Miraculous (Simply the Best)

by Morgan Stone

When I sat down and tried to decide what to write for the Secrets issue, I was a bit stuck. I had a lot of ideas, but none of them felt right. I needed something perfect, and that object of perfection struck me when I was driving the other night. What’s the best secret? Nothing else but that of Miraculous Ladybug.

Have I watched this show in the last four or five years? No. I have very little knowledge of what is currently happening in the lore, and I've never been one for internet fandom so I'm pretty out of the loop. But this show does live quite prominently in my mind from the several years that I watched it intensely while I was in high school.

Miraculous, les aventures de Ladybug et Chat Noir, or alternatively known here across the ocean as Miraculous: The Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir, is a french children's animated cartoon about two Parisian teenagers (Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Adrien Agreste) that double as the city's famed superheroes (Miraculous Ladybug and Chat Noir). 

They have their powers due to the "miraculouses" which are pieces of jewelry that correspond with a Kwami, which are tiny mystical creatures that provide said power, which is channeled through the jewelry. Together, they fight to stop Hawkmoth, who is another individual with a miraculous that uses it for evil, sending butterflies, known as akumas, that transform someone who's feeling negative emotions into a supervillain.

Whenever characters use the miraculouses to transform into their superhero alter egos, they do incredible magical girl transformations, and it's so fun. They can combine miraculouses, and have different forms of their existing identities, they give people they know miraculouses to join in the fight, and there's so much interpersonal drama. The show is goofy, it's sweet and it's a lot of fun. But that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

In this show, there are secrets GALORE! I mean for starters, they are superheroes, so they have to keep their identities secret from their family, friends, and from each other. Another great secret? The evil Hawkmoth is actually Adrien's father, and he nearly kills his son on a literal regular basis. The secrets are more and more layered, but that would require a lot of exposition and at that point you may as well just go watch the show.

But there's one secret that really makes the show what it is: The Love Square taking place between TWO PEOPLE! TWO! I've created a diagram to help explain just exactly what is happening.

So Marinette is in love with Adrien, therefore both Marinette and Miraculous Ladybug are in love with him (because they're the same person). However, Chat Noir is in love with Ladybug, which means that both he and Adrien love her (since they're the same person). Therefore, there is simply no winning for anyone in the love square. Chat Noir will never be with Ladybug, because Marinette is too in love with Adrien, who unfortunately is in love with Ladybug who...

THIS SHOW IS AMAZING!

And it gets better. I haven't been caught up on the show, but I have recently learned that in a turn of events, Marinette let her love for Adrien go and has fallen in love with Chat Noir, while Chat Noir has let his love for Ladybug go and now Adrien is in love with Marinette. 

Who is writing this show! Who is letting all of this happen! I mean I can literally look up who, but STILL. I just need to express the impressive nature of this web they have wove. 

What makes this so compelling is that classic "will they wont they," except you know they wont only because they are too dumb to see who the other is. There's literally an episode where Adrien and Marinette dress up and play Chat Noir and Ladybug for a celebration, and neither of them seems to think "huh, they kinda look like the real superhero." It's the kind of thing that has you yelling at the TV because "THEY ARE RIGHT THERE COME ON SERIOUSLY."

While I haven't been caught up on this show since like 2018, I'm starting to think I need to. What will they do next? What will the writers develop? How will they make the relationship between these two people more and more convoluted? What in the world will they manage to do next?

Realistically, I don't have the most ample time to re-submerge myself into this, but it's still really fun to think about. I imagine it's an amazingly fun show to work on and create, and it's awesome to see that it's still going strong eight years later! 

Perhaps one day Adrien and Marinette will find out the true nature of each other's identities, but at the same time, what would the show be? It's predicated on this eternal misunderstanding, and that secret is what makes the show compelling. What would the show without that central secret even look like? 

The secret makes the show fun. Who said secrets are always bad?