To honor the newly approved storytelling style of the show I hereby declare the following:
Chloé is doing wonderfully in London. She is studying at a Private School, focusing on remedial courses while taking dance and beekeeping. She has a new cohort of friends and is adjusting well, if a little gunshy, now that her father is no longer a part of her life. The alt-Chloé who returned to Paris is actually a sentimonster. Felix let Noé make one in exchange for the Kingdom leaving Amilie alone.
I think there is something going on with Adrien behind the scenes. Sometimes it's only vaguely hinted (like him getting up instead of simply standing after being brought back from the trophy, his lack of reaction other than constant smile during Amelie's interview, him standing on top of the stairs during Marinette and Nathalie's quarrel) and sometimes it's a bomb – dropped and never mentioned again, like Chat Noir destroying the statue of Gabriel. I don't know how much he knows or suspects, but something seems different to me.
💬 11 🔁 21 ❤️ 89 · ADRIEN KNOWS MORE THAN WE THINK?!
Adrien's "Clue Collection" To Figure Things Out On His Own from Every Episode of S6,
I want so badly for the thing Astruc thinks we're going to need to rewatch the whole season for to be "Adrien knew the truth the whole time" because it would be so interesting and fix so many plot holes, but I have absolutely Zero expectations for a good story from that man.
Unfortunately for Marinette, unbeknownst to her, telling Kagami about how great and talented she is is a bad idea right now.
Yeah, hugging Kagami is a much better course of action than trying to say anything to lessen the sting. Because yeah, Marinette really has no frame of reference on this front. Closest she has is Roland, and once he actually met her, he came around within a few hours.
You know who *would* have a good frame of reference for this and would be fully capable of relating to and understanding her feelings, who is great with words and has high emotional intelligence, and on top of that also has a cosmic miraculous upgrade? Yeah, Adrien. Where is he, by the way?
Here's the thing I think a lot of people don't understand about Marinette.
Her core driving motivation, the emotional need that underlies her actions and worldviews, isn't to be loved or to be needed. It's to be told that she's okay.
She desperately wants to hear that she's good, in both senses of the word. She wants to be someone who doesn't fall shy of others' expectations. Whether in morals or in skill, she wants to be someone there's nothing to criticize about. But she also wants to hear that she's alright, that everything is good and there are no problems or anything else she needs to worry about.
She wants it to be okay for her to just exist.
Which is something she can't believe herself because she has this deep seated belief that she's deeply lacking. She wants that external validation because she has none of that reassurance from herself. For someone to come and convince her that no, she's perfectly fine as she is actually.
And more than that, she wants someone to come rescue her from her own emotions. They're too big for her to handle, and she has no clue how to control them herself. They're a constant source of distress and anxiety that she wishes would just stop.
So many of her actions are just her seeking a relief from her own emotions, trying to control the world around her in an attempt to appease the monster that never lets her rest.
But it's that same attempt at appeasement that only makes it stronger. In her attempts to escape criticism, she ends up hyper-aware and anxious about all the ways in which she could be criticized and spends inordinate amount of energy on trying to prevent it.
Every time she avoids discomfort she trains her brain to see it as something dangerous that she absolutely can't deal with and so must escape from. Yet that only leads to her brain blaring the alarms stronger the next time she encounters something that stresses her out.
It's a never ending spiral. All of Marinette's attempts to escape only end up pulling her deeper.
The reason Marinette can't see a way out is because there isn't one.
The monster she's trying to escape from is her own anxiety. No matter how far she runs, she can't escape from herself.
And boy how much she runs. She runs to the comfort of others' reassurances, her own defeatist despair, the desperate belief that if she can just control enough things she can bend reality to be what she wants out of sheer power of will.
She runs to them because they all promise the same thing: she never has to face the monster. Whether it's because they temporarily appease the monster, tell her to give up or promise that the monster will never catch up to her in the first place, all of them give her ways to avoid a confrontation.
Yet that promise is a false comfort. A temporary relief that only leads her further away from what she truly wants.
Because in order for Marinette to actually be okay, she has to stop, turn around and look the monster in the eye. She has to confront her anxiety and weather the discomfort for long enough for her to learn how to manage it. Escaping the monster is impossible, but it can be tamed.
Ultimately that's something she has to do on her own. No one can rescue her from herself, no matter how much she wishes for an effortless magical solution that means she would never have to feel anxious again.
The only way out is through, but that's the one place Marinette isn't willing to go to.
And as of today we know(according to his own tweet) that the writers themselves couldn't handle Chloé Bourgeois either. From the man himself, she was axed because people liked her, and they shoved the bully trio into the show. No rumors or speculation here. This happened.
