#Setting a Bad Example

[thatsbelievable]

[dinosaurcharcuterie]

The coolest part about this concept is that it shifts not only based on your location and native language, but your own personal Silly Zone can and will change as you're exposed to more languages.

Long example after break.

E.g. my native language is Flemish, Belgian flavor Dutch. The way pronounce G's is the Silly Zone for a lot of Dutch people. It doesn't help that we looked at medieval Germanic languages and decided, nope, everyone is wrong, you'll pry the semi-formal from our cold, dead hands. We're objectively right about it, but it doesn't help.

When I was very little, I could understand German, but not speak it, nor be understood by German speaking people when I spoke Dutch. It was like the words were in a fun house mirror, or made of melted gum. I knew what I heard, but I couldn't recreate their distortion. My uncle could and can fake German to the point that he's more proficient at everyday interactions in German than at least four people in our extended family who technically are at or above level A2 fluency.

English was weird, because we had subtitles on everything. It went from "12 words make sense, the rest is coherent gibberish" until I learned to read. With zero social interaction, it slowly morphed into something I could understand, then speak, then write, until it made sense, and "coherent gibberish" shifted to Frisian and the Scandi languages. Icelandic and Finnish just sounded like the Swedish chef had a very well-spoken twin.

French was a wall. The sounds made sense to some, I could witness that, but it took three years of mandatory French classes before I could vaguely make out that there was definitely a system to it. After the full nine years of French classes, spoken French makes sense--written French, once you get away from the grammar that is still in active, everyday use by actual people, just looks like absurdist poetry, playing with the sounds and spelling without imparting any meaning.

I took Latin in school to get out of science class. I'm not great at it, but I absorbed enough that Spanish and Italian--an intellectual concept at best before that--got that ooey gooey German texture, though not to the point where I can understand it quite as instinctively.

And then I learned Norwegian, and within 6 weeks, Swedish and Norwegian were perfectly legit languages. Icelandic isn't silly, it now sounds the way its landscape looks, for lack of a better comparison, or reads like someone wrote a mainland Scandi language in an old calligraphy hand, regardless of if the actual text is in Comic Sans.

No, my brain has decided that Danish is the one that isn't a real language after all, and the people who speak it need to drop out of clown school, because surely no one can take it seriously. I know it's definitely a learned behavior I absorbed from the Norwegians, but I'd have to learn Danish to stop.

Also, Frisian now registers as a language, but only in the way that fairies in disguise register as Neither Man Nor Beast in legends. The kind that leaves food for the poor and eats greedy landlords. Do I want to know more out of sheer curiosity? Yes. Have I read enough Frisian history to know what happens if you mess with them for shits and giggles? Also yes.

The absolute weirdest thing is Afrikaans. I can't read it for shit. 80% of the words make perfect sense from Dutch--a bit heavy on the diminutives, but you do you--and the rest turn any text into an AI hallucination to me. I got graded on it in high school and failed hard. But when it's spoken? Yeah, no, that's just someone using dialect and we can communicate without either party switching languages. It's like the world wanted to teach me the idea of "it makes sense if you don't think about it". And it does.

Then I grew up and got myself a German girlfriend, now wife, and had to improve my German if I wanted to live with her. And I learned that the German Silly Zone is "all German that isn't subtitled or dubbed on the ZDF news". Any dialect, regardless of if it's for a village, a region, a state or a country that's not Germany, gets treated by Germans like a new exotic fruit just got put in front of them and they have to figure out how to eat it with zero instructions. About 50% of people do so with all the grace of someone eating a pineapple from the fronds down and with the skin on; usually after spending five to ten minutes laughing at it.

The closer a language is to yours, the easier it is to understand, the further it is from you, the harder it is to understand. But there's a sort of uncanny valley right in the middle that makes a language sound silly.

I'm an English speaker. German sounds similar, I can even find cognates sometimes. Mandarin Chinese sounds completely alien, but I can understand that it is a language.

But Dutch, Dutch sounds hilarious. Dutch sounds like a clown version of English. I wonder why that is.

I've heard Spanish speakers say similar things about Portuguese, which makes me think there's some sort of linguistic Silly Zone.

