Now? Well, This Is The Current List Of Characters With A Messed Up Home Life: Kagami, Zoe, Chloe, Adrien,

Now? Well, this is the current list of characters with a messed up home life: Kagami, Zoe, Chloe, Adrien, Felix, Luka, Juleka, and probably Lila. Add in Rose's serious illness, Mylene's mother abandoning her, and Marinette's traumatic past dealing with a straight up hate campaign on top of all the trauma introduced over the course of canon and I just don't care anymore. I am drained dry. They have introduced way too many serious elements without exploring any of them in depth and that is a massive writing faux pas.

Should really say something about Fairy Tail then. Natsu, Erza, Gray, Lucy, and so many other characters all had a tragic backstory one way or another, but one: they all varied in weight and depth; and two: they were all given their dues to be explored and to add substance to the characters, while also making sure it stays relevant throughout the story even if the arc is finished.

Natsu lost his only family when he was young, Igneel, and it added substance to his persistent philosophy of family; Gray lost his only mentor and pseudo-parent, Ur, and it's shown through how he uses his magic, and his tragic backstory is explored later on; Lucy lost her mother and later lived a neglected and miserable home life (sound familiar?) and while it's not shown in much of her life, her love for her mother is shown with how she literally writes letters to her and how she treats her spirits, and her family issues are also explored later on; and Erza, who was kidnapped and endured all sorts of horrific abuse in the Tower of Heaven before escaping, showed how that experience shaped her in her manner and her artificial eye, while also having her backstory also explored later on.

And there's so much more of them in Fairy Tail, in different guilds and different people that also vary in the stakes involved. Jellal, Oracion Seis, Loke, Mavis, Lyon, Ultear, and more. Their backstories are even mentioned in passing, even if it's not surrounding the trauma in general but memories related to said issues.

Goes to show that having multiple characters with different tragic backstories isn't inherently bad from a story perspective—if you do it right. The problem is that a majority of their "tragic backstories" are mentioned once and never talked about again. The Couffaine twins, Rose, Mylene, and Marinette all got a feature episode, and then go bye-bye afterwards. It never impacts their daily lives, or how it impacts their lives afterwards.

Others—like Kagami, Adrien, Felix, Chloe, and Zoe (iffy on this one)—might get the multiple-parter specials, but it's either mentioned in one episode, gets dropped for several more, and then mentioned in a later one as if they've been telling us about it the whole time; or it gets banged out in a row and never mentioned again. In the end, there's no build-up, no proper exploration, no lasting impressions; the "traumas" are just used for plot or excuse their behaviors (unless you're Chloe 'cause God forbid she ever had anything bad happen to her that she didn't deserve.)

I highly doubt any of these will ever be focused on in Season 6, because TA wants us to focus primarily on Marinette and her life; and to explore anybody else's trauma or tragic backstory, the camera needs to focus on them. But it likely won't, since anything that has to do with other characters has to do with how it impacts Marinette.

Do you think they should have made Colt a good father to Felix? Or are you fine with him being a bad father?

I don't think that Colt should have been anything. He died off screen before we even met Felix and Felix is a minor character. Why is he getting more backstory development than Kagami when Tomoe is alive and actively involved in the plot? Wouldn't it have been far more interesting if the play was her story?

But if we must include the mustachioed cowboy man, then I would make him a good father or, at the very least, a mediocre one. I'd do this for reasons that have nothing to do with me wanting Felix to have a happy childhood. I'm fine with him having a tragic past! The problem is that this is a story and, in terms of story telling, there is no reason to give him a tragic past. It adds nothing to the story. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that it detracts from the story, but we'll get to that in a minute. First let's go over why it's a pointless addition.

In his titular episode, Felix is a brat who tries to destroy Adrien's life. Those actions actually made more sense when we thought that Felix loved Colt and was acting out over Adrien not coming to Colt's funeral. Now that we know the full story, we're left asking, "Okay, so, why did Felix do any of that?" And don't say that it was to help him get the ring because it didn't help him get the ring. He got it from hugging his uncle and there were far simpler ways to get a hug.

