Hey guys! So I'm working on a KittyBella AU where Kitty Noire and Scarabella are the heroes from the start, and I've pretty solidly decided AdriNino is the beta couple, and the equivalent of DJWifi as "Couple that gets together early in the story and generally has their shit together."
But I also intend for Zoe and Alya to have an identity reveal and get together in the MIDDLE of the story, and outside of the superhero nonsense, their relationship is also pretty functional. Which means, for contrast reasons, I want a third relationship that gets together later in the story and is an absolute trainwreck disaster for a significant time before getting together.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), I have MULTIPLE fantastic options for this third relationship, so I figured I'd let the people decide!
Which Ship Should be featured with KittyBella and AdriNino?
No confirmed ships, just gay subtext that their classmates watch like reality TV
Something Else Entirely (tell me in tags/reblogs/comments)
Voting ended onApr 16, 2025
As you can tell, whoever ISN'T part of the Disaster Ship will probably get shipped with Luka in the end, unless I decide to include him on a Disaster Polycule (which means there's high potential for Sabrina/Luka, which is a fun rarepair), but that'll be a VERY lategame ship, even later than the Walking Disasters.
Also, I may co-opt Sabrinanette and Chlogami or Chlobrina and Marigami. (Although I cannot picture Sabrina and Kagami in a relationship, so they will not feature in Chlonette).
(Also, in case you couldn't tell, I'm redeeming Chloe and making her and Zoe close. Like. Chloe and Sabrina collectively get Nino's role of "Black Cat's best friend" and Nino and Marinette collectively get Alya's role of "Ladybug's best friend" and Adrien spends equal time in both friend groups).
It seems that the requirements for a black cat user are "Sad repressed blonde, head-over-heels for the ladybug, and has a close but complicated relationship with Queen Bee"
Anyway, have Chloe and Zoe in my KittyBella AU! I think Chloe is the ONLY miraculous I didn't shuffle around. Queen Bee is just too iconic and too perfect for her! I love both the bee sisters and can never resist making them super close.
Design notes under the cut, as usual.
I picture both these images being when Chloe is well on her way through her redemption arc, so later in the story.
When drawing outfits for Chloe, I always wanna make them glamorous and extra, but I lean more on the "glam" for pre-redemption Chloe and more on the "extra" for post-redemption, because I think she'd stop trying to appeal to her mother's tastes and embrace more of her own style. Specifically, I always want Chloe to look like a visibly queer femme. Obviously, there's no one right way to look gay---if you ARE gay, then you look gay---but I tend to lean heavy on glitter, shiny fabric, and bright colors (especially in her makeup) for Chloe in a kind of "party-girl" style.
I headcanon that her hair is naturally wavy/curly and she has to straighten it, so my post-redemption Chloe always has curls galore. I also have an obsession with giving Chloe a secondary blue color, because I noticed that the only thing about her appearance that isn't imitating Audrey is her blue eyeshadow. The more she breaks away from her parents, the more blue I give her.
For Zoe, I actually really like her canon outfit, but it is a CRIME that they did not give this girl tie-dye, she was MADE for it. In KittyBella, I mostly just pallet swap her so that her pinks are purples and her blues are greens to reference the cat miraculous. I also dislike that she's just wearing leggings---Zoe is such a skater girl in my head, so I always picture her in something sturdier, hence the jeans.
I think Queen Bee's canon outfit is like. ALMOST complete perfection. But it lacks FLOOF! Bees are FLOOFY, and adding FLOOF is a great way to make her look even more extravagent and like royalty! So, I literally just added FLOOF. All the FLOOF.
While I don't think Kitty Noir's canon outfit is bad except for the neon green lipstick and the colors clashing (which is really easily fixed by just cooling the color scheme down and making the purple darker and the green brighter), I'm a self-indulgent loser who likes making things appeal to my exact personal tastes. Zoe, in my mind, should never ever ever be without a leather jacket. She's a 2000s emo, removing it is the equivalent of shaving her bald and changing her name. It's THAT important to her identity. Not giving her a leather jacket is, to me, the equivalent of not dyeing the Couffaines hair or not putting Rose in pink. Everything else is basically just to complement the jacket.
I know Miraculous is a French show and that when Marinette tells Zoe "I like your accent, it's pretty" she's referring to Zoe's American accent when speaking French.
However, the dub absolutely missed their opportunity to give Zoe a THICK New York accent when she's speaking English, and in my heart, she absolutely has one.
Listen people---I love Chloe and Zoe both on their own merits separate from each other, and I love them both as a pair. In any more canon-close Miraculous discussion, I will ALWAYS push for the two of them to share the bee and to be GOOD FREAKING SISTERS as much as I can without drawing the story too much away from the main characters.
I know the writers room really just created Zoe to be a replacement for Chloe so they could fully commit to making Chloe """"evil"""" and """"irredeemable"""" and that her presence tends to mark the bad writing because it signals both their obsession with making Chloe bad and their obsession with making Zoe both the main character (despite so many other side characters deserving more attention) and completely uncomplicatedly good (even though she is NOT girlie has so many issues it's why I LIKE HER YOU GUYS). But I don't care because Miraculous is nothing if not a GOLD MINE of potential. And fellas. I am about to Get Rich Quick.
In KittyBella, Zoe IS the main character, Chloe is going to be deeply important to her story, and I am going to go HOGWILD on giving Chloe a redemption arc and giving the girlies a really close relationship. Because this is fanfiction and I am self-indulgent and I CAN! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Even in canon, Chloe loves her sister:
Uh oh, we have section headers, that's how you KNOW I got carried away.
When Zoe is first introduced, it's after the writers have decided to send Chloe on a nosedive off the deep end and Chloe is STILL very nice to her sister by Chloe standards. She immediately looks at Zoe and in Chloe-speak goes "You're pretty, and probably a little clueless, let me mentor you and make sure you have someone helping you on your side."
In Sole Crusher, Chloe spends the episode teaching Zoe everything she's learned about how to imitate Audrey and threatening not to accept her if she doesn't walk all over people. It gets Zoe akumatized, since she came here to ESCAPE all the mean-girl posturing, and then a little speech from Marinette---a girl she has said about 5 sentences to---convinces her that she'll be accepted.
While there are some things from the Sole Crusher setup we can take, I really dislike a lot of the writing decisions (mainly around how Zoe is just so ready to believe Marinette that makes no sense, even if she DOES have a crush). So I'll be making some changes.
Major Changes:
This is season one Chloe, not retcon plainly evil Chloe.
Season one Chloe absolutely adores her not-girlfriend Sabrina and her BFF Adrien even though they notably DON'T "walk all over other people," and is quite happy to do the walking for them. She gets waspish when they try to stop her from being a bully, but she doesn't really have issues with the fact that Sabrina is too meek to lead the mean-girl charge or that Adrien is a polite sunshine child. She just wishes he wouldn't spend so much time with people she considers beneath him.
Sabrina clearly does have the capacity to be mean and even seems to enjoy it sometimes: she's happy to help kick Mari and Alya out of their seats in Origins. But Chloe never feels the need to direct her to be cruel, she just wants assistance in her own cruelty. I definitely think we're taking a similar approach with Zoe. Chloe doesn't need to force her to humiliate Marinette, she just expects Zoe to be on board when Chloe is humiliating her, and to support her opinions of "lesser" people.
Speaking of Adrien and Sabrina, they're definitely going to factor into all of this. Because in season one, Sabrina and Chloe are much more equals and Adrien is quick to make excuses for her behavior. And here we reach the first change to Origins:
Adrien isn't a homeschooler.
I think it would be a bit much to have to juggle Zoe and Adrien bith majorly uprooting their lives and having Chloe being their only guide to the new world on the same day. So I've altered the setup a bit. First of all, all of the characters are aged up to be starting the U.S. equivalent of 10th grade, which, in France, is the start of high school, so the whole class is having a social shift. (I used to assume this was canon thanks to Sabrina's "New Year, New School, New Seats" line in Origins, but that's since been retconned. I don't care though, we're keeping it).
A lot of them used to go to the same middle school, but a lot of them didn't. Specifically: Nino, Marinette, Kim, Alix, Rose, Juleka, and Chloe all went to the same middle school. Sabrina and Chloe have been friends forever, but she actually went to a larger middle school with Max, Ivan, Mylene, and Nathaniel, which made any cheating they did easier to pull off. Alya is a transplant, and her parents did deliberately wait to move on the school year so the transition wouldn't be as jarring. She's been in Paris for about a month by the time the show starts.
