How Alya's mistreated by the saltdom and the writers
I've written this for the @yall-hate-kids-tourney, but figured that I'd publish it on my own tumblr as well for an easy reference point for others who want to illustrate how badly Alya's been treated - mostly by the fandom, but she's been somewhat screwed over by the writing as well. I've written it so that even people who have never heard of Miraculous before can understand my problems with the way Alya's often depicted, and I will probably use this essay for that purpose repeatedly in the future. It's over 4500 words, so buckle up!
The amount of hatred Alya gets in the fandom is absolutely insane. There are over 800 fics tagged with "Alya Cesaire Bashing", and that's just the ones that actually TAG it - many of them either use a a non-canonical tag or just take their demonization of her as canon. It's not just that a lot of fics bash her either, but that the fics that bash her are disproportionately popular. If you go through the "Miraculous Ladybug" tag on AO3 and sort by kudos, I'd say around a third of the top 500 most popular fics use this gross caricature of her in order to justify inflicting some sort of insane punishment on her, or at least replacing her with "better" friends and leaving her to wail in despair.
Basically, Alya is the best friend of the main character, Marinette. She's really into superheroes and aims to be a reporter someday, to the point that the first time a supervillain cropped up in the series, she immediately got out her bike and cycled after him so that she could be there when a superhero showed up to fight him (Lois Lane would be proud). She runs a blog called the "Ladyblog" which reports on what the superheroes are doing, and sometimes makes some fun videos, like about the most impressive feats of one of the superheroes.
More relevantly though, she acts as Marinette's support a lot of the time, often being the one to push her to confess her feelings to Adrien, to help her with plans she comes up with, to talk things out with if she's having trouble processing something, and trying to act as the voice of reason if Marinette's gotten to into her own head. It can sometimes head into Black Best Friend territory of having her mostly stick around to support her bestie, but she DOES get a decent amount of screentime and focus at least.
Then the first episode of season 3 aired, and the fandom went BALLISTIC.
This character, Lila, debuted back at the end of season 1 as being this attention-seeking liar who pretended that she knew a lot more famous people than she actually did, including being best friends with Ladybug. Alya, being a naive 14-year-old, believed her and put Lila's interview on her blog. Since Marinette IS Ladybug, she knew this was not true, though she was initially more freaked out about the possibility that Adrien (the boy she has a crush on) would find her supposedly amazing life to be entrancing and that Lila would steal Adrien away from her, to the point that she actively wanted to stop Lila and Adrien from spending time together to prevent Adrien from falling for her.
Fast-forward to Chameleon, the first episode of season 3, and Lila's back and lying some more, this time about having Tinnitus (which would mean that she needs to sit at the front of class, next to Adrien). The class has a whole seating rearrangement in order to accommodate the move, and because some of them just wanted to change seats. Since Marinette was late that day, she didn't get to give input, so she wound up sitting alone at the back of the class, instead of next to Alya like she usually did. She's upset by this, but can't prove that Lila doesn't actually have the disability (she doesn't even have evidence that Lila doesn't have hearing problems, it's just that her story of how she supposedly got the disability is suspect), so she puts up with it for the class period.
Then lunch time rolls around and Marinette tells Alya and Alya's boyfriend, Nino, that Lila's a lying liar who lies. Alya asks why Marinette hates her so much, since she barely knows Lila (this isn't the first time that Marinette's nitpicked at Lila's stories, but she's never actually managed to prove that Lila's lying, Lila's good at coming up with explanations for any hole Marinette exposes in her tales). Marinette tells her how, after Lila first arrived at school, she followed her and Adrien, eavesdropped on them, and then saw Ladybug show up and tear into Lila for not knowing her. (Presumably that's what she says, the episode skipped past her actual recounting of what she saw). Alya and Nino are more concerned with the fact that she stalked Lila and Adrien, with Alya also being skeptical that what she heard might have been out-of-context, given how common out-of-context eavesdropping is in fiction for causing issues, with Alya saying, "A good reporter always verifies her sources. Can you prove she doesn't actually know Ladybug?"
Since Marinette can't actually prove anything without revealing that she's Ladybug, she decides that the sane and reasonable thing to do is to throw a wadded up napkin at Lila while she's eating lunch, and when she catches it (Lila's pretending to have a sprained wrist), to loudly declare that she obviously doesn't have a sprained wrist. Lila quickly pretends that catching it did actually hurt, the classmates Lila was sitting with scold Marinette for hurting her, and then Marinette goes off to seethe in a bathroom, where Lila finds her and threatens to turn her friends against her if she continues trying to expose her lies.
