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cardiac-agreste · 15 hours

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Was at Mont saint Michel, I took picture and draw them last year. they are cute

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cardiac-agreste · 15 hours

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"He laughs, throwing his head back. His neck stretches, the skin lifting from the cocoon of his hoodie. A rosebush of love bites flash across his throat. Ladybug’s heart stops."

hey so you should read @rosekasa's fic what happens in london

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cardiac-agreste · 16 hours

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Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize, snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”.

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

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cardiac-agreste · 18 hours

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Look I know this isn't great work but I'm gonna be subjecting y'all to my crappy charcoal drawings regularly bc it's the only way I'll keep myself motivated is to publicly humiliate myself if I stagnate

#charcoal #portrait #artist:kpg

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cardiac-agreste · 2 days

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Revisiting this essay after the Paris Special, Marinette's final battle against Gabriel, and her creating a roster of permanent Holders, you can see how far she's come on this front!

She trusts her "evil" self enough to detransform and risk decapitation, Gabriel enough to detransform to ask him to give up even when her own victory was assured, and to relinquish the miraculous semi-permanently.

Ladybug Never Makes a Mistake

So, a lot of us feel that Marinette / Ladybug can sometimes be too controlling, yes?? What divides us, maybe, is whether or not we forgive her for it. I’m on the side of forgiveness, and I want to explain why.

First, Marinette is only 14, and she has plenty of time to grow. We all did stupid things at that age, and even older than that.

But more than that - I think Marinette does what a lot of people do: she tries to control what she can, when it feels like the bigger things in her life are spiralling out of control. For all that Adrien gets called ‘perfect’, the true perfectionist is Marinette.

The worse things get, the more she takes charge. The Cat Blanc secret she’s keeping? She’s terrified of what will happen if she lets the cat out of the bag (I couldn’t resist). That plan to get Cat’s identity, in ‘Ephemeral’? Absolutely awful - but also, that was her feeling powerless under Su-Han’s threat balanced with her vows to Master Fu.

She’s always had this streak in her. Think of her as Marinette, needing to wear her lucky socks or orchestrating complex scenarios involving romantic carriages, just to tell a boy she likes him. It’s not ‘stalking’. More like if she can control all the variables, maybe she’ll get the outcome she wants. She’s terrified of the unpredictable…because she’s afraid she won’t know what to do with it and will make a mistake with huge consequences.

When she became Guardian, this tendency got so much worse - because the stakes were raised. The more pressure heaped on her shoulders, the more she tried to control things, so that she felt more able to cope with her new responsibilities. By the end of S4, when she had her breakdown, what we saw was her feeling totally out of control, with no idea what to do anymore. She needed Cat to step in and take control again, to give her the security she suddenly lacked.

In S5, I think we’ve seen a less controlling Ladybug. She’s not all the way there yet, but she’s definitely changed. When she gave Cat the rabbit miraculous, for instance, that was a moment of her letting go and giving away. That kiss in ‘Elation’ was her giving in to her feelings and letting loose. She finally allowed herself to have some fun. She then gave in to akumatisation - and while this obviously wasn’t good, it was her allowing herself to feel all the stress that had been piling up on her for so long.

What triggered all this was the loss of most of the miraculous. And here’s where it gets interesting. I think losing the miraculous was a blessing in disguise - the thing Marinette needed to teach her to let go. Significantly, this moment of loss leads her to admire Cat Noir…because he’s flexible. He’s strong like grass - he knows how to bend with the wind when the storm comes, and spring back up when stepped on.

There’s this Buddhist practice of creating beautiful mandalas (geometric designs) out of coloured sand sprinkled on the floor or a table. They will spend months on one picture. On completion, they destroy it with one swipe of the hand. And no, no one takes a photo first. It’s meant to be a lesson in impermanence - the fact that nothing is 100% secure and we can lose everything in the blink of an eye. Life is ephemeral. We need to be able to adapt.

If we think back to ‘Gamer 2.0′, Cat tells Ladybug she needs to enjoy playing. And at the end of the battle, what does he do? He lets himself fall. Just like he takes that leap of faith in ‘Lies’ - or as Adrien, in ‘Gorizilla’.

Cat Noir easily surrenders himself to the flow of life and has faith that, one way or another, it will all work out. While this attitude puts further pressure on Ladybug, we can see it as the opposite extreme to her. He lets go just as much as she holds on for dear life.