Adrien used to go to a much smaller private middle school with a bunch of other child models and actors and such (think XY and Clara Nightingale, but they're both older than the Miracuclass). He was all set to get funneled into the same high school as his peers, but due to the recent "disappearance" of Emilie, Chloe convinced Gabe it would be better if he went to school with her and Sabrina (something he's wanted for a long time but it's so far been a bit fruitless). This is also where Aurore and Mirielle go to school.
This creates an environment where Adrien still has a pretty skewed social experience and is fairly sheltered, but he's not completely upending his life the way Zoe is, which allows more focus on her. For consistency's sake, we'll say Zoe was also going to a 7-9 or 6-9 junior high back in NYC (which wouldn't actually be super unusual, NYC schools are weird).
Anyway, point is, Chloe fully adopts Zoe and drags her into her friend group with Adrien and Sabrina. Unlike in canon though, she doesn't really expect Zoe to "walk all over people" or be actively cruel, she just expects her to only associate with people Chloe deems acceptable and to acknowledge everybody else as beneath them.
Think Regina George. There will be times when Zoe is expected to be mean, but not any more than the Plastics expect Cady to be mean. Actually, the Plastics are a stupendous analogy for the internal dynamics of Chloe, Sabrina, and Adrien: Bossy dramatic mean girl who's so stylish and cool and influential that everyone likes her anyways; super smart girl who's more cute than hot who probably has an unrequited crush on her bestie and does absolutely everything said bestie tells her to even when bestie is mean to her; and then a super sweet but dense as bricks and insanely hot person who happens to have friends with a nasty side that they aren't really conciously aware of.
(If I were to extend the mean-girls metaphor, Marinette is Janice and then Nino is probably the equivalent Damien, although I read him and Alya as bi not gay. Zoe and Chloe have very different types, so idk who Aaron is. Pollen maybe, but not in KittyBella. Doesn't really matter).
Anywhoodle, this puts Zoe in a really rough spot because, without even trying, Chloe is giving her absolutely everything she wanted: a family member who deeply cares about her and chases the wolves away and takes Zoe under her wing and offers constant affection and companionship. But it all comes at a price, because Zoe still can't be authentically herself. She's suffering the same problem she was suffering in NYC. She can only be interested in things Chloe deems appropriate (which, by extension, are things Audrey/Andre find appropriate). She can only have friends that Chloe thinks are exceptional enough. She can't speak up when Chloe is being unkind or going overboard.
And I find this dynamic FASCINATING, because Zoe is simultaneously getting her heart's desire at the cost of having to relive her worst fears. She came to Paris to get AWAY from all this and now it's happening again, but it's just different enough that she doesn't catch it early (Zoe isn't a great people-reader). She tried to run away, and critically, unlike in canon, it DID NOT WORK. Zoe DOESN'T easily stand up to people. She is NOT that confident in herself, and she DOES NOT trust that people will like her for her own merits (major major difference between her and Alya: Alya is who Zoe WISHES she could be).
Chloe is the only person Zoe is POSITIVE will not abandon her, because, if nothing else, Chloe is at least incredibly clear and direct about her wants and needs, and Zoe just has to do what she says.
Chloe is Not Like Other Mean Girls:
Speaking of it being kind of different, now seems like a good spot to talk about what I think the nature of Zoe's past mean-girl drama is, since it will affect how she breaks out of this problem and deals with Chloe going forward. Disclaimer that I haven't seen season 6 (I'm probably gonna wait until it's mostly all out), but if people would like to share tidbits from it, I'm happy to try to work it into my headcanons.
So to start, I think elementary school Zoe was bullied quite a lot. I've talked on this in a previous KittyBella post, but I headcanon Zoe as a deeply strange child who was mostly socialized around only mildly caring adults and has a lot of strange interests and behaviors that she hadn't learned to tone down. It made her an outcast when she went to elementary school, and the bullying ranged from deliberate exclusion of the group weirdo to teasing her whenever she acted odd to some of the more malicious kids (who saw her as an acceptable target since nobody really liked her) doing things like stealing her stuff or defacing her property.
Zoe learned to hide and mask her strange behaviors until she was the ridiculously sweet very bland individual we meet in canon. When she started going to boarding school in junior high, a lot of her peers were attracted to her because, even amongst them, she was pretty dang rich and her mom was very influential. Zoe, who was terrified of becoming a target of bullying again, was willing to do whatever they said to stay in their good graces.
And staying in their good graces meant doing a lot of things Zoe hated. For one, her "friends" were not ones to protect her from any bullying or hatred. Anytime Zoe did something weird, they were usually the first ones to jeer at and taunt her. If Zoe was being harassed by another person, they'd join in. For another, they all expected Zoe to do the same: be very cruel to others because it was "funny" or because "they deserve it" even though most of the time the recipients of the cruelty were just like Zoe was in elementary school. They made it clear that if Zoe wasn't constantly doing favors for them and following what they said to the letter, she'd be ousted from the friend group. Anything Zoe was interested in tended to get staunchly ignored and ridiculed, and she was instead stuck doing whatever her "friends" wanted.
All this taught Zoe to see friendships as transactional, where she constantly had to be giving in and doing what everyone else wanted, and in exchange, they wouldn't be cruel to her.
Now all this is DEEPLY different from how I'm writing Chloe. She's a very different flavor of jerk than Zoe is used to operating with.
For one, you diss Chloe's friends and you're *finished.* If you say something mean to Sabrina or Adrien or even Felix, she will end you. She will pull out every embarassing thing she's ever learned about you and mock you in front of everyone, and then she'll get you punished by the teachers and the principals too (or your boss or the law enforcement or whoever Chloe can convince to do it quickest). Only Chloe is allowed to tease them because she does it with love and for their own improvement.
For another, Chloe actually does respect her friends and their opinions, even when she LOUDLY disagrees. She thinks Sabrina could dress much hotter and more fashionably, but she recognizes that Sabrina feels most comfortable in a cute sweater vest, regardless of how out-of-style it may be. And so, Chloe will make sure Sabrina has access to the BEST damn sweater vest ever. Adrien wants to associate with losers? Alright, he's an idiot and she expects him to prioritize her over them every time, but she'll try to be less awful to Adrien's losers specifically.
Like. There are certainly limits to this. She's not letting Sabrina dress like a 70s secretary (which may be more what Sabrina wants to dress like), and she's not suddenly treating Adrien's other friends like equals. But she does care for her friends and will help them do things she finds stupid just because it makes them happy.
When her friends have interests, she might find them Ridiculous (utterly ridiculous) and will refuse to participate, but unless she wants them to be doing something with her right then, she won't *stop* them. Does she understand why Sabrina is a nerd who likes reading so much? No. Will she ever participate in a read-a-thon with Sabrina? No. Will she expect Sabrina to put the book down if Chloe wants to take her on an expedition or needs help with homework? Yes. But if she walks in on Sabrina reading for fun, she's not going to ridicule her, she recognizes this is Just A Sabrina Thing that she doesn't quite get.
Basically, while Chloe is bluntly rude, self-absorbed, and thinks she's better than everyone, she is actually fun to be around and does actually like her friends (in contrast to Zoe's middle-school "friends" who would sell each other for a singular corn chip). But Zoe doesn't fully understand this about Chloe. She just thinks "For some unfathomable reason, my sister decided I was acceptable the first time she met me and I better not fuck that up or I lose the only person I've ever met who will protect me from cruel people around me."
This All Affects Zoe AS KITTY NOIR:
I want to write it so that Zoe is still masking who she is a LOT, and, like Adrien does in canon, uses Kitty Noir as a release for that.
As Kitty, she has fantastic superpowers to protect herself, isn't a target for anyone other than Hawkmoth, and is too busy to worry about being liked by anyone other than Scarabella really.
She also finds that for once, exaggerating her personality is more helpful than toning it down. Her flirty side helps bring some much needed levity in dangerous situations, her side that's interested in getting and giving the heebie jeebies is useful for unsettling her opponents and putting them on the back foot, and her skill monkey side is useful for skill monkey reasons that don't come up a lot in civilian life. This is something she has in common with Alya, who for once, doesn't have to be so mature and restrained and can be more excitable---and a little bitchy.