Then at the end of the episode, Adrien goes to sit with Marinette at the back of the class to keep her company, the teacher thinks that Marinette ALSO has hearing issues so she's brought back to the front (and away from Adrien again), Lila pretends that her hearing has been fixed so she can sit at the back with Adrien, and Alya spots that Marinette looks miserable about sitting alone at the front, so she chooses to sit next to Marinette to keep her company and everyone ends up going back to their old places, except that Lila's sitting at the back of the class now.
And that's it. That is, for the most part, what kicked off the entire Alya hatred and demonization onslaught. While there ARE more things that happening in following episodes, they have a pretty small effect on the demonization Alya's put through, almost all of it is derived from Chameleon and hasn't changed much since then.
So for starters, in fanfics Alya is often made to ditch Marinette constantly to hang out with Lila instead. This never happens. She's often exasperated when Marinette starts talking about how Lila is awful and points out that she doesn't have proof of that, but she doesn't avoid Marinette, and the closest she ever comes to hanging out with Lila outside of class events is when she called Lila over to babysit hers and Nino's younger siblings when Marinette canceled at the last minute.
But most Alya-bashing fics don't just leave it there. Oh no. If you look through a bunch of the most popular Miraculous fics, you'll see Alya made out to be some sort of ringleader for the class in bullying Marinette, hitting her, pinching her, poisoning her, destroying her things, saying nasty, heinous things to her, the works, and inciting the rest of the class to do the same, sometimes to the point that even LILA is shocked at her cruelty. Usually in these cases, Chloe, who is canonically the class bully (and Marinette's bully in particular) is inexplicably Marinette's primary protector against the eeeeeevil Alya, becoming Marinette's best friend and support and basically taking on Alya's canon role and some of her personality traits, despite the fact that canonically, Chloe's as susceptible to Lila's lies as anyone else, and that in season 5 Chloe actually became Lila's partner in crime in trying to hurt Marinette in particular. (I don't like how Chloe's treated in canon, but that's a different story).
I've never even seen any justification given for why Alya's so frequently made to be outright violent or cruel towards Marinette, it's just widely accepted in fiction now, even with nothing pointing to her ever being malicious like that. There ARE other things Alya canonically does that I see her taken to task over though, but that fall apart when you examine them.
One of the biggest offenders is criticism towards Alya over how she handles babysitting. In Christmaster, Alya and Nino pick up Nino's little brother after Marinette babysits him for them while they're on a date, in Timetagger, Marinette's slated to babysit for them while they're on a date but cancels at the last minute, so they call Lila over instead, and then in Simple Man, Marinette books herself to babysit Alya's and Nino's younger siblings and the daughter of one's of her mom's friends, a little girl named Manon, all at the same time.
Alya receives heavy criticism for not paying Marinette for her babysitting, for having Marinette babysit for her secretly behind her parents' back without their knowledge, and for pressuring Marinette to babysit for her even though Marinette's so busy.
A few problems with this.
1. We see babysitting happen several times, sometimes with Alya helping Marinette with babysitting Manon and sometimes with Marinette just babysitting Manon without anyone else's involvement. At no point is payment brought up, and yet the absence of such a discussion is only ever used to demonize Alya.
2. There is no evidence that the babysitting Marinette does for Alya's sake is done behind her parents' back, the only thing pointing to that is a lack of Alya ever flat-out saying that she has her parents' permission to have Marinette babysit for her, but there's no evidence of sneaking around. MARINETTE, however, DOES canonically ditch her babysitting duties by having Alya babysit for her without the parent's knowledge. In Prime Queen, Marinette accidentally double books herself to do an interview as Ladybug at the same time that she's supposed to be babysitting Manon, so she calls Alya over to watch the interview with her, lies to her that she's just gonna go downstairs for a few minutes to talk with her parents and for Alya to please watch over Manon while she does that, and then leaves to do the interview while Alya watches over Manon the whole time. Nadja definitely didn't know that this happened, because she was surprised and worried when Alya and Manon called in during the interview with Marinette nowhere to be seen. In addition to this, in Simpleman, Marinette foists off all the children she's babysitting onto her grandpa against his will so that she can run off and help with Adrien's photoshoot after he calls her. The people demonizing Alya for supposedly having Marinette babysit for her secretly are not upset about the examples of Marinette canonically doing these things.
