We are underneath my desk today because I have severe mental health issues.
I was never discharged from the hospital.
I broke out and I lied.
I got a little wine stain on my shirt, that's cool.
Does anyone else ever have panic attacks every single time that they go into a bathroom?
I feel like they're always too big or too small to a cosmically horrifying level.
Yes, I take photos of you while you sleep.
Yes, I'm in your house right now.
Yes, you should look behind you more often.
"Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir" is a French baby show
where two teenagers are secretly superheroes.
In every episode they fight a new villain of the week
and, by the end of the episode, they've redeemed the villain
and solved all their problems with their magic.
It's also the only reason I'm still alive.
And most of the critical discourse online about 'Miraculous',
people say stuff like, "Oh, 'Miraculous'! My favorite garbage <3".
You ungrateful bars of soap.
That's the kind of thing that 'Kingdom Hearts' fans get to say,
that's the kind of right reserved for people that watch 'Supernatural' to the bitter end.
- The heartless obey me now, Sora.
Now I have nothing to fear.
- You're stupid!
'Miraculous' is not a mess.
It's genius and we don't deserve it.
I'm proselytizing, but the existence of the show, specifically, to convert people to watch it,
so no spoilers for this whole video.
The only outlet I have to stan this show,
the only people I'm in community with are star investigative journalist Lindalee Rose,
who's done excellent behind the scenes content with the creators.
- We're going to be going into Zag studios
and seeing all the secrets of the new Nickelodeon show, 'Miraculous'.
- I help writers to make them come alive
and so, design-wise and story-wise.
- That's cool.
And then there's just TikTok 'Miraculous' cosplayers,
because there's a very robust TikTok 'Miraculous' fandom, but...
♪ ♪
I am...
♪ ♪
It's just that I--
♪ ♪
I don't understand what you're doing.
I want you to be very happy, very far away from me.
Part 1: But It's A Baby Show
I know it's a baby show,
I just think you're a baby!
Since when are you above watching children's television?
I know what you watch on YouTube,
not all of it is as high octane as my content.
Some of it is trash.
So instead of re-watching the same three seasons of 'The Office' again,
you, basic uncreative fuck!
Watch 'Miraculous'!
Season One of 'Miraculous' starts off like a baby show.
It feels like a baby show.
It stays like a baby show.
It's kind,
it's funny,
it's cute,
it's sweet,
it's moral,
it's everything that your mom thought you were before you disappointed her.
Solid storytelling is solid storytelling.
You should watch excellent kids TV.
You gain nothing from categorically writing off an entire genre.
Maybe you deserve to watch a wholesome show with strong moral lessons.
Maybe you deserve simplicity.
Maybe you deserve to feel good.
Stop crying, why are you crying?
The more art you expose yourself to, the more powerful you become.
This is the calculus I'm using to try to become God.
Part 2: Emotional Abuse.
Yeah, but you weren't expecting that to be Part 2.
The way the show works is:
Butterfly man = Evil.
Cat Boy and Ladybug = Good.
Butterfly man uses shadow powers to capitalize on your emotional trauma,
leading you to a heightened destructive interpretation of your valid pain,
using your energy to create more destruction rather than healing.
Emotional abuse man does emotional abuse to people
and it gets way darker than you think it would.
You know, it's kind of evil if I like it, because I am Satan.
Let's remake 'Metal Gear Solid', but Solid Snake has Mickey Mouse's voice.
That's the only difference.
Why haven't we put out the sun yet?
Wait, I got distracted.
One of the central conceits of the show is how abuse works and how do we respond to it.
This theme is embodied by several characters.
The main one, obviously,
being the super bad big butterfly guy with the cane at his side.
Also, our main cat boy, Adrien Agreste has a really strained relationship with his father
and we watch the pain that his father is constantly putting in.
Really, Adrien is clinically depressed.
- Gotta go.
Photo shoot.
[CJ] But also, they love each other,
so they are trying to connect on some level,
they won't stop trying to connect and so we know it's evil,
but also we're kind of, rooting for them?
Because that's how abuse works more often than not.
We don't normally have a Twitter gun to end people's lives.
We have to-- Ow!
We have to negotiate with real people and how they hurt us,
but also, we care about them.
Which brings us to the ultimate abuse case study of this show:
Chloé Bourgeois, this bitch.
The main problem with Chloé is that she's white.
We stan Chloé because she's hilarious and we hate her because she's the worst.
In Season One, Chloé fulfills the archetype of school bully.
She's just needlessly cruel to everyone.
- Anyway, all that stuff about compliments and love...
Ridiculous.
Utterly ridiculous.
- This girl's got no heart.
Unhinged,
petty,
cruel,
vain,
selfish,
indulgent.
She's like...
Me.
