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mlbigbang · 4 months

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2023 General Fic Rec List

It’s the end of the year which means it’s finally time for the ML Big Bang’s yearly fic rec lists! We’re really excited to bring you our contributors’ favourite fics started this year to supply you with plenty of reading material while you’re waiting for the Big Bang fics’ publication in January.

drowning (in plain sight) by @buggachat

Everybody had expected Monarch's defeat to be a moment of triumph. Nobody had expected Gabriel Agreste, unmasked and mind frayed from continual abuse of the miraculous, crying out to all who would listen and making Paris certain of one thing: His son, Adrien Agreste, is one of his sentimonsters. And now he's missing. Nobody can find him— not even the superheroes, and not even his closest friends. But Marinette, Nino, and Alya aren't ones to give up so easily. They'll find him, no matter what it takes. (But, geez, would it kill Chat Noir to lend a hand?)

I think most of the fandom already read this fic, but if you haven't, you should give it a try! The angst is balanced by how deeply Adrien's friends (including Plagg and Felix) care for him, and the reunion at the end is so touching.

all of your flaws and all of my flaws (are laid out one by one) by @coffeebanana

Ladybug and Marinette have both been acting strangely since Monarch's defeat, and Chat Noir would give anything to know why—to be able to help them. He just…didn't expect his answers to come when Ladybug drags him to his father's statue in the middle of the night along with a bag full of spray paint.

An incredibly cathartic scene set after the Season 5 finale that is a perfect mix of angst and hurt and comfort! All the emotions are so raw.

Dreaming Wide Awake by @uptoolateart

Gabriel died a hero. He sacrificed himself in the final battle against Monarch. Or so Adrien's been told. At least he has his mother there to help him through the grief. So what is this niggling feeling that this isn't how the story was meant to go? And why does he keep having flashes of another world that lies just beneath their own?

A fantastic follow-up to the Season 5 finale in which Adrien is dealing with the loss of his father, and his relationship with Marinette, in a reality that's not quite right. Incredibly emotional and moving.

All That Glitters by @trishacollins

After - After the dust settles, and things feel a little bit more...permanent. Nathalie thinks back on her mistakes. With Felix as close at hand as he is, she thinks one of them might be fixable.

Every fic should be a Sentibug fic, and that's why I rec this. I love that it runs with the finale of S5 and addresses various characters' feelings about senti stuff, which is the real big question hanging over the end of the season. Well, one of them :)

The moment I knew (I’d no choice but to love you) by @bbutterflies

“He’s dating me,” Nino said, taking Adrien’s hand in his own. Adrien could only stare back at him in shock. “How dare you all force him to come out?” Nino continued, glaring at the reporters. “That was disgusting.” He pulled Adrien over to the car, guided him in, and shut the door behind them. In the relative quiet and privacy of the backseat, Adrien finally processed what had just happened. “So… when were you going to tell me we were dating?”

It's fake dating, but with Adrino!! What's not to like?

The Parable of the Caller by nemali

A week after Hawk Moth’s identity has been revealed, Adrien finds himself with nowhere to go, nothing he can do, and worst of all, strange gaps in his memory he can’t explain. In a stroke of luck, he stumbles upon a burner phone filled with voicemails from one of the Saviors of Paris: Chat Noir himself, who disappeared following Hawk Moth’s arrest. But with each new voicemail Adrien listens to, he’s forced to confront the fact that there might be some kind of connection between himself and Chat Noir — and discovering it might leave him more broken than before.

It's subversion of so much. Adrien is the ex-Guardian. Adrien has lost his memories. There's been no reveal. He has no idea what this mysterious series of voicemails from Chat Noir means. A+++ read.

A Masked Game by @mysticraven20

For almost ten years Paris has been peaceful. No villains. No heroes. No hate. But, as always, peace never lasts forever and as a new threat takes over the city of love, there’s a change in the game where this time death is permanent. Adrien has been living full of hope after the worst years of his life. He’s free. He’s settled. But most importantly, he’s in love. After years of trying to find his calling everything came together the day he married his wife, or so he thought. Marinette still craved the companionship of her partner. It had been a decade since she’d seen him; the dull ache in her heart constantly asking what had happened to him. If only she had the opportunity to speak to him one more time. The chance for a reconnection appears when Paris’ heroes are needed again and as feelings begin to resurface so does the hate, love and lies. Ladybug and Chat Noir will need to find a new dynamic to make this work, saving not only their friends but also themselves, leaving Adrien and Marinette to risk everything in a need to survive.

