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musicfeedsmysoul12 · 5 years

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Plagg Speaks Out

I know I’ve said I won’t be writing up stuff on my phone but this bit me yesterday so I wrote it up and finished it this morning.

Inspired by a lovely post from @nobodyfamousposts on Syren and Fu and Adrien.

This is a very salty fic and contains some ideas I have for my Punk!Au/Rewrite. I can’t stick it under a read more or I would. Please- this is salt. Not to be taken seriously.

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Plagg blinked at Adrien who glared at him.

“So… can you wait till we find that Luka kid? Or Nathanaël? They were contenders.” Adrien blinked, confused. “Or there was that Félix kid but he hit the bad luck side of me to much for me to want him you know?”

“What?”

“To hand over the Miraculous. Those two were other options for my holder and like… I dunno where they are-“

“What… Plagg I didn’t-“

“Didn’t just throw a hissy fit about something I knew you weren’t ready for- something Ladybug was probably warned about by the Guardian and her Kwami? Didn’t just leave a fight because you were acting like a brat?” Plagg frowned.

“Why aren’t I ready?” Adrien asked, and Plagg wanted to sigh. He knew this would happen- Adrien just hated being told no. You’d think with his dad he was used to it but it seemed he only ever took no seriously from his dad. Everyone else just… babied him.

“Because if this stunt and the one you pulled with Frozer. Ladybug is not interested in you- she did not say she would show up to the date. She made it clear numerous times she doesn't like you like that but you push and push and frankly? I’ve been wondering if I should contact the Guardian myself to ask him to take me away because this is not healthy behaviour and I don’t want to be part of it.” Plagg crossed his arms. “Adrien- I’m not happy that you’re ignoring your problematic behaviours and focusing only on the fact that I don’t think you’re ready.”

“... it’s not fair though!” Adrien said, throwing his hands up. “Why is she the one who meets the Guardian? Why won’t she date me?”

“Because she doesn’t like you like that!” Plagg was really wondering about his Holder and why he couldn’t get it through his head. “Adrien- she is not into you.” As Chat. He was aware of the crush as civilians but the truth of the matter was that Adrien just wasn’t ready for that sort of relationship because of the fact he had a bundle of issues no one addressed- and Plagg knew he was at fault somewhat for not reacting to some of the more glaring signs from Adrien but he had a hard time letting go of his kittens. He and the other main Seven struggled with letting their Holders go, given their concepts were much stronger then the other Kwami. When Adrien first put him on Plagg only noticed the bad things around Adrien and not his bad behaviour.

The Holders of the Black Cat tended to have the worst experience and luck and often nearly died so he was softer on his kittens then say Tikki was on her bugs. The Ladybug Miraculous was dangerous in the hands of those who were not pure of heart. Plagg had a feeling though that Tikki May be to hard on this one and had wanted to chat with her about it- but never found the time.

He was getting off track in his thoughts though and Plagg frowned at Adrien.

“Adrien- I have some news for you you’re going to hate. But you’re not the only one who can wield the Black Cat and you were the second choice. You were only picked because you’re closer to Ladybug in age and you resonated a tiny bit better.” Adrien looked so struck and shocked and Plagg knew that Adrien tended to think of himself as super important. He may act humble but the truth was while he was a sweet kid and a good hearted soul, the fact remained he had a combination inferiority and superiority complex. He never thought he was enough for his father but thought he was to important many other times. “The Black Cat is important- very important. It just doesn’t have to be you.”

“What about Ladybug then?” And Plagg hated that tone. That angry, bitter tone but he forged on.

“Ladybug is the only person in Paris who resonated with the Miraculous. Hell- she resonated so strongly that it’s the reason why the Guardian didn’t get upset Tikki told her a bit to early. Because he knew she was the next choice for the Guardian which is why she’s handing out the Miraculous boxes. Her resonation is strong enough to see who would be a good fit even if she doesn’t say or she defaults to good fits who are her age.” Plagg was brutally honest, staring Adrien down. “However- you are not. You cannot see who would fit a Miraculous well and your attitude is blindingly wrong, and disgusting- meaning I wouldn’t want to introduce you to the Guardian anyway. Remember Alya talking about how not to be a creep? Remember Chloé and her freaking out about a stalker? That’s what you’re doing.”

“It’s different!”