And why did Felix even want the ring? That has yet to be explained because, in Strikeback, he was planning to go out of the country as "Adrien" without ever offering to exchange the ring. He simply stole the fake peacock and got out of dodge. He had no possible way to know that Ladybug would come to him for help, allowing him to offer up the miraculous and use the ring to sweeten the pot. I also don't believe for one second that he needed to sweeten the pot. He could have offered up the miraculous and nothing else and Gabriel would have gone for it. So once again, what was the plan with the ring, Felix? What was the plan?

While we're on the topic of Felix getting the peacock, Colt being abusive adds nothing to that plot either. Whoever has the peacock can snap any sentimonster out of existence. Felix could have the best damn childhood on the planet and it would still make perfect sense for him to want the peacock!

The only reason to make Colt abusive is if you want to explore that and use it to develop Felix's character, but I have absolutely no faith that they're going to do that. Colt is the Jagged Stone nonsense all over again. They're introducing a very serious issue that would dramatically affect the psyche of most people and then acting like it's no big deal. I think I saw someone say that Colt was only introduced to shut up the people calling Gabriel and Emilie abusive by showing us "real" child abuse as if abuse was an Olympic sport and you need to qualify for the team. I'd buy that theory, but I wouldn't bet money on it.

Even if I'm wrong and they are going to explore Felix's trauma, I still think it's a bad move. There's a thing called compassion fatigue. It's commonly experienced by health care workers who deal with traumatic cases day in and day out, resulting in thing like the inability to feel compassion for your patients because your compassion meter has been rung dry. You can experience a lesser form of this just from watching the news. Story after story of people in need to the point that you're desensitization to these events evoking horror or sorrow.

When you're telling a story, you need to keep this phenomena in mind and be very careful when introducing multiple sources of trauma. The more trauma you introduce and the quicker you introduce it, the less impactful that trauma will be for your readers. If you're a good writer, then it will also be less impactful for your characters. Allow me to explain with a quick example.

I had a brief Marvel phase and, while I never wrote anything for that fandom, I made up a few stories in my head. A lot of them revolved around my favorite character, Tony Stark (aka Iron Man). Tony becomes Iron Man after being kidnapped by terrorists and I love confessions of traumatic backstories, so I was working out how to do one for him and the Avengers to help bond the team. Then I realized that his teammates are all orphans and that the majority of them were raised in poverty. Most of them have also gone through scientific experimentation of some sort and not all of it was voluntary. In other words, in the world of the Avengers, Tony's trauma isn't really special. His team might sympathize with him, but they wouldn't be deeply impacted by his story the way I wanted them to be because most of them have gone through equal or worse trauma.

Circling back to Miraculous: they keep heaping trauma on these kids and it's a terrible move. When Adrien was the only character with a messed up home life, things were interesting.

Now? Well, this is the current list of characters with a messed up home life: Kagami, Zoe, Chloe, Adrien, Felix, Luka, Juleka, and probably Lila. Add in Rose's serious illness, Mylene's mother abandoning her, and Marinette's traumatic past dealing with a straight up hate campaign on top of all the trauma introduced over the course of canon and I just don't care anymore. I am drained dry. They have introduced way too many serious elements without exploring any of them in depth and that is a massive writing faux pas.

Generally speaking, when telling stories, you should default your characters to whatever a happy home life is in their universe unless you're going to do something with the non-happy home life. Non-happy home lives complicate stories and you don't want to introduce a complication if you're never going to explore it. This is why I think that Colt should have been at least a decent parent. It's also why you'll see me say that Emilie should be at least a semi decent parent even though canon has made that option impossible unless you ignore a lot of the unpleasant implications found in Adrien's backstory.

While I love evil villain couples, Emilie is in a coma, so she can't be Gabriel's co-conspirator and I personally have no interest in her waking up to start a new villain arc. When she wakes up (or finally dies), the Agreste's story is over and so she basically has to be nonthreatening for that ending to work. It also circles back to the issue of keeping the trauma tight and focused so that the trauma you do include really pops!