Whodunit, murder mystery MLB fic from a great author exploring a new genre/style. Not just exploring, succeeding. Acing it. Wonderful story. As each chapter dropped, it really felt like the entire fandom was racing to read it first. Everyone was hooked. You should get hooked, too!

#ml #ml big bang #ml big bang 2023 #miraculous #miraculous ladybug #fic recs #ml fic recs

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miraculouslbcnreactions · 1 month

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Do you think Gabriel and Tomoe trying to force their kids together when they never seemed to care about that before season 5 was too much drama? @tallwriter

Yes.

Here's a little writing tip: if you want to keep your audience emotionally invested, make the drama build and try to keep most of it tied to the plot. Miraculous is really, really bad at this. It has no idea how to build the drama up to a solid, satisfying, logical conclusion. Instead, it tries to keep people invested through extremely cheap, pointless drama that goes nowhere. I'll use season five to explain.

Season five's conflict is that Gabriel has all of the miraculous and the heroes want the miraculous back. Season five ends with that happening. But does anything in the season actually lead to that ending?

Here's a list of all (or at least most) of the multi-episode conflicts introduced and arguably resolved in season five:

Nathalie no longer blindly supporting Gabriel

Gabriel getting cataclysmed and slowly dying

Nathalie slowly dying

The reverse crush drama

Kagami having a crush on Adrien (and Marinette?)

Lila's lies and team up with Chloe

Gabriel and Tomoe wanting their kids together

Felix having the peacock miraculous

Marinette being unable to say that she loves Adrien

The senti plot

Adrinette getting together

The only thing on that list that kind of mattered to the final was Gabriel getting cataclysmed because it meant that he could die without it feeling like suicide since he was already dying. Everything else on that list could be cut and the ending would not meaningfully change because there is no story arc for season five. Stuff just happens.

This is what I mean by cheap, pointless drama. Season five doesn't care about setting up a good, powerful ending. It just cares about keeping you invested and asking "what's going to happen next?"

The is not how epic stories are told. This is how soap operas are told. The entire draw of that genre is melodrama. In other words, it's for people who enjoy drama just for the sake of drama. People who don't care if the characters are mostly shitty, awful people or if plots get dropped mid-season or resolved in wacky ways because the audience is not here to fall in love with the characters or to hear an epic story. They're here for the drama and that's about it.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with soap operas. It's a massively popular genre for a reason. I'm sure that there are even standout examples that have fantastic plots, but that's simple not a requirement for something to be a good soap opera any more than a good romance requires the main couple to be healthy. The problem with Miraculous having a soap opera structure is that - as far as I can tell - Miraculous is not trying to be a soap opera. It's trying to be a serious narrative (which is why you have the writers claiming things like Marinette and Gabriel are supposed to represent individual creative spirit versus corporate greed), but it's failing and failing hard.

A show that was succeeding at telling a good, logical plot would have had multi-episode conflicts like:

Chat Noir and Ladybug figuring out how the miraculous powers are being given to people

Chat Noir and Ladybug trying to figure out if Tomoe knew that her rings got hacked/assuming the Tsurugi tech is behind everything and somehow infuriating the company, likely with Kagami's help

Chat Noir and Ladybug learning the truth of the butterfly and peacock and dealing with that/going to the mansion with purpose

Felix, Chat Noir, and Ladybug playing a season long game of cat and mouse

You know, stuff that would actually lead to the ending of the season instead of Felix randomly telling Ladybug what she needs to know right before the final without her actually doing anything to make that happen. (But don't forget that she's smart and clever guys. I promise you that she's smart and clever! The writers totally know how to write a smart and clever character!)

Another thing you may have noticed is that most of those suggested plot points build on each other. This is how good stories work. You should be constantly resolving subplots and, in the process of the resolution, you introduce new subplots. For example, they figure out that the rings are how the akumas are getting their powers, which leads to the investigation of Tsurugi tech. Two separate subplots that naturally link together to allow for a logical story flow while keeping things interesting.

This was a big problem with season four, which introduced the Ladynoir conflict that was just kind of there, looming over the story, but not doing anything for 20-something episodes. For all of season five's flaws, at the very least the writers kept things interesting. They just didn't keep it interesting in particularly talented way. It's all bullshit melodrama and, while I truly have nothing against soap operas, I'm not a fan of the genre.