[albaricomics]

He can't stay awake during his own divorce

[pastelsugar6w6]

Elladan and Elrohir: *bickering like typical siblings at the dinner table*

Thranduil: Control your barbaric children, Elrond. They should be more refined in company. They should behave more like my Legolas. *gestures grandly at his son*

Baby Legolas: *squatting in a tree breaking open an acorn with his teeth like a squirrel*

Elrond: ???????

[quetzalpapalotl]

*grabs the tf fandom by the shoulders* the people writing for official media are not doing fanfiction, what they are doing is different and in fact, if they approached it like fanfiction that would be bad. Often they are just doing their own take on things according to what works better for the story they're trying to tell, which may or may not be in conversation with previous entries to the franchise. But they have no obligation whatsoever to reference fandom and it is foolish to expect this from them. In fact, most of the writers participated in different spheres of fandom than the ones favored by the tumblr crowd, if they even participated in any fandom at all. When they were hired they were not aware of whatever fanon characterization/lore/ship/etc you think is obvious and universal. Please.

[tootysweetcheeks]

“Touya was evil from the start, he tried to kill baby Shouto”

People when the clearly neglected/emotionally neglected and abused child, riddled with unhealthy jealousy doesn't act morally correct:

[sergle]

oohhh this message came SO CLOSEEEEE to actually successfully feigning concern, until switcharoo right at the end telling me that my I'm-Not-Doing-Well-Posting is actually me encouraging other people to kill themselves. and closing it out with a "heh, anyway! get well soon diva! ✌💋"

[sm64mario]

Remember! Mario Party taught me the game of capitalism!

And I win everytime.

[whetstonefires]

You know I'm realizing one reason you keep seeing mdzs modern AUs where the Jiang parents are alive mainly so they can dramatically fail and betray Wei Wuxian by cutting him off financially--defaulting on his college tuition or formally disowning him etc--isn't just that people want to translate the Burial Mounds II arc into modern terms while keeping Jiang Cheng clean of it.

(Despite the fact that the internal logic of Jiang Cheng's character is largely built around him being a person who would abandon someone he intensely cared about under these specific circumstances.)

It's because it's hard to set up a modern analogue for the way that Jiang Cheng is responsible for Wei Wuxian, as his Sect Leader.

We live in a highly individualistic society. People are trying to write Wei Wuxian Tragically Wronged, and because there's a normative expectation that people in the position of parents will provide you with resources, and certainly won't withdraw them without warning, but no such assumption that people in the position of siblings necessarily owe each other support, making this work in modern setting with Jiang Cheng in his canon role would require a lot of extra work, just to get a less readily resonant result.

But I keep thinking about it. Because something that's getting lost here is, not just the nuances of character and relationship, but like...it's sort of key to the story that cutting Wei Wuxian off was, in fact, Completely Socially Appropriate.

The level on which it was a betrayal is subtle, and deeply cutting. And intensely tied up in the very different opinions each of Jiang Cheng's parents had about what obligations existed in their family wrt Wei Wuxian, and what these meant.

The level on which it was the obvious, normal course of action is blatant. That is to a huge extent why it happens: because Jiang Cheng's instinct to conform is a survival instinct, reinforced by trauma, and Wei Wuxian's choices meant he had no coherently compelling reason not to obey it, and enormous peer pressure to do so.

The fact is that Jiang Cheng was making a reasonable choice, the actual thing 'anyone would do in that situation,' unlike Wei Wuxian and Jin Guangyao's respective wildly warped ideas about what that is.

Wei Wuxian wasn't betrayed by Jiang Sect like your foster parents cutting you off because you're disobedient. Wei Wuxian was betrayed by Jiang Sect like your brother refusing to drop fifty grand to bail you out of jail.

Of course Wei Wuxian tells him not to. And of course the fact that Jiang Cheng already chose in the moment not to pay a cent because Fuck You Wei Ying still stands there glaring, a precedent that can never be taken back.

And then later he's betrayed by Jiang Cheng like your brother cooperating with a police investigation into a manslaughter you really did commit, that's being handled like domestic terrorism. And then like your brother calling the cops on you. And then like your brother helping the cops find where you're hiding.

