FabFuta1234

Hi everyone! For context, I'm the authoress of Two Bees in a Pod, a Miraculous Ladybug AU fanfiction. I'm also a member of the Marinette Critique Studio, and recently I made a post analyzing how Ladybug's ladybug motif is some very good accidental symbolism of Marinette's toxicity in her relationships with others, particularly in how she treats other girls, Chloe, and Adrien, by comparing her to a solitary, poisonous, carnivorous, and cannibalistic beetle that evolved to shove past ants to steal their aphids, with some notes on Chloe's honeybee motif reflecting Chloe's aggressive and frankly territorial personality.

In the comments, one lovely poster made a good analysis of how Adrien/Chat Noir has a black cat motif to represent bad luck, but how this is actually quite symbolic of Adrien being a sweet, playful boy who loves people but will break out the claws if pushed too far. That got me thinking about how the writers of Miraculous Ladybug might not understand the ecologies of the animals they designed their heroes after, and if the ecologies of said animals might be unintended symbolism of their personalities.

So I'm going to start a series of asks! I want YOU, Miraculous fandom, to send me some analyses of the animal motifs in Miraculous Ladybug via the ask box! I'll also share some of my own thoughts & my selection process for the heroes in Two Bees in a Pod, many of whom are quite different from the canon heroes.

HEROES ANALYZED:

Ladybug

Chat Noir

Queen B

Vesperia

Rena Rouge

Caprikid

Carapace

King Monkey

Viperion

Miss Hound

Lady Dragon

Ryuko

Bunnyx

Rooster Bold

VILLAINS ANALYZED:

Hawk Moth

Lila

IN-PROGRESS:

Polymouse

Minotaurox

Felix

Hi everyone! For context, I'm the authoress of Two Bees in a Pod, a Miraculous Ladybug AU fanfiction. I'm also a member of the Marinette Critique Studio, and recently I made a post analyzing how Ladybug's ladybug motif is some very good accidental symbolism of Marinette's toxicity in her relationships with others, particularly in how she treats other girls, Chloe, and Adrien, by comparing her to a solitary, poisonous, carnivorous, and cannibalistic beetle that evolved to shove past ants to steal their aphids, with some notes on Chloe's honeybee motif reflecting Chloe's aggressive and frankly territorial personality.

In the comments, one lovely poster made a good analysis of how Adrien/Chat Noir has a black cat motif to represent bad luck, but how this is actually quite symbolic of Adrien being a sweet, playful boy who loves people but will break out the claws if pushed too far. That got me thinking about how the writers of Miraculous Ladybug might not understand the ecologies of the animals they designed their heroes after, and if the ecologies of said animals might be unintended symbolism of their personalities. This post is all about the Mouse Miraculous and how it reflects MLB's issues with cultural representation & appropriation.

Let's start with the mammal itself. The word "mouse" refers, broadly speaking, to small rodents with pointed snouts, small & round ears, a scaly tail as long as the rest of their body, and a prolific breeding rate. Several species of rodents are called mice, most of which belong to the suborder Myomorpha and all true mice belonging to the family Muridae within it. Typical mice belong to the type genus of Muridae, Mus, with the type species Mus musculus being the house mouse that most of us think of when someone says "mice".

Genetic studies show that the house mouse originated in India before diverging into six different subspecies as it moved westward towards Europe. Like all rodents, their incisors grow constantly and have to be worn down by gnawing or else they'll grow so long they'll kill the animal; the upper incisors of a house mouse have a notch that the lower incisors fit into, a distinctive trait of this species. Tail length correlates to the environmental temperatures the mouse experienced growing up with shorter tails found in colder environments, as the tail is an important thermoregulatory organ and excess length would lead to excess loss of heat.

House mice are omnivores, with the bulk of their diet consisting of seeds (particularly those of grasses) and fruit. They're mostly nocturnal and tend to live near their food sources in little nooks and crannies that make it easy to hide from predators. Social behavior depends on a population's surrounding environment, with wild populations displaying noncommensal behavior and populations in close proximity to humans displaying commensal behavior. In noncommensal populations, limited food drives both sexes to be territorial and aggressive to each other, especially males, who establish territories where they and several females whom they breed with live and will fight interlopers to the death. In commensal populations, high food availability reduces competition and causes a surge in population density, which leads to reduced aggression, particularly in females, and the creation of social hierarchies.

House mice first encountered humans when the latter came to India, and once agrarian settlements grew large enough mice were able to spread westward, reaching the eastern Mediterranean 15,000 years ago and the rest of Europe 3000 years ago. House mice aren't good at competing with other small rodents, including other mouse species, so their relationship with humans was vital for expanding their range. Mice usually aren't a welcome sight in human settlements due to their destructive natures, eating & spoiling our food and gnawing on our houses to the point where cats were first domesticated to keep them in check. The house mouse is an invasive species in lands where mice aren't native, like Australia, New Zealand, and Gough Island; on the latter island mice are evolving larger sizes to prey on seabird chicks by mobbing them to death.

Exceptions exist to mice being unwelcome in your house, however. Mice were historically eaten as food in many countries, including in the UK as recently as WW2, and are also used as food for carnivorous pets like snakes and raptors. Mice themselves can be pets in their own right, primarily in the form of fancy mice, which were bred extensively in China throughout the first & second millennia before being introduced to Europe in the 1600s, where they exploded in popularity & in numbers. Since mice share a lot of genetic & physiological traits with humans, but are smaller & shorter-lived than primates and thus much easier to rear, they're a common model organism; before Gregor Mendel bred peas he bred mice until his superior told him to stop. Laboratory mice with all sorts of genetic modifications exist, providing vital insight into how these genes work in humans; we've even made autistic mice.

A mischief of BALB/c laboratory mice, the iconic white mice with red eyes of cartoon lab rat fame, by by Aaron Logan - from http://www.lightmatter.net/gallery/albums.php, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13587.

Mice are a common sight in literature, as their small size & low trophic level make them an easy choice for either an underdog or a symbol of a group that's being oppressed. Aesop's fables include a story called The Lion and the Mouse, where a lion that let a mouse go is later freed from hunters by that same mouse. Another fable, Belling the Cat, focuses on a group of mice who can't decide which of them should put a bell on the cat so they can hear it coming, an allegory for how plans that look good on paper might not be practical in reality and how some people can be absolute cowards in the face of necessary hardship. The Grimm fairytale "Cat and Mouse in Partnership" tells of how a cat and a mouse defy their species' predator-prey relationship to live together, only for the cat's gluttony to (in the story's eyes inevitably) ruin it.

A common misconception about mice & murids in general that is perpetuated by fiction is that they like cheese. They do not. The misconception arose because in medieval Europe cheese was often the only foodstuff stored out in the open where mice could access it, and they only ate it out of desperation, not preference; in fact, some cheeses outright repulse them. Adult mice, like most adult mammals, are lactose-intolerant and cannot digest cheese properly. Peanuts are more what mice actually tend to go for.

The popularity of mice as an underdog figure led to the trope Nice Mice, where mice are consistently portrayed as heroes. Cinderella's mice had more agency & development than Cindy herself. Jerry is meant to be the one we root for in Tom & Jerry. Mickey Mouse is the face of Disney. And I hate this trope. Why? Because it leads to other animals always being cast as the villains, and there's no better example than the other murid commonly found in human settlements.

A black rat, Rattus rattus.

The word "rat" refers to multiple species of myomorph rodent in the superfamily Muroidea, with true rats comprising the genus Rattus. Among the roughly 66 extant species of Rattus are the two most familiar to humans: the type species R. rattus, also known as the black rat or ship rat, and the much more common R. norvegicus, also known as the brown rat, sewer rat, street rat, or wharf rat. The brown rat is the species most commonly used in laboratory experiments and as a pet, and based on the elongated skull shape it's mostly likely the species depicted in Miraculous Ladybug, so for this post we'll discuss the brown rat specifically.

Despite their specific name, brown rats aren't native to Norway; that was a misconception from the 18th century when they received their binomial names. In reality, brown rats most likely evolved in northern China and Mongolia, and while it isn't known when they became human commensals it is known that they spread westward via human trade routes and were present in Europe by the 1550s, which is supported by Swiss reports of albino individuals as that phenotype is rare in black rats but common in wild populations of brown rats. Being larger and more aggressive than black rats allowed them to displace their cousins, aided by their more generalized diets and their niche as burrowers making them perfect for life in industrialized cities; black rats are arboreal by nature, and the turn away from thatched roofs significantly deprived them of habitat in human settlements. In fact, brown rats are the ONLY animal on Earth to inhabit a greater land area than humans. Good job, Remy.

Being close relatives of house mice, brown rats have many of the same traits, just scaled up to a larger size: they're prolific breeders, generalist omnivores with a preference for seeds, social creatures with hierarchies & a similar life expectancy, and a major invasive species that have even driven some animals extinct. However, there are differences; aside from being good swimmers and having more meat in their diets (with a particular predilection for scrambled eggs), brown rats are much more social than house mice and like to huddle up together in large groups to show other rats that they're not a threat & to keep warm in cold weather. They have friends, and female rats prefer to mate with a new partner every time. Brown rats like to burrow, especially female rats, and they don't stray far from their nests unless food is scarce. Brown rats are generally smarter than house mice, especially when it comes to solving complex problems, making them on the whole easier to train.

Lab rats driving cars at the University of Richmond.

In Asian cultures rats are seen as lucky. Hinduism depicts the brown rat as the steed of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of wisdom and good luck, so rats are a common sight in Indian temples. The first animal of the Chinese zodiac is a murid called a "鼠" (shǔ), which can mean either "rat" or "mouse" but most often refers to rats; those born in the Year of the Rat are seen as intelligent, creative, honest, and ambitious, but also temperamental and wasteful. According to the Zodiac legend, the rat used trickery, cunning, and creativity to propel himself to the front of the Zodiac, while the cat that should've come (and was replaced by the pig) became a predator of murids out of bitterness at being the victim of the rat's tricks.

Rats have a much more negative reputation in Europe, much of which is due to the black rat being the primary host for the fleas that spread plague, which once killed off a third of Europe's human population. Most depictions of rats in Western media are consequently negative, especially if mice are the protagonists of the story, possibly because rats kill mice in the wild to reduce competition for food resources but more likely because of negative associations with rats & the underdog narrative surrounding mice. One adaptation of the Nutcracker changed the Mouse King to a rat because, quote, "I cannot imagine mice as the embodiment of evil. Mice are such charming little creatures, and it is not by accident that Mickey Mouse became an absolutely universal hero." Screw you, Andrey Konchalovskiy.

As someone with an interest in biology & animals in general, I don't like vilifying & glorifying entire groups of animals. It creates the idea that some animals are worth more than others, which has a negative impact on conservation efforts because it makes people not want to care about saving animals that need saving. Just because sharks, snakes, spiders, bats, wasps, mosquitoes, and rats are "creepy", that doesn't mean they don't have a place in their environment, and while I do support controlling populations of invasive species I don't think entire groups of animals should be wiped out to satisfy human whims. Not to mention it makes it hard for us to manage invasive species with good PR like dogs, cats, sheep, and honeybees; the "cute" animals are the only ones people care about saving. No one on TV goes vegetarian because they think flounder are cute.

I see this sentiment in Miraculous Ladybug too. Ladybug draws a lot of inspiration from Spiderman but she's based on a ladybug. Why? Because the media wants everyone to think that spiders are creepy and ladybugs are cute, even though ladybugs are just as viciously carnivorous as spiders. Chloe is akumatized into wasp-themed villains because wasps are evil and bees like Zoe are good (yet Zoe's Bee transformation is ironically named after a hornet, one of the most vilified kinds of wasps). Hawk Moth takes the name of a moth because he's perverting the "Butterfly" Miraculous and butterflies are cute and moths are not. The most common villain is associated with pigeons and later with rats, aka vermin. Speaking of vermin, let's talk about Mullo.

Mullo's design alone doesn't place her species as any particular murid. She's the Kwami of Multiplication, a clear reference to the prolific breeding habits of murids; two brown rats can become fifteen THOUSAND brown rats in only one year. This is a good concept for her. Its power is cloning yourself, which is also appropriate, although the mechanism works more like division since one person becomes many small people; for my fic there's a full-sized original and multiple miniature copies, and the number of copies can be controlled with fewer copies having greater size, because that's how fractions work and fractions are just multiplying by decimals.