3. Of the three times that Marinette has, to date, been scheduled to babysit for Alya's sake (Christmaster, Timetagger, and Simpleman), for Christmaster she spent the next several hours after finishing with babysitting making Adrien's 50th birthday present (he's currently 14 years old), so I wouldn't say she was pressed for time, for Timetagger, she literally called Alya at the last minute to say she was too busy to babysit and Alya said it was no biggie and made other arrangements, and for Simpleman, Alya offered to cancel her date and take care of her younger siblings herself the instant she saw that Marinette was already babysitting Manon, and Marinette told her to go ahead and go on her date and that she'd look after her siblings.
So clearly, the people clutching their pearls about how horribly irresponsibly Alya is handling babysitting and how she's wronging Marinette in the process don't actually care about babysitting ethics here, because otherwise, Marinette would be getting the brunt of the hatred, not Alya. Despite this, I've seen a fair number of posts in the past tearing into Alya's babysitting for the reasons I already gave, and a bunch of fics that make it so that Alya pressures and guilt-trips Marinette into babysitting for her when she's struggling to keep up with all her work, only to have her parents find out and be horrified by how Alya's lied to them about who's been doing the babysitting and that Alya's been getting an increased allowance because of that, so they pay Marinette out of Alya's allowance and ground her, take away privileges, just have this be used as an excuse to punish Alya for supposedly wronging Marinette.
And then there's the subcategory of Alya demonization towards her for putting up Lila's interview on her blog without verifying that Lila was telling the truth. Admittedly, this was foolish, but she's 14. Retractions exist for a reason. And yet, fics frequently have her reputation be completely destroyed because she put up one interview that had a false statement by the interviewee in it, and sometimes even to be completely blacklisted from ever being a journalist in the future, things that are completely insane and would have even the most storied and well-respected of reporters be unable to ever get a job.
She also frequently gets demonized and bashed for "believing Lila over Marinette". My major issue with this: what she's specifically believing Lila over Marinette for is on the topic of "is Lila an awful person". I don't think it's unreasonable to have a higher standard of proof for believing that someone is an awful person than for believing that your friend might just have some biased interpretations. Alya thinks that Marinette doesn't like Lila mostly because Lila has hit on Adrien, Marinette's crush, before. This isn't unreasonable considering that Marinette's first reaction to Lila is to freak out about her stealing Adrien away, and that when this other girl, Kagami, started hanging out with Adrien, she freaked out about that too. Specifically, she called a meeting of all her female friends to try and stop Kagami and Adrien from going away together to London for the weekend in Backwarder, helped Chloe in trying to get Kagami covered in food at a fancy red carpet movie opening in order to drive her away and steal her seat next to Adrien for the movie, and when she and Kagami were paired up for a "friend-making game" where the goal was to locate where Adrien was in Paris and the prize was to spend time with him, she pretended to genuinely want to be Kagami's friend so she could sabotage both of them and prevent Kagami from spending time with Adrien. So it's not like the belief that Marinette might be unfairly biased against Lila because she's made moves on Adrien is an unfair assumption.
In addition to that, on the occasions when Lila HAS tried to frame Marinette for something, Alya hasn't believed it, or hasn't been shown to believe it at least. In Ladybug, Lila tries to frame Marinette for cheating on a test, for stealing a necklace from her, and for knocking her down the stairs. Despite the evidence Lila planted, Alya doesn't believe it and investigates to try and find out what really happened. She doesn't uncover any solid proof, but she still believes in Marinette. She doesn't believe that Marinette's assumption that Lila's behind this is necessarily correct, since Marinette's leaping to that without presenting proof, but she doesn't believe that Marinette's the culprit either. And in the two following cases when Marinette's framed, Alya never actually gets a chance to say what she believes after the accusation is made against Marinette.
Just... the amount of demonization towards Alya TO THIS DAY, often for things she NEVER EVEN FREAKING DID, is absolutely insane. Even over 5 years since Chameleon aired, fics with Alya being made into this malicious, awful bully so that Marinette can get some new friends to publicly denounce her, get her arrested, or otherwise be punished are frequently on the front page of the most recently updated fics on AO3, and are often some of the most popular ones. If you go to "Fandom-Specific plot" on Tvtropes, saltfics like these have multiple files going through all the common salt tropes. When looking through fics, I frequently search for Alya's name because she's often the first person to be unfairly demonized, so if she's safe, then everyone likely is.