I'm personally fascinated by the way Jiang Cheng's lifelong resentment for the way Jiang Fengmian reliably bailed Wei Wuxian out of everything informed those decisions to do the normal thing, the way he's reacting against his dead father as well as against Wei Wuxian and the actual situation.

But even without that daddy issues angle, the fact that the person who made that choice was Jiang Cheng, and that it was simultaneously the reasonable appropriate normal upstanding citizen rational thing to do and so shitty Wei Wuxian would be entitled never to forgive it is sort of. The Point.

Of the scenario, and also to a considerable degree of the entire finely tuned narrative construct that is Jiang Cheng.

[elizakai]

have funky little bads concepts

(they’re stupid and silly <3 )

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The fandom can't make up its mind on what's supposed to be a joke and what's supposed to be serious because the show can't either half the time. It's a tonally disjointed mess that wants to have absurd over-the-top humor as well as a plot and moments of drama, romance, and angst that demand you see the characters as people and feel for what they're going through. Except you can't do that without also treating the dumb bullshit in a somewhat grounded way. Like, you're still dealing with the same characters. You can't just go "Oh, that? Let's ignore that!" the moment it's no longer convenient to you. You've opened this can of worms and now you have to sleep in it. So, every character flip-flops between two different versions of themselves depending on what the writers need in any particular scene.

This is not to say surreal humor can't be used right alongside characters you're supposed to empathize with, Teen Titans (not Go) did that and it worked. It's just that the absurdity can only come from the setting (Mad Mod, Mother Mae-Eye, pretty much anything Control Freak is in) or from designated joke characters (Date With Destiny). Teen Titans never had the main characters acting in clearly absurd ways as the butt of a joke unless those characters were brainwashed somehow, because the writers knew that would ruin any of the more grounded moments they wanted to write. The writers of Miraculous missed the memo on that one.

I don't disagree. A perfect example is Derision where the show takes all of the bad jokes about Marinette's crush and decides to take them seriously as if you can possible take them seriously without making Marinette come across as unhinged and dangerous. You can't, which brings us to the topic at hand: how do you even begin to understand these characters when the show is constantly making character-breaking choices?

My approach - and the approach I recommend others take if they're going to keep watching the show - is to focus on the characters' cores and reject anything canon does to violate those cores. I don't argue for this stance because I love the characters so much that I only want the good things to count. I take this stance because, if you don't, then the characters fall apart. There is no way to make them work as fully realized characters while embracing every choice canon has made. Miraculous has massive characterization issues that go well beyond the humor.

For example, Adrien has multiple moments of terrible behavior that are played in a serious manner such as the moment in the episode Frozer where he tries to start a fight with Ladybug in the middle of an akuma attack because she wouldn't accept a rose from him earlier:

Setup

Ladybug: I can't accept this rose from you. I told you already. I'm in love with someone else. Cat Noir: I know, M'lady. But if he weren't here, would things be different between us? Ladybug: Well, you know, I can't even begin to imagine him not being here. I'm sorry, Cat Noir. I really gotta get going, and you better do the same. (Swings her yo-yo to head back home; Cat Noir is sad, looking downwards, with one petal of the rose falling.)

Payoff

Ladyice: Cat Noir. We need to set up a trap for whoever turned the city into a giant ice rink. (throws yo-yo) Icecat: (bitterly) My feline instincts prefer to track and observe before I attack. You go your way, I'll go mine. Ladyice: Please don't tell me you're mad at me about the rose. Icecat: There may be a certain chill now between us. Ladyice: I get it, but we should really focus on saving Paris right now. Icecat: We don't always have to do everything together, after all. It's not like we're a couple. (skates away)

There's no way to argue this off as a bad joke. While Adrien has every right to feel hurt, those feelings don't excuse him acting like a pouting child in the middle of an akuma fight. It doesn't excuse him acting like this at any point! Ladybug is not a villain for telling him no. She wasn't even mean about it!

