september's coming soon

tl;dr Yeah, if he's meant to be an explanation for Marinette's decision-making this season, they're sure not interested in getting that across to the audience.

S2: Original planned placement of episode

S3: Episode airs as one of the last episodes of the season. Thanks to time-travel and miraculous ladybugs, status quo remains at the end. Marinette uncharacteristically cuddling Cat Noir in relief in the final scene might suggest some change in her feelings for him, but this isn't followed up in later episodes. The episode is not brought up again in S3, and at no point does Marinette appear to have been mentally affected by the experience.

S4: Marinette reveals her identity to Alya, and Hawkmoth cottons on to Rena Rouge (whose identity HE knows) being special. In the final third of the seasons, Marinette repeatedly doubles down on the fact that no-one can know both her and CN's identity, since Hawkmoth would then only need that one person to get everything he wants.

"Sentibubbler": Episode is a bit past halfway through S4. Immediately after letting Alya keep Trixx permanently, Marinette is clearly having doubts about Alya's decision-making independent of her. The episode starts with a nightmare where Alya has made Marinette's idenitity public to all the world, which gets increasingly absurd until Cat Blanc shows up talking about getting married. The scene is not framed as particularly scary to the audience (again: compare it to "Oblivio" or "Cat Blanc"), and nothing in the directing and the framing recalls her actual run-in with him. Both Tikki and Alya chide Marinette for overreacting to the nightmare, and the episode is about proving them right: Alya is trustworthy and cunning and capable of keeping her miraculous safe. Marinette doesn't as much as think about Cat Noir until he shows up for battle and she's got to keep him from finding out that the Ladybug on scene is an illusion. Cat Blanc's presence in the episode is connected to Marinette's insecurities about Alya; at no point are there lines drawn between him and Cat Noir.

"Ephemeral": Adrien is once again akumatised. The only tenuous connection to "Cat Blanc" is the fact that Gabriel uses the same chain of events for akumatising him: get him while he's still reeling from the shock of Emilie's corpse and Gabriel being Hawkmoth.

"Kuro Neko": Ladybug thinks Cat Noir has been akumatised as a civillian. The only possible connection to "Cat Blanc" is her assuming that the akuma would be in the bell. There are no flashbacks or otherwise mentions made of Cat Blanc.

"Strik Back": CN calls her a pussy for refusing to learn his identity; when she brings up the aforementioned earth logic, he counters that they "can't be akumatised". She briefly recalls Cat Blanc, which she knows proves him wrong (and he doesn't, since she for whatever reason never told him about it). She does look upset at the memory, as anyone would (there's also the fact that he's clearly not comprehending how dangerous this could be). They're interrupted by Rena Furtive's activies being revealed to him and the topic not brought up again.

To borrow my own cleverness from elsewhere: Remembering that the world ended because you gave your crush a present =/= having PTSD

I swear to god I did not get out of bed this morning with any plans to write 3K words on Cat Blanc and authorial intent, but here we are, I guess. Might post to tumblr later. ( ho boy )

(if you’re at all intersted, check out pages 84-95 in the second edition of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, where you can learn all about how we construct authorial intent, underread and overread as we fill in gaps, and how all of this is just part of human nature)

The good: Since I started painting my nails, I HAVE reduced the amount of biting my cuticles

The bad: Since I started painting my nails and keeping them longer (because short nails + nail polish looks silly), I've been experienceing that previously unknown feminine ailment of "broken nails", culminating with today's fun which took a third of the nail off and bled like a pig and today is mealprep + hair washing day and this is inconvenient (but luckily not painful, at least not yet)

Conclusion: Long nails are bothersome and nail painting is time-consuming, but will hopefully be worth it if one day I either no longer have torn cuticles, or at least stop fixing them with my teeth

OTOH: Should Luka Couffaine, who I despise not because of the person he is portrayed as but because of the way he is written, count as a kindred spirit or not? He would share my suffering of the tediousness of nail painting, but as a guitarist he keeps his short and don't have to live with the fear of doing jumping jacks and catching a thumb on a shelf

I'm really really really not religious, but a post-grad degree in literature teaches you things.

Writing a fic full of of Biblical allusions isn't particularly pretentious. That Hetalia fic that was just Finland and Norway hanging around and making commentary on pieces of history that probably most people even in the countries wouldn't catch? That was pretentious. The only reader I trust to have understood what it was about was the kudos left by a Scandinavia word who turned out to be Swedish when I checked the profile. The rest, presumably lacking the background knowledge the fic was discussing between the lines, would probably just read a kinda weird and kinda sinister NorFin friendship fic.

But mythological allegories in a fandom where canon is not particularly subtle about the mythological allusions?

Not pretentious, unless allegory is per definition pretentious.

But fandom isn't as deep as you all think and when I see allusions discussed at all, it's mostly just to point them out, much rarer in attempts to read them as narrative devices. We love fairy-tale crossovers or maybe artsy fic citing fairy-tales as blunt metaphors, but I yet to find fic where the meaning relies on allegory.

So of course that was what I went and did.

