#((Ah yes. My ever-so-favorite trope: ''you didn't choose your love interest; the writers did''))

[miraculouscontent]

okay this is probably a ridiculous question, but was it ever stated explicitly /in cannon, not a tweet/ that the ladybug and black cat are destined to be together? like call me crazy but I've been here since day one and I really don't remember that, it feels like a side tweet or fanon thing people decided to run with and use to bash other ships/characters they don't like 🤷‍♀️

Aside from tweets calling them "romantic soulmates" and only holding on canon, it depends on what you mean by "explicitly." I imagine that they’d never say it explicitly even if it was canon, especially not with the side love interests because then it's like, "well, nothing matters so what's the point?"

As for the ladybug and cat specifically being destined, it's debatable, and I say that because Adrien and Marinette - at minimum - are "destined"? And I don’t say it in a good way.

Like--you can only hear "they're made for each other" so many damn times (to the point where even Chat boasts about it, which is where the idea comes from that at least he believes that they're destined) before you're like, "I get it, you're destined, kindly shut up."

You can only see them conveniently bumping into each other over and over again without seeing this as some form of fate. The term "contrived writing" doesn't exist in the world they live in.

Marinette's line in "The Puppeteer 2" lamenting how she and Adrien aren't "molded together in the plaster of destiny," with the obvious joke being that they are and she doesn't know (I know there are a few others like that that don't specifically say "destiny" but they're escaping me at the moment)? Yeah.

Akuma that was made into a gag before about how quickly he was defeated (Mr. Pigeon) suddenly taking an hour+ after they try to get with other people? Hm, interesting, surely it's just an off day for them.

Also, the red strings on their lucky charms? I doubt that's a coincidental design decision.

So on that logic, either Marinette and Adrien are soulmates/destined without the miraculouses and destiny led them to the miraculouses to further force them together, or it's because of the miraculouses that they're destined.

If we’re talking "explicit" as in "said with actual words" then definitely not, and when I refer to "destiny," 95% of the time I'm referring to Marinette and Adrien, not the fact that they have the ladybug and cat (Dread String of Fate runs on this too). I just feel like the evidence is so damn stacking at this point (we had the "made for each other" all the way back in "Origins" for crying out loud, as the closing line).

I think people using it as an argument against the ship is one thing. When we use the term "destiny," we're not pointing to specific dialog and more the contrivances and the force fate that's pushing the two together.

Why any love square stan would use "destiny" as some sort of selling point after that is beyond me. Destiny is not an argument for the love square, it's an argument against it.

(The TL;DR is that destiny is never stated outright and only heavily implied, making it a good argument for us salters because they keep teasing the idea for the people obsessed with the idea of soulmates while avoiding the outright admittance that "they're together because they literally can't be with anyone else," whereas it's a bad argument for the stans because they might as well be saying, "Ha! Our ship needed help by fate to get together--wait--")