Characters / The Karma of Lies

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Marinette Dupain-Cheng / "Ladybug"

A hard-working girl and part-time superhero, Marinette has been crumbling under the weight of her conflict with Hawkmoth and her civilian threat, Lila Rossi, for months. Wasn't she supposed to have backup?

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• 10-Minute Retirement: Marinette briefly considers giving up her Miraculous, thinking that it would only be a matter of time before Lila angered or saddened her to the point where Hawkmoth could akumatize her and then win by simply having her hand over her Miraculous. Tikki manages to talk her out of it.
• All Take and No Give: Lila identifies her as an unintentionally enabling Giver—Marinette feeds into the entitlement of her class by constantly bending over backwards further and further to do them favors for the sake of their friendship. All it succeeds in doing is giving Marinette burnout and the class unrealistic expectations for what a friend should be willing to do for them.
• Armor-Piercing Response:
  • Initially Subverted; when Marinette counters Adrien's query of "What's the harm of overlooking a few lies to keep everyone safe and friendly" with "Because I hurt, and I'm not happy," it doesn't phase him one bit. Being told point-blank that she's in pain simply doesn't register with him, and his blithe response nearly causes her to snap.
  • Her second attempt in Chapter 7 is much more effective, because everyone involved now actually has reasons to care about her feelings, albeit most for selfish reasons. When her (former) class tries to throw her a party at which Marinette and Lila can reconcile and Marinette isn't particularly open to the idea, Adrien claims that despite their disagreements, he's still her friend. She tells him point-blank that he's not, and confirms that she's completely serious when Alya tries to play it off as a bad joke.
  • In the same chapter, after Marinette leaves the party, Alya chases after her and questions why Chloé is being given a second chance after everything she's done while the rest of the class isn't. Marinette retorts that Chloé was trying to become a better person before she knew there was something to gain from being on Marinette's good side.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • When Tikki starts to lecture Marinette about how she needs to stay strong, Marinette finishes the thought for her, then asks, "You realize Hawkmoth's going to win, right?" This, coupled with her Despair Speech, forces Tikki to recognize that her empty platitudes aren't actually helping her holder cope.
  • When calling out her classmates, Marinette asks if they would have invited her to meet with them if not for the fact that they'd learned she was Ladybug. The resounding silence where there had previously been excuses is answer enough.
• Berserk Button: Calling her an "Everyday Ladybug" becomes one once she realizes how much her False Friends took advantage of her kindness.
• Brutal Honesty: When she decides to cut her classmates off emotionally, she stops handling their feelings with kids' gloves, as she's given up the desire to earn their affections back.
  • When prompted by Alya during a televised interview to explain why she replaced Alya on the team with Kagami, she bluntly announces to the public that Alya's behavior as a civilian caused her to reconsider Alya's qualifications as a hero, that she now considers all of the temporary Miraculous holders (sans Kagami and Luka) to be "failed holders," and that neither Alya nor the others will be given the privilege of wielding a Miraculous again.
  • In the same interview, she explains when prompted that while Chat Noir has been an asset on many occasions and he had been a welcome partner in the beginning, he has become decreasingly trustworthy due to his treating heroism like a game and constant harassment, and in many cases has made himself into a liability in battle. She also heavily implies that she's so far refrained from revoking his Miraculous only due to respecting her predecessor's judgement.
• Character Development: Marinette starts the story a depressed, burned out unintentional enabler feeding into her class' entitlement but unable to stop herself from investing heavily in their wellbeing because she's too attached. She eventually has a realization about how she's giving too much of herself and learns to assert healthy limits and boundaries, both onto herself and with others.
• Defensive Feint Trap: Marinette's final plan to take down Hawkmoth is to set up the pretense of an anti-akuma experimental weapon and then have it go "wrong," exploding its warehouse and eventually "trapping her inside" on live TV—with Ladybug's supposed entrapment giving Hawkmoth the "perfect" opportunity to try to take her Miraculous and the "weapon" (initially) disincentivizing the use of akuma on the premises, thus encouraging him to show up to take the Miraculous in person, with Ladybug and her allies actually waiting to pounce.
• Despair Speech: Gives one to Tikki in Chapter 1, telling her that she's only growing more upset and strained and if this keeps up, she'll be akumatized and Hawkmoth will win. This pushes Tikki to encourage Marinette to reach out and find support she trusts.
• The Dog Bites Back: Downplayed. After months of trying to solve the problem of Lila's manipulations entirely without support, Marinette realizes she'd given too much of herself to relationships that didn't support her back. Following this realization, she ceases watering dead trees, does her best to distance herself emotionally from her old class, and refuses to get involved with anymore of her former classmates' personal issues, citing that there are other support systems and resources they can use besides her. When Adrien discovers Lila robbed him and assumes Marinette will help, she actually laughs right in his face, quotes an Ironic Echo of the excuses he'd made for Lila before, refuses to get involved with him or Lila any further, and directs him to contact the police.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: What finally tips Marinette off to the fact that her classmates are False Friends: Kagami points out, after Marinette describes one of the many common forms of disrespect she faces, that she needs better ones. Even Lila notices that they don't really appreciate just how hard she works (ex. donating the clothes she made to charity), even if Marinette being disrespected suits Lila just fine.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After everything Marinette endured through the first three seasons of Miraculous Ladybug, the heartbreak of having her 'friends' abandon her, and being pushed to the edge of despair, she's able to take down Hawkmoth in a hard-won battle, finds friends who don't take her kindness for granted, and ultimately beats Mayura and saves Paris, along with getting the recognition she deserves.
