i want this with marinette and gabriel too but it's much harder than with adrien because the show doesn't give much to work with. alas i try to build something in a rewrite bc the protagonist and antagonist should have fun dynamics or it kills me.
marinette and gabriel: a girl and her hero. what she strives to be. a man who made his own fashion house and is a household name. she loves his work, wants to be him. gabriel sees a lot of himself in this girl his son brings around-his childhood, before he was successful. with superpowers that give access to emotions, it's hard Not to feel empathy, and there's a reason gabriel stays mostly in his house. but... shes talented. when he's not hawkmoth, all he does is necessary work, but it wouldn't hurt to let her shadow him doing things he already has to do anyways.
ladybug and hawkmoth: i hate you give me your miraculous (starting out with hawkmoth seeing her as a child who simply can be manipulated into doing what he wants. and marinette, who is used to kind adults who have her best interests in mind, is vehemently betrayed by the notion of an adult so horrible - despises him. the manipulation doesn't work, it becomes more and more vitriolic. theyre so similar, and they hate that about one another. it doesn't matter she's a child anymore; she's a brat with a weapon too powerful for her to understand, etc.)
marinette and hawkmoth: marinette despises him as always, but the power imbalance makes her incapable of doing anything. marinettes less of a fawner though. less conversation, more her considering ways to escape. meanwhile hawkmoth still has a soft spot for the fashion girl his son likes - so he isn't as horrid as he Could be.
ladybug and gabriel: gabriel is marinettes hero and ladybug is gabriels fucking worst nightmare and both of them have to tamper it down. ladybug can't hero worship, she's the hero! gabriel can't openly show any disdain -- who the fuck hates ladybug! similar to chat noir and gabriel, it's a power reversal where ladybug technically has more power over gabriel, but gabriel has the potential to use her seeking adult validation and approval to try and learn more about her. especially since marinette looks up to him. becomes more sour as marinette becomes more disillusioned with his parenting style; she would ask questions as ladybug she would never dare as marinette.
okay i will say one of the least utilized parts of ml is that the lovesquare isn't the only characters that can have multiple dynamics at once. and in fact one of my things i wanna do in a rewrite is have gabriel/hawkmoth have different dynamics with the main characters depending on persona.
for example; what is an interaction between hawkmoth and adrien agreste actually like? in a scenario where potentially hawkmoth finds out about ladybug being attached to a civilian AND having the excuse of knowing it because it's a popular model so it wouldn't out his identity, would he choose to endanger his son? or maybe would he do it himself instead of trusting an akuma, knowing he won't actually follow through with a threat to adriens life while an akuma would?
what's a dynamic between chat noir and gabriel? that's a superhero gabriel wants the miraculous from, but he can't be blatant about it, and more than that, he has no power over a superhero and no reason to dislike him. it's fascinating.
one of my fav fucked up things is the concept of adrien talking more to hawkmoth than his own father because gabriel learns that adrien is one of the most effective ways to bait ladybug. hawkmoth can read emotions, and one day he reads ladybugs enough when Adrien is in the vicinity- and woah, her emotions are so strong about him it's readable through the magical cloaking, even! he even justifies it morally because it's not like adrien is ever hurt. is it kidnapping if it's your own son? is it really hurting him if all your doing is playing chess with him on top of the eiffel tower, an unspoken threat of super powered violence enough to keep him from doing anything reckless? gabriel is spending time with his son /and/ getting the miraculous. and at the end of the day... when gabriel gets the wish, he can fix it all - so it'll be okay! :)
If we lived in the good timeline Nino would have canon parents and Adrien would have become an honorary lahiffe but instead he’s gonna keep on being marinette’s pet boyfriend
sorry to everyone following me im not done. so like okay i haven't kept up with season 6 much. does Marinette still not tell Adrien anything. like they're in a relationship but Adrien doesn't know anything about his dad or the sentimonster thing?? like the amoks? because I just want to say if no one has written 20 years in the future divorce fic.......... the custody battle would be crazy. can you imagine. "she knew there were rings that could remote control me and did not inform me of the fact." "you've been wearing them the whole time i didn't remote control you!" "okay but when we held hands when we said our vows?" "IT DOESNT WORK LIKE THAT" "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW YOU DIDNT TELL ME ANYTHING." i simply think it'd be the best psychological horror and also a comedy of all time.
gabriel is fascinating in that he is a deeply fucked up guy. can't believe they let him win they should've shot him like old yeller. he needed to be put down
if i wrote ml fanfic it'd be so self indulgentlike lila and adrien trying to appear friendly to everyone around them but the passive aggressiveness ramps up until there are looney tunes level shenanigans happening when no one is looking until they somehow become friends. But well the thing is that s5 I don't know what they're doing anymore so lila would be my OC. but that's fine i live in s3 forever i suppose...
don't ever remind me of miraculous ladybug it's that serious to me. I treat the writing of ml like being in the damn navy.
keep thinking 'do i tag anything for organization' on here. first of all this blog was made to yap on like nobody is seeing it but me. truly my journal. and second of all i really don't want it appearing in any tags. but if i start rewriting i might tag shit for my own benefit i don't know lmao. like at least so i can find that through my endless complaining
the sensory deprivation chamber is still crazy btw. adrien is actually meant to be in a victorian novel where they bring him out to the countryside for "fresh air" and a "rest cure." ah that agreste boy and his fits of emotion... alas maybe we shall keep him in bed and see if it fixes itself by the morrow
At a certain point, ppl really have to understand that you can't really judge anything normally in ML bc the writing is just that bad. It reminds me of the discourse over Marinette killing the sentis Gabriel sent after them. Stop looking at it as "Marinette is a murderer for killing sentis" and look it as "the writing is so inconsistent that they can't decide which sentis count as real people", and it's the same for this bc the senti logic is one of the worst parts of the lore. These characters are not real and do not operate on any internal logic bc there is none. That should be what the focus is. You're not gonna find any real answers looking at things from a Watsonian perspective anymore unless you're doing it as a fun thought experiment and absolutely nothing else
Precisely
You can’t follow the show’s logic and arrive to a conclusion that hasn’t already contradicted itself
That’s why I (and so many others) choose to focus on on critiquing the meta aspects instead of wasting time on a fool’s errand
I don’t get why it’s so difficult for some people to understand that