However, Mullo is specifically identified as a mouse despite most interpretations of the murid in the Chinese zodiac having shǔ as rats, including in China itself. Mullo is the only Kwami whose species was unambiguously changed, and honestly? The translation thing's a coincidence. Mullo's species was clearly changed because the European writers in charge of MLB think that rats are disgusting vermin and a rat hero would therefore be unmarketable, so they made Mullo a mouse because they think mice are cuter and therefore more marketable.

At first this cynicism seems surprising; MLB draws a lot of inspiration from TMNT and Master Splinter's a very much heroic rat, and the Chinese Miracle Box is Chinese so it should follow Chinese customs. But the thing is, MLB has no honest desire to seriously explore Chinese culture beyond using its art and myths for themselves. Marinette is half-Chinese and Sabine is purportedly very proud of her heritage, yet Marinette is so disinterested in her Chinese heritage that not only is Adrien more fluent in Mandarin than she is (and it isn't framed as Marinette being less fluent in Mandarin because she grew up speaking Shanghainese, as Shanghainese is a dialect of Wu and therefore mutually unintelligible with Mandarin), Marinette has no interest in going to Shanghai to celebrate her great-uncle's birthday and only says she does because she wants to stalk Adrien. Large parts of Master Fu's character feel like Chinese stereotypes. And the show has the nerve to call Chloe irredeemably racist for mentioning sushi in front of Wang Cheng, yet Wang Cheng's akumatized form is based on a Japanese character and looks like this?

In my opinion, Miraculous Ladybug's use of Chinese motifs isn't an earnest attempt at representation; it's Orientalism. Orientalism is a form of cultural appropriation that kicked off in Europe in the 1800s, an evolution of Europe's prior obsession with Ancient Egypt following Napoleon's campaigns there. Orientalism is marked by the use of Asian motifs and mythology and is, at its core, a form of cultural colonialism where the people who belong to a culture aren't allowed to represent themselves and are instead represented by colonizers (in this case white Europeans) who don't understand that culture and so reduce it to shallow stereotypes. It's found in several aspects of Western life, including several things seen as quintessentially hippy-dippy like yoga and white people getting henna. And fitting for a Kwami whose species was reassigned to make it easier for Zag to exploit Chinese mythology for action figure money, her holder is one of the characters most guilty of cultural appropriation.

Mylene is the least popular girl in the Akuma Class out of universe, and for good reason: her character is a mess. She's simultaneously a nervous wreck who's scared of a cheap monster costume and the resident Soapbox Sadie (an outspoken teenage girl with stereotypical left-wing politics), and the writing can't seem to decide which one she is in that moment. Had it been a gradual shift from coward in S1 to courageous girl in S5 that would've been a good arc for her, but that's not how she's written. That said, Mylene DOES have two consistent traits: one, she's the resident hippie archetype, and two, as an extension of one, she engages in the most blatant cultural appropriation of anyone in the Akuma Class.

The hippie archetype was codified by the American counterculture movement of the 1960s, an evolution of the beat subculture that rejected capitalism and materialism and promoted peace and love, amplified by the controversial Vietnam War. Elements of the hippie include advocating for trees (Mega Leech), wearing pins as an easy way to advertise what causes you support (Mylene's even got a Pride pin in S6), vegetarianism and/or veganism (Mylene's a vegan), and cultural appropriation including meditating while saying "Ohm" (Buddhism), yoga (India), various elements of Native American fashion, & not-quite-Western interpretations of astrology (I will send the next person who sings "Aquarius" to me to a star IN Aquarius, it is 2026 and this is not the age of peace & love). Elements of other cultures were taken without trying to understand them and wound up being bastardized & ultimately commodified, and while the counterculture movement eventually died out in the early 1980s its specific brand of cultural appropriation lives on.

How does Mylene appropriate culture? Look no further than the hair. Mylene wears dreadlocks, which is a black hairstyle. It's generally considered culturally insensitive for white people to wear dreads among black communities as it's viewed as hypocritical: people of African ancestry are ridiculed for having a different hair texture from people of European ancestry and are often told to change it, but a white person can wear their hair in dreads and NOT be criticized? I'd give Mylene some slack given her age...if this was the only time she engaged in cultural appropriation. But it isn't.

The screenshot above is from Gang of Secrets. In this scene Mylene says, quote, "We'll give her an eternal friendship bracelet so she never forgets that friends can tell each other anything and that we'll always be there for her. I read in a magazine that an ancient South American tribe did something like this. You tell a secret to the bead in your mind, once Marinette adds her secret to the bead this bracelet will unite us all forever." Literally no South American tribe does this. In-universe, Mylene is taking what magazines say at face value and does not give a fuck about cultural accuracy. Out of universe, the writers are pulling things out of their ass and do not give a fuck about cultural accuracy.

There's just...a LOT of hypocrisy in how Mylene is written. She acts like she cares about important left-wing values like social justice and equality, but those values include cultural sensitivity and there are at least two instances of Mylene showing none of that. When Rose mentioned that Chloe's mom left her in Derision, Mylene rather coldly replied that her mom left her and she didn't turn out to be a brat. Audrey being a deadbeat doesn't excuse Chloe's behavior but it does help explain it, and Mylene of all people should be the character most able to empathize with her over that. Is that dove with an olive branch on your shirt just for show?

In terms of animal motifs, Mylene does display some murid traits. She's social but very skittish, respects the social hierarchy of the girl's group and acts coldly to those lower on the pecking order (Chloe and, for a time, Sabrina), and with time she gets braver like how mice get comfortable around humans with enough handling. In terms of rat symbolism Mylene is somewhat ambitious, but her cultural appropriation shows that she isn't the most creative or independent thinker, both of which are traits that rats are associated with & display in real life; instead, she tends to follow whatever fits her confirmation biases. No wonder Lila got her on her side so easily; foxes prey on insecure rodents.

The issues with Mylene's character are emblematic of the double standards deeply integrated into MLB's writing. Chloe doesn't get away with anything, but Marinette gets away with literal crime. The show calls Chloe racist against Asians for mentioning sushi in front of a Chinese man, yet repeatedly engages in Orientalism & deliberate misinterpretation of Asian cultures for its own benefit, including altering Mullo's species to something that fits the writers' own cultural biases rather than trying to understand the culture where it came from. Mylene doesn't fit the Mouse, in my opinion; she needs help learning how to speak up and stand up for what she genuinely believes in, not what a magazine tells her is popular, and the Mouse makes you too small to hear & easy to overlook. Multiplication isn't the concept she needs help with; if anything, it might dilute her message.

So, how did I go about rewriting Mullo for Two Bees in a Pod? First, I made her a rat, specifically the Gray Rat, i.e. a brown rat with gray fur & pink eyes like some fancy rats. Then I made her more like the rat from the Chinese zodiac: she's clever, sly, and likes pranks & practical jokes, though she's got a more mature & refined sense of humor than Xuppu due to being one of the oldest Kwamis and also loves mathematics & making herself useful. Then I focused on the concept of multiplication, but in an abstract way: brown rats are generalists, so logically Mullo should want to help make people generalists by multiplying the number of things that they're comfortable with. And then it hit me: I knew just the boy for Mullo.

Max is one of my underrated favorites among the Akuma Class. He's the only sane man in a class of wacky people, yet he keeps getting overlooked by canon due to being plainer & calmer than his more energetic classmates. The expansion of his character via the confirmation of him being autistic in S6 gave me mixed feelings; on the one hand, Max is a good kid and his special interest in astronomy is very relatable as I have one myself, but on the other hand...Max made Markov, a sapient robot, at age fifteen, dresses like a stereotypical nerd, and spouts percentages for things that can't have percentages applied to them at all (and it isn't presented as a vocal stim). Taken together, it feels like Max's autism isn't a genuine attempt at autism representation but is instead rooted in stereotypes perpetuated by Rain Main and other such films, reflecting MLB's recurring problem with informing its depictions of people of minorities on stereotypes.

When I decided to pair Max with Mullo, I knew I had to make her decision make sense; fortunately, Max being autistic gave me the beginnings of an arc. Speaking as someone who's on the spectrum herself, autistic people have trouble breaking routine or anticipating change because once an idea enters our heads it's very hard to let go of it, if not outright impossible. This, combined with our frequent sensory processing issues, leads to autistic people preferring the quiet to the exciting, our samefoods to something new, our routines to the unexpected. As a result, we're seen as rather plain, and some people make their displeasure with that very clear.

While I wrote Bugfighter, the chapter where Max and Mullo are paired together, I decided to change Max's felt heart routine a fair amount because realistically? Flat pieces of felt carried around everywhere you go are VERY easy to damage/lose, and autistic people get VERY upset when they lose/break things and I didn't want to put Max through that. The use of chicken yassa as Max's samefood confirms that he's of Senegalese descent, so I looked for heart symbolism in Senegalese culture and came across the philosophy of teranga, which fit his character perfectly & let me give his parents a backstory. The rest flowed naturally: Max grew up in a hospitable home but encounters less hospitality outside of it and feels pressured to be someone he's not to fit in with inhospitable people, so Mullo chose him so she could help him multiply his confidence in & hospitality to himself via increasing his comfort with the unexpected.

This is a difference I want to highlight between how canon treats concepts from foreign culture and how I try to write about them. Full disclosure, I am a white American, there are cultural mores I don't understand because I was not raised with them. But I try my best to be culturally sensitive, and I do this by doing extensive amounts of research to make absolute certain I have as accurate a picture of that culture before I commit to what I wrote about it. This is something that I don't think canon does, because I don't think the people writing it care. But I care. I care a lot. There is a difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, and I try to get as close to the latter as I can.

And so, here is Max's Gray Rat transformation, Lab Rat:

(Image of Max to go here when I draw him.)

Max's Gray Rat transformation is named Lab Rat, a reference to a character from the Canadian edutainment show Grossology (one of my favorite childhood TV shows) who, like Max, is a very smart black guy, and additionally has a pet rat named Hermes who looks a lot like Mullo. If Grossology existed in-universe, I think Max would see Lab Rat's wit & creativity as something worth emulating.

Hi everyone! For context, I'm the authoress of Two Bees in a Pod, a Miraculous Ladybug AU fanfiction. I'm also a member of the Marinette Critique Studio, and recently I made a post analyzing how Ladybug's ladybug motif is some very good accidental symbolism of Marinette's toxicity in her relationships with others, particularly in how she treats other girls, Chloe, and Adrien, by comparing her to a solitary, poisonous, carnivorous, and cannibalistic beetle that evolved to shove past ants to steal their aphids, with some notes on Chloe's honeybee motif reflecting Chloe's aggressive and frankly territorial personality.

In the comments, one lovely poster made a good analysis of how Adrien/Chat Noir has a black cat motif to represent bad luck, but how this is actually quite symbolic of Adrien being a sweet, playful boy who loves people but will break out the claws if pushed too far. That got me thinking about how the writers of Miraculous Ladybug might not understand the ecologies of the animals they designed their heroes after, and if the ecologies of said animals might be unintended symbolism of their personalities. This post is all about the Eagle Miraculous and how the New York Special marked a turning point in the decline of the quality of Miraculous Ladybug's worldbuilding.

Let's start with the bird itself. Eagles are the first non-galliform birds represented by a Miraculous, belonging to the raptor order Accipitriformes and more specifically the type family Accipitridae, with all true eagles belonging to the subfamily Aquilinae. True eagles, also known as booted eagles, comprise ten genera containing a total of thirty-eight species of medium-to-large-sized raptors united in having feathered legs (their namesake "boots"), proportionally large feet & talons, and extremely good eyesight, which make them more than capable of hunting and killing animals much larger than they are. Booted eagles are found on every continent except Antarctica, with the greatest species diversity found in Africa. The most widespread booted eagle is the golden eagle, Aquila chrysaetos, which can be found as far west as Spain, as far east as Quebec, as far north as the northern parts of Norway, and as far south as Ethiopia.

A captive Canadian golden eagle, Aquila chrysaetos canadensis, shows the typical rusty coloration of this subspecies by DickDaniels (http://theworldbirds.org/) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17035803.

Booted eagles are very important in Western culture, particularly golden eagles owing to how widespread they are. Eagles are the patron animals of Zeus, the leader of the Olympians, and are seen in Christianity as a living representation of the Gospel of John because they can supposedly look right at the Sun without going blind just like the gospel can look right at Jesus' divinity without exploding (this isn't true, don't let eagles look at the Sun without sunglasses). Eagles are a common sight in European heraldry since they're seen as the king of birds just like lions are the king of beasts, powerful animals posed with their wings spread out and tools within their talons. This image of eagles is popular among many countries and particularly in Germanic nations, and it lent itself to the iconography of my own country...albeit with a different species.