• Everyone Has Standards: As upset as she is with him Marinette does agree with the class that Adrien doesn't deserve to be robbed.
• Fatal Flaw: Generosity. Marinette always gives her all to help out her friends and Paris and expects absolutely nothing in return, and this allows others to exploit her, take her for granted, and push her past her physical, mental, and emotional limits. The biggest part of her Character Development is in learning how to set boundaries for herself so that she can maintain her own well-being.
• Foil: To Adrien and Lila, as detailed on the story's foil page.
• Good Is Not Soft: After growing her spine, Marinette refuses to let herself be pushed around by those who have wronged her any longer. Without the threat Hawkmoth posed hanging over her head anymore, she practically revels in being able to express her feelings openly.
  • When Alya and Chat Noir confront her during Nadja's interview, she's brutally honest about how she feels about her partner and former classmates, referring to most of the latter as "failed holders" and lambasting their character on live television. While harsh and addressed by Nadja as such, this is not portrayed as a wrong thing to do, since Chat Noir kept spreading misinformation during said interview and Alya responded to the Internal Reveal of Kitsune by causing a scene and outing herself as Rena Rouge on air, declaring that Kitsune had taken Alya's Miraculous.
  • When Adrien realizes Lila has drained his family's emergency funds account and expects Marinette to 'pull some strings' to help his case get immediate and special attention, she laughs in his face.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: Among the three viewpoint characters, she's the kind-hearted and selfless Good to Adrien's blindly self-serving Bad and Lila's actively malicious Evil.
• Grew a Spine: Granted, she always had one, but her natural kindness and care for her friends meant she hadn't realized just how worn down it was with them. With Kagami's and Luka's help, however, she's able to face the fact that her former friends took advantage of her, break ties, and assert healthy boundaries.
• I Have This Friend: In a variation, Ladybug visits Luka in Chapter 2 and tells him about the problems she's been facing outside the mask... but while she freely admits that she's the one facing these issues, she omits the fact that he knows many of those involved.
• Karmic Jackpot: The plot of the story is that this is an aspect of the Ladybug Miraculous: when particularly meritorious Ladybug Holders win a major personal victory, they're rewarded with good fortune while their enemies are punished with bad. As such, when Marinette, pushed to a breaking point by Lila and her class, feels forced to cross the Godzilla Threshold and use the Miraculous as bait to lure out Hawkmoth for a Final Battle, her victory not only exposes Gabriel Agreste as the man behind the mask, guaranteeing his downfall, but Marinette is also revealed as Ladybug, making her an untouchable and adored figure in the city and launching her into personal fame and professional success. And the experience gives her the self-assurance to cut out the class from her life, recognizing how toxic their dynamic is.
• Loved by All: After being unmasked and defeating Hawkmoth, Marinette becomes Paris' biggest and most beloved hero, and basically untouchable by Lila... directly.
• Loving a Shadow: Adrien's utter lack of action, support, or even concern over the months of Lila's cruelties pushes her further and further into a realization that she's been doing this, capped off when she confesses that she's suffering and this information has no effect on him whatsoever.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Played With when Lila speculates that part of the reason why her classmates fall so easily for her most basic deceptions is due to Marinette having worked so hard to help them accomplish their dreams. Rather than recognizing and appreciating everything she did for them as their "Everyday Ladybug" to help them succeed, they presume that they're just lucky enough to have opportunities fall into their laps; hence, Lila's claims about her connections and apparent willingness to help seem like just more good fortune rather than Too Good to Be True.
• Official Couple: With Luka.
• Oh, Crap!: She reacts this way upon learning that Dark Owl has been re-akumatized, since unlike most others, he took the time to hide his akumatized object before engaging any of the heroes. This is a major issue since her plan hinges heavily upon Viperion's Second Chance, meaning they're on a strict time limit to figure out where his object is and how to destroy it.
• Paranoia Gambit: Her final visit to Lila. She gives Lila a friendly warning and drops a few hints about a terrible future that could be waiting for her if she continues to con and manipulate people. Once Lila realizes that Ladybug's comments about her potential fate were suspiciously specific and that Ladybug has the ability to time travel thanks to the kwami Fluff, she's left feeling very nervous.
• The Power of Apathy: After she's revealed as Ladybug, she finds it incredibly easy to cut ties with her class. She expected to be conflicted or uncertain but instead it's all too easy and she feels relieved by it... because she honestly doesn't care about them anymore. This winds up paying off for her immensely after the Final Battle where her identity is revealed. Lila, fearing retaliation, arranges a Batman Gambit that will discredit her by targeting Adrien to set Marinette off and damage her credibility. This fails because Marinette point blank doesn't care about him anymore. She won't make things worse for him but she's no longer willing to extend any help either.
• Pragmatic Hero: During her battle with Dark Owl, she's forced to make the hard call of Cutting the Knot in a way that potentially puts lives at risk; thanks to incidents like Syren flooding all of Paris, she knows that her Miraculous Cure can bring back the dead. This doesn't make her comfortable with having to use such tactics.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Marinette becomes prone to these after breaking ties with her former classmates.
  • In Chapter 7, "Consequences for Great Misdeeds", Marinette calls her former class out for pushing her aside in favor of Lila, spelling out how they abandoned her for someone who told them what they wanted to hear, and are only turning back to her now that they believe they can benefit more from it.
  • In Chapter 8, Ladybug hits Chat Noir with one when he crashes Nadja's interview to push his agenda, declaring that they're 'destined to be together':
    Ladybug: [frostily] I will never be with you.