In Season One, Chloé has some social capital,
but by Season Three, her destructive toxic behavior
has made everyone just kind of hate her.
- You're not gonna let her get away with this!
- That girl is worse than Hawk Moth!
- At least half the city has gotten akumatized because of her!
[ Giggles ]
The only people who eternally stand by Chloé are her most intimate victims,
of which there are two:
First is her emasculated father, Mayor Bourgeois,
who's so eager to please Chloé
and all he wants to do is love her and receive love for her,
and she withholds affection and just berates him and abuses this fact
and manipulates his need for her approval,
so that he can do horrifying abuses of power with his position.
She fucks with him constantly to get what she wants no matter how petty the desire
and without any regard for him as a person.
And he just takes it!
She has no respect for her father.
I actually don't think she even loves her father.
At the very least, she doesn't engage in the act of love,
the behavior of love.
She doesn't DO love.
And then, she has her best friend, Sabrina,
who is so cooked as a battered housewife.
It is hard to watch!
[ Serving Wine ]
I just spilled wine everywhere.
Sabrina is 100% loyal to Chloé.
Her lifestyle is just serving Chloé's desires and getting punched in the face by her,
emotionally constantly.
- Seriously, what are you good for?
The best case study of their relationship and the psychology behind it,
is in the episode "The Evillustrator",
where Sabrina actually becomes friends with somebody else instead of Chloé,
for a brief time.
As a result, we get to see what Sabrina thinks friendship is,
and her impulse is just immediately to become extremely clingy
and to idolize this new person,
and she does their homework for them without asking.
- I did your geography homework.
- Whoa! You didn't have to do that.
- Well, since you're my new best friend, it's the least I can do!
- Thanks, but I just can't. - Really?
[CJ] And you start to get the picture that this is what she thinks love is!
Is just expecting to be insulted and destroyed constantly,
and when someone isn't mean to her, she takes that as affection.
Cruelty is her standard and by the end of the episode she runs right back into Chloé's arms!
And we, as the audience, as well as the people around her
in her sociological setting need to kind of accept that she's committed to this,
and this is what she understands to be happy!
Is the only way she can process the world at this time.
- Chloé, your geography homework's ready!
[ Sighs ]
- Hey. - [Screaming] Ah!
And this is all done with purpose.
The show has a mission in what it might teach kids.
Most people in this universe are extremely kind to each other, regardless of background.
They celebrate their differences and they're not limited by their social standing or archetype,
like the geek and the jock, our best friends.
For no reason, it doesn't require explanation.
But then there's some characters that are just toxic by nature.
It's what they know.
The show deals with this like you have to deal with it in real life,
it's a complicated issue with no clear solutions.
We can't just round up people we don't like and shoot them in the back of the head,
unless, of course, it's Twitter.
In the way that Chloé destroys her life and is...
Really, a sad person, and you see this many times,
you start to wonder, "how is this even possible?
"How can someone be that cruel and not, at some point, get that they need to change?"
Until, after a long time, you meet her mom
and it looks like this:
- [Presenter] Audrey Bourgeois!
- I can't believe Gabriel allows his staff to drive like that.
- And neither do I.
- You spend a lot of time in New York,
it must be nice to be with your family for a change here in Paris.
- She's very happy to see me!
By the way, mom, I have a little something for you.
- Clara--
Oh, Chloé.
What is this?
That's really sad.
The cycle of abuse is just running down the family chain,
there's no quick fix for that.
- It's not her fault, okay?
Chloé just doesn't like birthdays.
She never remembers them.
- Just like her mom.
Here's a quote from Mélanie Duval, one of the writers that talks about this:
Anyways, yeah. This is deep shit.
Part 3: Representation
Some of you may have noticed
I'm not white.
As a result of this, I've been not white most of my life.
And, as you may have heard from some rather ungrateful demographics,
being not white can affect you!
One of those impacts is growing up as a young Indian boy
and fantasizing about becoming an actor, but realizing that
I'm less likely to be cast as the lead in a Rom-Com than I am to be "terrorist number six".
So I have a stake in representation and diversity in media on a psychological personal level,
but also, ideologically, I just think it's objectively the way to go,
for two reasons:
Firstly, from a humanistic political perspective,
the only way to truly break down prejudice is exposure to a demographic
that you might have preconceived notions about.
Am I making sense? Ow!
The world will be a better place when more kinds of people are exposed to more kinds of people.
We have to interrupt the assumed standards.
I feel like a small monkey.
The second reason I care about representation is from an artistic perspective.
Bringing new people into creative spaces means more perspectives,
better stories.
It means news stories.
It expands the artistic landscape.
It allows us to progress further in a medium.
I care more about art than I care about people.
I mean, I would kill people.
People are awful and they're all gonna die.