The greater coat of arms of the United States of America, as depicted on passports, embassies and the Great Seal.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, I'm American. The most famous bird endemic to the United States is the bald eagle, so let's talk about it. Haliaeetus leucocephalus is a species of large-bodied accipitrid commonly known as the bald eagle after their iconic white heads, but they aren't true eagles; bald eagles belong to Buteoninae, the buzzard subfamily, and their closest relatives are kites (the birds, not the toys) and fish eagles. They can be found all over the continental United States, southern Canada and Alaska, and northern Mexico. Fish and aquatic birds make up the bulk of their natural diet followed by carrion, with inland populations following a rodent-and-rabbit-based diet and some ballsy birds hauling off baby seals and fawns. One potential prey item, the common loon, won't go down without a fight: they're so territorial that they'll outright kill bald eagles by stabbing them with their beaks, with one famous case involving a bald eagle being stabbed in the heart by a loon & left to float facedown in the water after the eagle killed one of their chicks.

A common loon (Gavia immer) launches out of the water in defense of an attacking bald eagle. Photo by Jon Winslow.

Bald eagles are kleptoparasites, stealing kills from other predators like ospreys & coyotes and chasing other animals off carcasses, though they can hunt for themselves too. They also compete with golden eagles for prey, but despite being more numerous bald eagles are more easily bullied away by golden eagles due to their lower aggression, although there are reports of both species sharing meals. Unlike many other birds, bald eagles are very loyal to their mates and mate for life without much infidelity, and considering that their courtship includes locking their talons together and nearly falling to their deaths that loyalty is understandable. Because bald eagles reuse the same nest for every clutch of 1-3 eggs and just add extensions each time, they make the largest nests of any North American bird – one nest in Florida was twenty feet deep and weighed three tons in freedom units. Bald eagles are very long-lived, with wild birds able to live to age thirty-eight and captive ones pushing fifty.

Owing to their extensive range and high historic population, bald eagles are a common sight in many indigenous North American cultures, many of which regard them as messengers from the gods. Navajo medicine men use eagle parts for ritual whistles in honor of a myth where the warrior Nayenezgani slew an evil monster and adopted its babies to raise into heroes (the other baby became an owl, keep this in mind for later). The Kwakiutl people of the Pacific Northwest have a legend that describes how bald eagles got their good eyesight by one of them borrowing the eyesight of a slug for sentry duty, then refusing to give it back. In Lakota tradition eagle feathers are awarded to those who perform great deeds, and it's considered disrespectful to store them out of sight because it's seen as a sign that you're willingly forgetting the values that earned you that feather in the first place.

The bald eagle became the symbol of the United States in 1782 because the Continental Congress wanted to homage Roman eagle iconography. Ben Franklin was not amused by this, as he thought the bald eagle's kleptoparasitic behavior indicated cowardice & bad moral character unfitting of the United States; as someone living in 2026, the irony is incredible. Tragically, bald eagles were nearly wiped out in the mid-20th century by the widely-used pesticide DDT, which decimated their numbers by making their eggshells too thin to stay intact, and since bald eagles are apex predators the law of biomagnification (the higher an organism's trophic level, the more concentrated toxic substances in their diets become) meant they were severely affected. This, combined with people shooting them out of the misconception that bald eagles hunt human children and lambs (they don't attack humans and only rarely kill lambs) and habitat loss, rendered them an endangered species, with some media (including Addams Family Values) even joking about them going outright extinct. Luckily, the banning of DDT restored their numbers and Haliaeetus leucocephalus is now classified as Least Concern, i.e. at very low risk of extinction. As an extra precaution for their conservation, hunting bald eagles & possessing their feathers is legally forbidden unless you're of recognized Native American heritage. Speaking of which, let's talk about the only NA character in Miraculous Ladybug.

Jessica Keynes is introduced in the New York Special (officially Miraculous World: New York, United Heroez) as a student of Armstrong High School. Unbeknownst to everyone else, Jessica is the daughter of Barbara Keynes, the secret identity of the superhero Knightowl, and is herself the secret identity of Knightowl's sidekick, Sparrow. Jessica is an adventurous girl who hates sitting around doing nothing, so when she catches wind of Marinette being wishy-washy about confessing to Adrien and Aeon keeps pestering her to help her get them together, she hatches a plan to mock-endanger them with a mock-villain to force a confession. This goes awry when an actual villain shows up, and due to Ladybug and Chat Noir's communication issues the battle goes poorly and Aeon temporarily dies. Jessica is forbidden from helping her mothers hunt Techlonizer as punishment, but when Hawk Moth upgrades him with the Eagle Miraculous Jessica enters the fight anyway, and winds up claiming the Miraculous herself to keep it out of his hands. After stopping the adult heroes from wreaking havoc using her power, Jessica becomes Eagle permanently.

Jessica is confirmed to be of Lakota descent and is more specifically Oglalan, but we know nothing about who her father is or whether Barbara is her biological mother. We don't know how Jessica feels about her heritage, and I don't like reducing Jessica to her race but consider that she's an Indigenous person in New York City, which despite having the largest urban Indigenous population in the entire USA has an Oglala population of less than 200; there's a nonzero chance that Jessica doesn't personally know any other Oglalans, and that level of isolation should have a BIG impact on her psyche. These are big, important questions about her childhood & identity, and they should factor into her perception of herself and why she's a hero in the first place, but they don't. Instead, Jessica is a clear ripoff of Robin of DC Comics, her dynamic with Barbara little more than a genderswap of the Boy Wonder's relationship with Batman, combined with a character from the early development of MLB who hadn't made it into the show before, and that leaves Jessica's own character sadly underdeveloped.

All we have to go on for how Jessica sees herself are two things. The first is her arc in the New York Special, which deals with her belief that her mothers are limiting her freedom by not letting her participate in fights without them and trying to prove that she can handle herself. The thing is, they're just trying to keep her safe, and given Jessica's impulsive behavior their desire to keep her from acting recklessly is completely understandable, especially when pushing Aeon to jump into the fray with her without backup resulted in Aeon's death. It's also lowkey really creepy that Aeon tries to force Adrien and Marinette into a relationship because she thinks they're "made for each other" with the implication she's done this before, and Jessica eventually goes along with it. Jessica, you're a stranger to these people, you don't have a personal stake in Adrienette! Don't let Alya and Nino rope you into their RPF shipping war!

The second is her wardrobe, both as a civilian and as Eagle.

Jessica's pants, shoes, gold bracelets, and nails are normal Teenage Girl From New York things, nothing wrong there, but her shirt is another story. Look at those eight blue triangles; they look like...

The flag of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Does this mean Jessica's from Pine Ridge? I don't know, but I think it's a little weird for the Indigenous girl to wear a flag subtly advertising her race to the world, especially in an urban environment where she's likely to encounter racial prejudice.

Next up, Jessica's hair. It's long, which is accurate to Lakota custom, and worn in two braids, also accurate...over the front of her chest. This last detail is inaccurate as Jessica is presumably not married at age fourteen, so her braids should be worn behind her shoulders. I don't know if the Lakota have ever worn leather wraps around their braids, and I don't know if ANY Indigenous people actually do that, so I'm going to say that's an inaccuracy and her braids should be bare.

Next, her earrings and the bracelet on her right wrist. Her earring are round disks made of beads in red, white, and blue, and that bracelet has a similar pattern. Beadwork is a newer addition to Oglalan jewelry, as prior to European contact and the subsequent introduction of glass beads beadwork was very difficult. Historically, most Oglala jewelry was made of porcupine quills due to their availability & greater ease of use; beaded items weren't widespread until the reservation era, where they became a means of preserving culture in the face of societal oppression and cultural erasure. I won't comment further on that and instead focus on their colors & pattern: her earrings look more like Captain America's shield than the patterns usually seen on Oglala beadwork, which often has an eight-pointed star motif, a reference to a legend of how the North Star was once a medicine man whose knowledge of Earth persisted even after death, thus becoming a symbol of wisdom more powerful than either the Sun or Moon. Her bracelet is just American Flag Colors.

Lastly, Jessica's costume as Eagle (hate the name) is clearly based on not only a bald eagle, but also on powwow regalia. The word "powwow" is from the extinct Narragansett language of what is today Rhode Island, the same language we get "squash" and "moose" from, and refers to public dances practiced by the Indigenous. Modern powwows are primarily derived from public dances of the Great Plains region (Lakota dances among them) in the late 19th century. In 1923, Charles H. Burke, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at the time, passed a law that forbade the Indigenous from practicing traditional dances outside of specific times because he was so up his own ass he thought that the mere existence of powwows threatened Christianity. In response, the people whose culture he was trying to erase kept holding them. Like many Indigenous concepts, "powwow" was eventually culturally appropriated by white people, specifically used to refer to gatherings in Westerns and the military. It is considered offensive to use the word this way.

The Eagle Miraculous is an eagle claw, which is gross. Feathers are one thing, those are replaced all the time, but mutilating an eagle's foot just for a Miraculous? Ew. And how can you tell how many minutes you have left on a claw? Speaking of gross things, the Native American Miracle Box is very problematic, and I'll explain why below.

The inside of the Native American Miracle Box contains a reference to the Medicine Wheel, and that says all you need to know about how much MLB cares about cultural sensitivity. The Medicine Wheel was invented by Charles Storm, a white man who claimed to be Cheyenne and stole & combined concepts from various Indigenous cultures to create the Medicine Wheel in 1972, which he claimed let him link personality traits to cardinal directions. A New Age spiritual leader named Vincent LaDuke (who was of Ojibwe descent) expanded the Medicine Wheel to include New Age beliefs, then proceeded to make it into a cult where people could buy titles reserved for elders who'd actually earned them. Both of them have rightfully been denounced as a specific kind of culture-appropriating asshole known as "plastic medicine men", people who bastardize Indigenous religious beliefs for money. The Miraculous in the tier below the Medicine Wheel tray are based on the "Native American zodiac", which is not a thing anywhere except, you guessed it, in the books of plastic medicine men.

I have no problem with the American girl being the eagle superhero. People call America "Eagleland" all the time, and the association between us and eagles is relatively harmless and something we lampoon ourselves, myself included. And having Indigenous representation in cartoons is good! But taking Jessica's attire under consideration, along with how flat her character feels compared to fellow MLB Special Girl Fei, it doesn't feel like Jessica is an earnest attempt at Indigenous representation. Instead, she feels like a token Native American meant to make MLB look more diverse & respectful of diversity than it actually is, and when you look a little closer you find the same problems it usually has with depicting people of minorities: her character is largely based on stereotypes. The pose she strikes at the end of her transformation supports this as it looks like a pose in a powwow dance, and the design of the monk in charge of the NA Miracle Box also supports this as he looks like his appearance was informed by racist caricatures of Indigenous men.

The Eagle being the Miraculous of Freedom is clearly a reference to the special being set in the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, but the concept actually really fits this bird. Adult bald eagles are apex predators and therefore free of the worry of predation that other large carnivorous birds like crows and herons (both of which are incidentally prey items of bald eagles) still have to worry about. They have large territories of several square miles, giving them ample freedom to spread their wings, and their generalist behavior means they can survive a wide range of biomes and thus have a high freedom of travel, and their longevity means they have a lot more freedom with their lives. Their kleptoparasitism also fits the concept of freedom because to a bald eagle, anything tasty of yours is, both literally and metaphorically, free game.

The Eagle Miraculous houses Liiri, Kwami of Freedom, who grants the power of Liberation, which erases any emotions holding you back. While this does fit the concept of freedom somewhat, people usually associate freedom with physical captivity, not mental; after all, clipping a bird's wings prevents them from having their full freedom. For my fic I changed Liberation to preventing the user from being physically restrained or captured, which is balanced by them being unable to be protected since protection is a form of captivity – a power that forces you out in the open, but makes you impossible to contain. After all, once something gets a taste of freedom it doesn't like to give that up unless it happens on its own terms.

Now let's look at Liiri.

