at first it was cute and funny, how completely head-over-heels she was over him, but it doesn’t give way to many interesting shipping moments and definitely doesn’t give any opportunity to deepen their relationship so that it’s believable that they end up together by the end of the series for anything more than “gee, that person there sure is purdy...” 

And in regards to getting to know characters better, let’s take Marinette out of Suedom and let other people have thoughts and feelings and lives that don’t revolve around Marinette and Ladybug? I mean, I don’t think I can even name 10 facts about Alya that aren’t related to Marinette in any way, let alone Nino, and they’re supporting cast that have been around since season 1! They’re the best friends of the main characters, or should I say main character and main character’s love interest because let’s face it, even though Chat Noir’s name is in the title of the show and he’s the one with all the interesting story beats happening around him (his mother’s disappearance, his father being the main villain, his secondary-mother-figure being the other main villain, etc.) he’s nothing more than a supporting cast member. Season 4 even went so far as to officially brand him “just another member of the team”, a team comprised of MINOR characters who don’t always even get speaking lines in an episode or even make physical appearances in them, all following our shining glory that is Ladybug-the-Mary-Sue. 

So to correct that, I give the supporting casts their own story arcs, make them actually relevant with lives of their own and their own agency in the story, and watch things grow. While Ladybug/Marinette stays the primary protagonist, not every chapter is about her, and even when it is other characters get their moments to shine and do their own things. A real friendship grows between her and Chat Noir/Adrien where it’s clear how and why these two complete each other and chose to be together. Everyone grows and changes, and relationships develop naturally. 

But to manage this, there has to be consequences that last longer than the end title card, and lessons that need to stick and actually start changing how characters behave. This also extends to Chat Noir getting the credit and fans he deserves in universe, instead of the whole city just being “Ladybug! Ladybug! Let’s not care about interviewing Chat Noir. Let’s never thank Chat Noir for saving the day. It’s just Ladybug! Ladybug! All the way, all the time, only Ladybug! Ladybug!” 

And yes, some of those changes might not be for the best at first, and there does exist such things as back-sliding and people refusing to take accountability or to change their ways to correct their mistakes. Sometimes people might not even be willing to acknowledge that they made a mistake in the first place. I’m just trying to make the characters realistic and consistent. Enough of these one-off episodes where the characters are suddenly completely OOC, only to go back to normal the next episode as if nothing were the problem. 

Some episodes Chat’s flirting is “SO annoying” and “totally the problem and why they were struggling against the akuma!” and other episodes Ladybug’s flirting right back and even initializing the flirty behaviour. Some episodes Alya “totally has Marinette’s back, girl! They’re BFFs 4Eva!” and others she’s dismissive of all of Marinette’s thoughts and concerns and feelings. Some episodes Nino actually cares about Adrien’s wants and thoughts and desires and welfare, other episodes he’s just an extension of Alya and only interested in making Adrinette a thing no matter how many times Adrien insists he only wants friendship from Marinette.

And that’s not even getting into the problems of the timeline of the show, or the lore of the universe, or all those cases where the show actively contradicts itself. Seriously, how could Alya--Ladybug’s supposed biggest fan and the one civilian who knows everything there is to know about her--forget that in Ladybug’s big debut she saved Chloe from certain death, only to then go on to believe Chloe was Ladybug herself? It feels so often like if the writers just had one more person read through the whole season’s episode synopsis and beats they’d have caught so many of these inconsistencies! I swear the staff didn’t know the Origins episodes were going to exist or what they were going to have in them when they were making season 1...

So far my story is only about half-way through season 1. Each chapter is an episode on it’s own right, and there are OC Akuma that show up as well. In further chapters, there’s intention of adding a larger rogues gallery to Paris so it’s not just Team Miraculous vs Papillon and Mayura. There’s also OC supporting casts because Paris is bigger than just the Akuma class and their immediate family members. There’s friends from other classes and grades, there’s employees of the businesses parents own, there’s celebrities on social media, there’s other schools and friend groups and out-of-school extra curriculars. Some OCs are random one-offs there just to be the akuma-of-the-day. Some are there more permanently to fill out the world and make it feel more lived in.