Imma Make These One Day

Imma make these one day

not a dream

you know those vases with crocheted flowers in them?

i just think they're sooooooooooo neat

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.

Oof, I didn't even think about that. But now that it's been put out there, one realizes just how messed up the whole sentimonster thing is.

It also brings up questions about what a sentimonster is, what it can do, and how the Peacock Miraculous holder influences it.

Most sentimonsters present in the show aren't capable of free will, like the Banana Gorilla and the Reflekdoll—and the one that did gain it was the Sentibug, who just got poofed anyway by Mayura in the end.

However, Adrien never had that "break-out" moment, and if he did have one, we never saw it. So, the question really does put in a dark turn to the whole Adrien being a sentimonster.

One can argue that Adrien rebelling against his father is a sign of free will, but you have to wonder how much of that is Adrien's personality that he cultured himself and not some pre-programmed behavioral traits that Emilie wanted in a son.

The same goes for Félix. How much of his personality is his, brought about his father's abuse... or are they behavioral traits his father programmed in him or lingering emotions Colt was expressing himself before he died.

Then there's also the twin rings, and how Félix stole one of them that had his amok in it, so he could gain control back. Doesn't that imply that if you gain a sentimonster's amok, you could control it, even if you aren't the Peacock Miraculous holder?

I don't think Thomas Astruc thought this whole sentimonster thing through, because you've basically got several cans of worms that put darker twists into this whole Miraculous Ladybug stuff that can't just be ignored.

However, I highly doubt that he'll do anything about it. It kind of makes me wonder if he even realized exactly what he was doing by making sentient sentimonsters.

I think one of the worse things about Adrien being made a Senti is that now, I got to question how genuine he is and what is potentially influenced by Gabriel subconsciously.

Like, Adrien's stance on Chloe and Lila, both of whom help Gabriel with his agenda, it could be through Gabriel's influence that Adrien sides with them/discourages Marinette from challenging them. If they are stopped, Gabriel wouldn't have them to help him.

And then there's the matter of his romantic feelings and how he works off Ladybug. Gabriel wants to know who she is under the mask, and Adrien is often pushing for a reveal. Gabriel has a spiteful obsession over Ladybug, to the point he skipped out over his easy win with the Rabbit, and you got Adrien unable to divert away from Ladybug even when he starts dating another.

Is it possible that Adrien is just echoing Gabriel's agenda and intentions and is mistaking that for romantic love?

Given that whoever holds the item can fully control the senti, supposedly, yeah I now got to wonder what's truly Adrien and what's Gabriel's influence.

It goes even further than that. Whoever has the amok seems to be able to control literally every facet of your personality and those commands seem to hang around until someone overwrites them, so is anything about Adrien real? We know that Emilie was wearing one of the rings in her coffin, implying that she entered her magical coma while wearing it, so it's quite reasonable to assume that she actively used it pre-coma. In that case, what commands of hers are still controlling Adrien? What command of Gabriel's and Nathalie's were never undone? Who even is Adrien?

Like is his lack of strong negative feelings about his mother's death real or just the result of her telling him to not mourn her like she told Gabriel to not mourn her? Is he into piano because of natural interest or because his mom wanted him to like piano? Is his lack of career goals because no one bothered to program them in? Is he even capable of developing his own wants? Is his interest in Ladybug real or is it because she's kind of similar to Kagami and Kagami was the one he was supposed to fall in love with, so he just imprinted on the wrong girl? That last one is not helped by Kagami falling for Adrien's clone at the drop of a hat.

All of this is yet another reason why the sentistuff repulses me on a fundamental level. It just completely undermines everything about Adrien's character. This is not the sort of plot you pick for a rom-com and I'm here for the rom-com.

One thing I actually dabbled in (in thought, not on writing) is Lila not really being fourteen but an adult mage who was either a scorned member of The Order of Guardians or someone who wanted the miraculouses (of course, sans "flirting with Adrien").

I figured it would make sense, because besides having time for the evil intentions to marinate in her personality, but her ability to miraculously fool people could have an explanation.