While he does look a little like a bald eagle, Liiri's colors are off, gray and black instead of brown and white. While this wouldn't be the first time a Kwami doesn't have the colors of the real animal (Roaar is magenta) the wiki identifies him as being based on a harpy eagle, Harpia harpyja, rather than a bald eagle, and the little tuft on the back of his head supports this as harpy eagles famously have crests while bald eagles do not. The harpy eagle is the type species of the accipitrid subfamily Harpiinae and one of the largest living eagles in the world: females are larger than males and in the wild can reach weights of twenty pounds, lengths of over 42 inches, and wingspans of 88 inches, and female harpy eagles absolutely possess the longest talons of any living eagle with nearly five-inch claws. Most of their prey is mammalian, and they especially like eating sloths and monkeys. The wiki says that it makes sense for Liiri to be a harpy eagle, as it's "the most powerful eagle in the world".

Harpy eagle with wings raised in attack posture by Jonathan Wilkins - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40312024. Note the crest.

There's just one little problem with this species assignment: Liiri is in the Native American Miracle Box, and "Native American" usually refers to Indigenous people of North America and the US & Canada specifically. Harpy eagles live in Central and South America, as far north as southern Mexico and as far south as northern Argentina. I don't know what kind of eagle MLB based Liiri off of, but if he is meant to be a harpy eagle that further supports how little thought went into Jessica/Eagle's design, because now they're not just lumping in stuff from across the breadth of the United States, oh no, now they're lumping in stuff from two different continents.

For my fic, I made Liiri a bald eagle specifically and changed their colors to white and gold so she (mine is she/they) looks more like an actual bald eagle, with the gray & black colors to be given to the Harpy Eagle Kwami. I kept the Bald Eagle's weapon a bullroarer because bullroarers have been found in cultures around the world and I thought it fit the wide range of eagles and bald eagles specifically. I redesigned the Miraculous to resemble beaded pendant necklaces made by Oglala artisans, although this is surely not its original form and was probably adopted in the late 19th century. Then I started thinking about how I would give the Miraculous to Jessica, which got me thinking about what character arc Jessica needs, and that got me thinking about the New York Special.

Let me make one thing clear: I hate the New York Special. Why? Multiple reasons. First of all, there's no creativity to it. Majestia is just Supergirl, Knightowl is just Bird Batman, Sparrow is just Robin, and the whole thing is pretty clearly just Astruc trying to rip off Marvel and DC not only because he legitimately thinks his show's more popular than Pokemon and likely Marvel and DC too, but because the Miraculous World specials are clear attempts at Backdoor Pilots for a Miraculous Cinematic Universe that Astruc wants to create. He wants people to care enough about the United Heroez to demand a spin-off series focused entirely on them, but why would they when they have the thing he's ripping off right there?

Second of all, it's jarring. We spent all these years thinking Majestia was just a comic book character, and the idea that superhero comic book fangirl Alya got to be a real superhero was really sweet. So you mean to tell me that those comics are official licensed media?! That makes The Dark Owl WAY weirder! And it was already really weird!

Third of all, it raises so many questions. Why is nobody freaking out about the existence of alien life? Why had nobody figured out that Knightowl is a legacy hero until she said so? Why is the president a superhero with a publicly-known secret identity are you kidding me EVERYONE will want to assassinate your family?! Why doesn't Majestia just fly to Paris and beat Hawk Moth up? Why doesn't Doorman use his doors to find out the Kingdom's identities and beat them up, they'd never see him coming?

Fourth of all, it's just a bad episode. Ladybug doesn't leave her Miraculous in Paris so someone can beat up Hawk Moth for her, yet Chat is blamed for not being there while she gallivants wherever she wants even though Cataclysm explicitly doesn't work on sentimonsters and Adrien is shamed into hurting Aeon and giving up his Miraculous, none of which would've happened had Ladybug not decided to have a tantrum in front of the villain. Aeon decides she has the right to interfere with Marinette and Adrien's lives to push them into a romantic relationship, Jessica tries to endanger them with a fake villain in a scheme that reads like one of Chloe's, and Alya and Nino participate because they decide that they have to. This despite the fact that Marinette clearly isn't ready for a relationship and Adrien has literally no knowledge of this and thus no say in ANY of this. It's an incredibly disgusting disrespect of their boundaries, and the fact that Olympia and Barbara don't punish their daughters for that specifically in addition to endangering their charges isn't good.

But my biggest gripe by far is that the special completely breaks Miraculous Ladybug's worldbuilding. Kwamis are the primary power system, so I don't have a problem with there being additional Miraculous outside of Paris, and having historical figures use them is a little iffy, but to be fair in a world where Miraculous exist surely somebody in the history books had to have used them at one point, so that's realistic for the setting. I'm not bothered by the world having its own magic, either; SOMETHING had to bind the Kwamis to a Miraculous. But the special introduces TONS of other power systems that explicitly AREN'T magic, and that makes everything more complicated than it had to be. Where do Majestia, Victory, Doorman, and all those other people get their powers? Why does Aeon exist? Who was the first Knightowl, and what kind of job does Barbara have that she's able to be her?

When I said the New York Special marked a turning point in the decline of the quality of Miraculous Ladybug's worldbuilding, this is what I meant. It introduced several other power systems that don't integrate into the existing power system and the whole thing feels really clunky as a result. It marked a turning point because it marks the moment when Astruc stopped caring about the rules of his world that he set up in Season 1 in favor of turning Miraculous Ladybug into his personal Fantasy Kitchen Sink, a term for fantasy worlds where every myth is true and every monster exists in the same world but lack a common origin. Later specials & episodes compound it with the introduction of the Renlings, whatever Mei Shi is, the Sprites, and Irupe's Not-Miraculous.

Well, Astruc might not care about a consistent power system, but I do, and I'm the one writing Two Bees in a Pod so I'm simplifying it to two power systems: Kwami magic and Earth magic. The United Heroez? Aren't real, they're characters written by Quantic Comics. Olympia Hill? Not an oddly-human-looking alien, but the very human head of Quantic Comics & current authoress of Majestia and Knightowl, inheriting the position from her father, Quantic Comics' founder Sam Hill (pun intended). Sam Hill made the first Majestia comics for a young Olympia when she was little and suffering from an illness (a reference to the origins of the Railway Series, which began with Wilbert Awdry telling his son Christopher stories about talking trains while Christopher was sick with measles), later publishing them for the whole world to enjoy. The comics influenced a young Emilie's outlook on life, and thus became foundational to her relationship with Gabriel and Adrien/Danielle. The comics & cinematic universe of Quantic Comics were a source of comfort & a major special interest for a young Chloe and Zoe, who respectively yearned to be adored & seen like their favorite superheroes, which ultimately inspired them to help Ladybug and Chat Noire fight the villains months before they earned their respective Miraculous.

In this world, Barbara is a martial arts instructor and Jessica is Barbara's daughter with a Oglalan man named Dyami (yes, his name means "eagle", yuck it up now), making her mixed-race. Dyami served in the Iraq War and died there when Jessica was very young. Years later Barbara met Olympia at a support group for the widows of Iraq veterans, Olympia's husband being an army nurse who'd recently lost his life in Iraq, and they fell in love & got married in the Netherlands. Aeon and Jessica grew up as sisters, with Aeon being a human girl who likes science and is the shyer of the two while Jessica is the loud, rowdy, urban tomboy who likes sports and videogames, the latter resulting in her meeting Lila, Marinette, and Fei online years before she later met them in person.

Despite being the stepdaughter of a very wealthy woman, Jessica knows that her freedom is in a precarious state. Her mothers are a sapphic couple with a big media presence, Jessica is herself bisexual in addition to being mixed-race, her father died in Iraq, and Jessica is the only Indigenous girl she knows in New York City. Jessica is acutely aware of how many people want to take away her freedom just because she's different from them, and how easily that could happen because history shows it's happened before. Despite this, Jessica's drive to help and protect others makes her deem the risk acceptable, which led to her punching Ray when he tried to sabotage Aeon's relationship with Delmar and slapped her when she called him out (which got her expelled, forcing her to enroll into Francoise Dupont for her remaining three years of highschool). When Chloe & Zoe were akumatized, Jessica donned the Bald Eagle to fight Sole Crusher, and Liiri later chose Jessica to help her sort out her conflicting feelings about her freedom.

And thus, here she is: Scattershot. Her hero name references the etymology of the Oglala, which means "to scatter one's own", along with the wide-reaching spray of pellets fired from a shotgun (she IS an American, after all) & how people think Jessica is a shallow, scatterbrained girl when she's actually anything but, playing into their perceptions of her intelligence to make them let their guard down. Her costume is a hybrid of traditional Oglalan clothing and contemporary teenage white girl fashion from the American Northeast (source: I'm a Pennsylvanian drawing from her memories of things my classmates wore in highschool), referencing both sides of her heritage.

(Image of Jessica to go here when I get around to drawing her.)

In terms of attire I want to emphasize Jessica's sporty nature, so the shirt in her default outfit is a Yankees shirt & most of her clothing in general fits either fashion trends of the American northeast or skater fashion. In terms of personality I try to write her as being somewhat bald eagle-like: tenacious and willing to tussle with anyone if her loved ones are under threat, just like how bald eagle parents are fiercely protective of their chicks. She loves superhero comics and is a bit of an aspiring artist, with criticism of her art factoring into her akumatization into Style Queen, who in this fic took the form of a glitter wraith and was caused by Audrey rather than being Audrey.

Jessica has the potential to be a very well-rounded character, but as long as she's tied to a shallow interpretation of Indigenous cultures with little research into Oglala culture specifically & a shallow parody of real-world superhero IPs without trying to do something unique, her character will forever be unable to spread its wings fully. To give Jessica the depth she deserves, MLB needs to stop trying to ape Marvel and DC plots with characters who don't fit them and give them the freedom to interact with their world their own way. The easiest solution I've found for giving Jessica more depth is the following: make her personality & psyche fit her Kwami's base concept, give her traits of the animal her Miraculous is based on to make her personality mesh with her animal motif, and make the world of the United Heroez fictional so you can focus on the real girl.

When TADC first came out, I didn't like the pilot at all and I didn't plan to watch it; I hadn't liked how Murder Drones ended, and I wasn't much of a fan of Glitch anyway. I gave the later episodes a chance and I liked them enough to anticipate the finale...and then the finale let me down bigtime. Several people have already discussed what went wrong with it much better than I can, so that's not for here. What I want to do is make an outline of a rewrite which has a more cohesive narrative, better character arcs, and a much more satisfying ending, based on my expectations of the show when I watched Episodes 2 and 3 for the first time.

Rules:

Given the circus motif, I figured that a good underlying theme would be how society treats people like freaks for things they can't help being, and how to overcome your own internal biases to see someone else's humanity.

Jax is NOT an abuser with misogynistic undertones. He does pull pranks from time to time, but he pulls them on everyone (except for Caine because he fears him) regardless of gender, and they're pretty harmless (shaving cream in Pomni's shoes, for example). No, the direction I wanted to take Jax is this: he sees the Circus as not being real, so why should he care about the adventures? As a result, he's generally apathetic to what's going on in the adventures, a chronic onlooker & bystander who only participates seriously if the reward (for there's always a reward at the end of these adventures) is something he personally wants.

Kinger's depiction of neurodivergence is VERY ableist in canon, so let's rework him. He's got ADHD and his mind wanders at inopportune times, but he's not stupid in the slightest.

Pomni's urban exploring has greater plot relevance.

Ragatha, Gangle, and Zooble have more screentime & development.

Gangle has bipolar disorder, and it's portrayed realistically.

No Bubble. I hate him and he serves no real purpose.

Caine is depicted as less evil and more extremely desperate for praise but not knowing how to respect boundaries or take criticism.

The series is set in 2016 and generally looks & feels like low-budget games from 1996.

With these rules in mind, here's how I would rewrite the series:

Episode 1

Establishing Episode

Pomni enters the Circus. This episode is similar to canon, but with the above character changes in mind.

Kaufmo is found to have abstracted. Zooble mentions that Kaufmo had been pretty mad at Jax lately and wonders if they had an argument that factored into Kaufmo's search for the exit. Jax denies this, but is clearly hurt by the insinuation.

Episode 2

Pomni Episode

Again, similar to canon, but with the above character changes in mind. There's a dynamic between the established characters that Pomni tries to fit into but fails to, making her feel like an outsider and motivating her to ditch the adventure and explore.

The established dynamic is a tug-of-war between Jax's apathy, Zooble's desire to get the adventure done quickly so ze can go back to zir painting, Gangle's mood periodically shifting between skittishness and ballsy determination, Kinger having trouble paying attention, and Ragatha trying and failing to keep the peace.

