Lilanette Week 2026, Friday: Sacrifice
Welcome to Lilanette Week 2026! Over the course of this week I'll be posting art related to the prompts, but with a twist: all art will either be canon or semi-canon to my AU fic Two Bees in a Pod! For today's prompt, I decided to draw a comic that I'm very proud of how it turned out, which shows how, over the course of the universe's multiple rebirths, past versions of Lila were willing to sacrifice the universe for her ambition, while the current one has sacrificed her ambition for love.
Season 3 will reveal that Two Bees in a Pod takes place in a post-Wish world, specifically after nine past uses of the Miracle Wish. The first three, which ended the First Bound, Second Bound, and Third Bound timelines respectively, are of little note in the modern day aside from informing Tikki and Plagg's relationships with humans and the thousand years they spent apart after the Third Wish in the Two Heroes timeline and all subsequent timelines. It's the more recent six Wishes that are more important, as they all involve the Heroes of Paris.
Being an astronomy nerd, I used stellar astrophysics as symbolism for the character dynamics and Lila's metaphorical evolution across timelines. Fitting that the entry on the first day of spring involves stars.
Panels 1-3 take place in the Seven Heroes timeline, which is represented by blue background stars; Two Heroes would be represented by black/gray ones (The colors are significant, can you figure out what they represent?). Two Heroes is based on the movie and my speculations of what the upcoming sequel might be like; Seven Heroes is based on the first season of the TV series and my past speculations on what the second season might've been like, plus a few elements from the canon S2.
The stars on the left are an array of stars in spectral classes B, A, F, G, and K. They represent figurative stars, people who, like Lila, were ambitious, and whose ambitious natures allowed them to shine brightly and make names for themselves.
Seven Heroes!Lila wanted to be one of these people, to have a name for herself. However, she wasn't diligent enough to put in the work needed to achieve the stardom she craved legitimately, an attitude that we see in canon: prior to getting involved with Gabriel she never did anything, her travel photos were all doctored and she never left her room, and all her great adventures were lies. She's unwilling to put herself under the kinds of pressure needed to achieve the feats that would make a name for herself; metaphorically speaking, she's unwilling to exert enough pressure on her core to increase the amount of nuclear fusion needed to increase her temperature & luminosity. Therefore, Seven Heroes!Lila is represented by a late red dwarf, I'd say around M7V: a tiny thing a tenth the size of the Sun and not much bigger than the planet Jupiter, far too dim to see from Earth with the naked eye.
Red dwarfs have advantages over bigger stars. Their lower masses and internal pressures mean that they take longer to burn through their hydrogen supply, allowing them to last for hundred of billions if not trillions of years, especially the smallest of them, while the biggest stars die in only a couple million years if that. Metaphorically speaking, the biggest and brightest stars quickly burn themselves out and either die young or become dim fragments of their former selves, while an average person (like an average star, i.e. a red dwarf as they account for three quarters of all stars) can live a long time and live a humble, happy life.
However, Seven Heroes!Lila was afraid of being ordinary, and yearned to be anything but. I think it's safe to say that all of Lila's behaviors & actions in canon are ultimately driven by an incredible fear of being seen as ordinary or plain and a desire to be seen as exceptional by any means necessary. Very few red dwarfs have their own names, after all; most are just letters & numbers in a catalogue, and I don't think any of them have dedicated myths or are used to mark out the points in a constellation.
This panel depicts the infamous Agreste Derby Contest, which in this timeline involved the entire city of Paris, not just Francoise Dupont. Seven Heroes!Lila made her first appearance in this episode, having recently moved to France from Italy. She had aspirations as a fashion designer but didn't put in much effort to stand out; instead, she sabotaged other aspiring designers to make herself look better. This panel depicts Lila with two of her victims, who are represented by brighter red dwarfs (M4V and M2V respectively) that have been destroyed, reduced to clouds of gas and plasma.
Their eyes being shadowed is intentional: all of these people are dead in the present day.
The girl on the right is Seven Heroes!Marinette. Each version of her has slightly different pigtails so you can tell them apart.
In my opinion Lila and Marinette are mirror characters: both girls are ambitious, but Marinette is willing to put in the work to meet her goals whereas Lila is not. Additionally, Marinette puts additional pressure on herself via her anxiety issues; accordingly, Seven Heroes!Marinette is represented by a late yellow dwarf, I'd say around G8V, due to the increased pressure she puts on herself.
