#quickrants

Just wondering how you or other authors would fix the show.

Well, that really depends on what you mean by "fix." I'm not sure how Luka and Adrien being friends would fix anything because they ARE friends in the show.

If you want a love square endgame, I think you have to go all the way back to Despair Bear, which is where the LS peaked IMO. Up until that point it seemed like Marinette and Adrien were inching closer to each other. I would've reversed the love square at that point, with Adrien becoming more interested in Marinette and Marinette being more torn between him and CN, preventing her from confessing while she tried to figure out her feelings.

With no hate to Kagami, it's her introduction and more importantly, Adrien's reaction to her, that really tanked any believability for the LS for me. When contemplating moving on from LB, he consistently chose Kagami without even a thought of Marinette as an option, and that was just completely it for me. It's not just that Adrien is interested in Ladybug, it's that he is totally *uninterested* in Marinette, and that's where all the "he's socially awkward"/"he doesn't understand his own feelings" completely fall apart for me. The show doesn't generally let us inside Adrien's head the way they do Marinette's, so if there was any internal conflict there, they completely failed to convey it. They could have had him think for some reason, possibly through Chloe or Lila's manipulation, that Marinette wasn't actually interested in him and so he pursued Kagami and Marinette then thinks she would have to give up on him, and go at the alternate love interests to keep the drama going, and there could have been some interesting ground to explore there. Imagine how Frozer would be with Adrien going, well, Marinette would have good advice and I know she's not interested in me so it can't hurt to ask her about Kagami instead of being blatantly oblivious.

I also have beef with the way Adrien handled the hero team becoming more prominent; given his background it is reasonable for him to be upset and think that he has to shine above the rest to get LB's attention, but instead of sulking around and not showing up in fights (which, up until this point, was an aspect of salt fics I thought was comedically far-fetched) I would have had him seek out Su Han for training, potentially giving him a mentor figure/someone to talk to about it his relationship with LB, AND give him something solid and specific to contribute to the battle and relieve the burden on LB. (Who did they end up having do this though? *Luka*. Who had every reason to legitimately consider himself out of the fight. Just saying.)

Yes, I'm aware that was a really long sentence. Wordy bitch don't care. 😂

This would also require Su Han to be less of a dick, but there you go. Fix those things, and the godawful speech about "I can't help disrespecting your feelings because my own are so strong," and I would be nicer to Adrien. Give him some narrative accountability instead of acting the spoiled brat.

Wow I kind of spun out on a tangent so here's the teal deer and you can read the full word vomit under the cut:

More power to the writers who enjoy such things, but personally I'm just not interested at this point, so unless it's a side plot of a Lukanette story, I wouldn't seek one out to read, nor would I write one myself. The closest I really have is Something Just Like This, where all three characters work things out not always amicably, which I tend to think of as a prequel to All in the Family, where Adrien becomes the most welcome third wheel in history. At this point in time though, I'm just tired of Adrien and all the drama, canon and fandom, that comes along with him, and I don't care enough to put the effort in.

Since I've said it in the discord I might as well say it here--if I ran the world, I would have had Adrien take all his sad about being left out in Season 4, and decide he's going to be such a good hero that LB won't need anyone else, and he'd go off to get Su Han to teach him Mirakung Fu or whatever it is and actually step up to help LB and prove he can be the partner she needs--and maybe learn along the way that it's okay not to be LB's everything and that relying on other people is actually a good thing, he doesn't have to be perfect to be important. (That plot is free to anyone who wants to use it, feel free, drop me a link so I can see what you do with it.)

Now that I've written the longest run on sentence ever, here's the actually wordy stuff under the cut. 😂

Ship and let ship, but this one's not for me. Adrien needs a romantic relationship like a hole in the head. He's got a lot to work through before he can be in a relationship that's mutually healthy and supportive.

Oops it kinda slipped out a little didn't it.

Ha ha ha *deep breath*

I know you didn't mean to be a jerk but... yeah that does kinda sound like a dick move...

"You don't freak out because someone hugs you in greeting when you didn't want/expect it. You just take the hug and move on. It's not like they're assaulting you."

Friends. Especially young people. With love from Mama Quick, here's something I wish someone had told me many years earlier than I actually learned it.

People shouldn't be hugging you if you don't want them to. You absolutely have the right to decline any hug no matter how innocently intended it is. "I don't want to," is a good enough reason and no one should make you feel embarrassed or rude for asserting a personal boundary.