All of the above is why I don't have any faith in the next season of miraculous. They writers clearly cannot handle conflicts that last longer than an episode because literally nothing they introduced set up the final. It actually weakened the final because season five spent a lot of time making Gabriel worse than he's ever been, which is not how you setup a dramatic, last-minute change of heart.

To end on a positive note, the one thing that I will give the writers some credit for is the reverse crush BS. Rumor has it that this season was originally supposed to have The Reveal and, if that had happened right after all of the crush stuff, then it would have been more satisfying than a reveal without the reverse crush.

While Adrien has always been a Marinette fan and him eventually developing a crush feels logical, Ladybug has been really anti Ladynoir for a while now, so having her backtrack that stance pre-reveal would have strengthened the reveal and the relationship that follows. It still will even though Ladybug's Chat Noir crush is now nothing more than a brief rebound that was quickly forgotten. That doesn't change the fact that it happened which means that we now know that she's okay with her and Chat Noir being in a romantic relationship no matter his identity when it previously came across like she was completely opposed to the idea until she learned that it was Adrien under the mask, which was something I always viewed as a terrible writing choice, so I'm glad they backtracked it instead of trying to solve it post-reveal.

#ml writing salt #ml writing critical #ml season 5 salt

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carpisuns · 2 years

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Ok question though. If Felix felt so sad and guilty about Strike Back being blasted to the sun, and fwlt so happy and relieved after finally getting the peacock miraculous, all that because he is a senti, then why he mistreats Adrien? If Adrien was alao a senti, wouldnt Felix emphatize with him? Feel bad for him like he did with Strike Back. Those two behaviors dont match

I don’t think there’s too much of a mismatch. There’s a big difference between watching living beings get literally yeeted into the sun and being kind of a binch to your cousin lol. If felix were watching adrien die he’d be a lot more devastated than he was watching strike back die.

My feeling is that Felix is a complicated character who’s kind of morally gray so far, mostly acting out of self-preservation, not compassion. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the capacity for compassion. and the fact that he has mistreated adrien is not necessarily an indication that he doesn’t care for adrien at all. adrien clearly has affection for felix and there has to be a reason for that. they were friends growing up and Adrien’s initial attitude toward felix in Felix is very warm. Adrien’s a trusting kid who gives a lot of second chances, as we’ve seen with Chloe, but if Felix had given him a reason to mistrust him before, I think adrien would’ve been treating him more the way he’s currently treating lila.

I also have to assume that felix has affection for adrien—I think probably a lot more than he actually shows. Ofc Felix’s treatment of adrien isn’t ok; I just think it’s hard to fully judge him as a character yet when we actually don’t know much about him or his motives. Personally I don’t feel that Felix’s actions in the episode Felix are a great indication of what he was like when adrien knew him before—adrien seemed surprised by the behavior and quick to forgive him after an apology, and he even asked felix to call him next time he felt “out of control.” That seems to indicate that adrien knew this wasn’t typical behavior but that felix was acting out because he didn’t know how to cope with losing his father (adrien even told plagg as much). Presumably this is also around the time felix first learned he is a senti, which would make him even more confused and upset and erratic before he came to terms with it. His goal in Felix was to get the ring that contained his amok, and once he was in possession of it, he seemed a lot more calm and in control.

This isn’t to say that we should trust felix as a character—he’s clearly very sus and shady and he’s kind of a wild card in the series because we’re not sure what his deal is or where his loyalties lie. I do think though that after protecting his own life and autonomy he is also concerned about protecting his cousin’s. He came back in risk to switch places with adrien, and yes he used that opportunity to snoop around Gabe’s stuff, but he also did stand up to gabe as he promised adrien he would. And the way he worded it seemed to show that he realized that adrien literally couldn’t stand up to his father bc of the ring, so this was an opportunity for felix do it for him. If Felix came to Paris just to steal the miraculous, he didn’t actually have to help adrien, but he still chose to. Felix talked a lot about freedom to adrien and even though he was condescending about it, to me it does seem like he wants adrien to have the same freedom he does. So he does emphasize with how Adrien’s sentihood keeps him trapped.