    [Chat freezes in shock]
    Ladybug: I used to like you. I used to think you were funny and cool. But then you made it clear you didn't see me as a person. You saw me as some kind of trophy that you deserved to 'win' just for being Chat Noir. You flirted with me incessantly, even when I begged you to stop. You set up dates that I told you I wouldn't go on, and then you threw tantrums when I wasn't there. When I said I wasn't interested, you told me that I had to date you, irrespective of my wishes, because destiny said so.
    [she pins him down with a Death Glare]
    Ladybug: I will not date someone who does not respect me. I will not date someone who doesn't care about what I want and thinks only of himself. And even if we put all that aside, I won't date someone who was so irresponsible that he abandoned me and my partners during the final fight against Hawkmoth.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: She transfers over to Ms. Mendeleiev's class in order to get away from Adrien, Miss Bustier and the rest of her estranged friends.
• Stopped Caring: Played for Drama. Marinette realizes after talking with Luka and Kagami that she was performing almost all of the emotional labor in her very one-sided relationships and that this is just as much if not more of a contributor to her depression and burnout as Lila's actual deceptions and the threat of Hawkmoth. She makes the conscious decision to cut those relationships out of her life for her own wellbeing, and thereafter insists on treating most of Bustier's class like members of the public with whom she no longer has any special relationship. Downplayed in that while she mostly feels apathy towards them, she still has some definite feelings of bitterness that crop up from time to time, as seen in her Brutal Honesty and uncharacteristic lack of sympathy for their hardships despite otherwise being a compassionate person. Justified since these same former friends openly talk of trying to manipulate her using this compassion.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Downplayed. She admits to herself that she feels a couple of pangs of sorrow for Adrien as he digs himself further and further, but dismisses it as not her problem since he left her to rot under the same circumstances.
• Take a Third Option: When Alix brings up the potential of there being a Time Paradox if Bunnyx doesn't get the Rabbit Miraculous and Time Travel back to her present-day appearances, Ladybug responds that a Ridiculously Human Robot or sentimonster could work as a stand-in.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Gives this to Adrien. While Adrien claimed they were friends and that he was supporting her, Adrien didn't really treat her like one. Over the months that Marinette was suffering from Lila's actions, Adrien asserted that everything would work itself out, that Lila wasn't doing any serious harm, and that any action taken against Lila would only make things worse, leaving Marinette to shoulder the brunt of Lila's cruelties alone. She returns the favor when the situations flip by refusing to act in support of him, citing how, as someone he abandoned time and again to provide cover for her bully, she is not obligated to clean up the mess he made in doing so, that using her influence as Ladybug to tamper with an unrelated police investigation could make things worse, and that if Adrien goes through the proper channels, the problem may sort itself out. At least Marinette, unlike Adrien, is very honest about the fact that they're not friends and she is absolutely abandoning him to the hell of his own making that becomes his life since he and the class now can't convince anyone that Lila's a liar.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Marinette comes to realize that her classmates were toxic even before Lila showed up due to how they took her generosity for granted and made her feel like she had to work harder and harder to earn their companionship.
• Uninvited to the Party: Following the advice from Ms. Bustier, who basically said Marinette should earn her friends back through more labour for their benefit, Marinette prepared for an entire week to throw a party for Lila and her class only for no one to show up, because they instead threw a last-minute picnic at the park in front of her family's bakery and didn't invite her.
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: After falling out of love with Adrien from seeing how willing he was to stand back and watch her be hurt, Marinette is revealed to be Ladybug. Adrien happily reveals that he had a crush on Ladybug and "graciously" accepts her assumed confession, only for her to bluntly reject him.

Adrien Agreste / "Chat Noir"

Sheltered and privileged, all Adrien's ever wanted is the girl, the adventure, the social life, and the freedom to make his own decisions. He insists they're the right ones.

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• Accomplice by Inaction:
  • He doesn't actively lie to the others, but he does sit back and let Lila defraud the class and isolate Marinette despite knowing the truth, simply because he doesn't want to make waves and risk losing his friendships by telling them things they don't want to hear.
  • Chloé accuses him of being this in all of her bad behavior throughout their shared history. She takes responsibility for her actions but directly calls him an enabler.
• Adaptational Jerkass: Part and parcel for the Salt Fic genre. As an intentionally harsh Deconstruction Fic deliberately confronting the worst behaviors of his character with some of the ways his canon flaws can go wrong for him, the story takes those canon flaws and gives them very serious consequences with very little sympathy. In canon Adrien is characterized as naïve, immature, and not always realizing the severity of his circumstances, but genuinely kind and trying to do good. Here the conclusion is drawn that, while not malicious, his inaction comes from a genuine lack of empathy for everyone around him and his actions stem entirely from selfishness. His kindness is a barely-present façade, and his naivete comes from Willful Blindness.
• Advice Backfire: Adrien wanted Marinette to just let Lila be and stop making trouble for her, arguing that Lila's thefts aren't a big deal and that Marinette's strong enough to handle the emotional strain of the alienation from her class with grace, while forcing Lila to face the consequences of her actions would hurt her. Marinette responds by, as she puts it, giving him what he wants: she follows his advice and ceases involvement with the situation entirely by leaving the class, refusing to get involved with the conflict with Lila any further. That is, of course, right when Lila's new target becomes Adrien.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Adrien advises Marinette to accept that Lila deliberately alienating Marinette from the class and stealing from their classmates isn't really a problem and she should let Lila be because stopping her from hurting others would hurt Lila's feelings, implicitly telling Marinette he expects her to suffer in silence for Lila's benefit. Marinette gives him what he wants: she stops trying to oppose Lila and, from that point on, distances herself from the rest of the class, not answering their texts, avoiding addressing them when she sees them in school, and departing the class entirely so as to (hopefully) have no further contact with them. But it turns out Marinette isn't the disposable person her friends treated her as, and with Marinette no longer willing to get involved, there's little chance of saving Adrien when Lila puts him on the chopping block.