Said fic curently has three different reviews explaining that it left the reader crying in the middle of the night, which I guess says something about its length as a one-shot, but also that I really didn't need to worry about my clusmy use of litterary devices. Because even as I EXPLICITLY POINTED AT THEM IN THE NOTES, at least the audience that liked it enough to bother leaving comments was completely blind to the fact that a fic open to be read as a Christ allegory miiiiiiiight just also suggest a return from symbolic death. (alternatively: my writing simply isn't that great and the readers clever enough to have picked up on that had long since noped out or didn't think I needed encouragement to write more)

I don't fancy being the judge of my own writing, but I've sat through enough lectures to know that what I wrote would be blatantly obvious to any literary scholar worth their salt. I quoted the scripture verbatim twice and the Notre Dame was damn near omnipresent, and that put together with the canon connection to Mary and Joan of Arc would make it clear that yeah no, the references to Christianity in this fic are not incidental.

So I don't know which it is. In an age where faith is strictly personal, is it that people just don't expect to see a living religion used for purposes other than proselytising? Is it truly that foreign to see Christianity treated just like any other mythology? I mean, based on real, honest to god Christians I know, it's just very likely that even believers reading the fic completely missed out on the part where I turned Adrien into John the Baptist because god only knows I've had to discuss the Bible with enough people who believe a lot in a text that my atheist-raised-on-an-illustrated-children's-bible ass knows better than them.

Or just as likely: Fanfic Is Trash And That's Why You Should Read Novels That Aren't Genre Fiction. Yes there is really good fanfic out there no genre fiction isn't per definition bad but if you fancy yourself a writer then you should read good books too and I say this as a person who unabashedly read fic and loves fantasy most of all. I still won't shut up about the fact that almost all fanfic and most genre fiction I read do not aspire for subtlety.

Or allegory is just per definition pretentious, I guess.

My main fandom production is and has always been meta.

Of which maybe 1% ever got posted, presumably because I'm a wuss who don't like getting into arguments online or don't like upsetting people or whatever. I'm afraid to try and do estimates based on the sizes of the dozens of .txt documents saved in a carefully buried folder on an external hard drive. I've got fandom commentary going back to 2005 at least. There is a lot of it, and most of it is at least halfway finished, and got left behind as my fandom interest waned.

Today's topic included two drafts on a lengthy defence of the NO. 6 anime contra the novels (and technically the manga, but no-one ever brings up the manga in this discussion and we all know why). A long take on why Luka Coffaine is a shite character next to Kagami and why I'm not about to forgive that even IF he gets a personality outside his guitar next season (tl;dr amatonormativity). A near 2000 words of exploration of Chloé, Kagami, Lila and Alya in how they're placed around Marinette and around each other.

I was about ready to post that last one, in fact, because pointing out that "Lila" and "Alya" are near anagrams can't possibly upset people.

Point is, this was the results of my latest laptop decluttering a few months back, consisting of the pieces that were good enough and interesting enough to maybe be worth finishing and sharing. There were some 15 000 words on it. But GUESS WHAT GENUIS did something something with her shift and backspace button when she was trying to delete a few empty lines, and hit ctrl+s on instinct before se realised what she'd done.

What's left is some non-English tweet on subtitling practices that I wouldn't post anyway, and three lines of imaginary explanation on the topic of how Kino's NB status is definitely arguable but far from hard canon that I also wouldn't post anyway, because good god that is one discussion you can't win.

And, I mean. I probably wouldn't post that Luka piece, since my main beef with him isn't his existence so much what it says about or society that large parts of the fandom l o v e s him but is all "ew, Kagami" even though she's objectively a far better character. I'm not sure I'd do the NO. 6 piece either - I mean, it consisted of a separate preface about adaptation theory and that no, I don't in fact think the anime in particular is good but jesus christ, neither are the novels. The issue is that the fandom has recently got into reading a lot more meaning into said novels than I suspect they ever were supposed to have, and I don't particularly want to get into the it's-not-that-deep-fam debates with people who are political about them.

I remember the content of these essays well enough. I can re-trace them and make the same points, and at least that NO. 6 one, I can maybe get RIGHT rather than being torn between two pretty good but not perfect versions. And ultimately - what's the use of hauling around essays on fandom topics that nobody would ever read? I mean, I like going back to read them sometime, probably just becaues I like my own points. If nothing else, maybe this could be a lesson in having the courage to say things before the chance is gone.

Or maybe just something about using a file format that only allows for undoing one thing.

I took it from kalloway so that maybe I'll post more.

A: Ships that you currently like a lot. (They don’t have to be OTPs because not everyone has OTPs.) Friendships, pairings, threesomes, etc. are allowed.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng/Adrien Agreste in all its variations, but since the fandom seriously has wank about this, my ranking goes

1. Ladrien
2. Ladynoir
3. Adrienette
4. Marichat

(yes, I'm the person who thinks marichat is by far the dullest take on it and who adores ladrien in all its impossible, infatuated dysfunction. so edgy)

I won't bore you with all the reasons I like this stupid ship enough to write 2500 words of defensive meta about it, but suffice it to say that I love it like I haven't loved a ship in years.

I'm also still into Shion/Nezumi, though the NO. 6 fandom is pretty quiet these days. What can I say? Five thousand reunion fic is not enough to quell my need for seeing those two having a happy ending. I need an icon.

Honorary mention: Yuuram, which I'd read the hell out of if the fandom wasn't dead.


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