styofa doing anything
noise dept.
ojovivo
i don't do bad sauce passes
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Misplaced Lens Cap
trying on a metaphor
Product Placement
KIROKAZE
tannertan36
@theartofmadeline
#extradirty
pixel skylines
dirt enthusiast
hello vonnie
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
AnasAbdin
No title available
Sweet Seals For You, Always
cherry valley forever
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@sogoli
the epidemic of grown adults playing tiktoks at full volume in public is rampant why are you acting like a 7 year old with their first ipad you have a mortgage
Because life sucks and we’re regressing hehe
plug in some damn headphones before i regress into a caveman and smash your phone with a rock
My fucking cat has figured out how to gently dig his claws into my eyelid and pull my eyes open while I'm sleeping. He does this. It does not hurt. He is remarkably precise and gentle. I however am asleep when it happens and do not appreciate being clockwork oranged by a needy clingy goddamn animal who thinks he needs attention.
I would like to clarify that this animal self feeds and is not being denied breakfast by my sleeping in. He doesn't do this to anyone else. Everyone else simply gets increasingly invasive headbutts and even thats a fairly rare occurence. This fucking cat needs to cuddle with me specifically, And he is decided that the best way to do it is to gently shove his claws underneath my eyelashes and pull. There is no way I can train him out of this because believe it or not shoving your fingers in somebody's eyes to wake them up has the desired reaction.
We have come to a compromise. One that neatly illustrates the reason I'm not wearing an eyemask.
If I have a hair tie on my wrist, my darling sweet baby boy, love of my life and apple of my eye, can gingerly dig his teeth underneath and grab it in his mouth and then back up. and pull. And Snap the hell out of me with the elastic. Again, he is very gentle and precise, there are never teeth touching my skin. This is not a fluke, he managed this several times in various circumstances and positions.
This is worse than a toddler. We are approaching diabolical machinations hitherto undreamt of by domestic felines.
PLEASE watch this. i love chaotic sisters best dynamic in the world
1. this should be required viewing for anyone writing young girls, especially sisters
2. she did a good job and totally saved their asses.
Sometimes sappy is better
Sisters
Livia Blackthorn died too young, but Drusilla Blackthorn grew up too fast.
She had been fifteen when she took her last breath. She wanted to be a warrior, wanted to be strong, wanted to grow and achieve, but what growth comes from a corpse? She tried to cling on to the people she loved, but ended up leaving them too soon. A corpse who hasn't lived a life. A girl, dead before she had a chance. She never got to fall in love, to lead, to be free. Her only great milestones were ones she pushed to happen, like her first kiss.
She had been eight the first time she saw battle. She had always moved fast, reached out, because she had seen how quickly everything you love can be taken from you. She tried to stay still, but if she didn't want everyone to keep leaving her, she had to leave a part of herself. And so the girl died, and was reborn as a warrior. But anyone can tell you that a child is not a warrior, and for all she had seen of life, the horrors it brings, she was trapped by her age.
But in the end they were both Shadowhunters' fates.
Taylor performing Florida!!! with Florence Welch
- The Eras Tour in London, England (N8) on August 20, 2024 (x)
Chat Noir villain arc. Can it be done? Should it be done? In an ideal world? Where Adrien wouldn’t get a salt truck for it? I think he deserves to go apeshit for a season and it could be glorious. I think everyone has a breaking point. What do you think would have to happen to earn at Chat Noir villain arc?
Huh... that's a tricky one. Enemies AU's with Chat on Gabriel's side (at least to start with) are pretty easy to make happen, but Chat Noir as an actual villain, but one who's justified and sympathetic enough to not get hit with a salt truck, and still be somewhat in-character...? Hm...
I'm... not sure it can actually happen, with Adrien getting to go "apeshit", going past his breaking point, and becoming an actual villain. He has moments when he breaks, when he gets upset and lashes out, but they really are just moments. He can't really sustain it. His anger usually just turns into depression after a couple of minutes.
I guess if you were gonna do that, you'd have to do something big. Probably have someone murder Marinette in front of him. That would be a breaking point, and a sympathetic one. He might become an anti-hero or anti-villain at that point, trying to murder whoever was responsible for killing Marinette, and possibly going way too far to try to revive Marinette, like how Gabriel went too far in trying to revive Emilie (but you know. With Adrien ACTUALLY still prioritizing reviving Marinette over anything else.)