• Because You Can Cope: Justifies his inaction this way, assuming that Marinette can deal with Lila's myriad cruelties without risking akumatization.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Adrien constantly lies to himself to preserve his internal narrative that he's the hero and the world has to revolve around him.
• Beneath the Mask: On the surface, The Charmer. Underneath, a deeply self-centered and callous person. As he's in denial about the latter, he's not good at hiding the cracks.
• Betrayal by Inaction: He was already flirting with this, but crosses over completely when he opts not to show up to what turns out to be the Final Battle with Hawkmoth, leaving Ladybug and her other allies hanging when they'd specifically warned him that they'd need him.
• Beyond Redemption: It's pointed out by Marinette that his abandonment of her in her darkest hour has extinguished any goodwill she ever had towards him, and that he's out of second chances. Even if he does reform, she's still going to keep him cut out of her life.
• Black-and-White Insanity: In his mind, he's the absolute good guy and anyone who opposes him is wrong.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • Marinette had thought of Adrien as well-intentioned, kind-hearted, and sweet, until his handling of the Lila situation ripped her crush blinders off.
  • The beginning of the story has Ladybug realize that she no longer trusts Chat Noir due to his Skewed Priorities and refusal to accept her expressed feelings. She spells out her reasons further in Nadja's interview, saying that she used to think he was funny and cool, before realizing he didn't respect her as a person and thought of her as "something he deserved to win just for being Chat Noir."
  • By the end of the story, he's become one to all of Paris as Chat Noir. It's made clear that, while thought of as a bit "flakey," he was still fairly highly regarded by Paris at the beginning of the story. However, between his skipping the final fight with Hawkmoth, terrible show of character during Nadja's interview, and exposure as Adrien in a way that circumstantially incriminated him as an accomplice to Mayura and Hawkmoth, Paris ends up feeling deeply betrayed by him and he becomes Hated by All.
• Cassandra Did It: The police think that, in the aftermath of his father's arrest, Adrien emptied his family's emergency account and hid the money before the government could freeze his family's assets, deliberately setting up a scenario in which Lila saw his bank access information in order to frame her for the disappearance of the funds.
• Cassandra Truth: Because of his tacit support for her narratives while treating Marinette like she's the wrong party and his unbelievably irresponsible handling of his finances in front of Lila, nobody believes him about Lila's culpability when he's robbed of almost 50 million euros. The police, in fact, think he disappeared his own money to avoid losing access to it, with the "tell" in his story being how implausibly skeptical and naive Adrien would have to be simultaneously to see through Lila's deceptions for months and still believe her when she asked for his money.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: There's never any proof that he aided his father, but between Chat Noir's extremely poor showing during Nadja's live interview (during which he revealed himself to be a Dogged Nice Guy who frequently harassed Ladybug, extremely callous towards the suffering of those who'd been akumatized or otherwise harmed during the attacks, and the only person advocating for essentially letting the terrorist who caused said suffering off with a slap on the wrist), his inconsistent story to the police about how his family's emergency funds went missing, and circumstantially appearing to willingly give his Miraculous to Mayura, pretty much the entire world thinks he's an accomplice to terrorism. Those who know better tend to still dislike him for the actual bad things he did, since they were the ones to personally suffer from them. The story states that this was initially supposed to be Lila's fate, but since Adrien shielded her from it, it fell to him instead.
• Crossing the Burnt Bridge: As things go From Bad to Worse for him, he desperately appeals to Marinette to help save his skin, refusing to accept that he's burned that bridge.
• Crying Wolf: Inverted, with Adrien being the shepherd and Lila the wolf. Rather than announcing fake dangers that prevent people from believing the real one, Lila is a clear and real threat on many occasions prior to it affecting Adrien, but he chooses to say nothing and helps cover up the threat she poses. When she finally comes after Adrien, his own previous instances of covering for her make him look like a liar because obviously Lila had never posed a danger in the months before, whereas Adrien's sudden change in story and attacks on Lila's credibility are seen as very convenient in how they immediately follow Lila's testimony to the police about Adrien's family.
• Detrimental Determination: When he's pushed to the wall, he becomes obsessed with getting back everything he lost and refuses to quit while he's behind even though his efforts only make things worse for himself.
• Deuteragonist: He's the secondary main character, with his fall from grace being just as important as Marinette's Karmic Jackpot.
• Double Think: Adrien justifies his inaction by saying that doing something about Lila's behavior would upset her and that all of the losses Marinette and the class are experiencing isn't worth much compared to someone's feelings. This is his justification for not acting when Marinette says that she's in pain. Alix calls him out on this when he feeds her the same excuse later, saying that she for one is pretty upset!
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Averted. Adrien assumes that this will happen once Lila is eventually exposed; that Marinette and everybody else will forgive her for all the deception just like he has, and they'll all become friends. He would be wrong.
