"I would really love to know what you are trying to prove or accomplish with these questions, since it seems like you don’t actually read the work of any of the authors you petition."
Just wondering how you or other authors would fix the show.
Well, that really depends on what you mean by "fix." I'm not sure how Luka and Adrien being friends would fix anything because they ARE friends in the show.
If you want a love square endgame, I think you have to go all the way back to Despair Bear, which is where the LS peaked IMO. Up until that point it seemed like Marinette and Adrien were inching closer to each other. I would've reversed the love square at that point, with Adrien becoming more interested in Marinette and Marinette being more torn between him and CN, preventing her from confessing while she tried to figure out her feelings.
With no hate to Kagami, it's her introduction and more importantly, Adrien's reaction to her, that really tanked any believability for the LS for me. When contemplating moving on from LB, he consistently chose Kagami without even a thought of Marinette as an option, and that was just completely it for me. It's not just that Adrien is interested in Ladybug, it's that he is totally *uninterested* in Marinette, and that's where all the "he's socially awkward"/"he doesn't understand his own feelings" completely fall apart for me. The show doesn't generally let us inside Adrien's head the way they do Marinette's, so if there was any internal conflict there, they completely failed to convey it. They could have had him think for some reason, possibly through Chloe or Lila's manipulation, that Marinette wasn't actually interested in him and so he pursued Kagami and Marinette then thinks she would have to give up on him, and go at the alternate love interests to keep the drama going, and there could have been some interesting ground to explore there. Imagine how Frozer would be with Adrien going, well, Marinette would have good advice and I know she's not interested in me so it can't hurt to ask her about Kagami instead of being blatantly oblivious.
I also have beef with the way Adrien handled the hero team becoming more prominent; given his background it is reasonable for him to be upset and think that he has to shine above the rest to get LB's attention, but instead of sulking around and not showing up in fights (which, up until this point, was an aspect of salt fics I thought was comedically far-fetched) I would have had him seek out Su Han for training, potentially giving him a mentor figure/someone to talk to about it his relationship with LB, AND give him something solid and specific to contribute to the battle and relieve the burden on LB. (Who did they end up having do this though? *Luka*. Who had every reason to legitimately consider himself out of the fight. Just saying.)
Yes, I'm aware that was a really long sentence. Wordy bitch don't care. 😂
This would also require Su Han to be less of a dick, but there you go. Fix those things, and the godawful speech about "I can't help disrespecting your feelings because my own are so strong," and I would be nicer to Adrien. Give him some narrative accountability instead of acting the spoiled brat.
Oh yeah and also fix the speech where the rich white male supermodel teen icon tells Nino that asking out girls is easy. I've never forgiven him for that. And have him apologize in Frozer for letting his feelings get in the way of teamwork and leaving LB in danger without backup.
What do you think of Adrien redemption fics, and would you ever write one?
Wow I kind of spun out on a tangent so here's the teal deer and you can read the full word vomit under the cut:
More power to the writers who enjoy such things, but personally I'm just not interested at this point, so unless it's a side plot of a Lukanette story, I wouldn't seek one out to read, nor would I write one myself. The closest I really have is Something Just Like This, where all three characters work things out not always amicably, which I tend to think of as a prequel to All in the Family, where Adrien becomes the most welcome third wheel in history. At this point in time though, I'm just tired of Adrien and all the drama, canon and fandom, that comes along with him, and I don't care enough to put the effort in.
Since I've said it in the discord I might as well say it here--if I ran the world, I would have had Adrien take all his sad about being left out in Season 4, and decide he's going to be such a good hero that LB won't need anyone else, and he'd go off to get Su Han to teach him Mirakung Fu or whatever it is and actually step up to help LB and prove he can be the partner she needs--and maybe learn along the way that it's okay not to be LB's everything and that relying on other people is actually a good thing, he doesn't have to be perfect to be important. (That plot is free to anyone who wants to use it, feel free, drop me a link so I can see what you do with it.)
Now that I've written the longest run on sentence ever, here's the actually wordy stuff under the cut. 😂
I don't think Adrien's irredeemable, in fact I don't even think he'd be all that hard to redeem, but...let me think how can I put this, because I don't want to be like love square/Adrien stans are evil because they are not. They're just people who like something different than I like and that's totally okay. Ship and let ship.