The attitude that he "deserves" to "go apeshit" feels kind of weird to me, because I can't see that as something Adrien would want, or something that would bring catharsis to him. He wants to be more free, yes, but he's a compassionate, sensitive person who doesn't want to hurt people. An out-of-control evil rampage wouldn't be liberating for him, it would just make him feel worse and add to the pile of psychological problems he already has. Make him feel guilty for wanting to be free. Make it feel like his father has been correct and justified in abusing and controlling him.
Do we really want Gabriel to be framed as justified in how he's been treating Adrien? Like how he makes Adrien go to his room and calls him overly dramatic/emotional for having any reasonably negative response to bad things happening?
Also actually it wouldn't just add to Adrien's pile of psychological problems, it would also severely distract from the (way more interesting and well-established) problems that have been repeatedly shown and developed since season 1, because the evil rampage would be so much more in-your-face, "loud" problem. This would be greatly narratively unsatisfying, and go against the themes of Adrien's arc. Wouldn't it be way better to focus on the problems that he already has, and which the audience is familiar with, and have spent years waiting for the narrative to build up and address?
Maybe this is a gender stereotype thing? Many of Adrien's canon core problems are kind of... feminine-coded and not very "loud"; the kinds of things that unfortunately often go unaddressed IRL, too, because the people who have these problems mostly break "inwards". Whereas going on an "apeshit" villain rampage would be a gender-conforming, masculine, flashy problem, and therefore what people would expect? Also it would align with the negative but unfortunately common stereotype of mentally ill people being violent and dangerous, when the truth is, mentally ill people are way more likely to be the target of violence and abuse, or to harm themselves. Both of which are actually issues that canon Adrien has been set up to be in danger of! It would be disappointing to have so much build-up for representing these less "loud", underrepresented issues, only to have them suddenly buried and sidelined by something way more generic and loud that better matches the pre-conceived negative stereotypes that people already have.
I feel like wanting Adrien to "go apeshit" is more like, a power-fantasy projection wish-fulfillment for some viewers, rather than a logical conclusion for Adrien's own characterization. Adrien's always been set up to try to self-destruct and let others hurt him, more likely than he is to lash out. Can we please allow that to be an Actual Problem that deserves to be addressed?
And yeah yeah everyone has a breaking point, sure, everyone can be driven to madness if they're broken enough. The same would be true for any other character (or irl person) too. A different question is, would it actually, like, serve any good narrative purpose, or feel meaningful to watch? At some point, further breaking down characters just turns the fiction into misery porn. Is it really worth derailing 4+ seasons of character build-up?
Also IMO it's way more interesting to give a character such a stereotypically evil power like the Miraculous of Destruction, and then have them not go evil. Everyone's already seen characters with evil powers go evil, nothing new there. Actually with the way it's been framed...
Like, you know, Adrien's starting point was this abused, powerless kid in a restrictive "perfect obedient son" role, in a golden cage with very little agency. He gains a limited ability to break free, somewhat, (and have a secret kwami friend for emotional support and commiseration), when he's given the Miraculous of Destruction. It's something that you'd kind of expect to be considered an "evil" power (destruction, rot, associated with bad luck, an all-black outfit with inhuman eye design with slit pupils, comes with this tiny selfish ancient god of destruction spending time with Adrien as a mentor figure with a lot of potential for questionable character development).
...and then... it's okay? It's more or less good for his mental health, actually? It doesn't make Adrien evil, it just makes him a bit less powerless. As Chat Noir, he can get away from his abusive home life. For once, he's allowed to defend himself and fight back (against his father's manipulations! Even if he doesn't know that) and doing that will not result in him being seen as the Bad Guy, or getting punished. For once, he doesn't have to just quietly accept the injustices committed by his father, and act like they aren't a problem.
As Chat Noir, Adrien can have interpersonal interactions that aren't controlled by his father – and of course he makes various social mistakes and has a flaky sense of boundaries (not like he's ever been allowed to have any), and he's new to these unscripted interactions, he turns out to be annoying and sometimes upsets people, and it takes a while to unlearn. But despite the setup, it's not, like, evil.
Even Plagg's selfishness is kind of a positive influence on Adrien; Plagg keeps pointing out when people mistreat Adrien, when Adrien by himself would have let them get away with it and made excuses and let himself be hurt (okay, he still often does that, but at least he does have a friend pointing out the mistreatment). It's a balancing act, sure, but it's not inherently only a bad thing.