Of the duo, Scarabella is going to be the "meaner" one who always has a sassy biting comment for the reporters and an insult for the villains and won't hesitate to yell at people to GET OUT OF HER WAY. Kitty, while still a bit of a pungeon master, is more likely to compliment the villain's on their good attacks and style and to be sweet and comforting to civilians. She's mean at Chloe's behest in canon all the time, and she doesn't have to be as Kitty Noir, so she isn't.
I'm also going to put a sidebar here, since I don't have a better spot to put it: Zoe's behavior causes a lot of drama in the KittyBella lovesquare. How Alya and Zoe see each other probably deserves it's own post, but know that Alya is highly conflicted about Zoe.
Chloe's Redemption:
Anyways, as the story goes on, Chloe and Zoe's relationship is going to change.
First of all, Zoe is going to get more confident in herself and more uncomfortable with Chloe's cruelty as time goes on. But she loves Chloe and even if she wanted to, she couldn't just stop hanging out with her---they live in the same place.
Secondly, Adrien and Sabrina are also going to get more confident with time and more uncomfortable with Chloe's behavior. Adrien through hanging out with non-Chloe people, and Sabrina through watching both the new heroes of Paris and her new classmates.
I think, in order of who starts calling Chloe out first, it'll be Adrien, then Zoe, then Sabrina. Adrien starts doing it fairly early in the story and it causes a lot of tension, Zoe does it around the midway point as Chloe starts working to be a better person and encourages her along, and Sabrina begins doing it at the end, who feels more comfortable doing so after Chloe is furthest along in her redemption arc and makes it clear she DOESN'T always know when she's being mean and NEEDS to be called out.
I like the idea that Adrien hits it off with Nino really well, and so Nino drags him away from Chloe and into the greater friend group a lot, and Adrien invites Zoe and Sabrina along pretty often. As Adrien, who has never been witness to the way Chloe treats her classmates, learns more and more about how awful she is to them, he does start pushing her to change. He starts calling her out every time she does something mean and choosing his other friends over her (but only when she makes them choose).
This puts Chloe on the back foot a little bit because she does genuinely care about Adrien and doesn't want to lose him. But the other people in her life aren't exactly qualified for teaching her how to be good, so she turns to her heroic role models for help instead. Kitty jumps on the opportunity to give her sister a miraculous and she, Scarabella, and Kitty all build a really great rapport that teaches Zoe a LOT about how her sister works and encourages her to start playing an active role in the civilian sphere too.
Once they get a system worked out and resolve some of their communication issues, Sabrina, always stalwart and affectionate, gently and happily helps Chloe along.
Basically, Adrien kicks off Chloe's desire to change, Zoe (as both herself and as Kitty Noir) provides the support to make it happen, and Sabrina keeps it going even when Chloe backslides.
Zoe, Redeemed Chloe, and their Parents:
Also, a big part of Chloe getting nicer will be her realizing that her parents are supremely horrible people, and she and Zoe will bond over that because Zoe has ALREADY realized their parents are terrible, she just doesn't know how to stand up to them. Chloe's bold confidence combined with Zoe's YEARS of pent up ideas and frustration will quickly make them ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARES for their parents.
I've already made a post about some of my Zoe headcanons, and I picture Mr. Lee as a pretty redeemable guy, and I think I'm going to redeem him in KittyBella. I'm unsure about Audrey and Andre though. I'd have to majorly change how Andre is written to make him redeemable, since in the show he is almost solely responsible for Chloe's psyche being fucked on every level. If someone's got an opinion either way, I'd love to hear it. Audrey's still terrible, and I don't think I want to redeem her, but if someone would like to convince me otherwise, I'm all ears!
TL;DR
So yeah, that got long and a bit rambly, but those are my major thoughts on Chloe, her relationship with Zoe, her redemption arc, and how the Bee Sisters relationship affects both of them. If anyone has thoughts, opinions, headcanons, ideas, disagreements, or anything else to say about it please do! This WIP is still in the early stages of development and very little is set in stone here. Even if it's only vaguely KittyBella related, or even if it's Something Else Miraculous related, I'm super interested and all of it will give me things to think about when writing.
(And even if it's not miraculous related and you just wanna yap in my inbox, I love listening to and talking to people! Please just come scream at me)!
Next post will either be a LoveSquare dynamics deep-dive or cover changes to the magic system, but then I think I'm gonna try to outline Origins!
Thanks so much to everybody who voted in the first poll, but now we have a tie!
If you're new here and can't be bothered to read the first post, I'm developing a KittyBella AU where AdriNino replaces DJWifi as "earlygame couple with their shit together," but I intend for Zoe and Alya to get together and have an identity reveal much earlier, and generally be more functional than Adrienette. To balance the universe, we need a lategame disaster ship. This is the tiebreaker poll
Which couple should be featured with KittyBella and AdriNino
Chlonette
Kagaminette/Marigami
Voting ended onApr 24, 2025
Before you vote, do remember that while Chloe and Marinette will both be secondary characters (as opposed to Zoe and Alya being the main characters), Kagami will most likely be a tertiary character. The results of this poll may change that!
Also, keep in mind that Kagaminette's shipmate is most likely Chlobrina, while Chlonette's shipmate is most likely Lukabrina.
It's no secret that the lore in miraculous is kind of all over the place, and is pretty frustrating to deal with. If I ever did a rewrite that keeps the same general plot and main characters, I'd completely overhaul it. But for KittyBella, that feels like a lot of work when I'm also having to write the changes to character dynamics and general setup from the kwami swap.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of writer unfriendly elements to the Miraculous Lore and Magic System that are both difficult to work with and that I personally dislike so much that I simply won't have fun working with them at all, so I'll still be changing some things.
This does leave me with an awkward gray area though of "things I would 100% change if this were a canon rewrite but that I don't know if I want to add to KittyBella."
I'm hoping writing them all out will help me decide, but I'm also opening this to you all, the potential audience for this fic to discuss. Any lore changes you think would be appropriate in a KittyBella AU, I'd LOVE to hear, and if you have opinions on what to add and what to save for a different AU, it would be much appreciated.
So without further ado, here are the changes!
Things that 100% WILL be in KittyBella:
The black cat is now required for the World Healing Wave/Miraculous Cure power
One of the most frustrating aspects of canon for me is that the Ladybug and the Black Cat are pitched as Equals: Ying and Yang, Creation and Destruction, Bad Luck and Good Luck. They're both required for the big wish and they're supposed to be equal partners.
But in practice, Ladybug is the only one who actually seems to be more powerful: between the akuma purification, the miraculous cure, and the magical anti-akuma charms that work for like one episode, Ladybug effectively has 4 powers to Chat Noir's one. Add that into the fact that the writers tend to overfocus on Marinette, to the point that she was made the sole guardian of the Miraculous and that Adrien actually got BENCHED FROM THE FINAL FIGHT in season 5, and it tends to look MUCH less like Ying and Yang and more like Chat Noir is relegated to. . .well. . .
I'm aware that Season 6 declares Miraculous Chat Noir is a power used to destroy memories or something, but this is a total ret-con, since that's not how it worked back in Oblivio. And even besides that, there are a lot of things the cure can do that should really be the black cat's job anyway, like destroying bread monsters or desubmerging Paris. So now, both the Ladybug and the Cat wielders have to be present for Miraculous Cure---it's a joint power.
All miraculous users can now purify akumas
Instead of making this a super dumb power that comes from the LADYBUG'S YO-YO IN PARTICULAR of all things, we're going to make this power available to ANY miraculous holders. Evil magic corrupts the akumas, miraculous magic purifies them/restores them to their natural state or whatever. We're gonna say it works just by catching it in your hands and doing the reverse of whatever the hell Hawkmoth is doing to them. Having something to catch them in like a yo yo is certainly helpful, but Chat's extension stick is nothing to sneeze at---you can stand on that and keep your hands free while zipping around.
Usual fanon changes to the 5 minutes and you detransform unless you "grow up" rule
Can. . . can we all collectively agree that part where Marinette and Adrien just suddenly "grew up" in the season 5 finale felt like a fever dream and ignore it? Cool, thanks.