But there are a vocal number that are, shall we say, annoying. Because of that it becomes a bit of a pain to write anything because you're always going to get comments trying to argue with you (spoiler alert: I'm not looking to convince anybody nor do I care that people on the internet think I'm wrong, so I don't debate in the comments) or that sound snobby and judgey. In the past I did write Adrien into several fics and I always got weird comments on them, and the nicest ones were along the lines of, "I'm glad you don't make Adrien a complete jerk like a lot of Lukanette writers." That's not horrible, but it's also not super encouraging. Thanks, I guess? I stopped getting those comments nearer the end too so maybe people changed their mind as the story went on. 😂 (Which is fine! A very sincere thank you to anyone who quietly stopped reading and didn't leave me anything to let me know. Totally fair.)
Honestly I had similar problems with the one true salt fic I started, where a lot of the comments were just griping about the series without actually addressing my story at all, and that's kind of a bummer for me (if anyone reading this left a comment of this type please don't feel bad, I'm not saying this to guilt you, this is all about my personal preferences as a writer and none of you are mind readers).
There are a lot of things I don't like about the series, and some that occasionally make me confused or angry enough to rant about it a little bit here or on discord. At the same time, reading constant ragging and complaining about the series just depresses me. So many salt discussions spiral into this dead end of "it's such a waste what they've done and everything is awful," and there's no where to go from there. It's not going to change, and there's nothing we can do about it, and I don't like ending up at the bottom of the pit. I do this for fun and I'd rather focus on the things I like. I will be finishing Live With It, but clearly salt just doesn't make me happy, so it's not going to become my niche anytime soon.
So ultimately my reasoning boils down to, it wouldn't be fun for me, I don't think there's a huge audience out there desperately wishing I would write one, and life's too short to read or write fic that bores you. Adrien will be just fine without me.
Ship and let ship, but this one's not for me. Adrien needs a romantic relationship like a hole in the head. He's got a lot to work through before he can be in a relationship that's mutually healthy and supportive.
(Sorry I got distracted and apparently posted before I meant to) 😂
Clamping my teeth around a Fandom Old Curmudgeon rant 😂 I swear people need to a) mind their own business about what people like b) recognize if you choose to write something against the grain you're going to have a smaller audience and you shouldn't be pouty and passive aggressive about it. Now go to your separate rooms and enjoy things your own way.
Oops it kinda slipped out a little didn't it.
It's yucky outside and I'm grumpy, send adorable pet pics before I really go off the deep end 😂
"I read a fic once that I really loved even though it was endgame Adrienette because I enjoyed the Lukanette relationship in it, so I just reread those parts and skipped over the Adrien stuff 😂"
Ha ha ha *deep breath*
I know you didn't mean to be a jerk but... yeah that does kinda sound like a dick move...
Sorry dude I don't feel bad about it. 😂 it's not like I left them a note every time I reread the story to tell them I hated their ship and was only reading for mine. You're not going to make me feel guilty for reading something I enjoyed in the way I could enjoy it most, while hurting literally no one. I only brought it up at all to reference the line because to me it so perfectly encapsulates the ship dynamics and how both of them are perfectly valid options for people with different tastes. Sorry if abstractly knowing that I read only parts of an unspecified fic by an unspecified author upsets you. Full disclosure I usually skip all of the songs and poems in Lord of the Rings too. Read them on my first read through and skip almost every one of them the other fifty million times I read the book.
Recently seen this take in a couple places regarding the ML season 5 discourse and it disturbs me, so let me just put this out there (no actual spoilers this is just a tangential thing that keeps showing up in different ways).
"You don't freak out because someone hugs you in greeting when you didn't want/expect it. You just take the hug and move on. It's not like they're assaulting you."
Friends. Especially young people. With love from Mama Quick, here's something I wish someone had told me many years earlier than I actually learned it.
People shouldn't be hugging you if you don't want them to. You absolutely have the right to decline any hug no matter how innocently intended it is. "I don't want to," is a good enough reason and no one should make you feel embarrassed or rude for asserting a personal boundary.
Stepping back and offering an alternative greeting is absolutely a thing you can do. If someone keeps trying to hug you after you've done this then yeah, you're allowed to be upset. It doesn't have to be outright assault to be rude and feel violating. (Ugh the number of parents' friends who have hugged me uncomfortably long to ask me questions and tell me how much I'd grown when I desperately wanted to be elsewhere even though they were perfectly nice people who thought that was just a normal southern thing to do)
Here's some advice from Captain Awkward on how to handle unwanted huggers. (I highly recommend searching the site for scripts on any kind of difficult conversation there are many good suggestions, including "sometimes you just have to let people be mad.")
Don't be guilted into allowing unwelcome contact because you don't want to make a scene or be considered cold or rude.
ETA another favorite CA quote: “No thanks” is a decision, not the opening of a negotiation.
