#e.g. guiltrip

[buggachat]

I’m really struggling to word this but... 

Sometimes I think about how “The awkward but relatable high school student is in love with their beautiful blond classmate who’s a supermodel with an overprotective father.” and “The badass superhero is renowned for their leadership in saving the city alongside their sleek flirtatious black-cat partner.” are two sentences that you could give someone to accurately describe the two main characters of Miraculous Ladybug... but the average person unfamiliar with the show would see these sentences and immediately assume their genders incorrectly, you know?

It’s just something I always really appreciated about the show. It feels so cliche when you word it like that, but the fact that the show flips the gender roles just makes it feel really refreshing and new and it’s something I appreciate about the show a lot.

#and there are lots more ways to word things in the show like that too #like how marinette is the more chaotic of the two #like yes chat noir tells jokes and is sillier but marinette is just. feral sometimes #adrien is the one portrayed to be more empathetic and gentle #e.g. guiltrip #scenes like gabriel telling adrien that he ''had too many emotions for one day'' #how adrien is expected to act perfect and well-mannered and attractive and also just... constantly contained and repressed #the way ladybug naturally fills a leadership role between her and chat noir that they fall right into like it's just... obvious somehow #like idk i could go on and on about ways marinette and adrien represent gendered tropes but... reversed #and if anyone wants to add onto this feel free it's something i really love about the show and want to see talked about more

[trainsinanime]

@sayse told me to post my overly-long, not-actually-that-funny hot take about Marinette’s hair color after all, so here it is:

This may be an unpopular opinion, but: I think it’s okay to say that Marinette’s hair is blue. Especially when it’s funny to do so.

I know a lot of people will immediately point out the tweet where Thomas Astruc said that it was supposed to be black with blue highlights, and so “it’s supposed to be black”. And that’s true! It definitely makes way more sense, because there’s no in-universe explanation for why Marinette’s hair (and the hair of everybody with the same hair type, notably Kagami) is blue. Adrien called her hair black in his poem. There are times when the show really sells the “black, with a bit of blue as a stylistic thing” approach, e.g. in the Shanghai special.

But at the end of they day, you know, her hair is… blue. Just look at it! 

[Image description: Screenshot from Monsieur Pigeon 72, where Marinette is hugging Kagami, both with very obviously blue hair.]

The stylistic thing requires tight control of colours and lighting, and that’s not something the show can always do. Among other things, it works way better at night, where the blue highlights reflect the night sky; but the vast majority of scenes need to be set during the day for story reasons. Regardless of which studio animates things, in the end, her hair is usually noticeable blueish, and often it just becomes incredibly blue. It is basically always bluer than any other black object on screen, like Chat Noir’s suit, Ladybug’s own spots, or Juleka’s hair.

[Image description: Screenshot from Guiltrip, where Ladybug has bluish-grey hair, and hands the magical thing to Juleka, who has black hair that is partially died purple. Juleka’s outfit and Marinette’s spots are all black.]

There’s a point where something stops being an animation error and just becomes part of the show, and for Marinette’s hair color, that was like three episodes in at the latest.

At this point, it has essentially become canonically blue. In everything that isn’t the 3D animated show, the hair is always clearly, indisputably blue. Look at Miraculous Chibi.

(Honestly I’m not the biggest fan of that spin-off show, but it still proves my point). Look at the plush doll in the Zag store. Don’t look at the official licensed comics, they’re terrible, but even there: Blue hair, no two ways about it.

Even the show itself has tacitly admitted as much in later seasons. The biggest example is Cosmobug:

Yes, you can pretend that her light blue hair is just a design element that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with her normal hair color, but I mean, come on, seriously.

The hair was intended to be black, yes. But sometimes things don’t come out the way we intend. Sometimes they come out blue.

I see this question mostly crop up around fanfics; people generally accept Marinette with blue hair in fan art. But for fanfic I’ve seen a lot of people say “I don’t like fanfic that says Marinette has blue hair” or similar.

Now, I would advise against calling Marinette “the bluenette”, “ravenette”, “midnightette”, “tumblrbackgroundette” or “marinetteshaircolorette” unless you want to deliberately annoy your readers. Note that it’s perfectly okay to deliberately annoy your readers, just don’t do it by accident.

But I think we should be more willing to play around with it. Have Adrien and Alya (or Chloé or whoever) get into heated arguments what Marinette’s hair color actually is. Have characters insist that Marinette and Kagami have completely different hair colors. Reveal that Plagg thinks her hair is orange.

I think Marinette’s hair color is inherently funny, and we as a fandom aren’t doing enough with that.

#miraculous ladybug