Anyways, I'm just gonna use the familiar fanon rule that I think most of us thought was canon until. . .whatever that was: Your time limit slowly increases as you get more used to wielding a miraculous, increase your tolerance to magic, and finish growing.
So, like. If you gave an 8 year old, a 15 year old, a 21 year old, and a 35 year old a miraculous on the same day and none of them had any exposure to magic before and they were all naturally normal magic tolerance: the 8 year old would only be able to stay transformed for like 2 hours and would only have one minute after using their power. The 15 year old can stay transformed for like 8 hours and gets 5ish minutes. the 21 year old can stay transformed for 48 hours and gets a whole hour to use their power. The 35 year old can stay transformed for around a week and gets a day to use their powers.
However, having more magic tolerance increases your time limit, more experience with your miraculous increases your time limit, and if you start practicing when you're in adolescence, your tolerance when you reach adulthood will actually be BETTER because magic had time to adjust to your body when it was already making major adjustments. So if you had a 17 year old who'd been practicing since they were 13, they'd probably be able to stay transformed for up to two weeks and would have like 2 hours to use their powers---double the limit of a completely inexperienced adult.
Everyone in the Miracuclass is notable for having an unusually high natural magic inclination (Gabe also has high tolerance, Nathalie has regular tolerance, and Emilie has low tolerance which CERTAINLY didn't help). This allows all users to stay transformed as long as they don't use their powers for a full two days without any practice. If any akuma runs longer than that, they'll have to detransform, but nothing's taken that long so far.
The Peacock cannot create sentient life
This NEVER should have been a thing tbh. It just makes so many things on so many levels seem so questionable and needlessly complicates a lot. I do have tiers of how far I want to revamp the peacock's power since it's writer-unfriendly all around, but this is a must-have every time. Even if nothing else changes, this at least will.
Emily instead used the peacock to create a fertilized egg, which she could grow within herself and give birth the normal way. Basically magical in-vitro with a 100% success rate. Adrien's just a designer baby, not magically enslaved. Sentimonsters like the senti-Ladybug have no more autonomy than a robot, and have to be actively puppeted around by the Peacock holder to create convincing reactions. They can be told to do a specific thing, and will be stuck doing ONLY that thing until they're given new orders. They are barely a convincing simulation of life, say nothing about sentience and autonomy.
Guardian Order Re-Write
The Guardian Order seems INSANELY stupid and morally ambiguous the way it's written in canon. What do you MEAN you just left the six year old you kidnapped and starved all alone with a box full of magic nukes???? Why did you think that would ever work???? What do you mean all of your members are unwillingly trained from childhood??? What do you mean this stinky Su-Han man who just hates everyone is actually Fu's boss??? No wonder Fu is so incompetent bro, you all suck on every possible level! WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE USED TO BE HUNDREDS OF OTHER BOXES OF MAGICAL NUKES BEFORE THE HUNGRY SIX YEAR OLD BLEW THEM ALL UP?!?!?!?!?
If I was revamping ALL the lore, I'd nix the ENTIRE guardian order and probably Fu too, but that's, again, a bit much for a kwami swap AU. So for the purposes of this one, I'll probably just rewrite them.
In my AU, there is only one Miracle Box, and it was created by mystical sages who called upon the power of the gods and stored the magic of the ones they were able to contact in the jewels during a time of MAJOR MAGICAL CRISIS. Think like, they were regularly getting attacked by Kaiju and monsters from other dimensions and crud. There are more magic forces in the world than just the miraculous, and they were created with the express purpose of keeping that magic in check.
While there were initially anywhere from 3 to 12 sages, most of em were killed in the initial struggle, and it's become the responsibility of a singular sage and their apprentice to keep these Miraculous jewels safe and to hand them to chosen heroes during times of magical crisis. We're working by Sith rules here, there are only ever two at a time, and their hero flunkies.
The sages are necessary in case any of the holders ever get too power hungry or start behaving dangerously. They're very carefully selected from master to apprentice to be people that will not want to use the miraculous for themselves, and are very intensely trained in intuition and people reading to only choose good holders and a good apprentice. They're very secretive too, and do their absolute darndest to keep knowledge of the miraculous from spreading too far, since they know it would be catastrophic if world governments got their hands on it.
An evil sage has happened exactly once. They started idealistic, as someone who wanted to hand out the miraculous during times of peace and use their extraordinary powers to help people. When their master refused, saying that the Miraculous were created to combat dangerous magical forces and are too powerful to use mundanely, they betrayed their master.
They stole the miracle box and tried to wield a bunch of miraculous all on their own. The power made them crazy and they just about destroyed the whole world with the crazy overuse of the power. They eventually tore themselves apart from the magical overload, and the master was able to recover the miraculous and use their power to set things to right, but it came at a great cost. I haven't figured out what this is yet, if anyone has ideas yeet em at me!
Fu is in an unusual situation, because while he's been the full master of the miraculous for quite some time, the world has been unusually magically quiet as of late, which means he's having trouble finding someone magically in tune enough to be his apprentice. I debate on whether I want to give him one or not, I'll cover that in the "questionable" section. If he has one, it'll be someone the Miracuclass' age or a little older, to act as their more direct mentor.
The "lack of magically in tune people" issue is also going to be used to explain why our heroes are teenagers instead of adults, and why the apprentice, if I pick one, is going to weild a miraculous sometimes too.
In any case, it's been 4 or 5 guardians now since there's been a major magical conflict that would merit handing out the miraculous, so Fu is flying a little blind here. Which makes it very unfortunate that HE'S the guy that gets stuck dealing with the Butterfly and the Peacock resurfacing. Suffice it to say, Miraculous and the modern world interact quite strangly, and he's making some things up as he goes.
Kwamis are more actively involved in using their powers
In canon, Kwamis are something of a slave to their miraculous holder. They're magically forced to obey their holder's orders, they get no say in who uses their powers even if it's someone they would never choose, and they become completely silent and null once the user transforms.
I dislike this for a lot of reasons. They're gods! Do we really think they'd be that subservient? And if you're going to use magically merging two sentient individuals as part of your magic system, AT LEAST BOTHER TO EXPLORE IT! That is such a cool concept that is SO wasted with the way miraculous handles it.
In my lore, a Kwami has to sort of gel with their holder for their powers to work properly. While canon writes it so that any holder can pretty much use any miraculous, we're not doing that here. Certain personalities work better with certain powers, and certain kwamis also work better with certain personalities. If you're butting heads with your kwami, your powers will not only be weakened by circumstance (think Max the linear thinker trying to use Lucky Charm and it's unintuitive logic), but it will also cause the actual magic to deteriorate. People who are on the outs with their kwamis will have shorter time limits on their transformation, smaller ranges on their powers, and just generally weakened effects.
Additionally, using a kwami that doesn't get along with you can be outright DANGEROUS, since their thought processes will merge with your own a little bit while transformed (this is how I'm choosing to explain Marinette's Ladybug Vision. I'm interpreting it as diegetic and as Tikki's thought patterns merging with hers. Everybody has some version of this). If you're radically different from each other, you'll feel yourself being pulled apart at the seams as your brains try to solve problems in different ways.
Also also, not all the kwamis get along or work well together. Trying to dual wield Plagg and Tikki wouldn't be pretty for you. Neither would trying to dual wield a serious Kwami like Kaalki or Sass with a chaotic kwami like Xuppu or Daizzi. This is a big reason why using multiple miraculous at once can be dangerous. Having multiple Kwamis personalities affecting your brain in ways that oppose each other makes you go insane. Add that into the magical overload slowly eating away at and corrupting your body (especially if you're not particularly tolerant to magic in the first place), and you will literally and figuratively explode if you try to use too many at once.
I mentioned in my Alya Analysis post that I want her and Tikki to schism and butt heads a little bit. They're both very confident and sure of themselves, but while Tikki lives up to her Sugarcube nickname, Alya has a little more feistiness and bite to her that makes them disagree on how to deal with injustice in the world. This will have the consequence of weakening Alya's capabilities until she and Tikki can come to a compromise.
But agreeing with your kwami ALL the time is a major no-no too. Imagine if your black-cat holder had just as much of a devil-may-care attitude as Plagg. They'd encourage each other to the point of dangerous negligence and break something very important. The ideal holder for a kwami is someone who is both able to work with their personality and keep their less savory traits in check.