Y’all I gotta complain about Zoe for a minute, and stuff like this always gets me into trouble, so please, please just keep scrolling if you don’t wanna hear it. IDK I guess I’m hoping if I just get some of the griping out of my system I can quit thinking about it. 😂 Spoilers for season 4 under the cut.
I want her to be a villain so bad. Why couldn’t they have given Lila a setup like that and then used her effectively? I mean you have someone who admits they lie to fit in, that they like to act, and they come in with the perfect setup to be seen as Chloe’s victim and get in good with everyone else, and then start to lie and manipulate things just a little bit to go their way, and pretty soon everyone’s twisted around and you have a really effective setup for a liar/user who’s not completely obvious, and if she does get get caught, she’s got an iron-clad pity play right on the table already. “I’m sorry, I messed up, I’m trying so hard to do better, please forgive me,” and with the family she’s living in, who would question it? I know they’re not gonna do it, because it would just be repeating Lila’s plot again (only better) and they seem committed to sticking it out with her but UGH WHYYYYYYY IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BETTER. I’m not sure how you would actually work out her not knowing Hawmoth’s identity, unless she was a sentimonster, but also how amazing would that be? Hawkmoth creating a sentimonster, while the real Zoe never leaves her boarding school and just goes on, because you know nobody in the mayor’s house is checking on anything there. Maybe Nathalie’s last sentimonster so that HM can keep making his own. ugh that would have been so good. Now he’s got an inside agent that can manipulate things at school, goad Chloe, get close to Marinette if he still wants to target her.
To me that’s the only way to redeem the fact that you could find the exact same character in a thousand first-time-writer-self-insert fics--seriously she’s a freaking checklist. Long lost suddenly appearing sibling of a major cast member, mistreated by everybody, underestimates her own self-worth so that everyone tells her how great she is, being awesome enough to get even Chat’s attention for a millisecond, getting to tell Chloe off as the new queen bee, accomplishing previously impossible things that we’ve all wanted to see, for example the only one who can convince Mayor Bourgeois to stand up to Chloe, etc etc on and on--literally the only thing she’s missing is being crushed on by a secondary character so that she can be impressive and desirable without interrupting the main ship. I’m all for those things in fanfic, we all wrote that kind of thing at one point and I’m not judging anybody. But it drives me bananas when it shows up in a professional work that should know better (I am looking at you Heather from How to Train Your Dragon).
I know I’m massively biased, but I gotta be honest y’all the Zoeka thing mystifies me 😂 Setting aside all the issues above, we have a character who’s based around truth, sincerity, and perceptiveness/consideration of others’ feelings, and a character that straight up admits she lies to fit in (to the point of being cruel to others), who even after she reforms (so to speak) has no problem lying and manipulating her own sister (masterfully, omg, see above, why wouldn’t they use this), and generally is in the habit of not showing her true feelings or self. This is the exact opposite of what Luka is attracted to in Marinette (clear as a music note, sincere as a melody). I mean, they look cute, I’ll give you that, I think they’d have an interesting friendship dynamic and Zoe could learn a lot from the Couffaines. That’s fine in a friendship, but not great in a romantic partner. There’s a difference between supporting a partner who’s working through some hard stuff, and dating someone you have to fix, so. I don’t find it especially appealing. (I have this same problem with a lot of Adrien ships, to be honest; I ship Adrien x therapy 😂) IDK maybe five or ten years down the road when she’s learned how to separate herself from the roles she plays, but it’d definitely take some really good storytelling to convince me even then.
Ship and let ship, of course, y’all have a party, nobody needs my approval. Just don’t expect to see me jumping ships anytime soon. 😂
(you don't have to post this, I know you try to keep things pretty salt-light here) I mean, I'm sure everyone who uses any sort of good reasoning for Luka to not tell Marinette don't really mean it. They have to come up with various reasons because Luka (canonically) has never had a bad one for doing anything for/to Marinette. We all know that the writers want to keep him away from her and they just want someone to help the LS even more. The writers basically admitted that "now he can help both"
This inspired a whole rumination on the nature of salt and my feelings about it that I’m actually going to put in another post. 😂 When I do, please don’t feel guilty about it dear anon, it’s not your fault.
Anyway just for reference, for new readers or anyone who needs to know, it's not because I’m anti-salt or have anything against salt or because I disagree with salt takes or don't want salt on my blog at all, I just find that too much of it gets depressing for my chemically-imbalanced brain and kills my enthusiasm and ability to create, so I try to keep things a little lighter for my own sanity.