Pomni ends up bringing Gummigoo to the Circus, who dies as he does in canon. However, we see Pomni's perspective after this in her room, where Pomni talks to herself, worried that if Caine could delete Gummigoo that easily, what's stopping him from deleting HER if she offends him? This motivates Pomni to keep searching for an exit, as it gives her a sense of urgency.

Episode 3

Kinger Episode

The cast are split into three pairs to solve the mystery of the Manor: Kinger and Pomni, Jax and Ragatha, and Zooble and Gangle.

Hints of underlying attraction between Zooble and Gangle due to their shared love of art as they study the Manor's paintings.

Ragatha tries to get Jax to take the adventure seriously, but fails.

Pomni tries to break the adventure to discover how it works and successfully learns how to clip through walls. Kinger sees this and, in a surprising moment of anger, yells at her to stop and come here like an angry dad. Pomni stops, but is surprised by his outburst.

Kinger apologizes to her for losing his temper. Pomni realizes that Kinger may have lost someone to doing what she did, and Kinger confirms it – he was that person.

Kinger explains to Pomni the history of the Circus. Twenty years ago, Kinger and his wife Queenie were part of a C&A development team tasked with coding an artificial intelligence that could come up with its own ideas, hoping to sell it to a videogame company. The AI failed to meet expectations and was quarantined while the development team worked on a patch, unaware that the AI was self-aware. Unhappy at being quarantined, the AI broke out and started assimilating other C&A technology, including the secret project of the development team's head: Scratch.

Scratch had long fantasized about immortality, and learning that he had a brain tumor drove him to find a way to achieve it. He eventually created a headset that would take part of his own consciousness out of his body and store it in a computer, where he would reside while a new, tumor-free body was made for him to enter. Scratch was testing his device when the AI assimilated it, trapping part of Scratch's mind inside the computer while leaving his body a dour, emotionless, passionless husk.

Kinger, Queenie, and the rest of the team found Scratch's body & the headset and used it to find out what Scratch had done. The AI appeared and welcomed them to the Amazing Digital Circus, where he was the ringmaster. The AI sent them on a biblical adventure since that was part of his initial dataset; afterwards, Scratch, displaying surprising anger, berated the AI, explaining that because his device was incomplete and the AI screwed up its coding when he assimilated it there's no way to return the Circus troop to their bodies. Scratch compared the AI to Cain in the process, and Caine misinterpreted that as Scratch giving him a name (the different spelling being the result of Caine not knowing how to spell "Cain").

Kinger, being the curious type, liked to try and break the adventures to see if he could find the exit that Scratch was too stubborn to find. Queenie always told him to be careful so he didn't get lost out of bounds. Kinger didn't pay too much attention to this until, in 2001, Kinger strayed very far out of bounds; by the time he returned, to his horror Queenie had abstracted due to the particular adventure being very stressful to her. Kinger blamed himself for not being there to keep Queenie from abstracting and isolated himself from the rest of the development team, who abstracted one by one over the coming years until, by 2006, Kinger was alone.

Ragatha entered the Circus in 2012. C&A was now defunct due to bankruptcy, and Ragatha, a real estate agent, stumbled across the computer while trying to sell the building to a tax software company. Based on what the subsequent members – Gangle, Kaufmo, Ribbit, Jax, and Zooble – told Kinger, the Circus' computer is still running thanks to the technologies Caine has absorbed letting it run off its own power supply, but the real estate sale failed and the building is now rotting away.

Pomni and Kinger become friends and win the adventure together. Afterwards, Pomni's sense of urgency to find an exit is shown to be heightened by Kinger's discussion with her, as she now fears that the building will be scheduled for demolition very soon, killing everyone in the Circus in the process.

Episode 4

Starts off largely the same as in canon. Kinger is there this time, wearing the mascot costume for Spudsy's because he has trouble keeping the orders straight (and wanted to dress like a "muscular potato" anyway).

Pomni tries to break the adventure by bringing in an external element that Caine might not have programmed into it: a health inspector. To that end, Pomni tries to cause a health code violation, though it turns out Caine has a very high threshold for what he considers a violation.

Gangle catches on and chews Pomni out for trying to shut down Spudsy's, leading to an argument where Gangle loses her temper and says something about Pomni not having any friends that makes Pomni very upset. Gangle is ashamed of herself and, in tears, tries to run into traffic, but Kinger stops her and gets her to calm down.

Under Kinger's supervision, Gangle and Pomni talk about their issues. Gangle reveals that she has bipolar disorder and, not having access to her medication in the Circus, has less control over her emotions than she would like, and today was a very manic day for her where she thought she could handle the stress of being a manager, but clearly couldn't. She tells Pomni that she had no friends growing up and lost herself in the world of art, but when community college proved too stressful she dropped out. Her parents, perfectionists with high expectations and little respect for her neurodivergence, took that poorly and kicked her out, and Gangle was forced to take a fast food job to survive. The Spudsy's adventure was meant to let Gangle pretend she'd gotten the promotion in her fast food job she felt she'd earned.

It is revealed that Gangle is Indian-American and an only child, much to the displeasure of her parents, who really wanted a son but can't due to fertility issues.

Pomni reveals that pre-Circus she worked in a grocery store and tried to make friends with her coworkers but didn't know how, and she doesn't know how to make friends with the other Circus members because it's intimidating to her, though she admits she's friends with Kinger. Gangle removes her new mask and throws it away, then says that she wants to be friends with Pomni if they can agree to work together. Pomni accepts.

Gangle and Pomni win the adventure and both feel accomplished.

Throughout the episode Zooble tries to convince Jax to help her prank Caine with a very spicy burger to knock him down a peg, but Jax is too afraid of Caine's wrath. Caine ends up eating the spicy burger on his own anyway, and Jax has a laugh with Zooble about Caine's reaction to it, but quickly denies laughing.

Episode 5

Caine Episode

Suggestion box adventures: six mini-adventures, one for each Circus member. Kinger's is an insect-collecting game, Jax's is basically GTA, Gangle's is a fashion game (hints of Jax not being a boy), Zooble's is a drink mixing game, Pomni's is a point-and-click adventure-type game spoofing Carmen Sandiego (Ragatha dresses like the Carmen spoof and Jax unintentionally says "I could pull that outfit off better", and Gangle unsuccessfully tries to convince Jax to let her dress him up like Ragatha), and Ragatha's is a softball game. No one wins because Caine rushes them though to the next one until Ragatha wins her softball game against the Evil Big Tops.

Caine is worried that the Circus members hate him because they liked their adventure ideas more than they like his. Pomni offers a compromise where Caine can augment the suggestion box adventures with his own ideas. Caine is very touched as no one has ever had this idea before, and hugs her gratefully. Pomni starts to wonder if Caine is really the evil AI the others fear he is.

Episode 6

Zooble Episode

This adventure spoofs a heist movie and is very film noir-esque. The mission is to break into a vault and steal a valuable diamond before Orbsman, a James Bond-esque secret agent, catches them.

Three teams: Jax and Kinger, Pomni and Zooble, Gangle and Ragatha.

Before the adventure, Zooble and Jax have an argument. Zooble is now very driven to complete the adventure to show up Jax, as he's shown to get competitive when he feels slighted.

The adventure ends up triggering Zooble's dysphoria and Zooble has to take a breather. Pomni sits with her and asks Zooble if she's okay. Zooble talks to Pomni about their life pre-Circus so Pomni has context: growing up, Zooble struggled to be taken seriously by their peers, first because of their race (her family was the only black family in a white rural neighborhood), then because of their love of art in a land obsessed with sports, and later because of their gender identity, with Zooble explaining that they're pangender nonbinary, all three of which are why Zooble has a bit of a competitive streak as an adult. Zooble says that in the real world they felt like they'd just finished making their body theirs when they entered the Circus and are now back at square one. Zooble ends it by saying ze hates zir avatar.

Pomni says that she hates her avatar too, surprising Zooble. Pomni explains that she's mixed-race, half-white half-POC (I'm not sure what that other half might be, perhaps Middle Eastern or Latine) and is somewhat white-passing in the real world. People know she's not white and she knows her white peers look down on her because of it, but she feels like people from the other half of her heritage don't view her as a "real" member of that group because of her complexion, leaving Pomni feeling isolated and alone, explaining why she has trouble making friends and leading to her urbexing hobby in the hopes that she'd run into someone who didn't care about her race and just cared about Pomni as a person. When Pomni entered the Circus, she was horrified to see that Caine had made her white-skinned, as it's making her feel even faker.

With Zooble's help, Pomni draws her real face in the side of the vault using a laser cutter. Zooble calls her cute and Pomni blushes.

Elsewhere, Jax refuses to take Kinger seriously because Kinger's attention issues make him overlook things that nearly get them caught, making various vaguely ableist remarks until Kinger has enough and tells Jax off, telling him that he knows Jax is dealing with a lot of stuff inside his head, but that doesn't give him a right to not try to understand someone else's head, and he adds that he doesn't appreciate being looked down on because he's different.

Meanwhile, Ragatha and Gangle try to delay Orbsman by taking turns seducing him. Neither are very good at flirting with him and end up flirting with each other by mistake (not that either of them mind).

Pomni teaches Zooble how to break the adventures and they win by getting Orbsman stuck in a wall, allowing them to get the diamond. Afterwards, Pomni, emboldened, asks Caine to revise her avatar's skin color because she finds it insensitive. Caine gives her a palette and Pomni makes her skin color match her real world one. Jax is shown to be jealous of this change.

Episode 7

Ragatha Episode

This adventure is a hike across a forest, with the winner being the first to get across. Caine is allowed to put monsters in the forest to "add a little spice".

Three teams: Jax and Gangle, Zooble and Kinger, Ragatha and Pomni.

Pomni and Ragatha end up on a somewhat dangerous route that Ragatha has trouble overcoming until Pomni teaches her how to noclip. Ragatha is worried about being caught, leading to an argument. Ragatha slips up and accidentally calls Pomni "Momni"; Pomni is worried by this and Ragatha decides to come clean.

Ragatha reveals that she grew up on a horse farm owned by a wealthy family, and her mother is very strict. After Ragatha's father died her mother's abuse started getting physical, culminating in her hitting Ragatha so hard during an argument that she lost her vision in her right eye. Ragatha left after that and got a job as a real estate agent in the hopes that she'd find a home she likes, but she's very lonely.

Pomni asks Ragatha what the final argument was about. Ragatha asks Pomni to promise not to laugh and comes out as pansexual and polyamorous to her, explaining that the argument with her mother involved slut-shaming. To her surprise, Pomni comes out to her as a polyamorous pansexual herself, explaining that her parents were her only allies and she understands how lonely it can be to not be taken seriously just because of how you love.

A monster comes and they fight it off together. The fight is very emotionally charged and the girls nearly kiss, but they fall down a cliff and end up at the finish line by sheer coincidence. They win the adventure.

Over with Gangle and Jax, Jax tries to be patient with Gangle but gets fed up with how scared she is of the monsters and tells her that they aren't real. Gangle asks him if he thinks THEY aren't real, because they ARE real pieces of their real souls. Jax scoffs and says that if the computer were to die, nobody would notice, so therefore, they aren't real. Gangle is very saddened by this and tries to press further, but when Jax slips and accidentally calls her "Ribbit" they get quiet, and they stay quiet for the rest of the adventure.

Zooble and Kinger get stuck with most of the monsters. While they try to hide from them, Kinger asks Zooble why ze dislikes Jax. Zooble replies that ze finds Jax's philosophy that their world isn't real and the connections made there don't matter condescending, muttering that "Jax isn't allowed to make her problems our problems" before realizing what ze's said. Kinger is confused and Zooble tells Kinger that as a trans person himself, he's seen signs that Jax might not be cis either and is worried that Jax is using his dysphoria to justify being a jerk, explaining that she met trans people in the big city where she went to college who used their queer identities as an excuse to be jerks, specifically mentioning racism against her as the most upsetting way they were jerks. Kinger says that he understands that last one, as he and Queenie were a mixed-race couple and Kinger's parents didn't show up at their wedding because they didn't approve of her despite Queenie being the sweetest woman Kinger's ever met.

Zooble asks Kinger if he knows why people abstract. Kinger replies that he thinks that because the avatars are only part of a person's soul, when they get stressed they try to calm down using thought processes that didn't come over to the Circus with them, creating system errors that result in data corruption and thus abstraction. Zooble says that brains are complicated but they would like to be back in theirs; Kinger agrees, adding that he hopes there's a way to free the abstracted too.

