Gabriel Is Fascinating In That He Is A Deeply Fucked Up Guy. Can't Believe They Let Him Win They Should've

season 4 where instead of ladybug pushing chat noir out because of uh. er. well. shes reluctant to give him information because she's started noticing hints that he's a sentimonster and she's unsure if he's been replaced. meanwhile chat noir has no idea what's going on and why ladybug is starting to rely on other people -- after all... nothing has changed, right?

i do think the sentimonsters thing is absolutely intriguing but it doesn't seem planned at all and the fact that so many characters are sentimonsters makes it feel more contrived to me. also the fact there's no difference between people and sentimonsters. it would have been way more interesting if it had been hinted at since the beginning and became more of a hint over time to gabriels identity. like for example how fascinating would it be if chat noir had the typical "symptoms" of a sentimonster - whatever that may be - that he doesn't notice because he's lived with it forever but ladybug does through pattern recognition - and she has to figure out if this chat noir is HERS and always been a sentimonster or been replaced. and if he's always been a sentimonster, his identity itself is the clue to who hawkmoth is. it would also be a fascinating way to do a "chat noir villain arc" where gabriel finds out adrien is chat noir and instead of being a fucking dumbass and akumatizing him, he uses the ring to make chat noir a double agent and get the earrings from ladybug. ANYTHING but what they're doing. ANYTHING AT ALL!

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...

@wavebiders sorry to screenshot your tags but i agree with all of this so much + the examples. the messaging has always irked me about ml. for a kids show with an akuma of the day it's a pretty perfect set up to have those kids show episode formulas of learning a moral every episode but the morals ml teaches is, quite frankly, insane. which would be fine if it was for a little bit of an older audience but it's NOT. i dont know for some reason ive always seen miraculous as quite honestly pretty mean spirited in its storytelling...

like there's just so much going on in miraculous ladybug like it's a baby kids show that has akumas every week and is funny and has cute romance which is what i expected and i assume most people wanted. and then it also has insane themes from things such as having a miraculous that has a power of creating designer babies forced to do whatever you want; which is not inherently bad i actually think it's a fascinating topic to explore but maybe in a horror movie. not the baby kids show that is mainly a feel good romance? i suppose the idea is to make it more similar to avatar and other family focused shows where it is both fun but has adult themes that cater to parents watching, but in this case they could handle their more adult themes with like a smidgen more care than they do. instead they introduce shit like sentimonsters and waffle on the morality of doing stuff like: killing them. GIRL‼️ this is a baby kids show we're teaching children MORALS‼️ murder is bad guys. unless the heroes do it 💖

the miraculous au in my head where chloe and marinette are actually both into fashion and their school rivalry also becomes an actual rivalry in the fashion world but marinette wins that hat competition and impresses gabriel enough that she eventually becomes his apprentice, slowly entangling marinette in gabriel’s webs and manipulation not unlike adrien, lila, and even the other rich kids such as chloe n kagami. ties marinette closer to the main conflict in her civilian form. so i dont have to see marinette sneak into the agreste mansion for the 500th time, she’d just be there. also just because i think the drama would be insane.

Tell me, is there anything about Miraculous Ladybug that you wish had gone differently?

everything

Funniest fandoms are where the fans are like, "I'm obsessed with this. I don't recommend it even slightly."

miraculous ladybug asks a brave question. what if being a teenage girl was worse than being a terrorist?

okay so i also haven't totally caught up with season 6. i really did think maybe they were saving marinette telling adrien for later but the crazy thing is that felix knows. kagami knows. nathalie knows. and you're telling me NO ONE has snitched. everyone is totally fine with not telling adrien anything. i hope everyone goes to hell im so serious

gabriel and Adrien: obvious. don't need to say this. cold and distant, gabriels thrown himself entirely into his grief. when he's not working he's trying to find the miraculous, thinking to himself anything he fucks up he can fix with the wish. adrien might be neglected now but he won't remember anything but happiness when gabriel succeeds. if gabriel spends more time with adrien, it just prolongs their suffering

chat noir and hawkmoth: i hate this bitch give me your miraculous

the potential of a hawkmoth and adrien dynamic:

adriens POV "that's the villain I need to defeat by any cost but right now i have no powers and he could akumatize me, hurt me, hurt my friends - my best option is to fawn or flee --> this is an advantage to learn more about who im fighting without him trying to steal my miraculous"

gabriels "this is my son who is very well behaved usually and who I do care for yet I have forgotten entirely about in my grief. its strange, viewing him with this miraculous, seeing his emotions - im learning more about him now than in my own house. am i making a mistake? i can't be (sunken cost fallacy)"

potential chat noir and gabriel dynamic:

chat noir: adrien gets the freedom to ask his father questions that would seem disrespectful and get him in trouble in his own house. after all, chat noir has all the power and gabriel is the civilian. gabriel cannot harm him in any way--the power dynamic has been reversed, and it allows adrien to ask his father questions and interact with him in a more expressive way without consequence. of course, this is his father; adrien loves him, and he doesn't want to hurt him, plus it would seem out of character or even villainous for chat noir to hate a civilian randomly. but it gives adrien more of an outlet to express negative emotions with his father.

gabriel: "i need this boys miraculous but i can't transform right now, he has no reason to suspect me. this is a child--one that shouldn't be capable of bossing me around, yet holds the power of destruction so he can. --> this is an opportunity to learn more about chat noir, anything about his identity. if i seem nice enough, perhaps he'll let something slip. for some reason the hero seems to eat up any compliment i give him."

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! :)