Of course, for a child who has been abused the way Adrien has been, the power to gain some agency, to break free a bit, to be a person rather than be Perfect – of course it would be framed as a power that looks like it "should" be evil, or "should" make Adrien turn evil. That's how any abuser in Gabriel's situation would want their victim to view their own capacity for agency: as something dangerous and destructive that would make the victim ruin everything, if they make the mistake of pursuing it.
And that's why this normally evil-coded power isn't treated as inherently evil in this narrative, and why it doesn't actually turn Adrien evil when he does accept it. That would just mean proving the abuser right.
This symbolism also ties to Gabriel, the abusive parent, wielding the Butterfly Miraculous. It comes with a magical empathy sense to detect others' negative emotikbs and struggles. It's intended for uplifting and empowering these people by giving them superpowers to carry out tasks and needs that they'd otherwise be unable to do. But Gabriel, instead, uses it to manipulate people through despair and a false sense of warped sympathy, takes away their sense of self, and turns them into his tools. It's a metaphor for the power Gabriel wields as an abusive parent; someone who could have the power to uplift and empower, but chooses to manipulate and treat people as tools beneath him, instead.
We repeatedly see these people-turned-into-tools by Gabriel get pushed around and manipulated into "going apeshit" on evil rampages that, maybe at first glimpse may look like some kind of a catharsis factor, except... not really. They're Not Themselves, they're targets of manipulation (and literal supernatural brainwashing/possession), they don't get to remember it afterwards, they're repeatedly referred to as Hawkmoth's victims.
This is not a show that has ever framed "going apeshit" and turning into an evil rampaging villain as something liberating or empowered, or something that would make any sense for a character to "deserve" for their own good.
I, for one, would be disappointed if they change that.
Even Chat Blanc wasn't some kind of an edgy murderboy villain power fantasy for Adrien. It was, in fact, the opposite of that. Gabriel learned about Chat Noir – Adrien's secret access to having agency, support, and a way to escape his abusive home life. Gabriel used this information as a weapon and a "justification" to hurt Adrien even more. Gabriel deliberately traumatised and manipulated Adrien and overpowered him, tried to turn Adrien into yet another tool for his own means. Even akumatized, Adrien tried to resist because he didn't want to hurt anyone, ultimately attempting to self-destruct and cataclysm himself instead of anyone else – and completely failed. He was left alone with his guilt to haunt a dead world that he had no way of fixing, no matter how much he wanted to. He couldn't even reject the akumatization and actually be himself again, probably because there was no way to let go and reject the despair, because there was nothing left to come back to.
For Adrien, "going apeshit" and turning into a villain (even without being akumatized or controlled by anyone else) wouldn't be a power fantasy. It would be a loss-of-agency nightmare. And he's already currently living through one (albeit very different) loss-of-agency nightmare in canon anyway. I don't think he needs another.
Agreed on all of this. Adrien “going apeshit” doesn’t make sense in the context of who he is or how he generally reacts to things, and it wouldn’t make him feel better. What he needs more, is just to stop repressing his negative emotions so that he can actually express how upset, hurt, or angry about something he is so that it can actually be ADDRESSED, not so he can go on some roaring rampage to get some... catharsis I guess? It just doesn’t make sense for him to do that.
Gabriel, arms crossed: Why do people think I’m incapable of doing anything nice?
Nathalie, not looking up from her tablet: Experience.
omg i only just realized that she did indeed get her 8 kisses with chat noir in exaltation!!
Friendly reminder that he killed 7 billion+ people in an alternate timeline
Glad to see that we’re all on the same page
You know, I really appreciate how Illusion emphasized that, while Adrien can try to confront Gabriel, Gabriel is an abusive asshole and just “standing up to him” - heck, even just politely airing a grievance - isn’t safe for Adrien to do. Sure, Gabriel technically listened and talked to Adrien about his concerns about having his image used for Digi-Adrien, but even while talking warmly with him, Gabriel subtly threatened to withdraw this new parental affection if Adrien insisted on his complaint. And then Gabriel actually went THROUGH with withdrawing his parent affection (telling Adrien to no longer call him “dad”, and ordering him to his room, like usual) and blaming it partially on Adrien’s (fairly mild) complaint about the rings.
I like that the show reminded us that, while Adrien’s more able to recognize when a situation with his father isn’t great, and that he has the will to talk with him about it, Adrien is still in an abusive situation. There’s a reason he hasn’t tried to just talk to Gabriel about problems before, and why Adrien regularly represses his emotions and pretends to be more okay with things than he actually is - Adrien still needs the abuse survival strategies that he has built up, because he is still actively needing to survive this abuse.