Don’t get me wrong. Symbolism aside, on a more practical level it’s good that in season 5 we’re seeing a more composed Cat Noir who values life and has faith in his own ideas and capabilities. But Ladybug / Marinette really needed to learn from him, too - and she’s still learning.

The end of ‘Strike Back’ was a good first step for her. She still has a way to go, but it’s all part of her character arc. I believe that as her confidence grows, her need for control will ease off. She’ll listen more to the input of others, as we are already starting to see. Ultimately, she will still be the one with a plan…but she’ll understand know that a plan isn’t always needed. Sometimes you just have to ride the waves and see where the current takes you.

#miraculous ladybug #marinette dupain cheng

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cardiac-agreste · 2 days

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Somewhat famously in engineering circles and the Hedy fandom, the Navy classified the invention as top secret, and decades later when engineers were re-reading the patent after it'd been declassified, they realized just who "Hedwig Kiesler Markey" was. She finally got an award for the invention in the 90s.

#hedwig

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cardiac-agreste · 2 days

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Chapter 14: Push Hands

This is my story about Sabine & Marinette for the @mlbigbang. The story is from Sabine's POV as she tries to figure out what has been traumatizing her little girl (who, by the way, will not tell her anything).

Thanks to @uptoolateart and @raspberrycatapult. These two absolute legends get me through the gauntlet chapter in and chapter out. Go check out their Tumblrs. They are putting out amazing stories themselves!

Synopsis

Sabine came to this sewer to kick teenager ass and chew bubblegum, and she's all out of bubblegum.

Extract

Her two copies froze as she adjusted to double the sensory information. She was looking at herself. When one copy moved, she felt it in the other copy. Or was the copy feeling it and she was feeling what the copy was feeling? Was she the copy? No, the copy was her. Or she was it. Her.

Us. We are the copies.

The sewer smelled just as awful from either pair of nostrils.

The two Duoshus placed left palm to right palm, feeling the pressure, and she was reminded of placing a candle between parallel mirrors and seeing a hundred reflections of the light diverging into an illusion of distance.

“Hey,” one of them said into the other’s ear, and the speaker heard the greeting in her own ear.

My God, this is weird.

It was like being at a loud disco trying to have a private conversation. She had two sets of thoughts in her head, or in her heads, but with some focus, she could listen to one train of thought and ignore the other.

#miraculous ladybug #marinette-dupain cheng#chat noir#ladybug#adrien agreste#sabine cheng#kung fu#rope dart#meteor hammer#BADASS Sabine Cheng#SERIOUSLY SO BADASS#intergenerational trauma#author:KPG#ASBSF#mullo#wang fu#fu wang#qilin#troublemaker#ml fanfiction

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cardiac-agreste · 2 days

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It would have been cute if Adrien had kept that pottery wheel Marinette gave him in season 4. He seemed genuinely interested in it, and we could have had this delightful progression of ugly little armature pottery filling up the Agreste mansion from that point onward.

It could have started in Adrien’s room at first, with just a few little bowls and misshapen vases appearing on his coffee table and nightstand. But then by season five, they’re in the kitchen and living room. Eventually, they’re all over Gabriel’s studio because Nathalie knows that he hates the ugly little things, because they are mediocre products of a hobby that Gabe did not approve for his son, but he knows that if he says a word about it she will snap him like twig over one of her robot legs.

And then one day, Chat Noir gifts one of these little pots to Ladybug. Because she’s his best friend, but also because Adrien is seriously running out of space but is having too much fun with his pottery wheel to stop making them. And while Ladybug does give him a cursory speech about how they really shouldn’t be giving each other gifts, she accepts it, because it’s season 5, and she has a crush by this point.

And depending on whether Adrien had gotten into glazing and firing his pottery by this point, maybe he even added a little yellow rose to the pot to symbolize friendship. And a little black cat, because you know. He’s him. (And the two would not be at all in proportion to one another.)

Then weeks later, when Adrien just happens to be hanging out at his girlfriend’s place, he happens to glance over at her sewing table and sees a familiar little pot holding a bunch of spare bobbins and fabric scraps. And then his head explodes.

#“holy shit” was literally invented for ideas like this

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cardiac-agreste · 4 days

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