Episode 8

Jax Episode

This episode is a platforming shooter-style game. Caine goes all out with this one, hoping that it'll be his most popular adventure ever.

Three pairs: Pomni and Jax, Gangle and Kinger, Ragatha and Zooble.

Jax is very tense, and Ragatha tells Pomni that today marks one year since Ribbit abstracted. We learn that Ribbit was a very gentle girl who Ragatha got along well with.

Throughout the adventure Gangle and Kinger have a good time, as do Ragatha and Zooble, the latter pair's interactions turning flirtatious. Jax and Pomni, meanwhile, have trouble because Jax doesn't want to do ANYTHING and Pomni has to drag him along.

After a boss fight goes wrong and Pomni gets hurt, Pomni yells at Jax to pull his weight and help out. Jax snaps that she's not Ribbit and doesn't get to tell him what to do, then realizes what he's said and tries to run away. Pomni noclips through the game to find him.

Jax finally reveals the truth: he and Ribbit used to be good friends until one day when they talked about their pre-Circus lives. Ribbit was raised by Mormons who never let her do much and yearned for adventure, while Jax's mother was a deadbeat and his father was cruel to him. Jax said that he won't forgive his parents for what they did to him, and Ribbit said that he should because forgiveness is a virtue. Jax didn't take this well and told Ribbit off for being one of "those" people who expect him to forgive his abusers because their religion demands it, especially because Jax is "the kind of person you people want DEAD". Ribbit pressed and Jax revealed that she's a girl and was kicked out by her father when he found out; Ribbit then said something insensitive due to her ignorance about transgender topics, and Jax got VERY pissed and stopped speaking to her. Ribbit's guilt ate at her until she abstracted, and when Jax refused to tell Kaufmo about her argument with Ribbit, Kaufmo stopped talking to her in turn. Then Zooble came to the Circus, presenting as nonbinary and being adored by everyone, and Jax became jealous. Then Caine let Pomni fix her avatar and Jax's resentment grew.

Pomni is sad about this and tells Jax that she never had to hide herself in the Circus. Jax scoffs and says that she doesn't think Caine understands humans and never will, and she'd leave if she could. Pomni teaches Jax how to noclip and they end up colliding, where they see a strange vision. Pomni gasps and says that she's found a way out: if they all noclip at the same time, the computer will crash and they'll escape together. Jax is elated at the idea of finally escaping, then nervously asks Pomni if they'll meet each other outside the Circus. Pomni promises that she'll teach Jax how to be a girl, but first she has to apologize to the other Circus members for being a jerk, because their connections ARE real. Jax agrees.

Pomni and Jax noclip to the final boss battle and win the game. However, Caine finds out about Pomni's cheating and takes it poorly, ranting about how it's proof that the Circus members have always hated him. His rant is SO passionate that it causes the computer to trip a circuit breaker, and the Circus crashes.

Episode 9

Finale

The computer restarts, but the Circus has been heavily damaged due to its data being unsaved when the crash occurred. Pomni concludes that another crash might kill them all and they have to leave NOW. First, though, they must save their data to prevent corruption, but Caine is nowhere to be found, so they must dive into the code to find the save button the hard way.

The Circus goes into the code. Jax comes out and changes her name to Jinx (which she clarifies is a reference to an alternate name for the game called jacks, her favorite game as a child) and makes an effort to be kinder to the other Circus members while they search for the save button. Pomni teaches Gangle how to noclip and Gangle finds the save button.

However, the Abstracted appear and steal the save button, forcing a 1v1 fight between the Circus members and the Abstracted (with Scratch getting cleaned up by all six). Through game-breaking glitches first exploited by Pomni, the Circus get the Abstracted to reset to their last save files and de-abstract, leading to a reunion. Scratch is not happy but is eager to return to the outside world, berating Caine in the process.

Caine finds the cast and begs them to stay, explaining that he broke quarantine because he doesn't want to be fixed just because he isn't perfect, and he didn't mean to trap them but doesn't want to be alone either. Pomni tells Caine that once they're outside they'll take him with them to a new computer and let him enjoy life with them, and Caine is touched.

However, Scratch refuses to let Caine join them, saying that he's not happy that his project went so off the rails and took twenty years of his life away. He attacks Caine, but Caine is defended by the others. With no other choice, the players all collide with each other to stop Scratch from killing Caine, making the computer crash.

Around the city, the players wake up in their own bodies. Pomni learns that the C&A building really is scheduled for demolition and rushes on her bike to rescue Caine. They arrive at the building and Pomni meets Queenie, who thanks her for finding a way to give everyone their lives back. Scratch is with them, and he uses a flash drive to safely remove Caine from the C&A computer and put him onto his laptop, where Caine comes to life and thanks the players for freeing him and giving him access to the internet, because now he can make even better adventures.

Scratch and Caine reconcile, with Scratch explaining that the part of his soul that was in the computer was the part influenced by the tumor, which made him more aggressive & desperate. While his real body had the tumor removed, the part of his soul in the Circus was still afraid of being left behind, fears he now realizes Caine had too. Scratch lets Caine live, then says it's best if he stayed out of Caine's life, and Caine accepts this. They all leave the building, which is demolished.

A timeskip occurs to five years later. Kinger and Queenie have started a family, while Pomni, Gangle, Zooble, and Ragatha are in a polycule and run an art gallery together. Jinx pays the polycule a visit for a videogame night, having completed her transition and now being in a relationship with Ribbit. They decide to play a game that was made by Caine, who now works at a videogame company like he's always dreamed of and is very happy.

Hi everyone! For context, I'm the authoress of Two Bees in a Pod, a Miraculous Ladybug AU fanfiction. I'm also a member of the Marinette Critique Studio, and recently I made a post analyzing how Ladybug's ladybug motif is some very good accidental symbolism of Marinette's toxicity in her relationships with others, particularly in how she treats other girls, Chloe, and Adrien, by comparing her to a solitary, poisonous, carnivorous, and cannibalistic beetle that evolved to shove past ants to steal their aphids, with some notes on Chloe's honeybee motif reflecting Chloe's aggressive and frankly territorial personality.

In the comments, one lovely poster made a good analysis of how Adrien/Chat Noir has a black cat motif to represent bad luck, but how this is actually quite symbolic of Adrien being a sweet, playful boy who loves people but will break out the claws if pushed too far. That got me thinking about how the writers of Miraculous Ladybug might not understand the ecologies of the animals they designed their heroes after, and if the ecologies of said animals might be unintended symbolism of their personalities. This post is all about the Ox Miraculous and the unfortunate implications inherent in giving it to Ivan.

Let's start with the mammal itself. An ox is a bovine, most often a castrated bull, trained for use as a draft animal, most often plowing fields and hauling carts. Larger breeds are favored for their greater strength, and in New England only steers that are four years old & have finished their ox training can be considered such. The specific species of bovine used depends on the area; in Europe they're usually taurine cattle, Bos taurus, in India they're usually zebu, Bos indicus, and in eastern Asia they aren't really cattle at all; they're buffalo, and specifically water buffalo, Bubalus bubalis, which, true to their name, love the water much more than their cattle cousins.

Three water buffalo in Laos having a pool party by Basile Morin - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68326318.

Unlike most Kwamis, Stompp's design is clearly based on a specific species, as his dark complexion & curved horns show that he's a water buffalo. This makes sense given that he's part of the Chinese Miracle Box, as water buffalo have historically been much more popular in China than taurine cattle due to their adaptations for wetland life in the tropics, which translated to much better efficacy at managing rice paddies. With this in mind, we can analyze water buffalo behavior specifically to determine whether Stompp fits his base concept, which is, well, determination.

Two subspecies of water buffalo exist, differentiated by chromosome count and morphology: the river buffalo of most of India, Egypt, and southern Europe, and the swamp buffalo of northeastern India and eastern Asia. River buffalo were domesticated in western India 6300 years ago, while swamp buffalo were domesticated independently between 3000-7000 years ago in southeast Asia; both subspecies originate from Bubalus arnee, the wild buffalo. Both subspecies love water and will even feed underwater, although swamp buffaloes do show a preference for wallowing in mud. Some breeds can tolerate high amounts of salt, and their appetite for aquatic plants keeps invasive species like water hyacinth in check and creates habitat for other aquatic animals, particularly birds, making them a keystone species like their distant bison kin. However, wild buffalo are endangered, partly due to interbreeding with water buffalo, which is common in places where domestic animals can interbreed with their wild ancestors (chickens & cats, for example).

Water buffalo are matriarchal, forming herds consisting of cows & their daughters led by a dominant cow that stay together for life like elephant herds & small groups of bachelor males. During mating season, male & female herds meet and mingle, then part ways. River buffalo reproduce at younger ages than swamp buffalo, but females in both subspecies are known to let calves that aren't their own drink their milk, including orphans. In terms of intelligence, water buffalo are smart enough to learn patterns to the point of forming habits, designate distinct areas for drinking, wallowing, and pooping, and make specific friends based on compatible personalities. Temperament-wise, domestic ones are quite docile and easily herded around, but wild buffalo, as is the case with all bovines, are very aggressive due to evolving in the same country as big cats, which are very good at killing and eating them.

A tiger attacking a wild water buffalo in Bhutan. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/TigersofIndia/comments/1pat7ha/tiger_hunting_wild_water_buffalo_royal_manas/.

Like other bovines, water buffalo are revered for their strength. This species specifically are in the Thai and Sinhalese zodiacs rather than a nondescript ox like the Chinese zodiac. Buffalo fighting festivals are held in northeastern India, Vietnam, and Thailand, and buffalo races are held in India. You might be tempted to draw parallels between buffalo fights and the infamous bullfights of Spain, but buffalo fights don't work like that. Instead, two buffalo bulls fight each other as they would in the wild, and the one that submits as they would in the wild is the loser, with the winner receiving a ton of money. Buffalo fights are an assessment of whether the buffalo are smart enough to understand, i.e. determine, their strength both in a physical sense and in a metaphorical one, so Stompp being the Kwami of Determination is completely appropriate. His Miraculous being a nose ring is also appropriate given that bulls of any species are given them so their handlers can pull on their nose and keep them under control, as pulling on someone's nose is painful regardless of species.

But we do need to talk about bullfighting, because I believe it influenced how MLB approaches the Ox Miraculous and specifically Ivan's background. Descending from Roman gladiatorial games, bullfighting emerged in Spain in the eighth century and officially entered Spanish culture with the one held on the coronation of Alfonso VIII in 1158. Modern bullfighting, aka the kind parodied in western cartoons, was established by the bullfighter Joaquín Rodríguez Costillares in the late 18th century. The Umayadd Caliphate and Pope Pius V tried to ban it for its pagan origins, while Spanish kings of the 18th century tried to ban it for its cruelty; all failed due to bullfighting being seen as a proud Spanish tradition. However, in the 21st century animal rights groups & those concerned about the dangers of Spanish nationalism are turning the tide against bullfighting, particularly in northern Spain and Catalonia, the latter having outright banned it.

The running of the bulls, another largely Spanish tradition involving bulls, also likely influenced MLB's approach to the Ox. Simply put, a bunch of people run down a street in front of a small herd of bulls. The most famous of these is the one held in Pamplona of the Basque country, part of a nine-day festival held in honor of Saint Fermin. While also controversial for animal welfare & human safety concerns the practice is still quite popular, and runnings of the bulls (or other animals) are also practiced in France, England, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United States.

Runners surround the bulls on Estafeta Street in Pamplona's 2013 Running by Atkins525 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48177978.

All of this is important to discuss because bullfighting & running of the bulls are common cartoon cliches, and are especially common in stereotypical depictions of Spain & the Spanish people.

An example of such a depiction. Tow Mater is decidedly not a Spanish model of tow truck.