On the topic of Lila, her character made a lot more sense when all we knew about her was that she was the daughter of foreign diplomats. Judging by the fact that they brought her to France, it's safe to assume that her parents probably cart her around everywhere. Now, an ambassador serves on average for about three years. A kid who's moving to a different country every few years can't keep friends around and has to start from scratch everywhere they go. Lila was naturally going to end up being very lonely. So, what makes the most sense to me is she started lying to seem more interesting, and became addicted to the effortless popularity and clout she got by doing it, to the point where all her other motivations fell away. The fact that she was always moving also had the effect of insulating her from consequences—by the time anyone could figure her out, she was long gone.

I strongly agree with everything you said. The more we learn about Lila, the less anything about her makes sense. She went from a pretty logical, but poorly executed character to a massive question mark! Nothing about her makes sense! How did a fourteen-year-old convince all these people that she was their missing kid? How did Lila even identify people with missing kids? I'm so confused.

A part of me really wants to know the answers to these questions because it's such a weird twist, but then I think about all of Lila's other lies and I lose most of my interest. I just don't trust the writers who came up with the oh-so-brilliant lie of, "Jagged Stone wrote a song about me!" to be able to tell a convincing story about maternity fraud.

I wonder... How do people just. KNOW. their sexual orientation?

I know some people know immediately, and some know later, but it just amazes me how they are able to realize it and just... go with it?

I can't even make a decision on what kind of coffee to buy, how do you do it???

I also think the show should have also worked on Adrien's crush on Ladybug, because he was also essentially romanticizing her. Would've been nice, and I feel like it might help with their developments.

What I find weird about Marinette's crush is that Origins has her not caring about Adrien being a celebrity or the son of a fashion designer she admires which sets it as being a normal crush on a person you know (who happens to be a celebrity) but then the rest of the show mostly treats it as a celebrity crush

There's a reason that I've often said that Origins the best writing that the show ever gave us. While it's not perfect, for me, it was the moment where the show suddenly got good and had true potential. My possibly far too generous read of that squandered potential is that the writers wanted to write a strong romance, but they used the wrong trope to guide that romance in the wider story, so we get a story that's the worst of both worlds. It fails to fit the mold that it's guiding trope is supposed to fit and it fails to be a strong romance because the chosen trope doesn't allow for a strong romance, so let's talk about why that is!

It's really common for formula shows with a teenage lead to have a character for that lead to crush on. Kim Possible had Kim crushing on Josh Mankey for the first few seasons. Phineas and Ferb gave Isabella a crush on Phineas and Candace a crush on Jeremy Johnson. Danny Phantom had Danny crushing on Paulina. I could keep going with examples because this is such standard trope! In fact, if you look at how these shows play these crushes, then you'll actually find a tame version of Marinette's writing where the crushes are often used for comedy.

The problem is that this trope is pretty much never used to develop a serious romance between two leads. It's either used to create tension between the true romantic leads or to give a character a little extra depth because people get crushes and it's a nice, relatable element for kids and teenagers.

The reason why you don't use this trope with romantic leads is because romantic leads are supposed to have an actual romance. We're supposed to watch them fall in love and be invested in their relationship! That simply doesn't fit the way this trope works because this trope is all about the experience of having a crush, not about the experience of truly falling in love.

To go back to the Kim Possible example, Josh Mankey is what TV tropes calls a "satellite love interest." He is truly just there to be shipped with Kim because she's a teenage girl and teenage girls have crushes so we need our cool teen girl heroine to have a cool crush. However, somewhere along the line, the writers decided that Kim and her partner Ron were going to be the end game couple. Once that choice was made, Mankey was out! But Kim didn't start treating Ron the same way that she'd treated Josh because Ron wasn't just a cute boy for our cool teenage lead to crush on. Her was her costar. A romance between them mattered as it's success would redefine the entire show! It's failure would straight up end the show! That meant that this couldn't be your standard teen romance. It needed to feel so much more real and powerful and lasting.