Being a figurative yellow dwarf meant that Seven Heroes!Marinette significantly outshone Lila and was too massive to push around through her usual methods. Lila's attempt to sabotage Marinette failed because Marinette, being the paranoid girl that she was, had already made backup copies of the hat that Lila damaged for just such an eventuality. Marinette won the contest while Lila was disqualified and her past accolades began to be scrutinized. Lila swore vengeance against Marinette and vowed to ruin her life in revenge.
To say more about the creation of the Seven Heroes timeline from the Two Heroes timeline and what Lila was created to be would be spoilers for S3, but long story short, Seven Heroes!Lila did succeed in snuffing her Marinette out. Lila got involved with the Consortium (Two Bees' version of the Kingdom) after Hawk Moth's defeat alongside Felix and helped them capture the Heroes of Paris ten years after Hawk Moth's defeat. Lila was tasked with using the Fifth Wish to create the Supreme's ideal world, and she would've succeeded had Trixx not intervened. Trixx had noticed that Lila was a lot more envious and ambitious than Felix, meaning that while Felix would settle for having the Graham de Vanily millions instead of Adrien, outshining Marinette wouldn't be enough for Lila; she had to outshine EVERYONE. So Trixx told her that there were more Kwamis out there, and Seven Heroes!Lila took the bait & wished for there to be more Kwamis bound in the hopes of maybe getting their power instead of fulfilling the Supreme's desires. Thus, Seven Heroes ended and First Zodiac began, and everyone in Seven Heroes died.
Panel 4 takes place in the First Zodiac timeline, which is represented by green background stars. First Zodiac is based on the first two seasons of the TV series and my past speculations on what the third season might've been like, plus some elements from the canon S3. This was the first timeline where the Chinese Zodiac Miraculous were bound.
First Zodiac!Lila and Felix never learned Marinette or Adrien's secret identities in this timeline. However, after being akumatized into Volpina didn't work to discourage Marinette's aspirations, this Lila decided to change tactics and get others to antagonize Marinette for her. Lila joined Ms. Mendeleiev's class and used rumors, lies, & favors to turn most of them against Ms. Bustier's class, with a specific aim at making them hate Marinette. This culminated in framing Marinette for the theft of test answer sheets that had gotten all of Mendeleiev's students flunked, leading to an inter-class brawl that resulted in Chat Noir being akumatized into Chat Blanc.
Red dwarfs were once seen as bastions for alien life due to their longevity and commonality, with many people believing that planets in the habitable zones of red dwarfs such as Proxima Centauri b would be new homes for humanity. Newer research has dispersed the illusion (Volpina pun): red dwarf rocky planets are terrible places to live. Because of their internal structure red dwarfs have very active magnetospheres and produce far more solar flares than sunlike stars do, and planets close enough to a red dwarf to have liquid water are almost certainly tidally-locked and therefore wouldn't be able to rotate fast enough to generate their own magnetic fields. Rocky planets in the habitable zones of red dwarfs are therefore most likely to have been stripped of their atmospheres and water billions of years ago and be barren, irradiated, Mercury-like husks in the present day. That is what First Zodiac!Lila did to those of Mendeleiev's students who got too close to her: she lied about what a wonderful and kind person she is while figuratively boiling away their better judgement to leave behind a toxic husk that she could use for her own ends. Only First Zodiac!Marc, Aurore, Mireille, and Kagami opposed Lila as they were the only ones who saw through her, and so kept their distance so Lila couldn't poison them too.
The girl that First Zodiac!Lila is gossiping to in this panel is First Zodiac!Aglae. Full disclosure, I don't like Aglae; she's clearly very into pseudoscience and alternative medicine and I have exactly zero respect for people like that. However, her interactions with Aurore show that despite being quite obviously super gullible and prone to getting mad when the "easy solution" turns out to not be easy at all she's actually pretty popular with her classmates, making Aglae the perfect target for Lila to use to worm her way into the good graces of the rest of Ms. Mendeleiev's students (which I believe Aglae would've been one of in the First Saga had she existed at the time). Aglae's surname is "L'Ombre" in Two Bees in a Pod, a fitting name for a girl represented by a tidally-locked red dwarf planet where one side is always kept in shadow.