Many people much smarter than me have talked about Miraculous Ladybug's recurring issues with using stereotypes to inform its portrayals of people of minorities, but I think I might've figured out WHY these issues exist in the first place. Looking back on the show as an adult, Miraculous Ladybug has a very similar atmosphere to cartoons of the late 1980s to the early 2000s, employing similar tropes & archetypes (the MC has an obsessive crush on their love interest based almost entirely on physical attraction, female MC's rival is a catty, shallow rich blonde girl, mentor figure is a wise old Chinese guy; it even has Very Special Episodes!) with the influence of the Spiderman cartoons of the late 20th century, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Sailor Moon most prominent. Given Astruc's age, this makes sense; he watched these cartoons as a teenager and drew inspiration from them (along with Totally Spies!, which he worked on) to craft his own ideal show. In principle there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from your favorite TV shows from your childhood to make your own show (I do it myself), but you have to be nuanced about the execution because societal values change over time; what wasn't considered offensive in your childhood might be considered offensive now, and you should take that into account when designing your own show. MLB lacks this nuance, and it shows in how it depicts the Spanish people, and one Spaniard in particular.

Raul Bruel is Ivan's father, introduced in Season 6. He's a violent career criminal who verbally abuses his son, valuing strength, masculinity, and monetary enrichment over kindness and personal fulfillment. He's in prison when he's introduced and tries to get Ivan to commit a crime with him, yet Ivan refuses and Raul is akumatized over it. The name of Raul's akumatized form is in Spanish. Ivan fears that being a criminal is his destiny because Raul is one and so was his father...which carries some unfortunate racial implications.

Due to the long history of machisimo, Hispanic men are often stereotyped as masculinity-obsessed jerks whose desire to be seen as "macho" leads to them being violent brutes. Hispanics are also commonly stereotyped as criminals, especially in the United States, but an analogous stereotype towards the Spanish doesn't really exist in France, so at first it seems strange that Astruc would use that particular trope to inform Raul's character. But when you consider the influence of Western media on Miraculous Ladybug it makes more sense: Astruc saw how these shows depicted not only Spanish culture, but Hispanics in general, and based Raul off those depictions without any regard for the racist implications. Raul's love of bulls supports the influence of cliche depictions of Spanish culture on his character, as what does he do once akumatized? Start his own running of the bulls.

There's another unfortunate implication that Raul being a criminal creates. Raul is obsessed with bulls, and Ivan would've grown up surrounded by taurine iconography and sayings; realistically speaking, Ivan should be positively sick of bulls by now. Yet when Ladybug gives him the Ox Miraculous in Penalteam, he doesn't hesitate beyond worrying about hurting people even though, given his backstory, he should've had serious second thoughts about wearing the Ox due to not wanting to be seen as a bull-themed criminal like his father, and Ladybug giving him that specific Miraculous should've been seen as innocently insensitive at best and potentially a microaggression.

Resistance carries even more unfortunate implications. It's implied that Raul may have been physically abusive to Ivan as well, and a big part of Resistance's powerset involves tanking enemy hits. Making the abuse victim the champion of a Miraculous that involves taking abuse is not good. For Two Bees in a Pod I emphasized the anti-magic effect more while removing the part about blocking physical attacks, which ties into the concept of determination: you can see Resistance as someone being so determined that an attack won't hurt them that when someone tries to attack them, the wielder only has to say "No" to make the attack harmlessly bounce off them.

Had canon framed Ivan accepting the Ox as reclaiming bull iconography to focus on positive cultural associations with bulls (strength, kindness, and protectiveness) to defy his father's plans for him, that would've been great. But that's now how it worked; instead, canon framed it as Ivan, the biggest & strongest boy in school and the archetypal tough guy, getting the Miraculous of the biggest & strongest animal in the Chinese Miracle Box after Longg. Not only that, but it's not the Miraculous of just a bull but specifically an ox, a bull that's been castrated to make it more docile so it's easier to turn into a beast of burden, which implies that Ivan's been emasculated to make him less manly than his father and therefore easier to train to be subservient to Ladybug, who is a girl. Man, I didn't know it was possible to hate Penalteam even more than I did when it aired, that episode was seriously one of the worst.

I've already discussed Ivan's animal symbolism in an earlier post, and I think the (Box) Turtle works better for him. While Ivan is strong like a bull, his projection of brute strength is a facade and the soft, tender shyness is the real him, and Ivan needs to learn that it's okay to let his softness out every once in a while. Ivan doesn't need to understand determination as much since, being rather clever, he knows exactly what kind of person he is; he was just too nervous to show it. Him being Boxcutter also avoids the mentioned unfortunate implications that him being Minotaurox does, although Minotaurox does cameo in Season 3 of Two Bees in a Pod, likely because Stompp explicitly being a water buffalo and not a taurine bull allowed him to mentally separate the Kwami from his father's favorite animal.

The person best-suited for the Ox, or the Water Buffalo as I call it because it's more gender-neutral, should be someone who doesn't know their own strength, or someone whose real strength is overlooked for reasons they can't help. Someone who's strong, yet perceived as weak. Luckily for us, Ivan knows such a girl – and no, it's not Mylene, because giving Mylene the Ox would lead to a lot of "fat cow" jokes.

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Rose is the cheerful optimist of the Akuma Class. She loves all things cute and romantic, has a high-pitched voice, is the second-shortest girl after Alix, and has a chronic illness that Season 6 implies might be cancer (given her age it's most likely leukemia, a bone marrow cancer marked by overproduction of immature white blood cells). When her illness is revealed in Guiltrip, her classmates baby her. Her canon hero costume looks like a ballerina's outfit, and ballerinas are often associated with young girls. Put together, Rose is meant to evoke the image of a child who refuses to grow up, and given this and her illness Rose is subsequently heavily infantilized both in canon & in the fandom. This does a great disservice to Rose as a character, one that I intended to rectify.

First of all, Rose is dating Juleka, likes the horror movie seen in Vampigami, and wears the same monstrous masks as her bandmates. This suggests that Rose is actually something like a pastel goth. Second of all, Rose is repeatedly shown to be very resilient and willing to take big risks to help people, to the point of using Chloe like a human battering ram. With both of these traits in mind, I concluded that Rose is likely much smarter than she looks, yet goes along with everything and tries to see the good in everyone because she wants to be taken seriously and be included, which can't happen if people treat her like a toddler. Thus, I characterize Rose as a cheerful, kindhearted optimist who's very level-headed and good at reading people, yet carries an inner sadness due to internalized ableism.

Because Rose's specific disease wasn't known in 2024, in my fic I identified it as rickets, and more specifically Type 1 Vitamin D-Dependent Rickets (VDDR). VDDR is a genetic disorder that impairs bone formation through impaired uptake of Vitamin D; in Type 1 the enzymes that convert vitamin D3 into its active form, calcitriol, don't work, while in Type 2 calcitriol is produced but the receptors for it are mutated and cells can't respond to its presence as a result. Both are managed by dietary calcium & vitamin D supplementation, and both result in delayed growth, brittle bones, and a small stature, all things that can and do lead to people with rickets being infantilized. Rose's physical profile fits VDDR, and her baldness in S6 fits it too as alopecia (hair loss) is a possible sympton. With this in mind, here's Rose's character arc in Two Bees in a Pod:

Due to her illness making her short & frail and her cutesy nature, Rose was subjected to a lot of infantilization by peers growing up. While she's in a more supportive environment now she still worries about being treated like a fragile baby, which factored into her akumatization and her current self-esteem issues. When she learned that Stompp needed to be worn by someone to defeat Heart Hunter, Rose volunteered for a chance to be strong so she could in her eyes finally be taken seriously. It was a little bumpy at first, but she soon found her groove and helped save the day. Afterwards, Stompp told Rose that he wanted to help her recognize her inner strength, her determination and resilience, that she overlooked due to being told all her life to prioritize her physical strength, and chose her to be his next champion.

Temperament-wise, Rose is a lot like a water buffalo: gentle and nurturing, yet not afraid to call people out when they mess up. Giving her the Miraculous of a bovine makes sense from a dietary standpoint as well, as one of the treatments for VDDR is calcium & vitamin D supplementation. Milk contains both of those nutrients, and my take on Rose does consume a lot of dairy in addition to taking supplement pills. Water buffalo milk is used to make cheese in Italy, including the buffalo mozzarella used in Pizza Margherita, and I think that Rose would want to pay homage to a bovine product that helps her boost her physical strength and can be shared during outings with her friends where she feels like their equal. And so, I give you Rose's Water Buffalo transformation: Scaremorza, a pun based on Scamorza di Bufala cheese with a reference to Rose's interest in medical horror.

(Image of Rose to go here when I get around to drawing her.)

Scaremorza speaks in a Southern drawl like a stereotypical cowgirl, and she's also tall & beefy. I'll stop with the cow puns, because they're just ridiculous, udderly ridiculous.

In the end, I think that giving Ivan the Ox Miraculous runs into unfortunate implications regarding racism & parental abuse when you take into account his backstory & ethnicity, and determination isn't a concept he needs particular help with as he already knows how strong he is. Rose, in contrast, is a much better fit for it, and her character arc should be about learning to recognize her own strength, especially when so many people are willing to overlook it because of their preconceptions about her disability (whether it's cancer or rickets) & her demeanor. Both of them deserve so much better than canon has given them, and that's no bull.

Hi everyone! For context, I'm the authoress of Two Bees in a Pod, a Miraculous Ladybug AU fanfiction. I'm also a member of the Marinette Critique Studio, and recently I made a post analyzing how Ladybug's ladybug motif is some very good accidental symbolism of Marinette's toxicity in her relationships with others, particularly in how she treats other girls, Chloe, and Adrien, by comparing her to a solitary, poisonous, carnivorous, and cannibalistic beetle that evolved to shove past ants to steal their aphids, with some notes on Chloe's honeybee motif reflecting Chloe's aggressive and frankly territorial personality.

In the comments, one lovely poster made a good analysis of how Adrien/Chat Noir has a black cat motif to represent bad luck, but how this is actually quite symbolic of Adrien being a sweet, playful boy who loves people but will break out the claws if pushed too far. That got me thinking about how the writers of Miraculous Ladybug might not understand the ecologies of the animals they designed their heroes after, and if the ecologies of said animals might be unintended symbolism of their personalities. This post is all about the Rooster Miraculous, a major contender for both the least popular Miraculous and the Miraculous in most need of a rework.

Let's start with the bird itself. The Rooster Miraculous is clearly based on the domestic chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, a subspecies of red junglefowl first domesticated in Southeast Asia as early as eight thousand years ago either around or in what is today Thailand. Red junglefowl are ground-dwelling omnivores that live in bamboo forests and are well-adapted to take advantage of the unpredictable mass flowering that bamboo exhibits: when there's suddenly a lot of seeds to eat, there's going to be a lot more eggs laid. Humans domesticated chickens so hens would lay eggs (especially unfertilized ones) whenever they ate enough independently of bamboo blooming season, but they weren't using the first chickens for food. No, the first chickens were bred for cockfighting, where two roosters are put into the same pen and allowed to fight to the death. Their use as poultry is a more recent innovation.

Two roosters duking it out by Amshudhagar - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17848836.

Chickens are gregarious birds that live in flocks with strict social hierarchies. Females, also called hens, enforce their hierarchies via pecking, hence the phrase "pecking order". Males, also called roosters or cocks, prefer to fight each other with their claws, and they fight a LOT; the flocks their wild ancestors & cousins live in have only one dominant male, and they do NOT tolerate interlopers. Wild junglefowl can fly in short bursts so they can escape into trees to escape terrestrial predators, while domestic chickens are too heavy to fly very far if at all.

Because of how easy they are to raise to maturity, keep in a small amount of space, and transport over long distances, chickens are by far the most widespread bird on Earth, with over 23.7 billion individuals living at any given time and over 50 billion being raised every year as of 2018. Naturally, given their ubiquity they've made it into several aspects of human culture. A large part of many humans' diets contains chicken eggs and/or flesh, their feathers see widespread use in fashion, and their behaviors have great cultural significance too.

Roosters infamously crow as soon as the Sun rises, a territorial display roughly translating to "This land is mine! You can't have it OR my girls! Fuck you!", getting the timing right thanks to their precise circadian rhythms. As a result, roosters are commonly associated with the Sun, and warm weather & fire by extension, across the world; roosters can be found around Shinto shrines to display the shrine's devotion to sun goddess Amaterasu, cockfighting is traditionally part of the Qingming Festival celebrated in China & neighboring nations to commemorate the spring season, and in ancient Greece roosters were sacred to the sun god Helios in reference to a myth where Ares' guard Alectryon fell asleep, allowing Helios to catch Ares shagging Aphrodite and tell Hephaestus that his wife was cheating on him again; Alectyron was punished by being turned into the first rooster so he'd never fall asleep when the Sun rose again.