I hope for the day Ladybug’s lucky charm gives her a fryinp pan again or a baseball batduring an epic final fight against Monarch so she can beat him up with it
I was thinking about the Alliance rings and how Adrien is more accessible to the public than he ever was before, because his image is literally in the hands of the public At least before the alliance rings, there was still some distance between the public and Adrien, with his face on billboards and TV commercials, but now his image is directly accessible to people, available 24/7. They essentially own a copy of Adrien, a version of Adrien that they can interact with on their own terms and control what he does and says. We saw Plagg playing around with the alliance ring and getting the alliance Adrien to say what he wanted him to say.
In addition to that, his image is now associated with people's daily lives as people use the alliance rings for regular tasks, like Socqueline checking the stock in the art shop, Alya using the ring to call Marinette, and Gabriel using it to look up a recipe. It might cause them to perceive some sort of parasocial relationship with Adrien through his voice and image being present in their daily lives, feeling as if they have a personal connection to him where there is none. Already we've seen people recognising him and feeling entitled to interfere with his life and invade his privacy, one referring to the actual Adrien as his personal assistant, as if there was no difference between the real Adrien and alliance Adrien.
I knew those alliance rings were the devil's tools but your analysis makes those things even worse
Why Didn’t Adrien Dream About His Mother in Jubilation? Is his grief poorly written/Is he a sociopath?
1. Ladybug and Chat Noir got hit as a pair. Their goals in the dream only reflected things they would both want/people they both know. If Emilie showed up somewhere, Ladybug would have a lot of questions and then we wouldn’t have this secret identity business to push the plot/intrigue along, would we? Same reason Tom and Sabine weren’t at the wedding.
2. People grieve differently. Adrien’s grief is ongoing. It’s not nonexistent as we see that his mother is ever present- on his computer and phone screen and in his mind. Adrien is resilient. But he is also- to a point- a denier. He copes by distraction- going to school, making friends, love interests and his hero life. We’ve also seen him have quiet, sullen introspective moments where he stares at her picture. Just because he hasn’t gone 100% emo doesn’t mean his grief is nonexistent or that he is a socipath. Keep in mind, he has also canonically stated he feels he has to be stronger to support his father. His method of grieving is in line with his character.
3. The image of his grief just pales in comparison next to Gabriel who has made grieving Emilie his entire personality and is refusing to move to the next steps in the grieving process.
My God, people.
You know, I appreciate that Adrien’s more of a romantic, floating-on-clouds type, while Marinette’s feelings have that along with a more thirsty component, though nothing too overbearing. It’s part of the whole “subverting gender stereotypes” thing Miraculous has going on, with the guy being allowed to just be a romantic, while the girl’s allowed to also have a little bit of sexual attraction (though nothing too overt since it’s a kid’s show).
So Chat Noir brags a lot on his attractiveness and I think it’s funny that , even in serious moments like in Weredad or Elation, he makes comments about how he too would fall in love with himself. Do you think he acts this way solely to be funny or is Adrien more confident about his looks than he lets on?
On one hand he has low self esteem in other areas and I can see him using humor as a way to cover up insecurity about his looks too. But he’s also a model who has probably had people telling him how attractive he is since he was tiny. People send letters to him weekly just because of the way he looks. Girls (and probably a lot of guys too (Wayhem)) fawn over him in and out of costume. So I also don’t think it’s unreasonable that he would have a very swollen head as far as his attractiveness goes to the point that it may have even affected his persistence with Ladybug. Like after everyone putting you on a pedestal as the gold standard of gorgeous- including your only female friend Chloe who is constantly making passes at you- this one rejection would have to throw you. Like I can imagine some part of his brain that he would never voice as Adrien being like “this girl isn’t into me?! but I’m… ME!”
While I'm sure that Adrien IS confident in his looks - he's a model, there's no denying he's pretty, it's one of the things in his life he can be reasonably secure about - I'm pretty sure Chat Noir comments on his own attractiveness mostly to be funny, as a way to cut tension especially, like in Elation.
I'm betting you could write a whole essay going over how Chat Noir uses his jokes about his own good looks to... I dunno... maybe take ownership of his own looks somehow? I feel like there's something more going on there, what with how objectified Adrien is for his appearance (I mean his image is LITERALLY being sold to people as a virtual dress-up doll), and how Chat Noir, when he kind of jokes about how attractive he is, kind of... yeah "taking ownership" is the main way I can articulate that. I feel like I'm onto something here, but I'm not sure what it is, precisely.
