Honestly, I Don't Hate This Take. It Would've Been Another Interesting Aspect In MLB That Could've Added

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.

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.

I'm only in my early twenties, but God I felt 105 when I saw this 😭

I was telling my niece about flash games and she asked what's flash oh god

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.

Unfortunately, it comes off that way—that Chloé never had a strong chance at redemption or damnation—because they never bothered to give her an arc.

The episodes always have to structure with 90% of the camera's attention on Marinette. It's about Marinette and HER struggles, so the episodes have to relate to Marinette somehow.

But you can't do an arc without giving the subject in question some attention. To do a damnation arc, you need to show just how many obstacles they tripped over on the way there. We needed to see Chloé fail time and time again, to see that frustration build, until it exploded.

But we didn't get that.

When Chloé wasn't Queen Bee, she was the same petty brat who cried for Daddy when things got tough. And when she was Queen Bee, she was a damn good hero. Then we just get jumped with the "Sorry, you can't be Queen Bee anymore" and Chloé just goes right back to being bratty until Miracle Queen, after which she was suddenly an irredeemable villain.

Her damnation arc was very much a tell-don't show situation, and it just doesn't work that way.

Do you remember the famous Astruc words “We thought she (Chloe) was redeemable. She wasn’t”? I think that under that he meant “We tried to redeem Chloe. We failed”.

The translation that I've seen was:

They said that [they gave] Chloe everything to be redeemed, Thomas Astruc even [said] that he really wanted to redeemed her but that was just out of character for her to become good and a real person in her place will not choose to become good.

Which I would not interpret to mean that they messed up Chloe's writing and can't admit it. To me, it reads as something much sadder. It sounds like they think that they wrote an actual arc for Chloe where people tried to help her and failed because people like Chloe are beyond redemption.

You must have a pretty depressing view of the world if you think personalities are set in stone at 14 and a pretty lackluster idea of what it means to help someone if you think that the show really showed people trying to help Chloe change.

My feelings about Chloe have always been that she had no arc and I stick by that assessment. She never had a strong chance at redemption or damnation. She was a petty brat from day one and she stayed a petty brat until the end both through her own failings and because no one cared to help her change (looking at you Adrien), making her "story" a massively unsatisfying waste of screen time.

It's so offensive how they missed the chance to call him, "First Lord".

Instead, what we got was, "First Gentleman".

SMH 😔