I'm gonna die.
I'm gonna die soon!
I hope I don't die, I'm afraid of it.
And I know when I do I'm going to be eaten by cats.
Eaten by cats!
The main character, Miraculous, is the titular Ladybug,
whose civilian name is Marinette Dupain-Cheng.
She's half Chinese and half Parisian.
And you heard it right, the French part of her last name
is literally just the French word for "bread".
Marinette Bread-Cheng.
And we don't shy away from a Chinese culture.
We don't shy away from anyone's culture!
They celebrate the differences and it's all informed and well done.
There's all sorts of body types in this show,
there's all sorts of skin colors in this show,
there's different languages spoken.
'Miraculous' has brown-skinned Creole queens.
It has femme bitches in love with goth bitches.
It's got gamers!
All of the races!
The diversity in the show doesn't draw attention to itself.
It doesn't have to be the way that it is, but it just is.
It's not praxis, it's not the revolution,
but it's good and I like it.
It's refreshing.
It's like a fresh squeeze of lemon in the eye.
What?
Part 4: Worldbuilding
There's a phrase I use to define a characteristic
that my favorite pieces of worldbuilding have in common:
"No character left behind".
'Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood'?
No character left behind.
'Lelouch Of The Rebellion'?
No character left behind.
'Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir'?
No character left behind!
♪ ♪
Every single character are introduced into a narrative,
no matter how small incidental holds the capacity for elaboration.
This is the joy of worldbuilding.
The greatest worldbuilding standard in all of storytelling,
the ultimate high watermark that every single universe is trying to imitate
when it tries to do worldbuilding is real life.
Because in our reality every single person has a backstory.
Every single person has a function in society.
People are deep and everything is interconnected.
When I was a child,
I wished Pokémon were real so bad it gave me depression.
I was thoroughly bummed out that I would never
experience this universe inside of my Game Boy Color in my lifetime.
Why do Bionicles get to live on cool islands with cool names and
fire swords while I have to have a panic attack in the grocery store?
But here's the cure for that thought:
If I lived in the Pokémon world, I wouldn't have:
Any rap music. Any of the rap music I like, all gone.
Your favorite movie, gone.
Your mom, gone.
Also, not for nothing, our society would be based on the exploitation of animals on mass.
Oh, fuck! That is our reality.
The point is our universe is magic.
If we lived in the Pokémon universe,
then we would look at this reality we currently exist
and as if that was something to fantasize about.
Like music!
Wiggly air make your brain go "burr", that's fucked up!
Reading is just staring at a piece of wood with hieroglyphics and hallucinating.
Tell me that doesn't make you want to kill yourself.
So stories with the "no character left behind" ethos
are stories that capture the imagination due to their optimization of their fictional world
that resembles ours the way that everything is connected.
You decide on some principles that defer their universe from our universe
and then you create some characters, you put them in there
and then you let them all follow themselves to their logical conclusions.
The mark of a cohesive and complete piece of
art is when all the pieces are aware of all the other pieces
and everything is in conversation with each other.
That's optimization, that's the joy of worldbuilding.
'Miraculous?' God-tier worldbuilding.
Amazing! Everyone's got a place.
Because of the conceit of the show and the villain of the week style,
everyone gets shadow butterflied into a super villain at some point,
which means that we get a little mini character study on people and their trauma,
no matter how incidental they are.
The show just doesn't forget about characters, it just doesn't want to.
It keeps bringing them back in interesting ways.
Even the pigeon man!
The pigeon man!
- Oh, dreary day, poor Parisians.
[ Pigeon Noises ]
The most difficult thing about getting people into this show is getting them through Season One.
Many have tried to go through the 'Miraculous' episode list
and pick out the plot important ones and take out the quote-unquote filler,
but it's impossible because every scrap of information,
no matter how basic,
gets brought back in an interesting way.
Season One and its repetition and its simplicity is the groundwork for
building something complex and beautiful.
By the time you're in Season Three, the way that the worldbuilding is ramped up,
you start to wonder if children could even keep up with it.
But I suspect they can because children aren't stupid,
and also, the repetition that is baked into the structure of the show,
reinforces our understanding of the laws of the universe.
Part 5: Repetition.
In 'Miraculous Ladybug' every single time a superhero puts on their suit or uses
their power we get the exact same animation with the same musical stinger played again
and again
and again.
- Tikki, spots on!
The main thing that this does is it saves the creators a lot of money.
But because they're geniuses, it's also used creatively.
You see, the inevitable way you start to interact
with this ritual that occurs multiple times every episode
is you learn the words and sing along passionately.
"No more evil doing for you, little akuma".
"Time to de-evilize".
"Gotcha!"
"Bye bye, little butterfly".
"Miraculous ladybug!"