We have to remember: Adrien, whether or not he fully realizes it, is a victim of honestly quite traumatic emotional abuse. His terrorist of a father isolates, manipulates, uses, and then neglects him. While he's still reeling from the loss of his mom.
As a model and brand icon and digital avatar, Adrien's life is full of people who love him at a price. That love is conditional. Performative perfection is the price of everyone's love. As long as he does what he is told, he is golden--which is also why Chat Noir often takes on a quite different demeanor as he no longer has to be Adrien Agreste, literal perfection.
But Adrien is never shown as someone (like say Chloe) who blindly values his looks or acts vain. Instead, we know Adrien gets sick of people who don't even know him fawning over him, and he's repeatedly shown wanting to be unconditionally loved for who he is--not what he looks like or how cool he seems or how much revenue he can make for his dad.
That being said, Adrien knows he's popular. And he knows his looks are valued by the large majority of people. Even if he's sick of people demanding attention from him, he's used to it.
So much so that he's concerned when Marinette seems to actually avoid him, even after he learned that she was a fan. He's so not used to that. It actually causes him to worry about what he's done to make her mad.
And the more Adrien comes into his own, the more he just wants to be left alone, free to be himself, with no expectations of perfection. This is also why he's so touched by how Marinette strips back all the fancy language in her speech and instead professes her genuine admiration for buttercup, not as a romantic figure, but as a genuine person. And this is why what he takes away from this encounter is that he needs to act more like himself as Chat Noir.
The thing with that is that he's actually deeply worried that people won't like "me for me". They like him as a model or as a hero, but not as just some guy playing video games and cracking jokes and putting his heart on the line. So whenever he's insecure about being liked for his personality, he falls back on "oh ha ha I'm so good looking if you only knew, you'd like me."
When he says "I love me" he means "everyone else loves the persona I adapt, so I should pretend to as well." And maybe every now and then he gets a boost of confidence from the popularity and it works as a substitute for genuine love, but it's never enough and he's quickly frustrated again that he's not getting the kind of love he actually wants.
Because being truly unloved and alone is one of Adrien's core fears as a result of how his father treats him and teasing about his situation is a coping mechanism.
In addition, I think it's possible that whenever Chat Noir goes over the top with the "oh yeah I definitely am very amazing, I too could fall in love with myself" jokes, that's also him desperately trying to convince himself – not about being, like, good-looking; he knows he's conventionally attractive. But about being worthy of love (ever worthy of self-love???).
@fernsnouveau Don’t just leave this in the tags, this is great!
Adrien’s whole issue of the love he receives from his father being highly conditional heavily affects his relationships with everyone else. And we saw just how conditional that love is recently, in Illusion, with Gabriel’s whole “Oh I’m cooking pancakes for you, I want to spend time with you, call me dad - but if you aren’t okay with me using your image for this Siri-equivalent, I’ll stop doing all this and will be super cold to you again” thing. With that very much still being ongoing, it’s not surprising that he expects his most important and valued relationships to be that conditional.
Season 4 followed up on Adrien’s perception that if he wasn’t absolutely crucial and needed by Ladybug, then she wouldn’t want him around, but he’s had this insecurity displayed since season 2, ever since she started giving out Miraculous. You see it in Syren, Anansi, and Sandboy as well, it’s deeply rooted. He genuinely thinks that if Ladybug doesn’t technically need him around to fight akumas, then she’ll kick him to the curb at a moment’s notice - not because she’s actually given indicators that she’d demand his Miraculous (she’s never even floated the idea, either to him or in private), but because that is the sort of environment he’s grown up in.
Yes, exactly.
And Adrien cannot be expected to unlearn this abuse-survival mechanism of expecting his relationships to be highly conditional, and to "perform" accordingly (hide discomfort, fail to establish boundaries, change himself to be what he thinks the other person wants, expect to be punished or discarded if he "fails") because he's still currently living in an abusive household where this mechanism continues to be necessary for his survival.
Heck, Adrien has internalised at least one of Gabriel's favorite punishments (further limit Adrien's freedom and prevent him from seeing friends and loved ones) so much that Adrien sometimes does it to himself when he thinks he "deserves" it. That's why he renounced the ring in Kuro Neko.
ive seen some updated lovesquare charts recently and i think there’s some missing nuance so i’ve made my own
as you can see it’s requited on all sides now. they’re in love.
