#animula

“Animula vagula blandula” aesthetic

(?); Venus and Tannhäuser, Laurence Koe (1896); The young martyr, Paul Delaroche (1855); Ophelia, Léopold Burthe (1851); Teofil Antoni Kwiatkowski (?).

Animula is a Miraculous Ladybug inspired project that I have been working on and pondering about for a while. When I was into ML, I was making so many changes to it in terms of lore and set up, it was just best to just focus on doing my own thing. And with it, do what I wanted to see from ML but they didn't deliver.

Like, I wanted the kwamis to be actual characters.

By set up, they easily could've been the most interesting part of the show. These little animal themed spirits/fairies/gods were, supposedly, heavily involved in human history and worked off multiple heroes, and there's implications that they sway over history and were involved with some iconic people and their involvement also could've influenced how people saw certain animals.

This sets them up to be wise and complex, having different views based on what they went through, or choices they or the humans they were with made.

And if you worked off the animal archetypes, symbolism, and themes of what they are, that's a whole other flavor that could've been done. Could've added to their views, their behavior, even how they work off each other, and how they could've worked off the humans, how they could've helped a human grow or clash with them.

To name an example, Pollen is a huge missed opportunity in this.

Bees have the symbolism and themes of being hard working, of being community driven, to communicate well, to be a team player, and to be nurturing, industrious, tenacious, and open minded.

And she is paired with Chloe who is a lazy spoiled bully who thinks herself above everyone and gets kicks out of tormenting her community.

That is set up to be a very interesting dynamic to see play out, as everything a bee represents is the opposite of what Chloe is. She could've had an arc of being a wasp that becomes a bee. Or it could've been that her and Pollen clashed so much, it was a wasp vs bee dynamic.

But they didn't do that. Pollen became a yes man that's eager to serve and roll with whatever whim Chloe wanted, no challenging her on how she was. It just played into the idea that queen bees "run" the hive when in actuality its the worker bees (and they will terminate unfit queen bees, shame we didn't get that).

And it was really frustrating. It got worse when kwamis were all together, and took on a hive mind that they all behaved the same, or would act like they were mentally children.

As one of the biggest frustrations, that's what led me to delve into this, it's even why the project is called "animula" as that's the term I'm using for these little animal gods/fairies/spirits. I actually picked the term as it translates to little soul.

And has a slight pun with animal.

Other things I wanted, I wanted there to be growth and lessons for multiple characters, as ML had an idea that only the lead could be wrong (whether she was in the wrong or not) and only she could learn lessons. And I wanted characters to be actual characters and to see progress, as there was so much stagnation and keeping to the status quo.

I wanted more friendship and to see it matter, as ML regarded romance to be more important than friendship.