- Thank you for keeping your promise.
- We are a team, aren't we?
Pound it.
It's interactive on purpose.
It's fun, we're having fun!
- We had such a great school day today!
What was your favorite part?
- [Wanda Maximoff] I only remember feeling completely alone.
Empty out, just...
- Endless nothingness. - I liked that too!
The hyper repetition breeds hyper familiarity.
It gives us the space to breathe and it cements our thorough understanding
for exactly how things work.
This is necessary for how intense the power interaction gets later on.
The way the show structurally starts is with no origin story,
just break neck into the action,
but you can start to infer the rules and the nature of everything,
because of this repetition, because the show's smart.
And then, way deep into Season One,
you finally do get a two-part origin story and it's able to be nuanced and great
because it doesn't actually have to explain stuff to us.
It can just be interesting instead.
And then, when you finally start delving into the lore...
Bro, shit don't stop.
I can't overstate how good the magic system is.
It's fucked good.
I'm serious.
If you like 'Fullmetal Alchemist', you have to watch the show!
- Lucky charm!
Also, the convention and our intimacy with it makes any break from it exhilarating,
so when they start to push powers further or they make comedic interruptions
to what we know and love...
It's adrenaline!
Really.
Also, the final bit of repetition is it's so funny how the ultimate
big bad butterfly guy with the cane at his side,
he somehow justifies having a topical monologue at the end of every single episode,
they're like, "oh, you got me this time!
"But one day I will defeat you!"
He's lost like hundreds, if not thousands of times,
and he always gives the monologue.
- Wretched pigeons.
Wretched Ladybug.
I'll destroy every one of you!
- You don't scare me, Ladybug!
I know I'll destroy you in the end.
Someday, somehow, I'll destroy you!
No!
- One of these days, I'll find out who Ladybug and Cat Noir really are.
Someday your miraculous will be all mine.
- Blasted Ladybug!
Blasted Valentine's day!
Like, motherfucker, I appreciate the tenacity and your belief in yourself,
but at some point it's just a matter of humility and self-awareness to be like,
"I lose every time, maybe I just shouldn't do that monologue".
Part: Conclusion
Watch it.
Stop not watching it.
Do not be not watching it now.
I didn't spoil anything about the show because I love you.
I'm the only one that loves you.
My love for you gives you value.
Sike bitch, I'm a specter on the Internet.
I don't know you exist, give me money!
Power through the first Season and appreciate it for what it is:
An excellent interactive baby show.
Surprisingly sweet, nuanced and funny.
And then, when you get to the real deep shit
and it starts playing its actual pieces, it's going to be a great cinematic experience.
And if you're a cool degenerate that still needs a little bit of convincing,
I have personally developed the ultimate drinking game for this watching experience.
I've been fine-tuning this.
This is perfect.
This is definitive.
Don't trust any other list online, I'm built different.
I've cracked the code.
Get out your bottle of wine and drink:
Every transformation.
- Plagg, claws out!
Every power usage.
- Cataclysm!
Every time Hawk Moth's window opens.
Every time the Eiffel Tower inexplicably becomes central to the conflict.
- So what now? - Let's take Chloé to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
There will be less zombies up there.
Every time Adrien mopes about his abuse of absentee father.
- Father?
Every "what am I supposed to do with this?"
- What am I supposed to do with this?
Make tea?
And every "pound it".
This is how I'm currently spending five out of seven nights a week.
This is normal.
I shave my head at 4 am.
I know you're thinking about not watching the show.
You enjoyed the video essay and you're like, "okay, that was great,
"but I'm not gonna watch the show".
WATCH THE SHOW.
I know where you live!
I know who you are!
My arms are detachable.
I have a two terabyte hard drive where my heart should be.
I can prove the existence of God,
I choose not to every single day to fuck with scientists.
Watch 'Miraculous'!
Ow!
On screen currently-- Wait, my earring's fucked.
On screen currently are the names of my patrons.
You might be looking at this list and thinking yourself,
"why is everyone on this list so much more fuckable than me?"
The reason is because their names are on the list
and yours isn't.
You have to give me money if you want your life to have more value.
Patreon is an excellent platform because it allows you to support creators
and fund the work that they do.
For example, if a creator was marathoning 'Miraculous' and spilled wine on their laptop keys
and the laptops started slowly shutting down, so they took it into Apple for diagnostics
and then they said you're gonna need a full top case replacement.
It's gonna cost 530 Great British pounds, which translates to approximately 937 Canadian.
And then, that creator mapped out their finance over the next three weeks
and their income and what they're spending and they realize
they're probably gonna have to ask their mom to borrow 200 dollars,
which is really bad because their mom's gonna be mad,
because this is not the first time this has happened.
Patreon would help that person,
if that were happening.