  • Adrien tries to invoke this for his father. He uses his identity as Chat Noir to advocate for Hawkmoth receiving paltry sentences, increasingly downplaying the terror and trauma that Paris' citizens were put through and recommending prison time and/or the death penalty be put aside in favor of consequences like "counseling" and "community service," even saying in a live interview that the many counts of murder should be discarded since Ladybug was able to reverse them. Deconstructed in that Chat's popularity takes a nose dive for advocating for this, since Ladybug's magic doesn't undo the traumatic memories, so Chat Noir Easily Forgiving Hawkmoth sends the message that he thinks that forcing most of Paris to endure terror, personal violation, the sensation of death, and the aftereffects of trying to live with the memories afterwards isn't that bad. And that's not even touching the treason charge for nearly starting a nuclear war, which Adrien hears about from his bodyguard but doesn't even think about thereafter.
• Entitled Bastard: What he evolves into over the course of the story, as more and more of the privileges he took for granted get stripped from him. While he was always a bit entitled, especially towards Marinette/Ladybug, this worsens to the point where, after he loses his Ring to Mayura in a vainglorious attempt to win back public favor, he outright attacks Ladybug over her refusal to trust him with it again.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • As self-centered as he acts, he initially does recognize how horrible his father's actions are and his desire to help him is done with the idea of reducing his punishment instead of outright preventing it. And only then because he's the only family Adrien has left. This standard wavers over time as he increasingly tries to minimize what Gabriel did and is aghast at anyone considering the punishments for things like Gabriel almost starting a nuclear war.
  • It's also shown that while Adrien doesn't care enough about Lila's manipulations to stop them he also doesn't approve of what she's doing either. He may be apathetic but on some level that's because he doesn't understand how bad Lila's actions could really be for his classmates. He draws a clear line at deliberate malice, like Lila engages in.
  • While he does put his reputation over what's right during the fight between Ladybug and Hawkmoth, Adrien is not happy about doing so. He might treat his hero life as a game but he's still loyal to Ladybug and doesn't just brush off leaving her to fight alone.
• Failed a Spot Check: Adrien repeatedly fails to notice when others aren't responding as positively to him as he'd like, as he's far too used to receiving special treatment.
• Fair-Weather Friend: He's happy to enjoy his friends' company during fun adventures and activities, but despite knowing about Lila's true nature, he sees nothing wrong with letting her continue to scam his friends so long as he's not personally affected. He claims that Marinette can easily handle being shunned, even though one of the main reasons he's not exposing Lila is because he doesn't want his friends to get angry at him for telling them something they don't want to hear.
• Fatal Flaw: Arrogance. He is always right and always deserving and never responsible for anything bad connected with his own behavior. He is above the consequences of his own actions or the needs of others. No criticism is worth serious engagement and if the consequences of not listening come back to bite him, it's his critics' fault for not somehow making him listen.
• The Farmer and the Viper:
  • Adrien is willing to help Lila after Hawkmoth's exposure because she tells him precisely what he wants to hear: that he was right all along to 'take the high road' with her. She takes the opportunity to manipulate him into suffering all the consequences that she should have experienced, and robs the Agrestes' emergency funds.
  • In the final fight with Mayura, Chat Noir offers a hand up to Nathalie and she promptly steals the Ring right off his finger.
• Foil: To Marinette, Lila, Juleka, Chloé, and Luka, as detailed on the story's foil page.
• Frame-Up: Lila frames him for helping Hawkmoth terrorize the city; unfortunately, his own behavior is so dishonest and self-serving that he accidentally leans into it, convincing the police and later the public that it's true.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Adrien suffers tremendously over the course of the story due to his Karma Houdini Warranty running out. When he finally snaps during the climax and rants about how hard his life's become, he's shot down, as despite his refusal to recognize it, he's the one who brought that backlash down upon his own head through his actions and inactions.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Ladybug was already having personal problems with Chat Noir due to his irresponsibility and entitlement, but after he flakes out of the Final Battle with Hawkmoth he becomes a pariah among her new superhero team and is only barely tolerated due to his seniority. This goes right out the window when he manages to blunder the Ring away to Mayura, and he is flatly told his superhero career is over afterwards.
• From Bad to Worse: His life steadily falls apart over the course of the story. First his father is exposed as Paris' resident supervillain, then his display of callousness during a media interview costs him his public reputation as Chat Noir, then Lila swindles him out of his emergency funds and flees the country, then his attempts to get the police to pursue her make him look like he's an accomplice to Hawkmoth, then his father loses control of the company and the family mansion, then he is put under the thumb of his just-as-cruel aunt, then his friends abandon him after they learn he let them be scammed, then he is pulled out of François Dupont due to an implied agreement between his aunt and the school (who no longer trust or wish to be associated with him), then he's put under effective house arrest on pain of being shipped off to military school, and then he accidentally blunders the Cat Miraculous away during a last attempt to take back control of his life, costing him the closest thing he had to a remaining lifeline.
• Gaslighting: He has a tendency to brush off Marinette's feelings and opinions by telling her that she's confused, mistaken, being ridiculous, and doesn't know herself properly.
• Gone Horribly Right: The story itself notes that this is the case in regards to Adrien's attempts to protect Lila. He does succeed in protecting Lila, but by doing so, helps ensure that she doesn't face any consequences for her actions, ultimately taking that bad karma onto himself.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: Among the three viewpoint characters, he's the blindly self-serving Bad to Marinette's kind-hearted and selfless Good and Lila's actively malicious Evil.
• Guilt by Association: Adrien runs headlong into this due to his father being Hawkmoth. It probably wouldn't have been as bad if Lila hadn't taken the leeway he gave her to concoct a Frame-Up so no one would believe a word he said.
• Hanlon's Razor: A big problem he faces is that while he isn't deliberately or knowingly malicious, his naivete and stupidity go so far beyond the pale that Paris' public can't see the difference.