Interesting female character dumped for three male characters, because the male writer couldn't handle the reaction to her. 🤣😭😡
He gives her a totally abusive and neglectful mother whose attention she is desperately seeking after, and then is surprised when people start to feel sympathetic towards her. Honestly, I think Astruc genuinely doesn't realize that when you write terrible parents, that makes the character an abuse victim. And then you write an abuse victim, you are obviously going to have a lot of people feel both sympathy and empathy for that character, and because of that they are going to be drawn to that character and want to see more of their story. The concept of "This 14 year old child is being completely neglected by their parents because they don't care about or love them" should be something that any show writer should immediately recognize as a chekhov's gun that leads to "they are going to either confront or be freed from that unloving and abusive parent". You can't then be mad when people want to see more content about Chloe, Adrien, Felix, and Kagami. You were the one who chose to write them this way.
Which leads me to worry something much worse is happening, that Astruc genuinely doesn't realize that the behavior he has written for these parents is abusive. Which means that any children who see this show and identify with these characters because of their own experiences will be left being told "it's not that bad, it doesn't matter. Get over it."
Since when does Adrien think being a hero is a heavy burden??
There are plenty of instances with cataclysm that could explain how he reached that conclusion. You could even spin it as his guilt over not saving his dad making him see superheroing as a heavy burden. Like, making up a headcanon to explain this is very easy.
But I don't want a headcanon, I want to know what the canonical answer is! I don't want Adrien to be a vague vibes based silhouette I can color in however I please, I want to see an actual character! One who has character driven reasons for doing what he does and doesn't just randomly say whatever the story needs him to.
The entire thing just feels like a plot device. In fact, I'm willing to bet that they need no one to know Adrien is Chat Noir and/or to not have a backup black cat in order to make the plot of the finale work.
Mark my words, the entire thing is just setup for some stupid plot point they're trying to pull off.
The headcannon that makes this make sense to me is that he's not ready to share his identity with anyone he knows because it would mean them realizing that his absence caused his father's death, so he's just saying something to make LB not worry about it. That or he knows all his friends either already are heroes or, in Mari's case, just told him today that they don't want to be heroes. But that's all still clearly a headcannon, and I wish they would actually explain that if that's what they're doing because it involves CN actively being a little facetious in his conversation with LB and not giving her the real reason because it's too personal to his identity, which is fine in cannon but it leaves the audience confused without the added context. Additionally...
Ladybug already thinks there IS a backup Chat Noir! Did the show writers completely forget that LB doesn't know Catwalker is Chat Noir? She does think that Plagg has a backup holder already! This is such a stupid plot hole! It feels like the only reason this scene exists is so that Astruc can tell people on Twitter "See? You all kept saying it wasn't fair that Marinette had a backup but Adrien didn't, but he doesn't even want one! This is why you shouldn't question the people who REALLY know these characters. 👓👆" And that pisses me off because like you said in your post, Adrien DOESN'T have an actual reason for this answer in cannon, and what he says actively contradicts his canonical thoughts and feelings!
Let him gain weight now his dad is gone and he's not modeling anymore! He's canonically dating a baker girl who brings him sweet pastries all the time!
the english version of miraculous can be so hard to listen to sometimes i really do like the french version, i wish we talked more about how the french voice actors are incredible, honestly second in voice acting is the Brazilian Portuguese version oh my gosh i remember when felix did his little sing song it was such a slay. like there’s no hate on the english voice actors i think its just more the voice direction and american media… anyways one of the pros of kind of being able to understand french i guess! give me the french version always!! i wish the online sites wouldn’t remove the french and Portuguese versions as soon as the english versions come out.. it’s really annoying
So I thought riginarazione was a really well written episode, especially by miraculous ladybug standards, but there is one thing that seems to be an inconsistency in it, which is of course the earring grab by babynoir. I'm going to try and explain a possible solution for it, but this is a theory, not necessarily fact.
TLDR: Chat was turned into a baby sentibeing, while Tom was turned into a baby human, and those are two very different things.
What happens in the episode is that babynoir, when he is first grabbed by LB, grabs her earring right off of her. He then seems to be confused and acting like a real baby, just grabbing things with no real understanding of them. Then later in the fight, he has clearly come to his senses more and is listening to instructions and helping execute the plan, despite still being a very little baby. This then creates a problem where to make the earring grab and cataclysming the biscuits make sense he needs to be unaware like a baby, but to make his competence at the end of the fight make sense, he needs to be aware of what's happening pretty much like regular Chat Noir. But I think I have a way to reconcile this that neither writes it off as an oversight nor just makes stuff up to fix the plot hole.
So Riginarazione is turning people older or younger with her powers, but she isn't just adding or subtracting age from them, because otherwise there would be no reason for adult LB's hair to have been cut into the pixie cut. That only makes sense if what her power is doing is actually setting the people she hits to the real version they were / will be at that age, thus explaining the hair changing to match what they did / will have at that age. This means we can assume that when Chat Noir was hit with the baby ray, he was actually set back to how he really was as a baby, not just made to look like a baby.