Panel 5 takes place in the Second Zodiac timeline, which is represented by orange background stars. Second Zodiac is based on the first three seasons of the TV series and my past speculations on what the fourth season might've been like, plus a lot of elements from the canon S4.
At the end of First Zodiac Ladybug used the Fifth Wish to wish for a way to prevent Chat Blanc from happening, and it delivered: Alix became Bunnyx for the first time, saw Chat Blanc in another timeline, and intervened in her own to get Second Zodiac!Adrien therapy, thus preventing his akumatization. Bunnyx also prevented the brawl by telling Marinette to be careful of her bag, forcing Lila to slip the answer sheets into Marinette's locker instead, which led to Lila being exposed and expelled; she doesn't appear again.
I represented Lila's departure from the plot of Second Zodiac as a star cluster ejecting her star form into interstellar space never to be seen again, forever lost in the background. Most of those stars are various orange dwarfs, representing how Mendeleiev's students were more driven than Lila but not as much as Second Zodiac!Marinette, who's in the top left corner, watching.
Panels 6-8 take place in the First Cannonball timeline, which is represented by red background stars. First Cannonball is based on the first saga of the TV series and is essentially a perfect replica of it, and all that entails.
This panel depicts First Cannonball!Lila's akumatization into Volpina. Canon doesn't make clear why Lila was lying to her classmates or to Adrien, but I assume it ties into Lila's fear of being seen as ordinary and her desire to be treated like stardom. Her trying to push Volpina as better than Ladybug ties into that; what teenage girl hasn't made an OC who's related to their favorite celebrity, or insisted that THEY are the OC?
I believe that Lila's tears after Ladybug publicly humiliated her in front of Adrien were genuine. The ruse was up, and in front of the boy she liked no less. That likely made Lila worry that she was going to be seen as ordinary again, and she couldn't accept that. And thus she was akumatized into her OC.
Panel 7 depicts First Cannonball!Marinette, who had all of her canon flaws: she was a control freak who had to be involved with everything, was chronically incapable of managing her negative emotions or dealing with her anxieties constructively (and Tom & Sabine should be called out on contributing to that via her upbringing), was so severely arrogant that she always had to take the center stage and be the leader, and most importantly couldn't let Adrien be anything other than her ideal boyfriend. Also, her hair was blue.
Naturally, the comparison between "blue-headed tyrant" and "blue giant" was obvious, so First Cannonball!Marinette is represented by an O-type star, I'd say an O9V (which is main sequence, not giant, but she'll become a blue giant soon; O-types don't live long). O-types are the largest, hottest, and brightest stars, the biggest weighing in at over a hundred times the mass of the Sun and being hot enough & producing enough solar wind to vaporize all eight known planets in our solar system if you placed one where the Sun is. O-type stars have strong enough gravity to capture others of their kind in binary orbits; metaphorically speaking, First Cannonball!Marinette used her narrative gravity to force the story to revolve around her, and she shone brighter than anyone else thanks to the pressure she put herself under on purpose. In fact, First Cannonball!Marinette shone so brightly that she completely obscures the background stars in Panel 7 & takes up most of the space in it and even pushes her way into Panel 6, where she nearly drowns out all the background stars.
The symbols floating around First Cannonball!Marinette are symbols of the Fox, Bee, Black Cat, Ladybug, and Butterfly Miraculous, representing how canon!Marinette wants to control the Miraculous and more specifically who gets them (Chloe got the Bee accidentally and Marinette hated that, but she's fine with Zoe having it because she specifically let her have it; she wanted Alya to be Rena Rouge and had most of the Miraculous go to her classmates in a way that just SCREAMS nepotism; she wanted Hawk Moth's Miraculous so she can control who has it; and, of course, her resentment of Chat Noir is largely driven by her not knowing who he is and thus not being able to control whether he joins fights); a magazine extolling Ladybug's virtues (being Ladybug has only increased Marinette's arrogance); "MDC" (Marinette's aspirations to be a fashion designer); Adrien, three babies, and a hamster (she's obsessed with Adrien to the point of stalking him, breaking into his house as Ladybug, and sabotaging his relationships with other girls, she wants to control Adrien's life and future, and she spends most of her time fantasizing about a domestic life with him instead of preparing for a fashion career, the latter something which Astruc likely finds extremely romantic and I find deeply misogynistic); and a pocket watch (stars warp the fabric of spacetime with their gravity to produce weird relativistic effects, much like how history was warped via time travel to keep First Cannonball!Marinette from facing consequences for her actions).