That being said, let’s engage in a little literary criticism. 😁
I agree with you anon, I think a lot of people had that same confused, stomach-dropping moment I did and had to work backward to get to a place where that would be a reasonable decision, just based on the reactions I saw and the people I talked to when the ep first came out.
However if there ARE people who think that it was the right decision, either immediately or after thinking it through, that's okay, I think that's valid (and I think it is very likely those people exist simply because humans are so wonderfully different). I could see Luka being on a knife's edge there, trying to make the best choice under the circumstances, and I don't think it's totally implausible that it would play out the way it did. One might even say that the message she sends him in Ephemeral indicates that deep down Mari knows Luka knows and that maybe she even wanted him to lie to her, which being as intuitive as he is, he understood and compromised his deeply held beliefs and preference for direct sincere communication to do what she wanted. If he did make that decision, I can see him doing it that way--bold as brass, look her square in the eye and lie to her face. He could have prevaricated or just not really given an answer but he straight up, flat out lied. All or nothing is pretty in keeping with the way I see him, and I saw it a little bit as Luka's way of absolving her for lying to him by willingly--I don't want to say coming down to her level because that implies more judgement than I want, but sorta like that. So if Luka decided to throw all his beliefs to the wind, I suppose that is a good way to go? I think he can do that with good intentions? It could even make for some interesting conflicts for him later if they ever gave him more than three minutes of screen time. (see, now that was salt)
I do think that protecting Mari's sanity and/or saving her from having to make a difficult decision is the only explanation in line with his character, so given what happened, if I were going to write a canon compliant fic, I would absolutely go with that.
For me personally though--hmm how do I put this. Character is very intuitive for me? While I can, with some effort, pick apart why I think a character would act a certain way, it starts as a gut feeling. So when that moment happened, it felt like when you expect a car to go left and it turns right instead, and you feel for a moment like your stomach kept going the direction you were expecting to go. To me, that was an indicator that this moment is “wrong” for how I see the character. Which sounds kind of arrogant to say in writing, but eh, it’s the way I feel.
And you know, that’s fine when it's one moment. It happens sometimes, that someone sacrifices character authenticity to further the plot, and while lazy, it’s not earth shattering. What worries me about it, and about Wishmaker in general, is that I'm worried about it being a pivot in how they're going to portray his character from now on rather than being one out of character moment. Luka was overall pushier in that episode than he's ever been, and while it wasn't a lot taken by itself, it's a significant shift from "you should go talk to him" to taking her hand and pulling her, however gently, into a conversation with Adrien. Much like you can say Alya was out of character in a few episodes of season 3, but then you see them triple-down on this version of her character in the specials and season four, and now she’s straight up a bad friend. How many times can you make a character out of character before it becomes their character? Luka’s actions in that moment are just close enough to being in character to be a reasonable shift IF they plan to follow it up with him, as you say, “helping them both.” So, really, Wishmaker was the episode that really made me feel upset, because I had previously assumed, especially given how little they ever give Luka to do or say in the show (let’s remember that his glory episodes were Silencer, where he was akumatized as a villain who couldn’t use his own voice for the majority of his screentime and where a good bit of the time out of that was taken up by a silent montage, and Desperada, where 90% of the episode was Adrien, and the breakup episode, of which he got to be normal for maybe half), that they would write him out (travel the world with Jagged, etc) or just quietly ignore him/let him fade out. While I fully believe he would support Mari through the lovesquare getting together, I really don’t want to watch him do it, especially if they have him start pushing rather than just supporting. No thank you.
I also keep struggling with saying this because it sounds like I think being a luthier is boring or “lesser” and as a committed maker myself I absolutely respect the passion and skill it takes to make anything, let alone things as complicated as an instrument, but something about the timing and the way they made Luka want to be a career luthier made me feel like it was an attempt to...deglamorize him? Like, having him be an aspiring rock star (which, I’ll grant you, was never really stated for sure) was too much competition for Adrien so part of their attempt to tone him down as a love rival was to make him less compatible with Marinette’s ambitions, you know? It would have been different if we had ever seen Luka tinkering with guitars in the past, or fixing things, or having pieces of instruments or tools out in his room, but everything they’ve ever shown has pointed more for him being a performer on one scale or another, so just declaring it out of the blue seems like a cheap tactic to me. Which is annoying because I’ve always loved the idea of Luka getting into making guitars as a hobby/self-maintenance/off shoot of his passion/side gig kind of thing (see Luka refinishing his guitar in Finding Harmony), and now I’m aggravated when I think about it.
So, yes, all of that was a long-winded way to say I agree with you, it definitely feels to me like they broke character there because they’re trying to transition him out of the love rival position, and I’m not excited for where they’re going to take it from here.