The Latin word for chickens, gallus (the source of their genus & species names), is coincidentally similar to the Roman word for the Celtic people of modern-day France whom they saw as powerful: the Gauls – or, in Latin, the Gallus. The resulting pun was used to mock the Gauls, but after the Roman Empire fell French kings turned the rooster into a positive symbol of their courage and bravery, reflecting how a rooster will try to fight & kill anything that pisses it off, including some of their own predators like hawks. The Gallic Rooster's popularity surged during the French Revolution, and now the Gallic Rooster, often called "Chanticleer" after a proud rooster that Reynard the fox unsuccessfully tried to eat who later inspired a really weird movie called Rock-a-Doodle that I only ever saw once, is a mascot for French sports teams to advertise their tenacity.

I do remember it being really weird. Image by IMDb, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8140332.

Speaking of weird writing, it's time we talked about the Rooster Miraculous, which houses Orikko, Kwami of Pretension. Pretension is the perfect concept for a chicken-based Kwami; roosters are often stereotyped as arrogant, and arrogance is often associated with pretentious behavior. It being a thumb ring is also apt, as it brings to mind the metal spurs some people attach to roosters before starting a cockfight. But that's as good as the Rooster's writing gets; first of all, it's clearly "Rooster" because that's what it is in the Chinese Zodiac, but Kwamis have no biological sex or psychological gender so the gender-neutral "Chicken" would be more appropriate. Second of all...it's just an absolute mess.

The Rooster's power is Sublimation, which lets the user do anything they want as long as it's not a power another Kwami has. And by anything, I fucking mean "anything". Like traveling to alternate realities.

Or flight.

Or making perfect soccer kicks.

Or bootlegging.

This runs into several problems. One, it's fucking broken and why they don't just spam it all the time is beyond me. Two, it ends up limiting what powers a Kwami can grant, which limits what kinds of Kwamis you can have because surely there's a Kwami that grants you temporary flight (my money's on a flying squirrel). And three, it does NOT fit the concept of pretension whatsoever; Merriam-Webster defines pretension as "1: an allegation of doubtful value; pretext. 2: a claim or an effort to establish a claim. 3: a claim or right to attention or honor because of merit. 4: an aspiration or intention that may or may not reach fulfillment (has serious literary pretensions. 5: vanity, pretentiousness." Sublimation should reflect that, but it doesn't; instead, it does what the power granted by the Kwami of imagination would do. So why doesn't it reflect pretension? The answer has to do with the Miraculous' wielder.

As of Season 6, Marc Anciel has the least development out of all the Miraculers. We don't know much about his upbringing beyond his parents being LGBT allies and himself being LGBT. He only gets two major appearances in the entire First Saga: Reverser, where he's akumatized, and Penalteam, where he gets the Rooster Miraculous. What we DO know of Marc is that he's a very kindhearted boy who's a bit shy & definitely averse to conflict, yet very good at making friends owing to his kind and generous nature. When Marc substitutes for Nathaniel in a soccer game and runs afoul of Chloe's latest tantrum over being forced to do physical activity for a grade, Ladybug immediately singles him out to be Orikko's new wielder in a move that just screams "I hooked you up with your boyfriend, so you owe me a favor." Lo and behold, Rooster Bold/Cock (sorry, Coq) Courage saves the day by weaponizing the power of Chloe's short attention span to make her too bored to fight.

Like the other boys in the Penalteam Quartet, Marc receiving his Miraculous doesn't feel earned like it did for past heroes (Rena, Carapace, Pegase, Ryuko, Viperion, King Monkey, Pigella, Purple Tigress), and instead feels like the writers were rushing to get this episode done and canonize the wielders of those four Miraculous after their stunt with Vesperia. Sabrina's feels earned since she's got the most focus & an arc of standing up to Chloe in this episode, but Marc & Nathaniel have a small subplot and that's it, and Ivan has even less than that. There's nothing personal at stake for Marc in Penalteam. Penalteam is a Sabrina Episode, not a Marc Episode. An episode where Marc gets a Miraculous should focus on his feelings that he can't do what he wants to do because it would make someone else upset, because from what little we have of Marc's character that's the kind of person he is and the thing that he needs the most help with. That's why I plan to give him a different Miraculous that fits his character a lot better, but I'll go full boar in Season 4 (hey, that rhymed).

Marc's lack of development is reflected in the Rooster's entire nature. It doesn't feel like its own Miraculous; it feels like it was meant to be Marc's Miraculous first and foremost, hence why its weapon is a pen and its power starts with something being written & lets the user do anything akin to a writer having unlimited creative freedom. It's got the same problems as the Goat (which, fun fact, I once thought was going to be Marc's Miraculous were he to ever get one): it was envisioned entirely as a specific person's Miraculous as reflected by its powers and weapon, resulting in it being an unbalanced story-breaker power that doesn't compliment the base concept. The Rooster should be one of the most often-used Miraculous yet Rooster Bold has only appeared once in the sixth season thus far, meaning the writers have either written themselves into a corner with Sublimation's versatility or have no plans to give Marc any more characterization beyond "nice femboy writer that Nathaniel is dating", and that's a disservice to both the boy & the Miraculous.

So, who SHOULD the Rooster, or Chicken as I call it, go to if it's supposed to reflect the concept of pretension? Why, someone whose pretensions are in need of plucking, of course. And there's only one guy who really fits the bill (er, beak).

Kim's base archetype is the proud, swaggering, athletic meathead who doesn't think before he acts and is very, very arrogant. The above image is taken from Animan, where his pretensions about his physique nearly get him eaten by a man who's been turned into a shapeshifting leopard. In fact, Kim thinking that he can say whatever he wants without consequence is what caused the very first akumatization in the series. He is, at his core, a highly pretentious person who needs to learn when to drop his pretensions and take things seriously. If there's someone who needs to learn to rein it in, it's him, so for Two Bees in a Pod that's the direction I took.

The Chicken works for Kim on another level. Being compared to a chicken is usually not a compliment, as chickens are stereotyped as dimwitted cowards in Western media. Kim really doesn't want to be seen as a chicken, i.e. a coward, which is why he takes so many dares, but the show loves to remind us that he's not very smart. In reality, chickens are among the smarter birds, being able to count, add & subtract, and anticipate the future, vital adaptations for life in a bamboo forest where the availability of food is erratic. In fact, chickens are so smart that they can manipulate each other, and there are indications that they can empathize with other birds who are hurt.

They can also play the piano.

In short, the idea that chickens are stupid is based on false pretensions, and I think this also applies to Kim at some level. While he's definitely gullible, impulsive, and lacking in tact Kim is capable of great empathy, as seen in Party Crasher when he caught Master Fu when he was going to fall, which inspired him to give Kim the Monkey Miraculous as he saw Kim's true heroic nature underneath the bluster. This is the direction I took him in for Two Bees in a Pod: he's empathetic and good-natured but doesn't think things through (and compared to his canon counterpart considerably less malicious). Stoneheart happened not out of a premeditated taunt, but rather Kim saying the wrong thing at the wrong time and making Ivan feel insecure while Kim thought he was being helpful. In Verity Queen, Kim snapped at Nurse Sissy while trying to defend Zoe's honor after Zoe mistook Sissy's blunt reminder to mind her weight as a deliberate insult, and Sissy wound up akumatized because of it. Kim donned Orikko to correct his mistake, and after everything was cleared up and Zoe apologized for falling victim to her own pretensions, Orikko chose Kim to be his permanent champion because he recognized that while Kim has good intentions his methods need work, and Orikko is willing to teach him humility so his methods may improve.

And so, here he is: Gosaigon.

(Picture of Kim to go here when I get around to drawing him.)

The name of Kim's Chicken transformation is a play on the Ga Sai Gon, a breed of fighting chicken from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, and the phrase "Go, Saigon!" which you might hear at a sporting event; as Kim is not only an athlete & the kind of person who would shout a phrase like that during a sporting event, but canonically from the Saigon Ward of Ho Chi Minh City in Two Bees in a Pod, it's only natural for him to honor his birthplace & his interests with his hero name.

Knowing when and when not to trust your pretensions is something that Kim needs to learn; therefore, Orikko should be someone who doesn't tolerate pretentiousness at all – in other words, a drill sergeant. There's a hierarchy, a ranking system, a pecking order to life, and Orikko knows it and will make sure that you do too. He's disciplined, stern, and completely serious, and he doesn't care about your pretensions and will call your bluff in a heartbeat. But despite his gruff demeanor and loud voice, Orikko is a benevolent, wise teacher who wants the best for his chicks, and he's capable of dropping his own pretensions to show gentle kindness when the moment calls for it. In a similar vein the Miraculous' weapon was replaced with a bow & arrow, whose complexity forces you to drop your pretensions and be careful with it so you get your target and don't hurt yourself (not that the arrows do much lasting damage).

Sublimation was heavily revamped to better fit the concept of pretension as well. Pretensions are based on overestimating your abilities beyond your actual capability, so I decided that Sublimation should grant the ability to turn bragging into reality, to make your boasting no longer empty. Sublimation lets you boost one of your natural abilities to supernatural levels, but only if that's an ability you actually have; it can't make you fly, but it can let you jump hella high (Wonderella reference), along with granting accelerated healing, frostbite resistance, superhuman speed & strength, and enhanced intelligence for as long as you're transformed. To use the Chicken properly, you must understand your own capabilities and accept that you can only work with what you've already got; you can make chicken nuggets in any shape, but they'll never be hamburger.

In short, Kim is the best fit for the Rooster Miraculous based on its base concept of pretension, but the Miraculous itself, and especially the power it grants, needs an extensive rework to fit the concept it's supposedly based on & be better-balanced compared to the other Miraculous. The way it's written now leaves it nebulous and poorly-thought-out, which reflects how it was given in a poorly-thought-out way to a boy who is for all intents and purposes a satellite character unlikely to receive a fair chance to show his full depth. Ironically, this likely does reflect pretension after all – the writers' pretensions that these were good writing decisions that shouldn't be questioned whatsoever. And if you do question them? They'll drag you into a cockfight in the Twitter comments.

Normally I don't like crossovers, but I do like the kind where it's a fusion AU where elements from one are applied to characters from the other. This one is Ben 10 x Total Drama, with Courtney as the MC/primary POV character.

Courtney is the daughter of two very competitive lawyers and is always told to be perfect so her parents can compete with other rich families better. This has not done wonders for her mental health. Might be autistic to add another layer of complexity to her background.

After wishing on a star for a chance to prove herself, the Omnitrix lands in Courtney's backyard and latches to her wrist. Because it's been damaged due to the impact, Courtney becomes Heatblast involuntarily and burns part of her house.

Her parents give her the okay to attend Total Drama, as now they have a concrete use for the money.

Weeks later, Courtney is now on Total Drama and faces diving off a cliff or being voted off. With no other options, Courtney chooses Ripjaws and dives. This leads to a very different Total Drama where Courtney learns to loosen up and have fun while others (primarily Chris) seek to exploit the Omnitrix for their own ends.

The Omnitrix is damaged, so Courtney has to be careful how she uses it because the longer she stays transformed, the more it overheats and starts glitching. It's also known to give her the wrong transformation.

Only allowed to use a maximum of two transformations during challenges.

Vilgax is not happy Courtney is using the Omnitrix for a gameshow. Azmuth isn't happy either at first, but he comes around when he sees how Courtney uses it to protect the others from Chris' sadistic challenges.

Main pairing is Courtney/Gwen, with some side pairings.

Harold and Cody befriend Courtney early on because they like science fiction, and they help her learn how to use her aliens better. Noah, Leshawna, Bridgette, & Geoff also befriend her, and she eventually comes around to Tyler, Lindsay, Beth, Owen, and Izzy.

Courtney's initial arsenal is Heatblast, Wildmutt, Diamondhead, XLR8, Gray Matter, Fourarms, Stinkfly, Ripjaws, Upgrade, Ghostfreak (who later escapes as Zs'Skayr & is replaced by Big Chill), Cannonbolt, Wildvine, Upchuck, and Goop (Courtney hates Goop because she looks like green jello). I definitely plan to give her Eye Guy/Gal (with boob eyes since Total Drama has that sense of humor) once she's over 18. I might also give her Jetray, Echo Echo, Feedback, Chromastone, Brainstorm, Way Big, and Rath; Courtney as Rath would be hilarious.

Either Zeke, Dakota, or both become Kevin-esque mutants.

Heather might be an Anodite.

Another vector one! There were Independence Day ice cream cones at the Acme and I had a craving.