What about Adrien? Well, he's already a star who shines brightly because his father's ambitions have put him under enough pressure. He speaks multiple languages, is a good athlete, is a great fencer, and he's also a very nice boy, a figurative sunshine child who lights up the room just by being there. Everyone wants a picture of the bright star. Yet Adrien resents his brightness because the pressure to be that bright is eating him alive from the inside, filling his heart with what will one day become iron. If Lila is a common star who wants to be bright, Adrien is a bright star who wants to be common and surrounded by life. I'd characterize Adrien as an A0V (the same spectral class as Sirius A, the Dog Star) yearning to be a yellow dwarf; A-types don't live long enough for life to emerge on a planet around them, and because of how hot they are their habitable zones are very far away. He'd let a white dwarf eat his outer layers and reduce him to a G-type if it meant he could have life around him.
First Cannonball!Lila, as per her canon self, used her lies to integrate herself into Ms. Bustier's class and told them stories of adventures that never were, all while spying on Adrien for Gabriel. As her reward, she got fame, fortune, and Gabriel's respect, and even became a model for the female Alliance Ring AI. But eventually it all came crashing down: Lila was exposed by Marinette and Sabrina and Gabriel abandoned her. First Cannonball!Lila's web of lies collapsed around her, and thanks to the Eighth Wish she died with no way to rebuild herself.
Stars above eight solar masses don't become white dwarfs; they die in supernovas and become neutron stars due to the collapse of their cores being so violent that protons and electrons fuse into neutrons and over one solar mass of matter is compressed into a ball the size of a city. Metaphorically speaking, Lila got her wish and became brighter, but only because her lies & Gabriel's own machinations put her under enough external pressure, and it ultimately destroyed her.
I chose to represent the remnants of First Cannonball!Lila's star form (which would've inflated to a B2V) as a pulsar specifically and have Lila, in her Cerise Bianca guise, look on in shame at what she's been reduced to: a tiny, dim sphere of neutronium screaming toxic radiation into the void to no response. The colors of the nebula left over from her supernova are based on Hoaxer, Lila's last akumatized form in the First Saga (I'm excluding the London Special as it happened post-Wish).
Panel 9 takes place in the Second Cannonball timeline, which is represented by purple background stars. Second Cannonball is based on the second saga of the TV series, specifically Season 6 and my speculations of future plots, but is overall a less perfect replica of canon than First Cannonball was; namely, the events of the London Special as we know them didn't happen. But Second Cannonball!Lila still got the Butterfly Miraculous and became Chrysalis, and I still hate Chrysalis' hair. It's so ugly and 18th-century.
Narratively, as Chrysalis Lila is now free to make the plot revolve around her for a change. She outshines and outweighs everything the heroes and the other villains do. In other words, she's a narrative black hole, a trope named after a stellar remnant formed from the collapse of stars over 20 solar masses with gravity so strong not even light can escape. I decided to take that literally and represent Second Cannonball!Lila with an actual black hole. She made herself even more massive and brighter than Second Cannonball!Marinette's star form, an O3V whose hypernova allowing her to collapse into an all-consuming black hole.
More specifically, Second Cannonball!Lila is a quasar, a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk of gas so dense that it generates enough heat and other forms of electromagnetic radiation to be visible for billions of lightyears. They're often found in the nuclei of galaxies and are thousands if not millions of times the mass of the Sun, and they can indeed be violet.
Lila seemingly has it all now in canon: she's finally outshining Marinette and can control the orbits of EVERYONE. But the thing about quasars is that their light is still finite, not to mention powered by the destruction of other stars & the prevention of other stars forming. Sooner or later she'll run out of gas and be left a dark, dead star that cannot be seen at all, slowly wasting away as she evaporates into the void with no companions to comfort her as she goes. She might be shining now, but she is as she's nearly always been: completely and utterly alone.
Panels 10 and onward take place in the Two Bees timeline, which is represented by yellow background stars. This is the current timeline and these people are all alive, so their eyes aren't in shadow. Additionally, panels 10 and 11 are set in the daytime to show that night hasn't fallen on this timeline.
