A Certain Slant of Light

The final batch of Whumptober ficlets!

( 26. Abandoned. STRIKE team. )

( Alternate Prompt 1. Wake up! Miraculous Ladybug; Marinette. )

( 28. Beaten. Steve Rogers is having trouble adjusting to the 21st century. )

( Alternative prompt 9. Hiding. American Girl: Samantha. Nellie & her sisters hiding in Samantha's attic. )

( 30. Recovery. Natasha with SHIELD. )

( 31. Embrace. Anne of Green Gables; Katherine’s unrequited love for Anne. )

My biggest show this summer has been Miraculous Ladybug, which wasn’t a new show to me - I watched season one this year - but this summer we watched all of season 2 and have started season 3 (or rather the first half of season three, which Netflix is streaming under the name season 4, WHY NETFLIX) and season 2 was the one that got my super INVESTED.

See, season one is a fairly standard monser-of-the-week magical girl/superhero show, except that it’s set in France (I can’t tell you how many times they destroy the Eiffel Tower) and one of the girls is a boy, who is in love with his superhero partner Ladybug, only he doesn’t realize that Ladybug is actually his classmate Marinette who, in turn, is in love with her classmate Adrian… who is secretly her superhero partner, Chat Noir. OMG.

Neither young love nor secret identities are usually my thing, which is why I didn’t get super into the show in season one, but season two totally won me over because (1) the show’s mythology levels waaay up (new superhero powers! New superhero buddies! MARINETTE’S BEST FRIEND BECOMES A SUPERHERO AND IT’S AMAZING. Also way more backstory on the big bad), but even more importantly, the characterization gets way more complex.

I could point to a number of examples of this, but I think the character who most encapsulates the change is Chloe Bourgeois, who for most of season one is a pretty standard mean girl with a rich daddy: her only interesting quality is that she sometimes like to dress up like Ladybug and pretend to be a superhero herself. She’s so mean that she’s responsible for about half the akumatizations in the city (the big bad turns people into supervillains-for-a-day by sending an evil butterfly called an akuma to use their negative emotions to give them a supervillain persona).

But in season two Chloe’s (extremely) nascent yearning to become a superhero herself begins to blossom. She has character growth! Tiny baby steps of character growth! Tiny baby steps of character growth often followed by serious backsliding, but SUCH IS LIFE. However, my very favorite thing is that Marinette accidentally superheroizes Chloe Bourgeois too, and Chloe is just as bad at it as you might imagine, but she actually realizes she messed up and also manages to pull her superheroine skills together enough to join the big superhero team-up at the end of the season.

Also, I love Chloe’s magical girl transformation sequence. In fact I love ALL the transformation sequences, including the big bad’s. Every single time we got a new transformation sequence I shrieked, and this included Ladybug and Chat Noir’s new transformation sequences when they had to use their power level-ups to turn into fishpeople.

And it looks like we’re going to get more new superheroes in season three AND there are still four or five levels of powers that Ladybug and Chat Noir haven’t used. SO MANY NEW TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCES TO DISCOVER.