I clearly fully agree that Adrien looks awful and selfish here, but I'd still argue that it's not something that should be used to define Adrien's character if your goal is to tell the "ideal" version of Miraculous. "Ideal" being the version that canon seems to be going for based on the overall picture we can sort of make out if we back way, way, way up and look at the extremely abstract picture canon is clumsily painting.

Unless canon is going to do something monumentally stupid, Adrien is Marinette's endgame romantic interest. It's also clear that there is no plan to cut him from the team. He's going to be Chat Noir for the rest of his life or at least well into his adulthood. This means that he is supposed to be a good hero who deserves his miraculous just like he's supposed to be a charming and cute romantic lead. These are the two things I keep in mind when trying to shift through canon to figure out what writing choices I should fully embrace and what writing choices I have to either ignore or treat as true flaws that get an actual character arc. In my book, either approach is fine because most of the characters are deeply flawed at this point and you can't give them all arcs without bloating the story to nonsense levels.

My goal with this approach is never to say, "oh, that moment shouldn't count in terms of how people feel about the character." It's more, "that moment goes so hard against who this character is very clearly supposed to be that I can't take it into account if I want to tell the kind of story that Miraculous is trying (and clearly failing) to tell."

As an example, let's list off Adrien's worst behaviors. The things that make him look terrible:

He sucks at communicating his needs and feelings, leading to multiple moments where he gets mad at Ladybug for things she's totally unaware of

He has quit or considered quitting without warning multiple times and only one of those was because of something he did "wrong" (NYC Special)

He puts his feelings before the safety of Paris on multiple occasions, even going so far to purposely miss akuma fights to see what happens

He is incredibly pushy about his crush, often ignoring Ladybug's feelings on the topic by continuing to bring it up even after she asked him to stop

There have been multiple instances where he almost cataclysmed multiple people in a fit of anger

His love for Ladynette isn't strong enough to let him break free of things like akumas and nightmare dust even when he's looking her in the eyes making him a pretty crappy romantic lead

People will argue that some of this behavior makes sense for his character because of the abuse that canon has technically introduced, but that the writers seem blissfully unaware of. I don't disagree with that argument, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is acceptable behavior for a hero and Adrien is a hero who keeps doing these things. A sad backstory doesn't give you the right to behave poorly without consequences.

At the same time, if I fully embrace these elements of canon, what I get is an Adrien salt fic where he loses his miraculous for good while Marinette finds her real true love or even just a non-salty fic where Adrien leaves for his own meatal health and gets replaced by someone who can handle being a hero right now. Canon's not writing either of those, so the only way to engage with these flaws while enjoying canon or aiming for the same end goals as canon is to say, "I guess this doesn't count" or "I guess I need to tone this way down and work through it via a character arc" or even "I guess that was just a bad joke maybe?"

That is the essence of what I mean when I call myself a writing salt, character sugar blog. It comes from looking at canon and seeing that there's simply no way to embrace the worst moments and the best at the same time. We're not dealing with a coherent plot and/or complex characters. We're dealing with a nonsense plot that will warp the characters to bizarre shapes to make random ideas work even if those idea go wildly against canon's end goals.

As an example, Glaciator and Frozer should not exist in the same universe or, at the very least, something should explain why Chat Noir randomly changed his stance on Ladybug's crush from acceptance to pushiness. As is, the pieces don't fit together. The behavior is too contradictory. Remember, this is how Glaciator ends:

Perhaps Ladybug will love me someday. I mean, like, I love her. I have to believe. In the meantime, her friendship is the best gift of all.

Where did this version of Adrien go? Why did he regress in Frozer? There's no in-universe reason. It happened because the writers weren't ready to let the love square date or grow close, but they also wanted the love square to cause drama, so Adrien ends up looking terrible just like Marinette ends up looking terrible when it's her turn to cause love square drama. Her terribleness takes a different flavor so it can be hard to realize that this is a systemic issue, but that's what it is. It's deeply frustrating, but it also clearly stems from cheap writing and not quality characterization.

This is also why my stance is that canon as a whole only supports my Doyalistic core-character analysis style of approach. The writing is too poor quality to do Watsonian analysis where you embrace the full picture and try to put it all together. The closest I'll get to Watsonian analysis is pointing out how much the writing botches a Watsonian take by showing you all the way the writing contradicts itself, twisting into a nonsense pretzel of frustration where the payoffs never satisfy! (See the season four rant for an example or anything where I talked about Chloe's supposed damnation arc.)