Two Bees!Lila is a much kinder and gentler person than any of her past incarnations. She's humble, because even though all of her weird stories are actually true this time she just wants friends, and she has no aspirations to be the world's best fashion designer. Because of this reduced pressure on her core Lila's star form isn't even a main sequence star anymore; she's a brown dwarf, a failed star not massive enough to fuse protium (hydrogen-1), just deuterium. I'd put her as a T-type, not even an L-type for Lila Rossi.
Two Bees!Lila being a kid with Alya, Chloe, and Zoe. Alya, one of her biggest marks in canon; Chloe, the one who took the fall for Lila in S5; and Zoe, who was there. Because brown dwarfs are so lightweight compared to other stars they can orbit them without disrupting the orbits of their planets too much, meaning they can coexist with stars with habitable planets. Similarly, this Lila can coexist with her classmates without irradiating their planets with her lies.
While I definitely see Alya as somewhat ambitious and definitely very passionate, I would say that the pressure she puts on herself is less than the pressure Marinette puts on herself, so that would leave Alya as a mid-K-type at about K5V. It's an orange star, Alya is orange, no further explanation necessary.
In canon, I would say that Chloe represents a star that's bright, but acts like she's brighter. Chloe is quite rich and powerful due to her family's money and her father's job as the mayor, but that only goes so far; sooner or later you need to back power up with your own accomplishments, and Chloe doesn't have any because the way her parents neglected her has left her ignorant of how to do that without using her family's name. I definitely think that Chloe does know this to some degree, that she's only bright because of what stellar nursery she was born into and not because she's done anything noteworthy (Audrey said to her face that the only exceptional part of Chloe is the part of her DNA that's Audrey's), but because she doesn't know what else to do she doubles down on her familial connections. The one time Chloe DID have a constructive way of being exceptional, the Bee Miraculous, Marinette stripped it away from her, and in her attempts to feel that bright again Chloe burned everyone around her and eventually burned out completely.
I would characterize most versions of Chloe as F-type stars: bright enough to be noteworthy, but not bright enough to be legendary. In the pre-Cannonball timelines she would be an F9V specifically, while in the Cannonball timelines she would be an F4V due to increased pressure from all sides: her parents, her classmates, her teacher, Ladybug, the villains, and her sister, causing Chloe to flare up and fizzle out into a white dwarf before she was ready to go. In Two Bees she's a cooler G2V, the same spectral class as the Sun, representing how she has a more relaxed and less high-strung disposition compared to her canon counterpart but still has a lot of ambition, drive, and self-inflicted pressure to be exceptional.
In canon Zoe does have ambitions to be an actress, but I don't think she's as serious about them as Marinette is about her...everything, and she's a lot quieter and humbler in Two Bees in a Pod compared to her canon self. So I characterize Zoe as an early M-type, M0V (and that is indeed a pun).
Chloe and Zoe are conjoined twins in Two Bees in a Pod, so naturally I depicted their star forms as a contact binary. We do know of a contact binary of different spectral types, KIC 9832227, so it's plausible for a yellow/red dwarf contact binary to exist.
The twins' shirt is a reference to our solar system's twin ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Chloe got Uranus because she's the taller & lighter of the two, while Zoe got Neptune because she's the shorter & heavier of the two.
The twins are having a growth spurt in S2/S3 and are getting much taller than they were at the start of the fic rapidly. ATOW they're 5'5" and 5'4" respectively.
Stars contain bits and pieces of past stars, especially since the gas created by supernovas and planetary nebulae can collapse into new stars and the deaths of old stars can trigger the birth of new ones (the Sun is believed to have been made from an O-type star's supernova hitting a nebula, for example). Similarly, timelines in Two Bees in a Pod always leave traces of themselves in their successors. This is represented by Lila wearing red nail polish like her red dwarf form and Marinette wearing a blue band-aid like her blue star form.
Lila and Marinette being smitten with each other while Tikki and Trixx play cards. Like you do. Preview of my Trixx design, too.
Two Bees!Marinette has a more relaxed disposition compared to all of her past selves, so I'd characterize her as a K0V.
Is it gay to kiss your girlfriend in front of the stars? Why, yes. Yes it is.
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