I suspect that racism plays a major factor in this. It doesn't make sense that Alya's often painted as being a violent, malicious bully and leader in getting the rest of the class to physically hurt and terrorize Marinette, I haven't even seen analysis arguing that she'd do that... but it tracks with the "Black Brute" archetype. This becomes even more obvious with Chloe, who's white and canonically DOES do some of this stuff, taking on Alya's canon role and some of her personality traits in these sorts of stories.
Then there's the standard Alya's held to for how she handles her blog. It's way higher than anyone would hold real-world reporters to, much less 14-year-olds. But it makes sense if you factor racial bias into account, and how Alya, being Black, is going to be held to a higher standard than anyone else, and be punished more for failing to meet that standard.
For things like the babysitting double standard, it makes no sense if you're actually looking at the stated criticism, given that the same criticism isn't leveled at Marinette... but it makes perfect sense if you're going off the assumption that Alya, as Marinette's Black Best Friend, is supposed to solely function as her support and that she's simply fulfilling her duties by always being there for her when needed, including for babysitting, but that if Marinette ever attempts to repay in kind, then Alya's being unfair towards her because Alya's obligated to always support Marinette, but that relationship is supposed to be a one-way street. Alya is supposed to function as Marinette's support, never the other way around.
And as for the way Alya's demonized for asking for evidence before believing that Lila's lying, well... again, Alya's expected to act as Marinette's support, and her "failing" that in any way, even if it makes sense from her point of view, is viewed as a betrayal. She's supposed to be loyal to Marinette, and only to Marinette, not to think for herself or to have multiple other friends or values that she needs to weigh. And anything that she does to go against that "justifies" Marinette intentionally trying to hurt and punish her for failing to live up to her role.
In conclusion, the way Alya's treated by the salt side of the fandom is grossly unfair, often has little connection with anything she canonically did, and has some gross racist implications, and is likely at least partially spurred on by racism, especially with how common and popular it still is to this day.
Addendum: How Alya is screwed over by the writers.
While Alya is primarily screwed over by the fanbase, there are some aspects of the writing that exacerbate her ill treatment. In season 4, Marinette confesses her secret identity to Alya, letting her know that she is Ladybug. Despite now knowing why Marinette was so convinced that Lila wasn't friends with Ladybug, and that Lila's interview stating that she's best friends with Ladybug is a lie, the subject just... never comes up, even when Lila starts being important again. It's not that Alya's ignoring what Lila lying on those subjects means, it's more like the writers just completely forgot that Lila told those particular lies, since Marinette doesn't bring them up either. This creates an inconsistency with the fanbase, who really, really, REALLY haven't forgotten those lies.
There ARE ways to explain this - Lila lying about being friends with Ladybug in order to try to boost her reputation, especially when she's the new girl, isn't really all that heinous. Marinette lies a lot as well, even if you don't count lies told to protect her secret identity or other "necessary" lies, sometimes out of embarrassment, sometimes to to try and prevent someone's feelings from getting hurt, and sometimes because she thinks it's the fastest, easiest, or most certain way to get the outcome she wants. And yet, even though Marinette lies a lot, she's not ostracized for that since it's usually not for malicious reasons - foolish reasons at times, but rarely malicious. It would make sense that Lila too, wouldn't be thought too badly of for merely lying in an attempt to make friends.
None of that actually comes up though. Alya later, in Confrontation, states that, "Marinette, you know we'll always believe you. But every time you've accused Lila, there's been no evidence. And at worst, it was just a misunderstanding." Marinette doesn't say anything about the previous times Lila has been proven to lie, so it seems like either it was decided offscreen that the more understandable lies she's told don't matter, or that the writers just plain forgot about them.
There were other opportunities created by Alya knowing Marinette's identity that were ignored. Alya concludes that Adrien backing up Marinette's statement that Lila's bad news was just due to him wanting to defend his girlfriend. This is also a bit of a writing flaw, while wanting to back up his girlfriend's stance IS a decent reason for Adrien to be biased against Lila, this is Adrien we're talking about here. He's nice and understanding to a fault, and is known for giving people the benefit of the doubt and second chances. It makes far less sense to believe that he'd believe the worst of Lila, even if Marinette does, than it does for Marinette to be biased against Lila. That being said, Adrien wouldn't have been present for Lila's more indisputable threats and statements directed against Marinette, so he can't actually verify for sure whether or not there could've been some misunderstanding.
There WAS, however, someone who was always with Marinette, and who could actually back up Marinette's statements more definitively.