• Hated by All: By the end of the story, Adrien is one of the most hated people in Paris, since the public believes he was his father's accomplice, not Lila. Initially Lila was destined to be found out, but Adrien's efforts to shield her from being found out as a liar landed him with the consequences instead. Even the classmates who don't believe he was his father's accomplice still don't like him, since in their eyes his silence regarding Lila's lies and criminal activities makes him complicit in her many counts of fraud and theft.
• Heroism Won't Pay the Bills: Adrien hopes to avert this by asking Paris to repay him for all the services he provided as Chat Noir. It backfires as his interest in the money right after dismissing the traumatic consequences of Hawkmoth's reign of terror makes him look greedy and self-serving.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In so many ways.
  • His putting his reputation and desire to avoid personal conflict over his moral responsibilities bites him in the ass when Lila makes a scene during an akuma fight, forcing him to stay with her so the others don't think he's the kind of heartless Jerkass who abandons his girlfriend when she's clearly terrified and needs him for comfort. This just ends up damaging his reputation as Chat Noir instead.
  • Him crashing the interview he wasn't invited to with the agenda of convincing the audience to give him money and letting his father off with a light sentence trashes Chat Noir's reputation, as he's so focused on his agenda that he accidentally displays how little regard he has for the seriousness of his responsibilities as a hero or his audience's suffering at Hawkmoth's hands.
  • Since Adrien ultimately only cares about himself, it takes Lila harming him personally for him to be willing to say anything about her deceptive nature. Naturally, this proves to be too little, too late. Because Adrien repeatedly vouched for Lila's character before and even allowed her to pass herself off as his girlfriend, nobody believes him when he starts telling the truth about how bad she is after his father has been exposed as Hawkmoth and Lila has left Adrien holding the bag. Instead, it appears as though he's trying to throw her under the bus rather than it being the other way round.
  • His constant shifting of the narrative to make everyone do what he wants bites back hard with Adrien's disastrous interview with the police to report Lila's crime, in which he admits to having known about Lila's various crimes and abuses and done nothing to stop her for months, even going along with a fake dating act and reinforcing the perception that she was very honest. This prejudices the investigation against him by convincing the police he's a shady character, ruining the credibility of not only himself but anyone connected to him who speaks up against Lila after him. Because Adrien essentially admitted to being fine with manipulating, stealing, and lying, with the only inconsistency being that he claims it's his ex-girlfriend who's the liar with a whole host of wrongdoings, it becomes almost impossible to get the police to take the allegations against Lila seriously without concrete proof. Not only that, but when the interview transcript gets into Sabrina's hands, the whole class finds out he knew Lila was a Con Man and cooperated with her lies.
  • Adrien ultimately decides to pull One Last Job as Chat Noir, intending to take down Mayura before getting out of Paris until the heat dies down. He doesn't listen to Ladybug or wait for the rest of the team's support, instead hoping that taking Mayura down alone will boost public opinion of him since the other heroes "hogged" the fight with Hawkmoth. This results in him being unmasked, losing the Ring first to Mayura, then to Ladybug, with all of Paris now convinced he supported the terrorists.
• Humiliation Conga: His father's arrest triggers a chain of events that leads to everything good in his life completely imploding, and by the end of it he's left under effective house arrest under the thumb of an abusive aunt and is publicly believed to be a terrorist.
• Hypocrite:
  • He tells Marinette she's strong enough to suffer through public mistreatment so she doesn't need his help, but demands she help him when Lila manages to put him in the same position.
  • He preaches forgiveness and tolerance towards those who hurt others and judges the victims for not being tolerant enough—until he's the one who's hurt. Then he wants the perp to "suffer."
  • He argues that none of Hawkmoth's crimes should be legally held against him because all of the consequences were erased by Ladybug's Miraculous Cure, yet also believes that he should be compensated for all the times he temporarily died as Chat Noir. Plagg directly points this discrepancy out, but Adrien brushes him aside while insisting "that's different."
  • When he finally does (partially, and only to the police) admit Lila's a liar and a scam artist, he fully expects to be believed when Marinette wasn't, because he's him.
• I Reject Your Reality:
  • Adrien point-blank refuses to see or try to understand things from others' perspectives as his own values increasingly depart from theirs. It gets to the point where he's constantly assuring himself he's right and deserving of praise and all the rewards he desires while plotting futures for himself that do not coexist with anyone else's blatantly stated feelings, desires, or intentions.
  • He absolutely 100% refuses to believe Ladybug doesn't like him and creates every kind of narrative under the sun to explain away why she isn't welcoming his romantic overtures, ranging from being too proud after rejecting him publicly in anger to being confused and/or deluded and/or in denial and needing to "come to her senses." He also thinks that if he can win her over romantically, she'll agree to help him get everything he wants and do everything he says out of sheer dedication to making him happy.
• Impoverished Patrician: Played With. The family is still technically wealthy, but after Lila steals his family's emergency funds and Gabriel cedes his shares of his company to Audrey, Adrien loses most of his possessions due to Gabriel filing them as company property to tax dodge, and he doesn't know how to access the accounts Gabriel made for Adrien's own personal money and the earnings from his modelling. He ends the story in the custody of his also-rich maternal aunt and living in Marinette's upper-middle-class apartment.
• Innocently Insensitive: Adrien appears to specialize in being this:
  • On top of simply not caring about Marinette being hurt by Lila manipulating their classmates, Adrien repeats how it would be wrong to call Lila out and upset her and dismisses Marinette's anguish at seeing that the class has donated the clothes she made by declaring "they're just clothes" and that she can easily replace them, implying her handiwork is worth less than her bully's feelings.