Idk I just don’t think felix was always as “bad” as he has appeared on the series so far, and even with what we have seen, there are a lot of missing pieces. I think a more complete picture would show that while felix certainly does questionable things sometimes, he is isn’t “evil,” and he’s definitely capable of love/affection, toward his mother in particular but also toward adrien, and potentially others in the future. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d classify him as a true neutral, kind of doing what is most beneficial for him and playing by his own rules on whatever team is most convenient at the moment. He could potentially tip either way into being a true villain or a true hero—we’ll just have to wait and see.

#anon #ask #felix #ml spoilers #ml strike back #ml risk

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miraculouslbcnreactions · 29 days

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This happening very recently, but I was replaying to another fan about the whole thing with the fandom being mad at Marinette about not telling Adrien about his father and about him being a senti monster and how it was dumb that the fandom was (going into a lot of the fandom making fanfic of Adrien leaving Marinette because of her lying and then turn around to complain.)

I, at first, said that I understand the fandom’s criticism because that moment seems OOC for Marinette to keep Gabriel’s secret and that if Marinette loved Adrien, she’d tell him the truth, regardless on him leaving or not.

They responded (to sum it up) that Marinette hates lies yes, but she keeps lies to protect the ones she loves. She does it all of the time. And her keeping a secret has nothing to do with the fear of loosing Adrien, but everything with his safety.

They then responded some more but I can’t get into cus…they blocked me…after I basically said they had Vaild points but I wouldn’t blame Adrien for leaving Marinette if he found out. I see both of their POV’s

My over all thoughts on this is that…I do understand why Marinette did the things she did, but it doesn’t erase the fact that it feels…icky that Adrien has little to no knowledge or anatomy over himself. The knowledge and anatomy lies with his partner…

So….thoughts?

So I disagree that this lie protects Adrien. It might keep him emotionally safe, but it risks his physical safety since he has two magical remote controls that aren't exactly well kept secrets. Marinette has no idea who all knows about them and she should be assuming that the new butterfly is in the know since the butterfly clearly knew about Emilie's hidden chamber.

If Marinette had kept the rings, then you could make the argument that she's keeping him safe in the best way that she can while still protecting the rest of the world since there is a solid argument to be made for not exposing her secrets while there's still an ongoing threat, but that argument's out the window since she gave the rings to Adrien! She made him the unknowing guardian of his own freedom in a world where jewelry theft is a common teenage past time. That's really, really, really bad and you cannot logically justify that choice.

With that being said, I can actually buy Marinette not telling Adrien right away. He just lost his father and, as previously said, telling Adrien probably means exposing her secret identity, which is a huge deal when the butterfly is still at large. I do think that she'd cave pretty quickly, though, because the guilt would eat her alive. I think that she'd quickly start having nightmares about him losing the rings and other such stuff that would quickly poison their relationship.

However, I also feel like this is yet another case of Marinette getting an unfair amount of blame for a thing that isn't all on her. Yes, she needs to tell him, but she's a late comer to this party who only knows the details second hand. Heck, I've said before that I'm not even totally sure that she knows that Adrien is a sentimonster because Felix's play was rather vague about Adrien and Kagami's status.

But you know who is fully in the know about everything? Felix! And Kagami! And Nathalie! And probably Amelie, too. People who are also supposed to love Adrien and want what's best for him. People who have also told him diddly squat even though they knew long before Marinette did, yet I don't see anyone complaining about them.

Kagami in particular really grinds my gears because I especially don't buy her keeping this from Adrien. She's the queen of confrontation who literally called him up to yell at him for being such a push over after seeing a freaking marketing photo! Does anyone actually buy her keeping the senti stuff from Adrien for literal months? In a lot of ways, I actually think Kagami and Felix should be the ones to tell Adrien because they know so much more than Marinette and because they share his status so he won't feel so alone.

Basically, the fact that Adrien doesn't know isn't the result of good writing, it's the hand of the author taking corporal form and sewing everyone's mouths shut because the writers either don't want to deal with this issue or they want to milk it out for drama in the coming seasons. Do I like that Marinette is keeping this a secret? No, but she's not doing it because she wants to. She's doing it because she's a fictional character whose writers are really bad at handling both serious topics and satisfying reveals. I haven't read any post season five fics but I'm sure that they'd annoy me just as much as the fics that deal with the season four conflict by heaping all the blame at Marinette's feet and holding no one else accountable for their actions or lack there of.

#ml writing salt #ml writing critical #ml season 5 salt #senti salt #adrien deserves better #marinette deserves better #ml fandom critical #ml fandom salt

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