There are even characters where canon is such a total mess that you can Doyalistically argue for two separate takes! Gabriel is a perfect example. He is all over the place and his ending was so poorly handled that you can make strong arguments for writing him as a cold-hearted villain or a sympathetic villain without the end result feeling like it spits in the face of canon because both takes maintain his one core element: villain.

That's the big thing I keep in mind when I look at the characters and the lore and the plots and try to come up with versions that the average fan would like. I don't think that there's one true version of any of these things, but I do feel comfortable saying that there are versions that will very clearly only appeal to people who are salty about a specific thing that canon did poorly. That's not who I want to appeal to in my adaptions, so while I'm not going to argue that those takes have no backing in canon, I will argue that those takes are not supported by canon as a whole. Embracing them requires you to take the worst parts of canon at face value while ignoring what canon is clearly trying to do with the overall story.

I get the appeal of that, but it's not fun for me because that approach feels like rolling around in the mud with the pigs. I don't want to sink to canon's level! I want to have fun! That's why I talk about how to make canon into its best self, not its worst self. If you want its worst self, just go watch the actual show. I will be shocked it if disappoints you.

[bdsmrist]

im high rn so u can ignore me but going insane over the fact that the harry that is nice to kids and likes them is *basically* the canon harry.

like harry wants to be nice to cuno despite how annoying he is, and makes a massive graffiti that says I LOVE YOU CUNO so he grows up knowing that someone out there (harry) loves him. not to mention if kim eats shit n dies, cuno comes w u and u advocate for him to become a junior officer.

also, his scene with annette is so precious; how he can tell that shes extra polite because shes guarded, and when he sees her nails, he doesnt scold her but rather sympathizes with her situation. AND stands up to her mom and calls her out for being a shitty parent (which most ppl irl never do).

and when he meets the anodic teens/young adults, hes so fucking desperate to be perceived as cool while simultaneously reassuring these kids that they are cool, and that their dreams and aspirations are valid and special. like these kids are *homeless*, but he uplifts them to the point where as a player u can easily forget the fact, because he doesnt treat them as such. he treats them like complex people, like fellow artists.

like can u imagine just how kind this man mustve been to his student as a coach. how many shy kids he befriended and got out of their shell. how many kids came out to him as queer (n he was cool w it). and how many kids he can-opened into telling him of the troubles back at home, and how he talked to them through the pain. like do u think he became a cop because a part of him hopped he could help these kids even more if he did?

i think its intended to understand harry as a complex man who holds immense amounts of resentment to the world around him, and has the potential to be one of the most detestable people ever. as a cop, and as an addict, hes seen both the worse of humanity, and seen the worse of himself. so hes meant to have one or two regrettable interactions w those around him.

BUT! he knows kids are never the problem. he understands more than anything that kids are just kids, they need to be protected, and be treated with patience, kindness, and respect. like yeah, u can punch cuno, but the game doesnt rly want u to. if u do, the skills, HARRY’s skills, tell u ur an asshole, and resent u for it.

so in short empath/gentle harry du bois is the best harry du bois. im not sorry abt it.

[waitineedaname]

binghe is of course qing jing's star student, but even the protagonist can't be good at everything, so what do you guys think his best/worst classes were?

[wackywatchdotcom]

something i genuinely adore about tadc is how painfully flawed everyone in the circus is. and not in a small way

everyone does SOMETHING that negatively impacts the others. but it makes the fact that you are supposed to sympathize with and really connect with them all the more potent. because its easy to want to put a bunch of characters in a bad situation together and to just have them all be nice to each other and everyone and never make mistakes because theres no reason to hurt each other, and most of them dont TRY to, but the way they cope is so, so realistic for each of their personalities, and it doesnt always mesh with the others, and sometimes it exceeds self destructive and Just Hurts Others, Too

they still generally care about each other and the mistakes they make and the ways they end up hurting each other dont lose their weight but like. it doesnt take away from their humanity and the fact that they are all trying so hard to manage in an awful situation

and the characters seem to have sooome sort of understanding of this too. not fully, because the characters dont tend to be 100% communicative, but when they hurt each other, it often makes EVERYONE uncomfortable. because these are the only people they have. these are their friends. and theyre all coping. but it doesnt change how much it affects them (best illustrated by ragathas lines at the start of ep 2 or gangles 'i love her, but after a while it gets kinda hard to tell how genuine shes actually being'). its not all like this, theres a good amnt of variety, but characters knowing this but not really knowing what to do about it is very painful in an effective way