This is where Miraculous' problems come in. When we look at Origins, we can see that the writers really do want our romantic leads to feel like romantic leads. They want this romance to feel real and powerful. We can also look at season five to back this up. Once the square is together, they have some truly adorable moments. For example, the hand raise scene in Kwami's Choice was about the only good thing that episode gave us. We can even look at the final episode of season five to back this read. While it's generally a massive failure, it is all about Marinette's relationship to Adrien. He isn't just a cute boy that she's crushing on. He is massively impacting her life.

But when we look at the leadup to this romance happening? The things that took place between Origins and Kwami's Choice? There's nothing of substances. I can't even tell you why Adrien's crush flipped to Marinette or if Marinette's crush on Chat Noir was supposed to feel like anything more than a rebound. There's not even much substance once they get together because substance would require them to have deep conversations about their lives and they can't do that while the secret identities remain a thing.

This is part of the wider problem that every side of the square feels like casual friends at best because the their story wasn't written like a romance. It was written like two sets of impossible crushes where the focus was on the struggle of having an unrequited crush and not the thrill of a romance. Adrien isn't Marinette's Ron, he's her Josh Mankey. Same goes for Ladybug and Chat Noir. While Ladynoir was closer than Adrienette, we never got moments that showed them as close friends with a bond like no other. Alya and Marinette are closer than any side of the square and that's a pretty massive writing failure for a rom-com unless Alya is secretly Marinette's end game romantic partner.

To continue our Kim Possible case study, Kim and Ron really don't feel like a couple for most of the show. For the first three seasons, the focus was on their friendship to the point where I didn't even think about shipping them when I first watched the show. But when the relationship suddenly happened in the final season? It still felt natural and right! Of course these two would get together! How did I not see that?

If Miraculous wanted to make the square feel like a true romance, then they needed to take a lesson from shows like Kim Possible. They need focus on making Ladynoir and Adrienette extremely strong friendships with a background element of pining and romantic tension. You could keep Marinette's failed confessions, but they should almost always fail into cute friendship moments like Adrienette gaming in Gamer. Same goes for Ladynoir with moments like that one episode where Chat Noir could have learned Ladybug's identity, but chose to respect her boundaries instead. These kind of moments keep us excited for the square because they make it feel like they're obviously meant to be. But when it's just Chat Noir hitting on Ladybug and failing to get a positive reaction or Marinette failing to even talk to Adrien? That's not love. That's a hopeless crush.

This doesn't mean getting rid of Alya. Kim Possible had a female best friend, too! Her name was Monique and I loved her, but Monique and Kim's relationship never felt more important than Kim's relationship with Ron. There was even an episode where Monique tried to replace Ron since he was unavailable and she failed hard because, without Ron, Kim can't be a hero. If you want another show to look at to see how the square should have been written, then I'd check out Danny Phantom. That show has an endgame couple - Danny and Sam - and their relationship always had a romantic tension to it, but it was primarily a friendship for most of the show. I'm not saying that these two shows were perfect, but they did a great job with the romance element and show how Miraculous could have made the square work.

There are actually a lot of ways that show's like Kim Possible could have inspired and guided Miraculous. It's why I like using it as an example where I can. It's really sad to see a 2016 show failing so hard when there's a wildly successful 2002 show out there that had already shown how to succeed when using similar concepts. Marinette and Kim are even similar characters as are Adrien and Ron and even Plagg and Rufus. The template was out there, guys! Kim Possible even shows us how to take a comedy side kick and develop him into something more as the series goes on. Episode one Ron and end of show Ron aren't the same character. End of show Ron feels way more important!

This is also why it's so useful to study tropes. They're the building blocks of stories so it's very useful to understand why certain builds are popular so that you know when and where to use them. Don't like a trope? That's totally fine, but you generally want to start by asking "why is this popular" instead of just dismissing the trope all together assuming you're working in a genre where that trope dominates. Like I'm personally not a big fan of the satellite love interest, but I appreciate why they're a thing and understand when you should use them.