  • Stage One of the public turning against Chat Noir is a post-battle interview with Nadja Chamack, during which Chat makes many extremely insensitive comments while thinking he's being charming. He accidentally implies one person's wellbeing was more important than the rest of Paris and that the people who were akumatized were so because they (unlike him) were just bad at managing their negative emotions, understandingly explains to a less experienced hero who actually bothered to show up to the fight how heroes are "supposed" to be, downplays the seriousness of Hawkmoth's offenses against Paris in a room full of many of Hawkmoth's traumatized victims, and then, to top it off, focuses very noticeably on exactly how much reward money he'll be getting for all the times he helped save Paris. To say he leaves a bad impression on his audience is an understatement.
• It's All About Me: It becomes increasingly clear that his actions aren't just misplaced moralizing but that everything he does is with the intention of benefiting himself first, foremost, and in some cases only. He point blank does not care if anyone is hurt as long he gets what he wants. Not revealing Lila's lies? He doesn't want any waves in class. Marinette is being hurt by Lila? Too bad, she can cope and he's just fine. The class gets led into giving up their best clothes? Not a big deal because they can just get more. Class might not take Lila's lies well? They can just forgive her like he has and they can all get along. His father is Hawkmoth? Okay that's bad, but he doesn't deserve the absolute worst sentence possible. After all, the man is the only family he has. Wants Marinette to put in a good word for his father? Of course she'll be happy to speak up for the terrorist who's been attacking all of Paris specifically to go after her and Chat Noir. After all she likes to help people, especially him. Finally knows Ladybug's identity? He can finally get the Relationship Upgrade he's been wanting. She says she's not interested? She's clearly just in denial.
• Karmic Misfire: On the wrong end of one. Due to his enabling of Lila as she screwed over his classmates and tried to ruin Marinette's life, she is able to throw him under the bus and make him take the fall for her crimes.
• Lack of Empathy: One of Adrien's problems is that he doesn't sympathize with the pain Marinette is going through on account of Lila isolating her from the class. He says that she is strong enough to handle it, so he doesn't feel the need to intervene. He also fails to consider the perspectives of others; as Plagg points out, while he's wealthy enough to easily replace things like clothes, not all of his classmates can say the same. The clothing scam in particular exemplifies this—as a wealthy model and heir to a fashion mogul who has hundreds of employees to do the work for him, Adrien simply can't understand that his classmates can't afford to replace the bespoke clothes Marinette gave them as presents, nor how much of an extraordinary financial burden, time constraint, and labor it would be on Marinette if she actually made the clothes again for free. As someone who has never wanted for any material resource, he simply cannot relate to his classmates' daily living constraints and so his self-centered perspective means he's developed no empathy whatsoever for any resource-related struggles. He sees no problem with letting the class give away their best clothes and implicitly demanding for Marinette to remake them all because he has no capacity to understand what this costs them, both materially and emotionally.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • One of Adrien's defenses for why Lila's conning the class wasn't a big deal is that they weren't losing anything that they couldn't afford to, oblivious to how bad this really is because he has no view of how valuable money actually is. He winds up conned out of the entirety of the Agreste emergency funds (which reach into the millions), which, while considered by him to be a "small" account, is the only one of his family's bank accounts he has access to due to his father's controlling nature. Which is particularly bad, given his father's just been arrested for being Hawkmoth. Adrien's not poor but he can't actually use the money either, so he hasn't lost anything he couldn't afford to in the most technical sense of the word.
  • In the first chapter, Adrien treats the bespoke clothes Marinette made for the class as if they were worth very little, easily replaceable, and took no effort to make, having no concept of how expensive and time consuming such luxury items are, likely because his father runs a fashion company that gives him easy access to the highest quality clothes. Towards the end of the story, Adrien is forced to move out of the company's mansion sans all of the company's property, leaving him with about a week's worth of clothes.
• Learned from the News: How he finds out his father is Hawkmoth.
• Like Father, Like Son: Both Adrien and Gabriel are extremely arrogant, believing themselves to be untouchable even after being slapped in the face with proof that they're anything but.
• Missed the Recital: Adrien's downfall starts when he misses the final fight with Hawkmoth. While Ladybug doesn't include him in the rest of the team's planning due to his refusal to take things seriously, she does specifically tell him to keep his schedule as clear as possible for the next two days because there will be a big fight and she'll need him. He promises to do so. Immediately afterwards, he lets Lila invite the class to his house for a party, which of course is going on right when the big fight breaks out.
• Moral Myopia:
  • Adrien determines whether something is a problem or not through the lens of if he personally thinks the consequences are serious, regardless of how anyone else says they are affected. Once he decides that something is the right course of action, whether or not it winds up hurting someone, then that's all there is to it for him.
  • A notable reoccurring example: rather than holding Lila, Chloé, or Hawkmoth responsible for their actions, Adrien downplays their misdeeds, demands their victims cope because "it's not a big deal," expects their victims to make things easier for them by forgiving them instantly when they need it, and judges the victims when they don't accept the mistreatment with grace. Of course, when he's the victim, he demands that Lila "suffer."
• Never My Fault: Adrien repeatedly insists that he hasn't done anything wrong. No matter how bluntly the problems with his attitude are spelled out to him, he continuously deflects blame to others, claiming that he can't be held responsible for what they've done. The clearest illustration of this comes when Plagg suggests that he might be able to negate some of his bad karma by simply sincerely apologizing to Ladybug, only for Adrien to immediately declare that "She doesn't hate me; she's just confused."