Reminder that the above is a discussion of story telling, not a commentary on what makes real people interesting or the commonality of home life issues. There's also nuance I didn't get into because this was already really long. Writing trauma well is a really fascinating and complex topic.

Thank you! 🤗 Because this was screwing my head over, and Google wasn't helpful in the slightest.

Another dumb question, if you don't mind!

I see it often that hijos means "children", but when I google if "hijas" mean the same thing, I'm getting mixed signals. One answer I got from my look-see is that somehow, if you say hijos, it means "sons/children", but if you say hijas, then it's exclusively "daughters".

Is this correct? If it is, why? Is it another one of those nuance questions, or is it a regional thing?

Yes, the default word for "children" is hijos which is also "sons"

But if someone asks ¿Tienes hijos? "Do you have children?" you might say Sí, tres hijas "Yes, three daughters"

hijas by itself only ever means "daughters"

Honestly, I don't hate this take. It would've been another interesting aspect in MLB that could've added more substance to Gabriel's character and how his mind works. One could even evolve it into a situation where Gabriel doesn't realize his views were that similar to the views of people whom he condemned. It could even showcase a short-sightedness and a lack of self-awarness, which could've impacted his villain persona.

Basically, he had an ironic self-importance about himself because he pulled himself up by the bootstraps to get where he is, and without thinking, looked down on others for not doing what he could (basically ignoring that just because he could do it doesn't mean they can).

I would've loved to see that, a Gabriel that was so high-handed and arrogant without realizing it, but also had a heart that deeply loved his family and was devoted to it to the point of taking drastic measures to keep it together—like becoming Hawkmoth to fix what he now considered his broken family.

Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, your brilliant take won't work, and it's so frustrating because I haven't seen something like that yet. But MLB has this ridiculous consistency issue that pulls their personalities this way and that until all we get is this overstretched piece of taffy that's held together by silly string and a Hail Mary. It doesn't help either that Thomas Astruc wants us to think of Gabriel as a good father, and God forbid he was anything else than that.

This is probably small in the grand scheme of things, but how did Emilie being noble play any impact in the story at all?

I mean, I'd get it if it was just a small detail to help deepen Emilie's character, but why nobility of all things? I don't know, from what I'm seeing so far, the whole "Emilie renounced her noble title" shtick just feels worthless if it's not going to impact the story or add depth to Emilie's character (like maybe upbringing or personal values?).

I don't know. Like everything else, the noble part just feels shallow and means nothing to the story, especially for a character like Emilie, who is the plot device for the whole show. Any detail about her, like her personality and life story, is supposed to influence the story and characters one way or another, namely Hawkmoth since she's his driving force.

So what was the point?

For context, this ask is about Félix's play which says that Emilie gave up her title to be with Gabriel. I'm gonna give a slightly larger section of the transcript of the play for full context, but the relevant but is at the end of the last paragraph:

Félix: The king and queen's twins grew up, each day as different in heart as they were similar in body. The firstborn, curious and brazen, despised life at court and escaped at every opportunity. The younger daughter, well-behaved and respectful, did everything she could to please her parents, and stayed quietly in the castle. Félix: (as Mr. Graham de Vanily) Oh, my queen. Did we entrust our legacy to the right princess? Kagami: (as Mrs. Graham de Vanily) She will fall in line, eventually. Félix: Confident that she would settle down as she matured, the king and queen allowed the curious princess to leave to study beyond the sea in another kingdom. There, she immediately found true love in a humble tailor. Félix: The tailor was making clothes so magnificent that they revealed the beauty of the soul of anyone who wore them. Although it made her parents furious, the curious princess gave up her rank, her wealth and her kingdom to live a bohemian life with the tailor.

Story wise, I have no idea why any of this was added since it adds nothing to canon. It's not like this finally explains why Gabriel and Emilie are poor while Amelie is wealthy. Along similar lines, it's not like Amelie's title has ever mattered. Prior to this play, I don't think that we even knew that she had a title or that she was the younger sister. The play is all about explaining things that we never had reasons to question in the first place.