Just as examples: the ideal holder for Tikki is someone who's creative like her. They're chaotic and tend to think in bursts of inspiration that help them navigate her oddball lucky charms. They're a little impulsive and never hesitate, which helps them enact their lucky charm plan even if it's a little nuts. But, they're also someone who's got an intense sense of justice and some bite behind them. Tikki is all sugar, so their holder needs to be a little spicy to properly utilize her powers as a fighting force. Someone who was exactly like Tikki wouldn't ever bother fighting, they'd try to talk everything out and forgive and forgive and forgive and compromise and compromise and compromise. That's not super effective either. This can be seen in both Marinette and Alya, it's what makes them good Ladybug holders.
The ideal holder for Plagg is someone who's. . . for lack of a better term, a bit of a little shit. Destruction is a power that works best when you know how to cause damage and like doing it at least to some degree. Good black cats are also a bit lazy. They prefer to watch and wait until they can take the problem down with a single strike, not micromanage it into submission. Black Cats also need to show the upsides to being selfish. Someone who takes a detour to help every single person and is constantly sacrificing themselves for the good of others will clash HARD with Plagg's style of helping others by taking care of himself. Someone who's too busy trying to save everyone else to think about what they want lacks the focus needed to wield destruction. But unlike Plagg, Black Cats can't be reckless with their powers. Destruction is simply too dangerous to have someone who uses it freely, so his best holders always have a lot of restraint compared to his own willingness to use his powers even when he's not attached to a holder.
You may notice, this leaves us with a major issue: how are Gabe and Nathalie using their kwami for evil if you have to be in tune with them for the powers to work? That leads in nicely to the next change:
The butterfly and the peacock are not miraculous.
I was gonna put this in the gray area section, but I changed my mind writing it. It's more work to keep them as miraculous. The butterfly and the peacock both work completely differently from any of the other miraculous: you're not really supposed to fight with them at all, you make champions to fight for you and they both have the freaky evil-izing power thing. They're supposed to create minions that lets you operate from a distance. They do not fit with the magical girl up close and personal fighting squad.
Now they're both dark corruptive gems from The Shadow Realm or something that let you manipulate others emotions into evil powers and force your influence onto things. It is the fastest simplest way to keep the same powers and to keep them as villains without having to rewrite things to make the miraculous powers consistent with each other. You can even keep Nooroo and Dusuu as their stewards but now they're evil corruptive entities or something.
This even lets you go ham on sending Gabe and Nathalie off the deep end by making these things eeeeeevvviiiiiillll magic that makes you eeeeevvviiiiillll the more you use them, but Gabe and Nathalie don't KNOW that when they start using them. Or hell, maybe they do and they're desperate enough not to care!
Like, I haven't hammered out the full Backstory TM for what these things are, but they sure as hell ain't miracles!
Some of the miraculous powers need to be changed
Having powers like the goat and the ladybug exist at the same time is really really bad for trying to understand the lore and the worldbuilding. If the Ladybug is creation, how come the goat is just better creation, (and how come the Peacock is even BETTER creation, down to being able to create sentient life)? Why is the rooster so ridiculously busted? You can just have (basically) any power you want? Why is Sass time travel, but then Fluff is just Extremely Broken time travel, and how come the Butterfly can just Give People Miraculous Powers?
If I was doing a full rewrite, I'd also massively pare down the amount of Miraculous there are. There are a whopping NINETEEN of them currently, which is way too much to juggle. I don't know if I'm going to get rid of any for the kwami swap, but SOME of them certainly need their powers changed if they stay. Which ones? It's a bit up in the air.
The ones I will for sure be changing are the goat and the rooster. Their powers are actively contradict established lore. There is no way I will be able to tolerate giving them their canon powers and write a narrative that feels cohesive at the same time. @princess-of-the-corner (sorry for the ping) has my favorite existing rewrite for their powers by giving them a Night and Day motif which I like. They give the rooster light manipulation that can range from lighting up a room to a flashbang to a concentrated beacon, which I'm stealing. They also give the goat dreamwalking, but I'm going to just give them the straight inverse with shadow manipulation. They can swallow an area in darkness, manipulate shadows, and hide people in them. This works for me with goats being a symbol of demons/evil.
I am also probably going to straight up GET RID of the rabbit. Fluff's power is simply too broken and overlaps way too much with Sass for me to be comfortable. Sass's power is a good example of how you can make time travel work without it completely breaking everything. Fluff's is not. So now Sass is the miraculous of time.
Unlike with a lot of these other miraculous, I don't even want to keep the rabbit for character focus reasons. Being the omni-universal steward of time who lives separated from The Now and has to be responsible for making sure nobody acts outside the way their supposed to is a very depressing and terrible power for anyone, but especially Alix. Alix is very aggressive, in-the-moment, and vivacious. She would NOT be just kicking around in the timeline and correcting people when they act in universe-altering ways. With my established lore, you could argue that it works to keep her sane (a user who's a bit less present would get easily lost in the many timelines and lose their anchor), but I'd honestly rather not have to deal with time travel. Just give her the snake if you have to.
That wraps up all the definite changes I think. onto the next category!
Changes that the lorehead in me would really like to make, but might be too confusing for what's supposed to just be a kwami swap
The thing about kwami swap AUs is that they're supposed to be mostly similar to canon and are not about fixing the magic-system, but are instead about how the character dynamics change when the roles and powers are shuffled around. Changing too much lore can get really confusing for both the audience and the writer.
For example, I won't be doing a deep-dive into the horror potential miraculous lore has in KittyBella (Sentimonsters being enslaved to their amok and also easily destroyable, Hawkmoth's presence creating a scenario where you have to supress all negative emotions and can't even deal with them healthily lest you risk becoming a raging supervillain, Guardian Amnesia, ramifications of kwamis using their powers without holders, etc.) because that has enough Implications that it deserves it's own AU and would be better explored in the context of our familiar setup and character dynamics, otherwise, much like Miraculous itself, I think there would be too much going on.
But, Miraculous Lore is deeply frustrating and inconsistent to me, so there are some things that I'd really REALLY like to change anyway. I need someone to either push me over the edge or reel me back in on these. I am screaming my need for assistance to the heavens and the void. I am about to mis-tag this post with the tags I might use on the fic so I can reach the potential audience so ya'll will tell me what you want because I am INCREDIBLY indecisive here.
More Miraculous Powers overhaul
Carrying on from the last point, I would probably change other kwamis powers to have more internal consistency and match better to real world mythology (probably everybody's powers except the fox, the turtle, and perhaps the bee), as well as massively pare down how many of them there were if I were doing a full lore rewrite---no more than 10, probably no more than 7.
That's too many differences for me to write effectively in this kwami swap, so now the question becomes: how far can I go?
If I were going to remove anyone other than Fluff for this AU, this is probably the order I'd do it in: the ox, the mouse, the dog, the pig, maybe the monkey, and maybe the tiger. If I hadn't rewritten the goat and the rooster's powers, then they would be the first to go, even before Fluff probably because I think they're THAT stupid.
If I were doing a full show rewrite, I'd also probably remove the peacock completely, since it's powers completely overlap with either the butterfly or the ladybug, but I'm almost positive that will change too much for KittyBella. The peacock being damaged and Nathalie's role as Mayura take up far too much of the plot as-is for me to be comfortable axing it.
If I do decide to keep everything though, I feel like I want to change some of their powers up, simply because I don't like the way a lot of them work. Take the dog for example: that's a really weird and hyper-specific power that doesn't fit well with concepts as broad as creation and destruction and time. The mouse and the tiger both have fine(ish) powers, but those are still really hyper-specific concepts when compared to elements or illusion. The pig miraculous representing joy fits lore-wise, but the way the power works is really weird and is either completely useless or completely broken depending on when and how you utilize it. The ox's power is literally just a "nuh-uh you can't beat me when I put up my everything-proof shield," and the monkey seems like it was created solely for fighting other miraculous users.
