Okakuri Deserves Rights

LADRIEN PANIC ATTACK PART 2?!?!!?!?!?!?! LADRIEN PANIC ATTACK PART 2!!!!?!?!?!?!

LADRIEN.

PANIC.

ATTACK.

PART 2?!?!!?!?!?!?!

Feels good to draw something stupid again

that reveal though

COME ON LADY HELP A GUY OUT

let me whisper one of the reasons ladrien and ladynoir make me go feral. a lot of fandom talks about marinette being unappreciated in her life and of course there’s the bane of my existence “true selves” but i think that fundamentally overlooks the fact that marinette is fucking adored and loved and well cared for by most of the people in her life. most people look at marinette and are like yes! that is someone to love!

meanwhile when she’s ladybug she has all this pressure and stress and burden that she carries but for everyone else she has to put on the face of strong and capable and able to take on anything. and of course paris loves a hero, of course paris loves their hero, but no one in the entire city knows or gets ladybug like chat noir. chat noir sees her at her lowest and worst and loves her for it. they push back at each other and support each other and ladybug is not just a figurehead but like the realest of real people to him. and so when ladybug comes to him whether he’s chat noir or adrien there’s this level of tenderness that just rips me apart like i’ll watch the last five minutes of strike back and lose my mind because we see ladybug devastated and panicking in adrien’s room while adrien works to calm her down and then we cut to chat noir reassuring her that they will fix this together and there’s nothing they can’t face and just… with him ladybug gets to fuck up and break down and he still loves her and maybe loves her more for it. idk this is not a comprehensive breakdown of why i think marinette as ladybug deserves love and recognition too or why seeing her at her alleged strongest being taken care of and loved and known intimately makes me so warm inside but i wanted to try and put it into words just a little bit.

"It's really me, Adrien Agreste."

I commissioned this from the amazing @ladyofacat for @miraculers-for-ukraine! Check out the HD version here and here!

you just know if Adrien ever knew ahead of time that Ladybug was going to come to his room he’d be waiting there like th

sick adrien being rescued by ladybug and him feverishly slurring the word mildly over and over again

ladybug is hella confused and concerned meanwhile plagg is hiding out in adrien’s shirt pocket like thank god they’re both stupid

OP this is such galaxy brain I had to draw it

Later

I still can’t get over what a great idea the Lovesquare is, for engaging people with a ship. 

Just having two characters be cute together is fairly simple, but it’s rarely enough to get people super interested in it, to get really invested in the relationship. In a lot of media, the most interesting couple, and the one that’s written about the most, isn’t the canon one that the series is actually trying to push. The canon couple often has fairly shallow interactions, the relationship between the two characters isn’t as important or emotional as between a different set of characters (this happens in Shounen a lot, with rival characters almost always thinking about each other more often, being motivated BY each other, more than the protagonist and designated love interest are).

But with Adrien and Marinette, that’s not the case. Adrien and Chat Noir both play HUGELY important roles in Marinette’s life, and Marinette and Ladybug both play very important roles in Adrien’s - especially Ladybug. They’re constantly thinking of each other and taking actions BASED on each other, are motivated by each other. The relationship between the two of them is the bedrock the series rests on, whether romantic or platonic.

And then there’s the facets that the Lovesquare adds, the added angles and dynamics. Adrienette, Ladrien, Marichat, and Ladynoir - each have their own distinctive dynamics and things going on, and interactions on one side affects how they interact in at least two other sides of the square. It keeps things interesting and complicated, as well as presenting lots of different angles to explore the relationship between these two characters, and exploring the different sides of the characters themselves in the process.

The dramatic irony of it all is also just so tasty.

Usually with any sort of secret identity superhero media the protagonist(s) and audience have roughly equal knowledge of what’s going on. Lois Lane is in the dark, but Superman knows everything we do. When she tells Clark to be braver and stop running from the action, he’s in on the joke.

With ML, and especially the love square, there’re extra layers. Marinette might be snickering at Chat’s exaggeration of an event Ladybug was present for, but at the same time she’s missing that it’s Adrien involved.

This is part of why reveal stuff can be so fun, as they start to unravel all these extra dimensions. An offhand remark to Marinette and a harmless personal detail shared with Ladybug, and suddenly the pieces click and she’s got a whole new perspective on Chat.

That’s another aspect of it, I think. An extremely frustrating part of any goofy romance is unnecessarily bad communication. If they’d just talk! ML and ML fandom is guilty of this in a lot of ways, of course, but the lovesquare enables a lot of “you played the game perfectly and still lost” scenarios. With the best of intentions and without any forced errors, there’s still so much room to spin drama and extra relationship interactions without anyone being at fault.

Chat respects Ladybug’s boundaries and stays professional, then quietly admits to his friend Mari (trustworthy Marinette, who would never tell a soul) that he has feelings that aren’t worth hurting his partnership to bring up, and suddenly she has to balance that. Marinette relaxes around Chat (her goofy partner, that she trusts with her life) and her distance from Adrien is now so painful. Ladybug hypes up a civilian by minimizing how bad the situation is without Chat, and it hits at his deepest insecurities.

And they can be trying so hard! Ladybug would never talk down her partner! Marinette is doing her very best to be a real friend to this boy! Chat is just trying to make everyone happy! They both overthink anything that might reveal their identities, not realizing that they’ve given one person every piece of the puzzle.

Y'all the takeaway wasn’t “Catwalker was too perfect and distracting and Chat Noir isn’t perfect and distracting which is why he’s the better partner for Ladybug” it was “Chat Noir is Ladybug’s partner. It’s not about whether or not he’s ‘the best’ for the job, it’s about him being Ladybug’s best friend and the one she CHOOSES as her partner.” After everything with Catwalker, Ladybug wasn’t thinking “Chat Noir was the perfect partner because he wasn’t so distracting” or anything related to their job, her only thought was the same as the little girl’s thoughts about Kuro Neko: “This isn’t my kitty. I miss my kitty.”

That’s far more meaningful and romantic than showing that Ladybug “needs” Chat Noir, imo. She DOESN’T “need” Chat Noir to be her partner, she could find someone else, but the one she WANTS by her side as her Cat is him and him alone. Love is about choosing each other.

@buggachat​‘s tags:

I didn’t listen to you. I lied to you. I pushed you away.  It’s you and me against the world, m’lady.

when he switches in to "my wife needs me" mode