“How? They all claimed to love their objects of affection- ignoring the words of the girls. As well in case you’ve forgotten there’s also the fact that you turn down girls on the regular and get frustrated when they keep harassing you.” Plagg frowned at Adrien who looked… heartbroken. Plagg wanted to stop, wanted to take back his words but he knew his Holder better now. He knew that Adrien wouldn’t learn- like he didn’t the last few times- without him continuing. “You need to stop. You need to get off your high horse and look at the bigger picture. Paris is underwater. People are drowning. People probably are dead and there is a time limit to how long they can be dead before the Miraculous Cure can’t bring them back. So grow up, get to work and no- you do not get to see the Guardian. You wait until I give the okay.” Adrien still didn’t look like he got it but Plagg knew that he’d have to beat the lesson in anyway- his Holder kept messing up and it needed to be addressed.

“Quite right.” Plagg turned to see Fu in his Transformed state, the man frowning heavily at Adrien. “I thought she was right that you were ready to know but it appears you need much more time to become a hero who is worthy.” Adrien flinched and Plagg just sighed.

Looks like he had a lot of work to do.

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If you don’t give me a reason Mairinette is super important I’m making one up. She’s the only possible Holder for Ladybug. So ha.

Honestly- I feel like Adrien does have a superiority/inferiority complex because he tends to react in ways that lend me the idea that he feels he’s always right and that everyone should listen to him. (High road anyone?) his dad is really the only one to tell him no and everyone else never seems to hold him accountable so... yeah. Here is my thoughts. Plagg is just the guy who I use as a mouth piece cause it’s got to get annoying dealing with it.

#miraculous ladybug #ml salt #ml salt fic #adrien salt

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biofunmy · 4 years

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When He Was Good, He Was Breathtaking

The Swiss painter and printmaker Félix Vallotton was an intriguing, talented but slippery artist. From painting to painting in “Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet,” a small survey of his career, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you often don’t quite know what to expect next in terms of style or subject, even within the same year.

They begin with the soulful “Self-Portrait at the Age of 20” from 1885, just after three years of study at the Académie Julian in Paris. It shows the artist looking wise beyond his years, already adept at a suavely brushed surface redolent of Manet, Ingres and Degas. In “The Sick Girl,” a sparkling interior scene of 1892, his realist style hardens to such perfection that it dazzles but also seems slightly cold.

At the other extreme is “Street Scene in Paris,” from 1897, which has the flattened, rough-edged shapes of the small Post-Impressionist cohort that called itself the Nabi. The group included the artist’s good friend, Édouard Vuillard, and Vallotton himself, although he didn’t share their preference for images of cozy domesticity. Also from 1897, his portrait “Thadée Natanson,” in which realism takes on a stiffening naïveté that evokes the self-taught French artist Henri Rousseau. Vallotton, who wrote criticism for a newspaper in Lausanne, Switzerland (where he was born in 1865), gave Rousseau an early laudatory review.

Further along, in “Nude in the Red Room” (another from 1897), Vallotton’s realism intensifies into artifice; the sleek, curving, almost serpentine female subject may be based on a photograph. The painting confirms that while Vallotton ignored most of modernism, he influenced such Surrealists as Dalí and Magritte, and also the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) painters of Weimar Germany.

By this point in the show, it becomes clear why Vallotton is not considered a first-rate painter. Perhaps he was excessively skilled with too many options at his fingertips. The variety here sometimes resembles a group show, or a solo of some extra-early postmodern artist who simply played the field.

It helps that the show begins with a tiny unforgettable gallery where Vallotton’s talent stays in one place: It is devoted to his groundbreaking woodblock prints of the 1890s, which made him famous, provided entry into the Parisian avant-garde and made his place in modernist art history. Their daring black and white compositions depict some of the pleasures, but more often skewer the hypocrisies and inequities of Parisian life. Vallotton did not see life as full of happy endings.

He made his first woodblock prints in 1891, inspired by the innovations of Japanese artists, eliminating their rich colors while exploiting their practice of cutting with rather than against the grain. It facilitated the curving shapes and lines basic to his formal wit.

Within a year Vallotton had a thriving, if not highly remunerative career. His terse exercises in dark and light appeared in periodicals, illustrated books and portfolios in Paris, then London and as far as Chicago. They were nearly instantly understood as radical, and by the mid-90s Vallotton was a regular illustrator for Le Cri de Paris, a left-wing magazine and the like-minded journal La Revue Blanche, which also covered culture (and was founded by Alexandre and Thadée Natanson).

The woodblocks have the compression and legibility of cartoons and news photos, the formal daring of abstract art and the literary punch of modern short stories. They portray action in the streets, as in “The Charge,” in which gendarmes wade, swords swinging, into a group of anarchists (with whom the artist sympathized). Bodies seem to fly overhead until the image’s spatial inventiveness asserts itself: The protesters aren’t airborne, they’re actually lying on the street, left behind as the melee surges toward us. “The Demonstration” reverses this: The crowd dashes frantically toward the top of the image; advancing police not yet in the picture will soon fill the white, empty street lower down.