Here's my crack at just editing their powers:
Xuppu's power can stay the same, although I might choose to make his concept Reality/Truth instead of Disruption (I am 100% axing the -ion suffix rule because it's needlessly limiting). We just have to ever so slightly tweak it to say it extends to disrupting all magic and powers, not just miraculous ones. This means that any other hypothetical enemies I want to throw at these guys like a vampire or a shadow demon would also have their magic cancelled. This is a dangerous all-or-nothing type power though, because it also cancels out the abilities of your allies, and cancels out any sort of magical weaknesses somebody might have had (a vampire can't turn into a bat, but also no longer burns in the sun and probably still knows how to use a shotgun). It's a miraculous that's very situational in it's uses, and since one of the powers it cancels is the all-powerful Miraculous Cure, it's usually not helpful for the show.
I also know that the show has a thing going where the different layers of the miracle box represent Ying and Yang and then the five Chinese elements, then the Chinese zodiac, but since I already killed off Fluff and that theme with her, I'm instead going to try to make it so every Kwami kind of has an opposite/comes in pairs. As I mentioned in the first section, Ziggy and Orikko represent night/shadows and day/light, while Tikki and Plagg are obviously creation and destruction. Trixx and Xuppu are going to be a pair with one representing illusions and the other representing stark reality.
The ox is going to instead gain the power of strictly physical invulnerability. You can't be hurt by physical attacks, but you can still be brainwashed or hypnotized or subjected to good old fashioned taunts and emotional manipulation just like anybody else. It's domain is now strength. It's opposite is the dog.
The dog now has the domain of loyalty. It's power is basically the ox but for your brain. You can't be brainwashed, hypnotized, tricked by illusions, or otherwise swayed from aiding your allies. In addition, you gain an innate sense of where all your allies are even if they're separated from you by magical means and even if you didn't know where they were before using the ability. The name of the power is now Pack Bond. The dog and the ox are both good support miraculous' but dogs struggle to deal with mostly physical opponents, oxen struggle to deal with mental ones, and both struggle with some of the more extreme magical abilities.
The pig still has the domain of joy/jubilation, but now instead of the weird heart's desire vision thing, it fills all willing targets within a certain radius with joy, energy, courage, and willpower. It's a really helpful ability that's great for boosting team morale, but it's not great if you need to be sober and careful, since it tends to make people reckless and a little too chipper to be super focused and task oriented. It also can't be used to just break an akuma out of brainwashing unless their motive for getting akumatized was "I just wanna be happy/I don't wanna feel sad anymore," since the target has to be willing. Also, I'm changing the name of the power to Celebrate. I would have gone for Rejoice, but that's the transformation phrase lol. It's opposite is the tiger.
The tiger now has the power of intimidation. You can target an individual and fill them with crippling, paralyzing fear. This miraculous is incredibly effective, but it is single target so it's not great if you're dealing with a large group of opponents, and sometimes particularly strong-willed or aggressive individuals react with fight instead of flight or freeze. The name of the power is now Ambush. It's opposite is the pig.
The mouse gets the domain of the body and can shrink and grow ala antman. Power is now named Minimize or Maximize depending on which one you're using. It's opposite is the dragon.
Speak of the devil, the dragon's domain is the elements/natural forces. It's powers are all exactly the same except now it gets the five Chinese elements (Wind, Water, Fire, Earth, and Wood). It's opposite is the mouse, as one represents a creature's impact on nature and the other represents nature's impact on creatures.
The snake and the horse are the same, and I'm choosing to justify it as Space and Time simply being the two opposing forces that control the universe. They both warp the universe, just in opposite ways.
Bee and turtle are also the same, opposite each other (one is aggression/offense/attack the other is protection/defense).
So yeah my major dilemma is, do I alter everyone's powers this way? Can I get rid of the dog, the pig, and the ox? The monkey and the tiger? I'm not removing any of the main 5 and I don't think I plan to drag KittyBella out for all 5 and then some seasons. I kind of want to end after 3-ish seasons, so it's not like most of these extras will play major roles anyways. If they do, I'm seriously debating just having an existing team of 5-7 dual weild instead of dragging everyone else in, cuz that seems a little excessive.
Five Charges of Your Power
The miraculous all have a very cool, cohesive five-segmented design that gets totally wasted with the way I rewrite the timers, and tbh they're still kinda obsolete with the way canon writes the timers. You're telling me these things that are less powerful when minors use them and are therefore not to be used by minors most of the time are specifically designed to indicate when a minor's using them?
So, to preserve this cool design element, I like to make it so you can have multiple charges of your power the more experienced you get. At full power, you have five uses of your power before transforming back. But again, I'm stuck on if I actually want to add this or not, since it might make my power system too complicated to follow when we're also trying to keep track of the kwami swap.
Alternatively, I could also make it so you DON'T have a detransformation timer when you use your power, you merely have charges of how many times you can use them, and the kids only get one charge until they get more experience. But I feel like that takes a lot of the tension out of some of our identity shenanigan scenes, since they're basically never gonna be under threat of detransformation, so I don't know that I wanna write it like that.
Adjusting the peacock's powers
Even after we've removed the peacock from the miraculous framework, it's STILL stupid! It's basically just a knockoff butterfly that manages to be more powerful since your sentimonster is under your direct command and doesn't have emotions or goals of it's own.
So we gotta fix that. If I didn't need to care about the Mayura plotline and only needed to care about the Emilie one, I would just say Emilie used the butterfly to get herself pregnant (or akumatized gabe and gave him the power or vice versa) and the magical overload put her in the coma, but since I do need to care about Nathalie, I do need to keep the peacock around.
We've got two options for this. The first one is that the peacock is designed to work in tandem with the butterfly. Since they're no longer miraculous, I can make it so that they don't have to be capable of independent operation. Sentimonsters can only be created for Akuma villains. You can't just make one and have it do what you want.
While this solution allows for the least amount of changes to the canon powerset, it does require me to put in some extra legwork in their backstory to explain why the malevolent emotional manipulation magical entity also has a sidekick that lets you make constructs, and I don't know that I wanna do that.
So instead, my thought was to change the peacock's powers the same way I did for the other miraculous. Now, it lets you create constructs you can project your conciousness into and puppet them around. This means that our heroes are PERSONALLY fighting against Mayura instead of fighting a proxy she's empowering the way Hawkmoth is. I like this better, it lets Mayura be a more effective second in command and lets her do the usual Villain's Right Hand Man job of personally screwing with the heroes while the villain schemes.
The constructs can't have any power you want: they can be any shape you want but they're basically just puppets at that point, so you usually wanna make it something that's small enough to move around but big enough to be threatening. You can puppet multiple constructs at once, but you only have so much awareness, so they start to get less effective if you're trying to control too many. A sentimonster possessed by Mayura is basically the default sidekick/babysitter to any akumatized villain when she shows up, and she makes fights much harder.
While the powerset is certainly better for story writing, it might be too big for KittyBella, so which route are we thinking would be better?
That took less rambling than I thought it would to be honest. I just would really like to hear people's thoughts on what kinds of changes they'd prefer to see, since I genuinely don't know which I'd rather do: make internally consistent lore at the risk of making it too complex to follow in a kwami swap as well, or compromise on some of the lore to spend more time on character dynamics.
And if you all have thoughts on lore changes you'd like that I DIDN'T include here, feel free to chime in! I'd love to know, as well as anything else miraculous/KittyBella related (or literally anything else I like being yapped at).
Aiight, I've talked about Zoe for my KittyBella project I'm working on, time to talk about Alya!
Alya is a secondary character instead of a tertiary one---she's the main character's bff meaning she's much more important and gets more backstory and focus as a result. For me, that means I'm focusing less on building her a personality and a backstory and more on psychoanalyzing her and thinking about how her being the main character affects the story.
As Marinette's best friend, we also see Alya act as someone who's good at pulling Marinette out of her spirals and pushing her to act when paralyzed.
Alya is an aspiring journalist who absolutely adores superheroes, can't stand percieved "injustice" whether this be Chloe picking on Marinette or Marinette's unexplained hatred of Lila, and is generally a very confident individual who knows what she believes and isn't afraid to act on it. Alya is also very excitable and can be quite reckless in her pursuit of blog footage. She's also got a tendency to jump the gun---once she has an idea in her head, it's very hard to get it out, the most notable example being her Lady WiFi episode.
All of this paints a picture of someone who is a HORRIBLE fit for the fox miraculous. Like. I'm sorry, Rena Rouge is both hot and cool. But if they hadn't SPECIFICALLY needed the fox miraculous and Alya hadn't already been DEEPLY involved in that particular akuma, I would have given her LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE.
