#miraculouscharacter

[annillustration]

Moon Wolf || Miraculous Ladybug OC 

[greenlief-afterhours]

Lila Rossi isn’t pure evil

Think about it, Lila Rossi from Miraculous Ladybug is obviously the creators choice for the secondary antagonist after Hawkmoth, if not eventually the primary antagonist. In order to keep this image, they purposefully don’t tell us more about her, and seem to try and make certain details about her fade away. 

Ambiguity is their key to villainising her.

We see it mentioned maybe three times that Lila is Italian, and because of her Parisian home being more modest than that of Chloe/Adrien/Kagami, it seems to be overlooked that her family does in fact have money.

We don’t know what the situation with her father is, or her relationship with the rest of her family back in Italy. We know that she is an only child.

Yes, Lila lies, but she’s not the only character to lie. Marinette herself lies to her Nonna and others, for reasons outside of her being Ladybug. Lila lies as a way to cope with her loneliness.

Italian culture has a heavy focus on family, and with her parents being away on work a lot, or her potentially moving around a lot, Lila would have been isolated from not only her family, but other kids her age.

Technically, Lila had all the freedom in the world, while Adrien had none. They are parallels, and the thing is, they could have turned out the exact same. They were both lonely rich kids, and they had potential to both be liars because of needing to use their imaginations to pass the time.

Not to mention, Marinette instantly has a vendetta against Lila from the moment she’s introduced, if for nothing other than Lila having feelings for Adrien. Marinette then went on to completely embarrass Lila in front of the boy she liked, because she couldn’t handle knowing other people she actually knows having feelings for him, like with Kagami. Marinette/Ladybug has actually been the cause of a lot of the akumatisations we see in the show, whereas Lila hasn’t caused other people to get akumatised.

Lila wants to be liked, which is why she lies. As she says, she’s just “telling people what they want to hear”. She wants to impress people, get attention, be liked, and have friends. Lies may not be the best way to go about it, but she doesn’t know any better.

Even other largely disliked characters, like Kagami and Chloe, have their stories told and we learn more about them as people and their family situations. Lila gets none of that, and is potentially more hated than Gabriel/Hawkmoth, by characters and fandom alike.

The key to keeping Lila as a hated character is to not tell us more about her story, and her as a character. Her confidence is either a mask, and or a result of having no one to tell her otherwise, as well as getting away with her lies because her parents are so busy with work so she didn’t get caught or told off. 

Even though her mother loves and cares for her, the ease with which Lila lies to her and gets away with it shows the disconnect between them. They haven’t spent enough time together for Signora Rossi to be able to tell when her daughter is lying to her. I suspect she tried to compensate for her absence with gifts and holidays when she could, but it doesn’t make up for not being there for her daughter.

Lila isn’t evil, she’s a sad, lonely girl that just wants to be liked and have friends, but after getting embarrassed in front of her crush, she doesn’t know how to deal with the emotions she’s feeling. They start to sour and we see her further descent into the villain we see her portrayed as. I’m willing to bet that if the show wasn’t biased towards Marinette being on a pedestal as the main hero, and wasn’t focused around her perspective on things, that if we actually got a backstory for Lila and saw more into her personal life, which I suspect is full of her staying in her room on her phone and her laptop while home alone, that she wouldn’t be as heavily hated as she is.

Even Adrien has the clarity to see that she isn’t all bad, that she wants friends, and needs help but by that point, it seems like a waste of time hoping that we will see anything from her side of the story. 

The writers/creators clearly want Lila to be a villain without a redemption arc, which I see as something that is both extremely sad, but also how perspectives are an important thing to consider in anything. Lila has the potential to show how things aren’t always as they seem, even more so than with the Bourgeois family! Yet at this point, that potential is being thrown away.

Even if it may not seem obvious, Lila clearly has issues, including but not limited to the loneliness behind her lying. She could be used to show how different people deal with different things, and how things like therapy/medication are useful for some people but not everyone. 

Lila is probably the character with the most unexplored potential, if not the most potential period, in the show. They came up with a complex character that by now, it doesn’t seem they’re going to explain further and show other sides of. 

Lila has become the “true high school bully/villain” even more than Chloe could ever be. She has become the scapegoat to hide the flaws of other characters. She had nothing against anyone else until Marinette/Ladybug embarrassed her. 

In my opinion, Lila is probably the most complex character in the entire Miraculous Ladybug universe, whether the fandom/creators have realised it yet. It’s because so little is given to us about her that it’s so easy to hate her. I am well aware of the criticism this post/opinion can get me, but when I came up with a closet cosplay for Lila, using canon audios on Tiktok didn’t feel right. The fact that I can come up with this much on Lila without having done a full character analysis shows just how much potential she has, and just how little we actually know about her.

I started watching this show as a teenager when it first started airing on ABC 3. Years later I am still a fan, but finishing high school and thinking about it and the characters as an adult lets me see and consider things I didn’t realise before. Just as my opinions on Kagami could be seen as unpopular because I like her as a character, my opinions on Lila are seen as unpopular.

The amount of hate I’ve seen directed towards Lila from fans and members of the fandom, children, teenagers, and adults alike, almost seems unwarranted when you start to delve into her more. No, she’s not perfect, but neither is any other character in the show. When I think of the hate given towards her, it makes me think people forget she’s a teenager as well, and like Kagami, she isn’t French by any other reason than living or spending time there.

No, cultural differences aren’t an excuse for her behaviour, and some would say there are no excuses, but we don’t actually know the full extent of the reasons behind her behaviours. When you think about it, the show being centered around Marinette is why Lila is so highly villainised. 

I think this is where I’m going to sign off, else I start repeating points. I will probably do more posts about this when I get a proper analysis done. I’m aware I probably have unpopular opinions about a lot of texts and medias in general, but it’s not often I voice them. I already had thoughts and feelings about Lila, but starting a closet cosplay and having canon sounds from the show feel wrong when I listen to them or try to use them really opened the floodgates for me to properly think about how Lila is seen and perceived in the show and fandom. 

A lot of people point out differences between characters in canon and fanon, and I think if we were to see that for Lila, there would be nothing on Lila beyond how she’s seen by Marinette; as an evil villainous liar.

Greenleaf out~