then, what are your favorite fics on ao3 that are angst? or just the right amount of angst? 🤭
tell me how he makes you feel by fleurjaune (@unecoccinellenoire) and archekoeln (@telmes)
Anagnorisis by minuseven
The Splintered Soul Staring Back At Me by Dragongirl180
It's a Long Way Down by ShadowMayura (@shadowmayura)
To Stand Among Ruins by Windcage (this one isn't even super angsty, it's just my favorite and I will never stop recommending it)
And of course, one cannot make an angst fic rec list without including Throwing Up These Butterflies by MyMayura. 😍
I've mentioned most of these multiple times before. I am sure there are so many great fics much angstier than these that I'm not listing because I haven't read them. I must confess, I don't really read that many fics. I've probably written more than I've read in the last year.
“Oh, I-” She looked down. “Just needed to take my mind off things,” she murmured.
“And is swinging around the Eiffel Tower a good method?”
Fanart of Felix with the fox miraculous <3 from the fanfic "Trickster"
https://archiveofourown.org/works/30737288/chapters/75861206
by @lennauts
It's not fanart of that scene it's just dialogue I thought would fit, the cute shapes are a mirage he made that's floating around the tower.
He's doing that thing you see in animated movies where he's swishing his claws through it and watching the shapes fly away and then float back into the current- kinda like water?
I guess another thing about ‘Ephemeral’ is like. Getting one what-if/worst case scenario episode to demonstrate a version of highly-anticipated events that won’t happen is fine.
But the more I think about it, the stranger it feels that we got two.
Because - speaking purely from the father/son reveal angle here - now that we’ve seen more than one possibility of how Gabriel and Adrien react to each other’s secret that both end in Gabriel akumatizing his son, I can’t help wondering what we, as an audience, are supposed to expect from a permanent reveal? Like, are we meant to dread Gabriel learning his son is Chat Noir because we’ve seen twice now that it goes poorly, or are we to expect a totally different take on the reveal when it goes down for real?
Maybe it’s my apathy, but I feel like there’s a lack of tension here? If Gabriel reacts to finding out Chat Noir’s identity by considering his opportunity to take advantage of it for his own gain, why would I be invested in that? I’ve already seen it. Twice. I’m not going to learn anything new about his character as a result. The only way to vary that approach would be to have Adrien successfully resist him, but that still wouldn’t do anything for Gabriel’s character…which wouldn’t be out of the blue given how little the show appears to actually care about Gabriel’s characterization when it shares even an inch of space with the lovesquare.
And if the reveal between them doesn’t result in Gabriel trying to take advantage of his son…that would be great, depending on whether or not it manages to exceed the stakes of the reveal scenarios that preceded it. The show has to top itself. Its audience shouldn’t be left underwhelmed because the actual plot points it commits to are less interesting than the ones it had already explored and erased.
The Ladybug is a serious leader and Chat Noir is a goofy sidekick who constantly pursues Ladybug is such a garbage dynamic those bitches are Besties. They are Stupid together. They are like twelve. They’d probably quote memes at each other and be super annoying. As they should.
Ok, but just imagine. On a usual thursday afternoon Gabriel finally confesses to Nathalie, it is dramatic and heartwarming, he talks about how she's amazing and he realized how amazing and strong she is when they were Hawkmoth and Mayura and how he can't afford to lose her and he finally decided to stop and he proposes.
And then Adrien from the back of table, mind reeling from the fifty different realizations he's had at once, just goes
Thinking about how one of the benefits of Ephemeral over Chat Blanc was that we got to see Marinette grapple with the Chat Noir=Adrien reveal even though it's something I think deserved way more screentime and an episode of it's own instead of getting derailed by Gabriel's interference.
Which then make me think about that because of that same issue we never get to see Marinette react to the fact that Adrien's been dating her because he worked out she was Ladybug.
Which I know I have a whole post about how the Lovesquare plot and the Agreste plot don't really mesh and in the above episodes trying to make them do does a disservice to both, but it really does drive home how the adamant the show is about making any threats to the Lovesquare be external rather than dealing with any of the internal dynamics between the two.