Alya's NOT the kind of person to sit back and watch and wait to create the perfect illusion, she's NOT a good liar and HATES doing it (this is the subject of at least one major plot), and she's dedicated to cutting through the noise to tell people like it is, not carefully manipulating the noise to get people to believe what you want.
Now, this can work if you make Alya have to learn a lesson the value of restraint and the occasional lie, but that's NOT WHAT WE'RE DOING HERE.
In KittyBella, I'm mainly aiming for Alya's miraculous powers to work WITH her instead of AGAINST her. She's going to take the role Chat Noir frequently takes in canon of being willing to take a lot of risks and sometimes moving *too* quickly. Scarabella is going to use her boldness and confidence to her advantage by never hesitating and quickly jumping into plans while Kitty Noir is going to have to be the one who shows restraint and waits for the perfect setup to strike.
Now don't get me wrong, Alya is still going to be the leader of the pair. Zoe simply lacks the self-assurednesss to make it happen. When Alya says to do something, Zoe does it, and Alya will frequently yell "FOLLOW MY LEAD" and Zoe will run chasing after her. But unlike in canon where Marinette is the planner and Chat is simply a tool in those plans, I think a more common interaction for KittyBella is this:
Kitty Noir: "Alright, so what's the plan?"
Scarabella: "Uh, hit it?"
Kitty: "Okay, but like how? We don't want the akuma to get defensive when we get close."
Bella, sheepishly: "I hadn't gotten that far yet. I was kinda just gonna try running at it and see what happened. What do you think?"
Kitty: "Oh wow. Me? Um. Okay." *takes some time to observe the akuma attack pattern* "I think X may be the akumatized item? If I keep it distracted, you can use your yoyo to grab it!"
Bella: "Sounds good to me! I'll signal you when I'm in position!"
Kitty: "Wait!"
Bella: "What's the matter?"
Kitty: "Just. . .please be careful."
Bella: *winks* "Don't you worry about me Kitty Cat! Don't you know ladybugs are always lucky?"
And then Kitty's nose starts bleeding cuz she's SO whipped lol.
In addition, we know that the Ladybug's lucky charm tends to change based on how the holder thinks. While Marinette tends to come up with convoluted multi-part plans, using the lucky charm in addition to numerous other items to craftily trap or trip up their opponent, Adrien's tends to be more straightforward in a "just hit it" kind of way.
For Alya, that means I want all her lucky charms to involve an element of . . . Endangerment for lack of a better word. Alya is obsessed with superheroes and is batshit insane enough to go running into a magical battle just for blog footage. The way her brain works is "When there's a problem, confront it head-on by throwing yourself directly in the line of fire."
I will DEFINITELY have to rewatch the show and/or reread the script for this project so I can look at some of the lucky charms and the villains and whatnot and think about how the kwami swaps would change that, but I think a good example right now would be in The Bubbler.
In that episode, Marinette's lucky charm is a wrench, which she uses to disassemble an hvac and have Chat use the air pipe to deflect the bubbles.
I think for Alya, hers would, first of all, skip a couple steps, and second of all, wouldn't be used to deflect the bubbles and instead would be used to *pop* them. A little more direct, a little more dangerous. Since lucky charms are a little unintuitive by nature, I think it would be really fun if it was something like a pressure washer that she's gotta attach to a garden hose. Not exactly a weapon, but certainly useful, and not as convoluted as DISASSEMBLING an h-vac, but still cleverly utilizing her environment and observational skills.
And while Scarabella is hosing the Bubbler down, Kitty can take the opportunity to either cataclysm the wand or the soap bottle, since both render the akuma useless.
And of course, when thinking about a Miraculous Holder and their power is thinking about their relationship with their kwami. While we get a decent idea of how Plagg and Zoe would interact in canon, Tikki and Alya don't really interact without Marinette as a buffer. It's all through the lens of Marinette's kwami and Marinette's bestie.
Critically, I think they'd, uh. Clash a little bit. Tikki is very supportive and loving, but she's also bossy and very concerned with making sure her holders are doing what she percieves as right. While Tikki doesn't really criticize Marinette's Ladybug related actions (major flaw in canon there, if she's criticizing anything it should be that), she'll always lecture Marinette for using her powers selfishly and always encourages Marinette to be kind, to a degree I think can be detrimental.
I think this would clash a LOT with Alya's strong sense of justice and her own confidence and bossiness. At first, I feel Alya would be a bit starstruck by Tikki and try to do exactly as she says, but it won't take too long until Alya gets caught up in the excitement of a plot and disregards her Kwami's advice. I think, where Tikki might encourage kindness and forgiveness towards someone like Chloe, Alya would be prone to ignoring that in favor of calling Chloe out and stopping her from being cruel to others.
This could all easily make Tikki a little twitchy, and may result in a schism or a few shouting matches that make the powers of the Ladybug far more difficult to use (I am slightly revamping the magic system I think because this is fanfic and I can do what I want, but that's another post). Point is, I want them to have to work on their relationship and teach EACH OTHER about different ways to go about being heroes. I definitely want the equivalent episode to Lady WiFi to be a big moment for the pair of them.
Finally, for my psychoanalysis of Alya, I wanna talk about her relationship to her family. I think you can mine a lot from the way people behave around their families and how it reflects into the rest of their lives.
Alya takes on a lot of responsibility in her family with wrangling the twins and acting as Nora's most consistent sanity-check, and that shows in how she easily slides into "older-sistering" a lot of her friends---she's frequently the one who gives people the push needed to try something and also the one who reels them back in when they get too excited.
I love this about her, but I do want it to grate on her just a little bit. She'd like to not always be The Responsible One thanks. Is it really so bad that Alya wants to be a little bit crazy sometimes and not have everything else fall apart?
Her role as Scarabella gives her some release and some strain in this aspect. Now she's responsible for ALL OF FREAKING PARIS, and she's an example for THOUSANDS. . .but she's also got a lot more freedom in what type of example she is. She can be a little less chilled out and mature as Scarabella and a little more wild and fun, because she's no longer playing off her bombastic sisters. She's now playing off her far more skittish partner.
I also think Alya, as a middle child with a strong-willed older sister and two chaotic younger sisters, learned to express her opinions LOUDLY and EARLY. Alya subconciously worries ALL THE TIME that if she doesn't make her voice heard, then she'll get drowned out. Fear of fading into background noise is a big deal for Alya, and it's a lot of why she wants to pursue journalism---making her voice heard.
It's not that she can't let others take the spotlight; having siblings means you learn to share whether you like it or not. It's that she thinks everyone else wants and is fighting for tje spotlight just as much as her.
She doesn't realize that some people DO NOT LIKE being perceived. Less in the Juleka "I have social anxiety but I do actually love when my peers acknowledge my talent" way---she's perceptive enough to know when that's happening---and more in the Nathaniel "attention is annoying not gratifying" way. She doesn't have a whole lot of respect for people's privacy, and it's something she'll have to learn.
Similarly, she's not great at recognizing Sabrina or Zoe types: people who would like to be heard but find it difficult to express that over the louder voices. But critically, unlike Juleka, these guys are gray areas. They have enough confidence to state their opinion *sometimes* but find it easy to let a louder voice drown them out and frequently find themselves shunted to the background without anybody really trying to do that.
Alya's going to have a bit of a hard time with this, and her relationship with Kitty Noir and with Zoe are going to be VERY good for helping her figure this out.
Finally, I want Alya keeping her identity secret from her family to be a big source of angst for her. In sharp contrast to Zoe, who's never had a family to rely on and is used to not telling them important things, Alya is really close with and loves her family, and keeping secrets from them isn't easy.
Every time her parents worry about Hawkmoth and the clearly teenage heroes fighting him, every time her little sisters gush over how cool Scarabella is, every time Nora unknowingly puts herself at risk, Alya's heart breaks a little more. Every lie she has to tell her family weighs heavily on her and it makes her moody and exhausted.
And importantly, as I established above, Alya is not a good liar. I want her parents to start putting together the pieces on the civilian end and for her sisters to start putting it together on the hero end WELL before a proper reveal. They start finding subtle ways to support and help her and are wholly unsurprised when Alya comes clean (which will probably happen after the reveal to Kitty, but well before the story's end).