The problem with that is, he's a senti. He's not a normal human baby, he's a sentimonster made to be like a baby. And we know from S4E18 Wishmaker that when Adrichat was a child, he wanted more than anything to be "Whatever his parents wanted". So what's actually happened is he's been set back to the age where his only desire was to be what the adults in his life wanted him to be. It then makes sense that before anyone tells him what to do he's behaving like a normal baby, grabbing at things and crying and just generally having no clue what's happening. But once an adult (grown up LB) starts telling him what to do and having clear desires for what he should do and how he should behave, then he suddenly starts changing his behavior to be more like what she wants him to be. This then also explains why babynoir was so competent, while baby Tom was clearly just a confused little baby up until the moment he was turned back.
Personally I really liked this new episode! It felt to me like it handled the mature content of grieving a grandparent in a way that's age appropriate for the youngest of the target audience. Framing it more in the direct dialogue as losing the house than Roland specifically was a decent way to thinly veil / censor what adults can clearly see is an episode about a character dying. I also really liked the Marinette in this episode, and I don't usually like her character that much. Her actions all felt very reasonable given the information she has at her disposal and her age, and even though I was absolutely cringing the entire time she was rushing to leave while baking the bread, it felt very in character. And not only that, but it also felt like something that many people could relate to looking back on their childhoods and how they acted towards grandparents or other elderly loved ones. I hope this episode could help teach the lesson to children that you shouldn't rush through life taking people for granted, because you never know when they might be gone. Overall one of my favorite episodes of the series honestly, very well written.
(And yes I did tear up both when LB is running away and at Adrien's bit at the end)
So I'm trying to figure out why does the frog motive keep appearing. First in Risk, which lead to Marinette losing all her miraculouses, and now it's papacorn in season 6.
Symbolism: (source: Google)
Wealth and abundance → the frog toy represents Gabriel
Wisdom
Good luck
Fertility??
More importantly: Trasformation, change, rebirth, renewal and stuff like that, embracing new beginnings and accepting change as a natural part of life, exploring your hidden emotions, trusting your intuition, embracing oppprtunities and trusting that they will manifest in some kind of prosperity or abundance (frogs live in environments rich with life) not necessarely finacially, could be in love
Okay that was very clamped up so I'll try to break it down a bit and connect it to miraculous stuff
Risk & Froggy
Made people take risks, which can be interpreted as trusting your intuition and not overthinking about it (tendency to overthing and overanalyze was mentioned somewhere)
Froggy also set into action a lot of changes. It sparked Marinette to say thing that made Adrien realise his love for her and also he decided to quit modeling. All the other miraculouses were stolen, so the other heroes would be unable to transform.
Frog vs Butterfly
Both are symbols of metamorphosis and transformation.
When a butterfly (akuma) appears, Ladybug and Chat Noir need to transform. The very appearance of a butterfly holder caused a need for some people to transform into heroes.
The frog isn't a miraculous, so it's appearance doesn't just signify superhero transformation (although last time it made a lot of the heroes unable to transform). It seems to cause character development (positive or negative) and change in personal life. Although that doesn't explain why the frog toy made Marinette reconsider telling the truth to Adrien.
The very boilable toy called papacorn
So Marinette knows she needs to tell Adrien the truth but the words just don't come out. She overthinks, she fears change. In El Toro de Piedra the frog makes her decide to not give Adrien the letter. In Sadnansi it makes her reconsider telling the truth. The frog is just reminding her of the comfort that Adrien gets from not knowing, but that comfort is the kind that isn't healthy and that they need to step out of.
But wouldn't it make more sense for the frog to remind her that change is okay, knowing the symbolism? Good question me, I'm not entirely sure why it doesn't work that way. I think it's because the toy is not a real frog. It has never gone through metamorphosis. Gabriel changed for the worse, but papacorn stays as a reminder of what he used to be. It's nostalgia. (Actually I like that, yeah, let's go with that)
For Adrien the frog appears when he wonders how his father could be both a hero and an abuser. He wonders how he used to be at least a bit kinder, kind enough to make papacorn, when in the last years of his life that kindness was gone.
While we're at it, let's talk about the boiling frog metaphor! So basically if you put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out. But if you put it there when the water is cool and then start slowly heating the water, it doesn't jump out. The metaphor is that we might not realise the gradually building risks and changes until it's too late. I'm interested to see if this shows up in the series, although I guess it appeared in Risk when they didn't even realise that Froggy was akumatized for a long time.
Also, the puzzle with the missing piece in Lady Chaos is a frog puzzle.
I absolutely love all this symbolism here, thank you for pointing it out op! My personal running theory (and many other people's, no credit to me) is that Adrien is going to get akumatized when he learns the truth (hence all the Chat Blanc parallels this season) and when he does, this will be his akumatized object. Which I think really adds to the parallels between butterflies and frogs both going through metamorphosis!