My best guess as to why the writers wrote this pointless backstory is that they wanted to make Emilie seem even more pure and perfect so they went with the tired old trope of a rich girl giving up material things for the sake of love and art because good pure women don't care about material things! Only nasty, shallow women care about money. (Way to play into sexist tropes, guys.)

There may also be cultural elements at play here given that France doesn't have the greatest history with nobility, so giving up a noble title may be seen as good and pure to a French writer, but I don't know enough about French culture to say that with any certainty. If anyone who reads this blog is French and would like to chime in, then feel free!

While we're on the topic of the play, I wanted to point out that the above quoted passage is why I say that the Graham de Vanily parents can be as kind or as abusive as you'd like to make them. It's incredibly vague and you can read into it whatever you want to read into it. Were they good loving parents who were just upset about their daughter living in poverty or were they miserable controlling classist who Emilie fled England to get away from? It's up to you because you can get both reads from this. The play commits to almost nothing of value. Politicians could take lessons from this impressive level of noncommittal writing.

A better version of the play would have focused on things that actually matter to canon like the details of finding the miraculous and/or Emilie learning she's sick, but you could only have those details if they were coming from Nathalie or Gabriel. Félix is a terrible choice for a character to tell us the show's backstory because he knows so little of it, thus the play focusing on his largely pointless backstory.

I was pretty unimpressed with the actual show, but I started reading early fandom fanfic between our watching sessions and that kept me interested enough to keep watching.

This was sort of me. Except I was a bubble-headed young thing (13-15?) who watched Season 1, read lots of fanfic, and merged the fanfic MLB cast with the canon, so I had some serious rose-tinted glasses slapped on from reading fanfic that actually put them in a decent light.

My first introduction to the show was a friend showing me the episode "Horrificator", already halfway through, so I basically missed the first half and ended up in the second half, where I saw a cool-looking monster with an interesting superpower, and two teenage superheroes that—at the end—were one person pining after the other. (I didn't know about Adrien's crush on Ladybug until later.)

So, what made me like the show was the love square, because it was the first time I'd ever seen anything like it—two secret-identity superheroes, with feelings for each other but they don't know it, and I was super excited to see how that dynamic developed. And thanks to fanfic, I was basically feeding that fantasy with so many fictional scenarios that only got me more hyped.

For me, Season 1 was the best season of the entire show, probably because the drama was low-stakes and there wasn't too much lore—basically your classic "Season 1 is the intro, Season 2 is when the story develops further". Aside from the "I have his entire schedule" thing, I didn't get any red flags off of her, and Adrien also received decent screentime to explore him and his feelings.

"Gamer" and "Stormy Weather" are probably my favorite episodes. In "Gamer", I enjoyed how Marinette and Adrien interacted, and it showed that once Marinette and Adrien had more time together, she was able to get comfortable and talk to him like a normal person. It was basically fanfic Adrienette merging with canon Adrienette, and I was all for it.

As for "Stormy Weather", besides the top-tier animation and lighting, I loved how Ladybug and Cat Noir's dynamic was like. They worked great together, didn't need too many words to understand each other, and both had their chances to shine. It wasn't all about Ladybug.

I had dropped off watching the show from that because Season 2 hadn't come out yet, and even if it did, I didn't know it because I didn't have dependable internet at the time. By the time I got back into MLB, it had 3 seasons, and I was still thinking of Season 1. Even then, I saw only a few episodes of Season 2, like "Anansi", "Queen Wasp", "Malediktator", and "Sapotis", but I wasn't too mad about it. (Also, sidenote, when I first learned of Lukanette and Adrigami, I was PISSED because I was still Adrienette endgame; now, Adrienette makes me sick.)

My initial gripes about Season 2 and Season 3 weren't major at first. It was more or less just over unnecessary drama between Ladybug and Cat Noir and too much of people stanning Ladybug. But Season 4 was when I began actively hating MLB, for reasons stated already by so many people here.

And then Season 5..... well, I already had no hope for the show at that point, but I was still disappointed.

