#non-specific fandom things

[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.

[greenerteacups]

Hey GT! Totally fine if you ignore this, and I apologize if you get asks like this a lot as I'm sure they can be irksome, but I was wondering if you'll ever feel comfortable revealing anything about yourself? Even if you keep it vague, I'm just so curious about where you're from (I think you have said you're in the US lol) your age and things like that. I know there are certain things we'll never know and I think that's completely fine, just wondering if you think you'll ever tell us any small, even vague, details x

Oh, sure! For starters, I'm a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I'm also a witch, and I go to a magic school called Hogwarts in England where I'm in the seventh year (I'm seventeen). I'm a goth (in case you couldn't tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow. I was walking outside Hogwarts. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.

[dekusleftsock]

Mha fandom when you say that Izuku’s biggest fic mischaracterization isn’t making him twinky:

WHEN DID BEING A TWINK BECOME A BAD THING CAN I JUST ASK THAT

Like yes, twinkifying one male character in a ship can be annoying—it can perpetuate heterosexual roles onto same sex relationships (“who’s the woman in the relationship/who wears the pants in the relationship?”), BUT LET US BE CLEAR:

TWINKS ARE A PART OF THE QUEER COMMUNITY. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING A TWINK, MAKING A CHARACTER A TWINK, OR SEEING A CHARACTER AS A TWINK.

WHEN in the ever loving FUCK did that somehow translate into “the twink has to be the stereotypically aggressive one so it doesn’t abide by queer stereotypes”. HOW DID WE GET HERE.

[bluedalahorse]

Periodically I wonder what Young Royals fandom could have been if bad faith anon discourse about so many characters and plot points hadn’t been so Everywhere during the fandom’s heyday.

[crownedwille]

I know the fandom is shrinking so it makes this even harder but are there active yr blogs who also contribute something to faves fest that doesn't include wilmon (besides like the two other blogs I can think of)? Or in general any blogs who post content of literally any other character? I seriously wanna know, are there Sara blogs, Felice blogs, etc? If so, I would love to follow them so in case you are and see this, please speak up

Or let me rephrase this: are there any people who are interested in including more Sara or Felice or other characters on their blog?

[t1oui]

so i was just working on character charts for some of my ocs and realized my oc hitell's favorite book, nyho gaten, translates to starchaser... they're everywhere guys

[akins-art]

Can you please draw a good and non-hating RocheCiri…

Hi! Sorry, it took me so long to answer. :) Hope you like it.

Truth to be told, it's not my ship so I struggled with what to draw. No ideas were coming to me. (Thanks for the reference drawer) As for the non-hating part, they look weird because I am not that good at drawing recognisable characters in my style (in my opinion). Not because I disfigured them on purpose.

[shakingparadigm]

"trying to get Ivan into the tumblr sexyman fandom wiki" anon here. I succeeded. He now has his own page on there. Yes yes yes I KNOW that he doesn't really "qualify" as a Tumblr sexyman (he's moreso just a regular sexyman) but once you visit the tumblr sexyman wiki you'll be surprise at what people there consider to be sexy (it's..... Bizarre to say the least) and there's like almost 2k characters who are considered to be sexymen on there. Once you get sucked into the sexyman wormhole you'll realize that there's more to sexymen outside of Tumblr and that it's alot more complicated than "suit and tie, is evil, is rich" ect ect. In the end a sexyman is just any character who is considered sexy by their fandom lollll

YOU ACTUALLY GOT HIM ON THERE 😭 CONGRATS 😭 Though Ivan isn't close to the big tumblr sexyman names I don't think it'll hurt too much if he's on the wiki. It's all in good fun, anyway. I can't believe I'm discussing a character's fandom perceived sexiness this late at night when it's a busy Monday tomorrow. Tumblr moment. Anyway good on you anon

[do-you-ship-this-taz-ship]

Propaganda: im gonna be real i just genuinely want to know if people still ship this. because this WAS a thing. at LEAST two people shipped it. Clint made a joke in crystal kingdom about Killian having a crush on Johann and writing it in her diary, and she blushes iirc. there was a whole jumbotron of a couple who called themselves Killian and Johann.

[waywardsalt]

1 and 8 for the choose violence ask game?

1 (the character that everyone gets wrong): ok this one is tricky for me bc to some degree im cool with ooc-ish stuff on the case of like aus/personal interpretation/whatever AND i am actually someone who doesnt actually read a lot of fanfic and doesnt have tooooo many really strong feelings abt characters outside of phantom hourglass so this one i had to think abt for a bit for a character that i have strong enough feelings on and actually like. care and know how ppl popularly interpret them. i am a bit of a hater but its very specific haterism a lot of the time. so i don’t really have much of an answer for this? (except to say im a bit put off by ww/ph link as like some hardened rough and tumble pirate type, that’s always felt off to me)

8 (common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about): shut up about linebeck committing tax fraud shut UP about linebeck and tax crimes he’s a THIEF like CANONICALLY textually theres a whole fucking subplot that’s caused by him being a THIEF BITCH. he recommends theft to link at least once. shut the FUCK up about fucking tax fraud. what you all want is that mob psycho cunt. burglary is a hotter crime anyways.

[captainstressed]

eddie diaz is not a canonically queer character and by spamming official accounts on social media claiming otherwise you’re playing into the homophobia that a lot of queer people have faced for most if not all of their lives.

the best part of fandom is that if you want to believe something for yourself you can and you can share it with others who have the same beliefs. these people don’t include the real life actors who play these character on the show and it also doesn’t include forcing your views down the throats of other fans that just don’t share the same thoughts as you.

[strawglicks]

i can feel myself drifting from the TTCC community .. like i still love the characters and their dynamics, but ive been thinking less about toontown as a whole and just some of the characters are lingering . this usually happens towards the end of my obsessions

plus i just dont feel in touch with the community LOL i just kinda stick to my own stuff and sometimes like the art and stories ppl make .. but im in this awkward spot right now where im MENTALLY not engaging as much. idk if this is anything

[fuckyeahlesmiserables]

Had my work Christmas meal today. They played I Will Follow You Into The Dark. It felt like physically being thrown back in time ten years.

[no1ryomafan]

I love how I’m a queer person who writes fanfics yet my fics while diving into my sexuality-I’ve written a bit of straight content but I may be bi, yet it’s still clear I’m into MLM-I’ve barely touched the surface of my gender.

I’ve written Kei being trans as fuck sure but no one knows how much I hold back gender stuff with Ryoma and it’s not because I think some loser will be hung up, I just don’t know how to literally execute the ideas I’ve had because there’s either not enough room for it or if I could pull it off.

[jutsuuu]

girl help I’m experiencing

[rooftops-are-for-towels]

Realizing that the hottification of skin marks and hair and all that and the increased desirability of all that fun jazz has become another body standard for people who do not have bodies that are "conventionally attractive" to look at enough already. Shout out to people with bodies with distributions of fat or lackthereof that's considered substandard that have no fun marks and tidbits bro