(i think a subtle example of this is how zooble handles gangles situation in ep 4- they were so genuinely trying to help her because they care. but could tell as the day went on that oh, this is not working at all and its making things worse, and they leave gangle alone- something that very genuinely couldve been the moment she abstracted, because of the mask zooble gave her- and we dont get to have a super blatant explanation of zoobles thoughts on it, but they reach a fairly healthy conclusion about it that helps both of them, and i like that a lot, because on paper zooble could be placed at fault but the narrative doesnt dwell on it excessively, because thats not the point. i dont know if that tangent makes sense but i think about it sometimes. i think zooble wasnt 'to blame' but it was still a mistake, which is a hard balance to strike, and having them help at the end feels extremely effective at rounding it off!!!)

but like. in general its complicated balancing making characters in a bad situation act flawed because it can run the risk of seeming like the story is scolding them or blaming them for the situation theyre in, or like youre expected to not sympathize with them despite it (though the inverse also has complications- if characters in a bad situation never mess up, it feels unrealistic and hard to relate to, and can imply that their innocence is why whats happening to them is bad at all), but the show handles it so well

even the characters who are genuinely trying all try in different ways- some of them have similar outlooks or attitudes towards these thing but theres vital differences for ALL of them- sometimes it works and sometimes it doesnt. in fact some of the more painful mistakes characters have made in the show have come from them so genuinely trying (like the thing i mentioned w zooble, or basically Everything Ragatha Does, or pomnis first attempt at helping gangle, etc), which hits harder than if every mistake characters made had wholly selfish and cruel goals.

i mean, there is a selfishness to many of the characters' actions but imo not in a way thats not warranted. because all of them are in a horrible setting. its uncomfortable to watch characters be selfish. but it is a natural instinct to survive. its not the foundation of most of their actions, but when it is, its uncomfortable but hard to completely disparage them for in a way that makes you feel kinda conflicted

and like. it hurts to be doing your best and for that to make things worse, but its what happens often in the show. because no one in a bad situation is gonna handle it well. by the very nature of trying to survive something is gonna give, but it makes the themes of the show so much more powerful. that making sure the people around you dont feel unloved, cherishing them and finding meaning with others is no less important just because everyone is fucking up. it complicates things, for sure, but it doesnt make those characters exempt fromt this. theres a reason pomni tells gummigoo that she doesnt want "anyone" to feel like theyre nothing, and that kinger doesnt add ANY quallifiers to making sure people feel wanted and loved (not that i think either of them were thinking SUPER super hard, but it conveys smth from the perspective of the narrative

it gets complicated when you add in jax for sure, since i think on the surface he IS the exception to this concept- none of the characters like him, including pomni or kinger. but i think this is something thats gonna be examined further down the line, bc hes the main complicating factor in this reading of the show, but i feel like thats on purpose. hes universally disliked (and so is caine, in a different way) and his actions arent mistakes. they are him coping. the show has made it clear that he can be a complex person AND also a piece of shit. his actions dont detract from the fact that hes a person and the show reminds us of this. so it makes things so messy, but im genuinely super excited to see how the show examines that. where his character goes is, imo, going to be a massive piece of how this show fleshes out this concept

[finleycannotdraw]

holland march is such a disaster. on october 26 a guy breaks his arm and they spend the next two days involved in a high stakes investigation. by christmas they've started a detective agency together. this is nonsense behavior

[princesa-buck]

I’m so relieved bc I’ve been hating the “he has to let Chris decide” takes. Chris is 14!! Eddie is his dad!! He knows his parents suck! Chris belongs at home with his father who is a good parent!