Stepping back and offering an alternative greeting is absolutely a thing you can do. If someone keeps trying to hug you after you've done this then yeah, you're allowed to be upset. It doesn't have to be outright assault to be rude and feel violating. (Ugh the number of parents' friends who have hugged me uncomfortably long to ask me questions and tell me how much I'd grown when I desperately wanted to be elsewhere even though they were perfectly nice people who thought that was just a normal southern thing to do)

Here's some advice from Captain Awkward on how to handle unwanted huggers. (I highly recommend searching the site for scripts on any kind of difficult conversation there are many good suggestions, including "sometimes you just have to let people be mad.")

Don't be guilted into allowing unwelcome contact because you don't want to make a scene or be considered cold or rude.

I want her to be a villain so bad. Why couldn’t they have given Lila a setup like that and then used her effectively? I mean you have someone who admits they lie to fit in, that they like to act, and they come in with the perfect setup to be seen as Chloe’s victim and get in good with everyone else, and then start to lie and manipulate things just a little bit to go their way, and pretty soon everyone’s twisted around and you have a really effective setup for a liar/user who’s not completely obvious, and if she does get get caught, she’s got an iron-clad pity play right on the table already. “I’m sorry, I messed up, I’m trying so hard to do better, please forgive me,” and with the family she’s living in, who would question it? I know they’re not gonna do it, because it would just be repeating Lila’s plot again (only better) and they seem committed to sticking it out with her but UGH WHYYYYYYY IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BETTER. I’m not sure how you would actually work out her not knowing Hawmoth’s identity, unless she was a sentimonster, but also how amazing would that be? Hawkmoth creating a sentimonster, while the real Zoe never leaves her boarding school and just goes on, because you know nobody in the mayor’s house is checking on anything there. Maybe Nathalie’s last sentimonster so that HM can keep making his own. ugh that would have been so good. Now he’s got an inside agent that can manipulate things at school, goad Chloe, get close to Marinette if he still wants to target her. 

To me that’s the only way to redeem the fact that you could find the exact same character in a thousand first-time-writer-self-insert fics--seriously she’s a freaking checklist. Long lost suddenly appearing sibling of a major cast member, mistreated by everybody, underestimates her own self-worth so that everyone tells her how great she is, being awesome enough to get even Chat’s attention for a millisecond, getting to tell Chloe off as the new queen bee, accomplishing previously impossible things that we’ve all wanted to see, for example the only one who can convince Mayor Bourgeois to stand up to Chloe, etc etc on and on--literally the only thing she’s missing is being crushed on by a secondary character so that she can be impressive and desirable without interrupting the main ship. I’m all for those things in fanfic, we all wrote that kind of thing at one point and I’m not judging anybody. But it drives me bananas when it shows up in a professional work that should know better (I am looking at you Heather from How to Train Your Dragon).

I know I’m massively biased, but I gotta be honest y’all the Zoeka thing mystifies me 😂 Setting aside all the issues above, we have a character who’s based around truth, sincerity, and perceptiveness/consideration of others’ feelings, and a character that straight up admits she lies to fit in (to the point of being cruel to others), who even after she reforms (so to speak) has no problem lying and manipulating her own sister (masterfully, omg, see above, why wouldn’t they use this), and generally is in the habit of not showing her true feelings or self. This is the exact opposite of what Luka is attracted to in Marinette (clear as a music note, sincere as a melody). I mean, they look cute, I’ll give you that, I think they’d have an interesting friendship dynamic and Zoe could learn a lot from the Couffaines. That’s fine in a friendship, but not great in a romantic partner. There’s a difference between supporting a partner who’s working through some hard stuff, and dating someone you have to fix, so. I don’t find it especially appealing. (I have this same problem with a lot of Adrien ships, to be honest; I ship Adrien x therapy 😂) IDK maybe five or ten years down the road when she’s learned how to separate herself from the roles she plays, but it’d definitely take some really good storytelling to convince me even then. 

This inspired a whole rumination on the nature of salt and my feelings about it that I’m actually going to put in another post. 😂 When I do, please don’t feel guilty about it dear anon, it’s not your fault. 

Anyway just for reference, for new readers or anyone who needs to know, it's not because I’m anti-salt or have anything against salt or because I disagree with salt takes or don't want salt on my blog at all, I just find that too much of it gets depressing for my chemically-imbalanced brain and kills my enthusiasm and ability to create, so I try to keep things a little lighter for my own sanity. 

That being said, let’s engage in a little literary criticism. 😁