Silver lining though, MLB pretty much inspired my OC fanfic to improve the show, so there's that! 😃

Tell me, what did you think of ML when you first discovered it? I thought Chloe's arc in season 2 was decent for this type of show, even if it could have been better. I also never took Marinette's obsessive behavior over Adrien that seriously until it started getting really grating.

My first interaction with ML consisted of me looking for kids shows to watch in Spanish, finding Miraculous on Netflix, watching maybe three minutes of The Bubbler, and then turning the show off because it didn't seem very good. That's the episode that starts with Marinette freaking out about giving Adrien a birthday present and it gave me the impression that Miraculous was doing the classic female-protagonist-pines-for-the-male-protagonist-who-barely-even-knows-her-name trope, which is not a trope that I'm into. I'm way too ace for that shit. This is the scene in question as I looked it up to make sure I was remembering it correctly:

Marinette: Ah! (she stops right in front of Adrien.) Um, he-- Hey! (she gets nervous as she holds her gift behind her back.) Adrien:(surprised, shyly) Hey. Chloé:(as she watches what's happening outside) Wait! Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing? Don't tell me it's Adrien's birthday?! Sabrina:(checks her tablet, gets surprised, and makes excusing noises while smiling sheepishly.) Chloé:(facepalms) Ugh, do I have to do everything myself? Seriously, what are you good for? (walks toward Adrien.) Marinette:(nervously) I, uh, I wanted to, umm, gift you a make-– I mean, gift you a give I made-- I mean... Chloé:(yawns while Marinette is talking and then shoves her away) Out of the way. (she acts sweet.) Happy birthday, Adrien! (throws herself onto him and gives him a kiss on the cheek.) Mwah! Adrien:(surprised) Yeah, thanks Chlo.

This backs up my vague memory that my initial assumption was that Adrien and Chloé were friends while Adrien didn't know who Marinette was because he was clearly much more comfortable with Chloé. Same goes for Nino who was talking to Adrien earlier in this scene.

I'm not sure when this first watch occurred, but I know it was at least a year before I revisited the show. I made a friend in another fandom and that friend was transitioning out of Miraculous, but they had a lot of really good Miraculous fanart and even some fanfic which got me curious as I couldn't understand why anyone would be into the show given my dismal initial impression.

On this friend's recommendation, my SO and I started watching Miraculous an episode or two at a time. I was pretty unimpressed with the actual show, but I started reading early fandom fanfic between our watching sessions and that kept me interested enough to keep watching. My initial impression of the show didn't really change until we watched Origins. That's the episode that really made me fall in love with the canon characters as it took everything about the show and elevated it. The crushes had depth! The Chloé/Adrien thing wasn't just the bitchy rich girl going after the popular boy! Gabriel was confirmed to be the big bad! Things were suddenly going places and that honestly wasn't surprising.

It's incredibly common for kids shows to have lackluster first seasons where they don't really commit to anything major re plot because they're just testing the waters to see if they'll be green lit for more seasons. Because of this, I was under the impression that Origins must have been when they got green lit and season two was going to do the standard kids show thing where they really get to dive into the plot and characters in a big way now that they're making money. This assumption was backed up by the addition of the new heroes to the show's intro.

For the first half of season two, I was invested as it seemed like we were finally getting seasonal arcs. Chloé seemed to be getting set up for some sort of character arc, which I was all for as I enjoy a good mean girl arc. We also had some tension brewing between our heroes with Fu favoring Marinette, a dynamic that felt more accidental than planned since it only happened because Marinette found the grimoire at the end of season one. I thought all of that was going to come to a head with Chloé's Queen Bee debut as things had seemingly been set up for Chloé to be Adrien's pick for a Miraculous.

Then Queen Bee actually happened and my excitement quickly faded. I still cannot think of a less interesting way for Chloé to get and use the bee. No one gives it to her and she outs herself on national television right away? Talk about wasting an idea. Clearly this had just been a one-off thing done so that the show could drive up hype for season two based on promo images of Chloé as a hero.