Other scenes of everyday life show pedestrians opening umbrellas; an elderly woman being gingerly rescued from beneath a carriage horse; and well-dressed ladies in a department store, examining linens like connoisseurs. In voyeuristic views of opulent Parisian interiors, lone musicians practice their instruments; naked women loll on patterned textiles and unhappy marriages and love affairs unfold. If the 19th-century had film noir, these would be the story boards.

Vallotton’s people are stereotypes personalized by highly specific expression, gesture and posture rendered with utmost economy. See the different reactions rippling across the sea of upturned faces at the bottom of “The World’s Fair VI: Fireworks,” as strands of light descend into the night sky.

Black increasingly overpowers white. In “Money,” from the 1898 Intimacies series, a young woman in white stands at a window, her face a study in quiet anguish. A not-young man in black stands very close, his hand open. He could be offering money for sexual favors, or delivering news of the couple’s bankruptcy. Either way, it’s bad, and underscored in purely visual terms. The man is one with the solid black of the room behind him, which is most of the print.

Vallotton does much of his best painting in the late 1890s and early 1900s, when he added some of his own narrative tension to the textured paint handling and soft colors of the Nabis. The bereaved mood of “Woman in Purple Dress, Under the Lamp” of 1898, focuses on the blank, masklike face of the seemingly numb woman, modeled by Hélène Chatenay, Vallotton’s companion of a decade. She is seen in their apartment, slumped on a sofa above which hangs Vuillard’s “Large Interior With Six Figures,” a recent gift from that artist. Her face is dejected, a gray mask; her arm rests woodenly on the table before her, as if paralyzed or wounded.

Vallotton also sought to imbue his paintings with the prints’ extreme simplicity and aggressive blacks, now offset by strong bright colors, especially red. One standout is “The Visit” (1899) a velvety vignette of a man welcoming a woman into a hushed apartment at dusk. In the shadowy “The Visit by Lamplight,” two women sit, shrouded in inky ominousness, rendered with paint handling so uncharacteristically brusque it recalls Walter Sickert, the British painter of disquiet.

After 1900 Vallotton seems to go into a decline that steepened after 1910. It’s hard to be sure because with around 40 paintings and as many prints, the show is not definitive. It doesn’t help that the effort — organized by Dita Amory of the Met and Ann Dumas of the Royal Academy of Arts — has shed 10 paintings since it was seen in London last summer. Most were important; several were unlike anything here.

The change in Vallotton’s art is often attributed to his marriage, in 1899, to a wealthy woman, by which he joined the haute bourgeois he so despised. It also removed two anchors: his relationship with Hélène Chatenay and his prints. He could afford to paint full time. He also became the reluctant stepfather of three children, a predicament encapsulated in “Dinner by Lamplight” (1899), a darkened scene in which the artist depicts himself as semi-present — a cardboard-thin silhouette — facing the bright curious face of a little girl across the table.

A rising animus toward women reaches a zenith of sorts in “The Chaste Suzanne” of 1922, which verges on cartoon kitsch and reverses the biblical tale of Susanna and the Elders, casting the woman as a sly trickster. Nearly two decades into his marriage, Vallotton mused in his journal, “What great evil has man committed that he deserves this terrifying partner called woman?”

But three paintings from after 1900 stand out for their size and ambition, if also their increasing academicism. The first is marvelously strange: “The Five Painters” (1902-03), a group portrait of the Nabis (Vallotton included). The dark-suited artists almost merge with the dark background, while their stiffly painted hands, faces and hair treatments, stand out. It is a little as if Vallotton were trying to outdo Rembrandt’s group portraits by way of Rousseau.

Next is Vallotton’s 1907 portrait of Gertrude Stein, an exercise in too-solid gleaming flesh and a conservative answer to Picasso’s brilliant proto-Cubist portrait of the writer. The Met owns the Picasso and has added it to the show. The battle of old against new is, surprisingly, a draw.

Finally, Vallotton’s “The White and the Black” (1913) takes a limp pass at inverting the power dynamic of the imperious white courtesan and black maid of Manet’s “Olympia.” Here the nude white woman is a drowsy innocent. Her worldly black companion, dressed in blue-green silk, sits at the end of the bed, thinking and smoking. It’s a confounding picture, conceptually arresting — visually, not so much.

As the first extensive Vallotton show in New York in decades, this exhibition is invaluable, despite its problems. It reintroduces an artist who achieved early greatness in the relatively modest medium of prints and then either failed or declined to follow a single path in painting. His work is a fascinating, frustrating thorn in the side of the modernist ideal of wholeness.

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet

Through Jan. 26 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

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