gift for @unecoccinellenoire ✨

Embrace

if there’s whispers or rumors about the woman before her, it’s that she was a nobody. stupid. an actual intellectual disability they say, too slow to keep up with anything. it’s a virtue, said in everyone’s eyes that evaluate her, that she’s nothing like her. what’s a few years of childhood that can’t be flecked off? it’s for the best she was only raised with one parent. it’s for the best she can barely remember the woman at all.

in all nathalie’s cleverness, it’s almost impossible to figure him in love, what that looks like. she knows what it looks like between them, at least, but that’s special, that’s different, that’s theirs.

she learns about genetics and thinks she’s an anomaly. she’s his right hand, not a copy. there’s a sameness that can’t be replicated by duplication, it just feels as natural as wiggling your five fingers. he is well respected, and she is respected by him.

you could take it from another perspective. instead of taking it as “what would you change about the writing of him and the storyline and how they interact and influence each other (essentially how you’d fix his presented traits to better fit the story and not have him be inconsistent)”, you can take it as “what would you change about his character (purely) to enrich it”

so: how would you have made him interesting?

i.e. i always thought a bad past with religion would fit him very nicely; having been overweight as a teenager, having had a ‘situationship’ with harry clown, idk. anything. i feel like all we got from him was “very evil billionaire guy that abuses his son and was born in low-middle class” which is, granted, very boring.

also the weird gabenath moment in s3-s4 had me in shambles. i would've loved a redemption arc where he moved on from emilie and realized he could be happy with nathalie!! they were so fitting and so in love (very biased) anyway thank you for your time i love reading your posts 🥳🥳

(Ask this post is referring to)

There are many ways to play Gabriel. Which path is the best depends on what story you're trying to tell. A comedy where Gabriel is the cartoonish villain? A drama where Gabriel is the sympathetic, but doomed villain? A romance where Gabriel is redeemed to a happy life with someone other than Emilie? Each of those paths is possible! They just require wildly different choices if you want them to work which is one of Miraculous' big problems. The choices they made lead to an ending that doesn't fit those choices, making the ending feel wildly inauthentic and offensive to the audience.

So what would my ideal Gabriel look like? How would I fix him? Let's discuss.

When it comes to character design, I favor simple choices. Don't add complexity to the narrative unless it improves the narrative. With Gabriel, that means that I wouldn't do anything with his pre-Emilie backstory because the focus of the drama is what happened after he met Emilie. Giving him additional trauma only makes sense if it enhances the Emilie plot and I don't see that being the case.

For example, if we give him religious trauma, how does that improve the story canon is trying to tell? I'm not seeing the vision. Medical trauma that makes him reject medicine in favor of magic could be a nice addition, but even that feels too complex for my tastes since this is all backstory that we're not going to see in detail. He doesn't need medical trauma to turn to magic. You can just say modern medicine didn't work so he looked to ancient power. See how that one sentence gives you all the answers while the medical trauma path requires a lot more explanation? That's why simple is good. Save the complexity for the parts of the story you plan to develop and show. That keeps the audience's focus where you want them focused. Hanging and underdeveloped threads just risk distracting them and leaving them unsatisfied because they didn't get all their questions answered.

A good example of this is the Nathalie nonsense from season three. That season really leaned into the idea that something was going on between Gabriel and Nathalie leading a lot of fans to expect that Gabriel would move on from Emilie and be with Nathalie instead. I don't hate that idea. It's good for kids to be told that a person can have multiple powerful loves in their life and that the end of a relationship isn't the end of the world plus I love a good villain couple! We need more of those! But canon didn't do that. It just gave GabeNath a bunch of weirdly intimate moments and then pretended those moments never happened leaving fans asking why those moments were ever added? What did they add outside of cheap drama and a longer run time? (I know those moments were likely artifacts of the time when the plan was for Nathalie to have a secret goal of wishing that Gabriel would love her instead of Emilie, but that doesn't explain Gabriel's behavior. What was that about?)

Another thing I like to point out is that a character doesn't need to be complex to be interesting. My corruption-arc Gabriel pitch is simple, but it's still my favorite way to play him. I like the idea of him being a genuinely good father who loses himself to grief while Adrien moves past his grief by going out into the world and making friends. That's way less complex than what canon gave us, but I think it's a much better story!

The corruption arc is the path I'd pick if I was telling a serialized story that ended with Gabriel unredeemed which is my preference. I think the story should have a bittersweet ending where he pays for his crimes, but no one is really happy about it. His defeat is more a cautionary tale than a triumph over evil. My ideal version of this arc is more complex than what I gave in the pitch, but the pitch is good enough to get the idea across.

I also love my redemption pitch where Gabriel doesn't die at the end of season five and is instead forced to join up with the heroes. That idea hinges on toning Gabriel down a bit and giving him a more obvious, but still simple delusion. You rewrite Gabriel to be convinced that he's living in a nightmare. That nothing he does matters because nothing that's happening is real. It's just the nightmare that he's living in until he makes his wish and sets everything back to the way it's supposed to be. That's why it's okay if he ignores Adrien because he's not actually ignoring Adrien. He's ignoring the nightmare!Adrien who will stop existing as soon as Gabriel rewrites reality and sets time back to the moment when Emilie's illness was discovered. If you play that up, then Gabriel's actions are still monstrous, but you can now justify the idea that he genuinely loves Adrien and that's all you need to make him work. It's nice juicy complexity, but the complexity is the execution, not the idea as is often the case.

This answer likely wasn't as detailed as you wanted. If you want a more detailed answer, then give me some of the key details of the overall story you'd like to see as that's the most important piece of the puzzle. The thing that defines who Gabriel needs to be. Do you want Gabriel redeemed at the end? Do you want him doomed? Do you want him to move on from Emilie? Do you want him sympathetic? Do you want him to be a blackhearted villain?

All of these things are possible and all of these things shape the character design in wildly different ways. You can't just throw random shit into the pot if you want the character to work as canon shows. Their lack of good characterization ruined Gabriel! It genuinely feels like they had no idea what they wanted to do with him so they kept making choices that didn't work for the story. A big one is that Chat Blanc should not exist in the same show as the season five ending.