But it wasn't a one off thing. For some reason, they kept bringing Queen Bee back and that's when I knew we were in for a bad time because that should have never happened. It especially shouldn't have happened when Marinette was giving out the miraculous. I could maybe see a setup where Adrien gives Chloé a second chance, but Marinette trusting Chloé made no sense:

Marinette: I must choose someone who's not impressed by people in power. Who can help me trap Malediktator. Huh?! Of course! That's it. (reaches for the Miraculous of the Bee) Wait, what am I thinking? (facepalms)

Yeah, what are you thinking? Alya was your first choice for the bee, she isn't impressed by people in power, and she wasn't hit by Malediktator, so go grab her! Why would you pick Chloé?

Long story short, I kept watching because the show wasn't terrible, my SO enjoyed hearing me dunk on it as we watched it, and I was really enjoying the fan content, but I didn't have much faith in canon after the midpoint of season two and I continually lost faith as the seasons progressed. I never pictured it getting as bad as seasons five, but I only had hopes for Miraculous to be truly good for about 2 weeks as that's how long it took us to get from Origins to the Queen Bee mess. I was also disappointed by Alya and Nino's hero journeys. I expected them to be chosen for grander reasons. As is, it felt like they only got recruited because their loved ones were in danger.

Since you brought up Marinette's crush, I'll end by saying that I have never been a fan of that style of crush-based humor (once again, way too ace for that shit), but it didn't bother me in a serious way because it was very obviously meant to be humorous. I just suffered through the jokes when they happened and then moved on as there was no reason to dwell on them. It probably helped that I was reading a lot of fanfic and even the people who love the show generally agree that Marinette's crush should be played down in more serious stories.

The only time Marinette's crush bothered me was Derision as that episode straight up destroyed her character. It also made the writers look awful because they made Kim the bad guy for laughing at Marinette's behavior, but we'd just spent over four seasons being told Marinette's behavior was a joke, so what is the lesson here? Are we all supposed to feel guilty for laughing at a trauma response we didn't know was a trauma response? Are the writers saying that trauma is funny? How can you be so tone deaf?

That, and the fighting was BS. It felt so clunky and awkward, and I didn't really see how "Mirakung-Fu" was giving Ladybug and Cat Noir a run for their money.

I literally saw this thing where Su Han got up on one foot, folded the other foot underneath him, bent his upper body parallel to the ground, and then started punching one of them in the torso with both fists. It looks exactly how it sounds, and it's weird. He's completely unbalanced, most of his strength would be in his legs and abdomen to keep himself up, and how would that pose be better than ANY other style of fighting?

And while we're at it, wtf were Ladybug and Cat Noir doing fighting melee style? Ladybug's yoyo in a range weapon, and Cat Noir's staff can lengthen to as long as it wants! So why bother even getting close?

The thing that bugs me about Mirakung-Fu (aside from the abysmal name) is that the spiritual aspect of it is completely ignored in favor of "Haha monks punch hero."

It says a lot when a movie where Jack Black voices a panda did a better job representing the ideology of kung-fu than this show did.

I didn't get into the details in my other post because I wanted to focus on the Luka stuff and because I didn't want to come across as making a definitive statement on something I'm not an expert on, but the spiritual thing is a big part of why I said that mirakungfu feels disrespectful to me. The way it's presented makes me feel like they didn't put any thought into what it meant to give an ancient order of monks a special martial art or really any beliefs and, if you're not going to put in that kind of effort, then why associate the monks with another culture? Su-Han and Fu could just as easily be European for all that their heritage matters to the show. The whole thing has this "Oriental mysticism" vibe to it that makes me uncomfortable.

To end on a positive note, the Kung Fu Panda movies are a great example of honoring the source culture while still using comedy! They prove that you don't have to be serious and deep about this stuff. You just have to be respectful.

Was doing the last of my work, middle of the night (12-5am) hand in pain, and was pretty much on the verge of an emotional breakdown.

AND THE ONE THING THAT KEPT ME FROM DOING THAT WAS:

"I have no time for this."

What's up with my mental? Did I just procrastinate on a mental breakdown?