Really, I Took It As Gabriel Actually Caring About Adrien And Saving A Family Picture He Made When He

Really, I took it as Gabriel actually caring about Adrien and saving a family picture he made when he was young in his safe.

Hey hey hey hey

Remember that time Gabriel broke baby Adrien's drawing of his family in the Collector back in Season 2?

It looks like the miraculous ladybugs never fixed that back then and that Adrien's family really is broken and unfixable 🙂🙂🙂

the way Adrien stuttered like “You want to reveal our identities right n-n-now?” and then his small hopeful smile after the transformation dropped and then the way he had no hard feelings whatsoever towards Ladybug for not wanting to reveal her own identity right away because he knows it’s terrifying and then the way he said “my heart is beating so fast″ and “I hope you’re not too disappointed”

Like compare his actual reaction to the reveal vs the time he said “if you saw me without my mask, you wouldn’t be able to resist me” I’m crying he’s so sweet he just wants Ladybug to like him

Ephemeral be like

You know what’s sad about Marinette never even considering Adrien as Cat noir and Adrien being so ready to Jump on the Idea that Marinette is Ladybug?

It’s the fact that we will never get the worst/best Cold War of Chat Noir Vs Ladybug, both of them examining every interaction they to for some scrap of proof to prove the others’ identity and both of them coming up with planes to contrive a clue.

Ooh yeah, that particular bit of fanon is scrapped. Adrien will immediately jump on the slightest evidence that Ladybug could be Marinette, skipping the whole "finding a smoking gun" phase and just going "Yep, that's my Lady!", while Marinette Will Not Consider It unless it's literally staring her in the face.

Kinda funny, since fanfics often pushed the opposite, especially with Adrien. Even now, "Oblivious Adrien Agreste" is SO ingrained that there are still fanfics and jokes about it, even though he's shown that he can sniff out Ladybug, EVEN when she's wearing another costume, like in Feast and Kwamibuster, and has zero difficulty believing that she's the love of his life.

I've seen people hating on Marinette and/or the writing of Ephemeral for "doubting her feelings for Adrien" or like being "grossed out" by him after finding out he was Chat Noir but that's not what it was at all? At least not how I read it. I mean I fully expected and was in fact Looking Forward to the inevitable freakout and prpr Coping Period for Marinette while she had to rethink her entire world. If you didn't think that would happen on her end then idk if you've been paying attention to the show but anyways

Marinette wasn't doubting her feelings for Adrien but rather doubting their Validity, i.e. she was basically going through the True Selves(tm) discourse bullshit in her head - "Was I in love with a fake Adrien? Is Chat Noir the real Adrien and the Adrien I fell for just an act? Or is it the other way around? How could these two people I thought were completely different be the same?" It was only natural that she'd freak out because of how Adrien had compartmentalized different aspects of his personality in to different "masks" and how he always acted overconfident and over the top around Ladybug as Chat Noir. And then as she watched him more closely with this new knowledge, she started seeing how the two sides overlapped and fit together as one wonderful boy and realized they're Both parts of real Adrien, and that the boy she loved was also her partner who had been fighting alongside her all this time, and she loved him all the more for it.

Conversely in the Chat Blanc timeline she'd already been dating Adrien for some time before the reveal so she'd undoubtedly already seen him act like a clown around her, and on the flip side, seen Chat Noir act more Adrien-like around Ladybug since he secretly knew she was his gf, so it would've been easier to put the two of them together in her mind (and a lot of the shock would've been overridden by the intense emotions of the "breakup" that'd just happened). In the canon timeline, Adrien only resolved to act more like himself as Chat Noir in Glaciator 2.0, which was only 7 eps before Ephemeral. On top of that, as you know, those 7 eps had a lot of other important stuff going on in the foreground, leaving little time for Ladynoir to just hang out together and talk one-on-one like they have before. He hasn't had enough time/opportunity to really show who he is to Ladybug, and therefore at the present time Ladybug still has the idea of him being this overconfident flirt/clown - and that's really not her fault.

As I said before Ephemeral, the whole point of the episode was going to be a checkpoint…where are Marinette and Adrien in terms of their development?

We learned that Marinette is not at the point where she can see Chat Noir for who he really is, nor is she completely ready to be vulnerable with her partner. The “identity reveal” plan proves that, as well as her freakout upon learning his identity.

We learned that, while Adrien is starting to be more comfortable with himself, he’s still got a bit to go. He needs more confidence (and probably more information about potential senti-status) if he wants to stand up to his father for good.

Blind love walked them into Gabriel’s trap in Chat Blanc, but Ephemeral is the extra confirmation that it was never their love that destroyed the world. Ladybug is probably going to come out of it thinking that the identity reveal is the problem, but we still know the truth, especially now that it’s been hammered home again. The show is going to keep hammering it in. It’s always Gabe’s fault.

And the reason we see it again this time? Because we’re still peeling back the layers and trying to uncover all the little secrets Gabriel has, and the true depth of control he has over Adrien. We’re not done learning things about that yet.

Anyway, if anyone still thinks the reset made this episode pointless, I encourage you to rethink the way you view the storytelling in this show.