So to sum up:
Alya is a bold, confident, and sometimes reckless person and I want that to reflect in the way she weilds her miraculous. Her lucky charms will all have an element of putting herself at risk to make them work, and of her and Kitty, she's the more impulsive one. She leads with her heart, Zoe leads with her head. Additionally, her relationship with Tikki is going to be a bit more explosive than Marinette's as the two butt heads over how to solve problems. Finally, Alya's relationship with her family is going to heavily affect the story from all sides!
I can't sleep so instead I'm gonna vaguepost about the random bits and pieces of my Miraculous Ladybug KittyBella AU Rolling around in my head and request thoughts and feedback from people.
Block my tag KittyBella WIP if you don't wanna see it/don't want spoilers. Please come to my askbox or my DMs or this post or tag me or ANYTHING to babble about them, even if it's not 100% related to the AU.
So. It's an AU where Kitty Noire and Scarabella are the heroes from the start. This means the first problem we bump into is "How are we getting Zoe here," since she's a canon late arrival.
I say, it's not suuuuuper hard to say her drama with the meangirls of her past went down a little earlier and she decided to transfer on the start of the school year instead of in the middle of it, but since she's the main character now, we have to flesh out some aspects of her family and her life before France that didn't really matter in canon, because they'll significantly affect her behavior and thought processes and relationships.
She could have just switched schools, sure, but all this has made her really desperate for people who actually solidly care about her, and she's PRAYING with her whole soul that her mom's second family will do that for her. They're exceptional enough for her mom! Surely that means they can both put up with Zoe's defects, since Audrey isn't an easy person to handle, and are good to be around, right? Right???
This is also probably a good time to talk about my Mr. Lee headcanons: I like to write him as someone who cares but isn't a great parent. His first name is Andy, short for Andrew, and Zoe calls him Mr. Lee, not dad. This is because she grew up with nobody around him calling him dad (including himself when talking to her) so tiny-baby Zoe, when she was learning to talk, learned his name as Mr. Lee and he didn't bother to correct her.
He's a professional photographer/camera tech and met Audrey during one of her early photoshoots in NYC, where he was the only person on staff who was both patient enough to deal with her banshee screeching and blunt and stubborn enough to cut through her bullshit and get her to cooperate as needed. He quickly became the only photographer she was willing to deal with for the duration of that particular fashion season in New York, and they had a one-night stand (he did not know she was married).
When Zoe was born, since she was an affair baby, Audrey DID NOT want to keep her, so she tracked down Mr. Lee and was kinda like "You knocked me up now take her," and the whole thing about Audrey being married and having JUST HAD another baby 9 months earlier came out. Mr. Lee was pretty pissed, but since Audrey had more money and better lawyers and he didn't wanna condemn the kid to America's shitty fostercare system, he was like "fine, but you owe me SO much child support."
Now, a lot of the reason Mr. Lee was so reluctant to take the kid is because he is SUPREMELY unfit to be a parent and he KNOWS it. He's an alcoholic who's only able to keep his job because nobody cares if he shows up to work drunk and/or hungover, and he travels so much for his job that he basically doesn't have a permanent address. He's fortunately good enough at his job and was getting a sizeable enough paycheck before he started drinking that he's never had to worry about paying for his booze, but he's not the type of guy you want to give sole custody of an infant. He also has no idea how to raise a kid or how kids work, and he only has so much time he can/will commit to parenting books and internet forums.
The first thing he dipped into the generous child-support budget for was a competent nanny because he does NOT wanna kill the kid by forgetting to feed her when he's in a drunken coma. Zoe was put in daycare the moment she was old enough, and didn't see much of her dad for a lot of her childhood. She calls him at least once a week and he tries to spend at least one day with her whenever he's home, but he didn't really raise her.
Instead, she was raised by the colorful building staff, her teachers, and the aforementioned nanny, who is a good caretaker but not anything like a mom. She's mostly there to make sure Zoe doesn't kill herself, and she's something like Nathalie in that she's a model of professionalism and maintains a level of distance between herself and Zoe. She has her own life outside of Zoe and stayed on for less and less hours as Zoe got older. By the time she was in middle school, the nanny had quit and Zoe was in boarding school.
Basically, Zoe was well taken care of physically, but suffered emotional neglect and social isolation. Her father definitely cares about her, but he acts more like a fun irresponsible uncle, or a quirky benefactor. They like each other well enough and she knows she can talk to him about stuff when he's around, but she can't trust him to be stable or present for her or to have actual answers to her problems that aren't "will this go away if I throw money at it?" He's not really an authority figure, he's more like a friend with money, and at some point around when she was 11 or 12, he quickly transitioned from seeing her as "helpless infant" to "she's basically an adult with no rights, I can let her do what she wants."
Because of all this, Zoe was a latchkey kid free-range child. Whenever Audrey was around, her nanny would take her to visit under the idea of "she should get to know her real mom," and this mostly consisted of Zoe getting yelled at unless she did exactly what Audrey said, and toddling around the office/photo-set being "awwwed" over by the other employees who treated her like a complete baby, even when she was getting too old for it and just wanted some respect (like around 8 and 9). She calls Mr. Lee at least once a week, and sees him once a month on average. Her nanny makes sure she eats food, and cleans her room, and does her homework, and drives her around places. But beyond that? She spends a lot of time looking after herself, which means she spends a lot of time wandering around her neighborhood just talking to people.
Subsequently, I think most of Zoe's friends are adults, even when she was a really little kid, because she just. Was really strange and didn't really know how to act around other kids. She learned pretty early that if you just do exactly what the adults say, they'll be chill around you, and if what they say is stupid then you just do it where they can't see. Kids are not like that though, they're confusing and she doesn't know how to connect with them. So it contributes a lot to her social isolation, and she quickly learns to just start imitating other kids around her to fit in.
I also like to believe Zoe didn't fit in at school because not only was she a but of a weirdo who acted too much like a grown-up and was too used to being the only kid around, but she also had a bunch of niche and weird interests that are gonna FULLY enter headcanon territory. Beyond "sweetheart who likes to be liked, extreme code-switcher, kinda awkward," we don't get a whole lot for Zoe in canon, so I go a bit hogwild on giving her a more distinct personality that doesn't blend in with the generic nice person lump.
What are these headcanons you ask: Zoe has a natural draw to anything gross. Public sewage systems? Fascinating to her, she's interrogated sewage workers about it before. Swarms of bugs and insects? She had a bug catching phase as a kid. Massive heaps of trash? She's gone junkyard salvaging before. Nasty diseases? Zoe reads wikipedia articles about em for fun. Mud and dirt? She loves getting covered in it. Nasty ooze and dissecting critters in bio class? Zoe had the time of her life.
This is because Zoe likes to have the heebie jeebies, and is also drawn towards horror movies and books, morbid art, and anything that kinda makes your skin crawl. To her, it's the best feeling in the world.
All of these are interests that she's since supressed, in an effort to appease the people around her, but she can't exactly stop herself when she doesn't know "oh that morbid thing is supposed to make you run away and scream, not smile."
Zoe is also a skate-park punk in my head. Her whole wardrobe just screams this to me. It's one of the places where there are no rules and there are none of her so-called friends that she's trying to not get yelled at and bullied by and there are no stuffy adults who look at her weird when she does things like swing around a light post just cuz. She can do what she wants there, and getting around on a skateboard is a lot faster than getting around on foot. She's a poser, so she doesn't talk to the other skaters much, but she's learned some cool tricks and dresses the part when she can.
Finally, mostly to add contrast with the French cast later, I always give Zoe some Aggressively American Hobbies, in that she was in the girl scouts as soon as she was old enough, and she was on the cheer squad and the school softball team because they were the sports all the popular kids played (she liked softball she did not like cheer).
All of this sets us up for a Zoe who is, at her core:
1) Lonely. She desperately wants friends and even more than that she longs for a real family.
2) Awkward. She code-switches and lies and imitates because she has no idea how to actually interact with people. She does not trust them to like her on her own merits.
3) Weird. She spends her spare time ESPECIALLY in the summer wandering the streets of NYC largely unsupervised and engaging in strange gross interests. When she finally starts living as her authentic self, I want her to be rather unsettling---in a good way, but it takes you off guard. This will be cranked up to 11 as Kitty Noire.
Next up on the roster, I talk about Alya headcanons and how their origins episodes go, and then I delve into the Bee Sisters relationships!