Tikki. She was present for every threat Lila made, for everything she ever claimed. While it's possible that both Tikki and Marinette may have misunderstood Lila in the same way, it's far less likely, especially since Tikki would have had different biases from Marinette. Tikki could be an important witness. Yet that never comes up, is never proposed, because that would end the plotline too quickly.
Alya was also screwed over in the immediate aftermath of Lila being exposed, though not by the writers per se? There was a short scene planned after Lila's exposed where Alya apologizes for not believing Marinette about Lila being a liar and generally an awful person, we've even got leaked footage of it, but it appears that it was cut somewhere between being written and voice acted, and the episode being aired.
All of this only really affects detailed arguments about how well (or poorly) Alya's story arc with Lila was handled, its affect on the actual fanfiction produced about Chameleon salt was minimal, I saw no change in its frequency, severity, or general handling of the characters with any season after season 3. I highly doubt that even the changes I suggested here would have done much to persuade the saltdom against Ron the Death Eatering Alya, especially since a lot of the hatred against her has so little to do with the show.
There IS some hatred thrown at Alya for non-Lila related reasons - well, reasons that aren't DIRECTLY Lila related, most of that hatred still stems from people hating her for Chameleon stuff and then retroactively justifying it by looking back at other things she did that irked them. The most common one (that actually has some sort of argument to it, not the "Alya's a horrible babysitter and is abusing her friendship with Marinette" nonsense I listed in the main essay) is that Alya's pushy about getting Marinette together with Adrien.
This is more a product of Alya's usual role in the story than anything. I mentioned in the main essay how Alya sometimes falls into "Black Best Friend" territory, and this is one of the biggest examples. One of her most common roles throughout the series is as the person who pushes Marinette to actually confess to Adrien, to hang out with him, to pursue her romantic desires even with her anxiety holding her back, and to be honest with herself during the times when she's trying to deny her feelings for him. She's Marinette's sounding board whenever she's having an anxiety spiral about... actually, just about anything, and acts as the voice of reason when Marinette gets in her own head too much.
Thus, Alya sets Marinette and Adrien to end up somewhere alone together, or tries to push her to talk to him, or to be honest during the times when she tries to "move on" from Adrien by denying that she still has feelings for him (which is blatantly untrue). She IS okay with Marinette dating someone else though, if she honestly seems to want to do that. She had no problem with her dating Luka, for instance. She DID protest Marinette's seemingly sudden interest in Chat Noir, but that was mostly because Marinette seemed to be grabbing at her new attraction as an attempt to run away from her feelings for Adrien, something that Tikki ALSO noted.
That's another thing - Alya's the character who's most frequently thrown into this role, but she's not the only one, nor even the most extreme one. A new character that was introduced for the Miraculous New York Special, Jess, observed how Adrien and Marinette acted around each other, and decided to try to get them to confess their love by faking a supervillain attack on them, with the supervillain kidnapping anyone that no one loves in order to compel Marinette to FINALLY confess to Adrien. (Alya thought it was stupid, but agreed to help since it might actually work). When Marinette, Adrien, Luka, and Kagami went out to the wax museum together, Luka intentionally locked Adrien and Marinette in a room together so that Marinette would stop running away and would be forced to talk to Adrien. Marinette is written in such a way that other characters are compelled to meddle in her lovelife, because otherwise she'll continue making her own extreme plans and pining away, but never actually confess her feelings.
So while Alya could be said to be "pushy" to an extent, it's mostly for Marinette's benefit. I would like if this was a less frequent role for Alya - I think it does her a disservice, since it locks her firmly into Marinette's orbit rather than emphasizing who Alya is as her own character. Most of the hatred towards Alya for this is tied up in "Die For Our Ship" being directed at Adrien though, with Adrien bashers hating that Alya's trying to set Marinette up with what they see as an inferior option. Ironically enough, while Alya's role in this situation is one of the primary examples in the show of her being treated by the writers as a "Black Best Friend" who exists to serve Marinette's character, it's actually one of the cases where I think racism is a pretty minor part of the hatred by the fanbase over it, since I think that's mostly motivated by hatred towards the Lovesquare.
In conclusion (again), there is an issue with the writers bending Alya's character in order to tell a particular story, particularly a Marinette-centered story, while ignoring how little sense that makes with what happened earlier on in the plotline, or how it centralizes Alya's role and character around Marinette in ways that exacerbate already existing writing patterns in media.
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