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Adrien's willingness to entertain and enable Lila's claims, to the point that he hosts parties for her at the manor and lets her pretend to be his girlfriend. Not only does one such party prevent him from slipping away from the others when Chat Noir is needed to go and fight, but him backing up her supposed good character make it nigh-impossible for him or the rest of the class to convince anyone of her true nature later on.
  • When Mayura finally makes her move, Chat Noir engages her solo, exposing the Achilles' Heel of her sentimonster so that she can correct it and letting the Ring fall into her grasp, making her even more dangerous.
• No Sympathy:
  • Adrien for Marinette when she tries to tell him how Lila's manipulations have been hurting her. Marinette returns the favor once he starts to suffer the backlash of taking on Lila's karma.
  • Adrien's Moral Myopia develops into a particularly twisted zigzag with this trope. It turns out Adrien can express sympathy... for the villains. All of the "kindness" and "understanding" that he touts internally as proof of his own goodness manifests as demanding that victims forgive those who unapologetically hurt them and let them off with little to no consequences, and never does it extend towards the actual victims unless that victim is himself. Then it turns out that he's really only been looking out for himself and is just trying to beg off consequences for the villains because of how those consequences will negatively affect him in particular. Unsurprisingly, being an apologist for Hawkmoth gets him labeled an unindicted accomplice.
• Not Proven: In the end, the only reason he doesn't end up in jail for aiding his father in his terrorist campaign is because there's no physical evidence proving it beyond reasonable doubt.
• Not What It Looks Like: Adrien, Adrien, Adrien, and unfortunately for him, almost everyone sees his denials as Implausible Deniability for the following reasons:
  • Realizing that Marinette's exposure as Ladybug will out her as a liar and her connection with Gabriel plus any words from Marinette will likely make people conclude she assisted Hawkmoth, Lila sets Adrien up as her patsy, priming the police to believe he manipulated her into unknowingly providing info to him and Hawkmoth just in case anyone does find any connections between Hawkmoth's actions and Lila's.
  • Adrien's refusal to call Lila out as a liar for months and his allowing her to lie about their relationship means that their face-value relationship counts in Lila's favor, as no one believes Adrien would happily date someone for months while she allegedly stole from his friends and then show that thief the security passcodes to his accessible funds. The fact that Adrien only speaks out against her character after his father is exposed as Hawkmoth and a significant portion of their family's fortune went missing in the immediate aftermath makes the police assume Adrien is trying to set Lila up for the theft while he hides some of his family's assets for his father before they can be frozen, since by Adrien's own story he sees no actual problem with lying and stealing.
  • Because of a bad personal decision, Chat Noir isn't present during the fight against Hawkmoth, but does show up for the post-fight interview several days later to make apologist arguments in defense of dropping the murder and terrorism charges against Hawkmoth while being completely unsympathetic to Hawkmoth's victims. Later, due to further bad choices, he fights Mayura alone, exposes her as Nathalie, and reaches down to help her up. She, in turn, takes his hand, and then his Ring. To the rest of the world, it looks like Chat Noir let Mayura have his Miraculous. This also exposes him as Adrien Agreste, Hawkmoth's son, whom the authorities already suspect of working with Hawkmoth. After this, everyone views him as having been a Fake Ultimate Hero and The Mole all along and no one believes a word in his defense.
• Obliviously Evil: He's not deliberately malicious. He's just so completely blind to the harm he's causing that nobody can tell the difference.
• Off to Boarding School: Adrien finds himself potentially facing being shipped off to Military School after Amelie becomes his guardian.
• Oh, Crap!: Adrien realizes just a moment too late how bad it is for him that Sabrina brought transcripts of his police interview for everyone to read.
• Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers: Deconstructed. Adrien refuses to get an attorney while reporting Lila stealing from him because he hasn't committed any crimes and doesn't think he needs one. He fails to understand just how precarious of a position he is in as Hawkmoth's son, and manages to make himself look more like a willing accomplice because of it.
• Ontological Inertia: Adrien's efforts to oppose this form the core of the plot, at least according to the fic's summary. Lila would ordinarily suffer harsh punishments and consequences were her lies to be exposed, but Adrien doesn't want that to happen, so he covers for her and prevents her from being harmed. However, those punishments still happen... just to Adrien, not Lila.
• Original Position Fallacy: Over and over again. He insists when Lila commits crimes against others that they aren't a big deal and it wouldn't be right to make her face repercussions for them because heroes need to be forgiving, only to suddenly agree with Marinette's earlier stance that they shouldn't let Lila get away with her crimes after Lila steals from him personally, even going so far as to internally contemplate avenging himself. He goes back on this again when it comes to his father's crimes, expecting Lila to be punished in full for her crimes against him but also for Hawkmoth to be given leniency for his because heroes need to be forgiving, all while downplaying his father's crimes just like he previously downplayed Lila's. Notably, his position doesn't change according to the severity of the crime, but instead according to how each personally affected him. His stance seems to be that everyone owes forgiveness and leniency to those who hurt them, except when he's the one who's hurt.
• The Poorly Chosen One: As Chat Noir, he prioritizes his own entertainment and his romantic delusions over his responsibility towards the people of Paris. Ladybug only lets him keep the Ring out of respect towards Master Fu, but finally puts her foot down when he accidentally lets Mayura snatch it right off his finger.
• Poorly Timed Confession: The weekend after his father is exposed as Hawkmoth, Adrien goes to the police to accuse Lila Rossi of draining his family's emergency bank account, the login information for which he carelessly showed her immediately after his father was arrested. During this "interview," Adrien, seeking to give the police context for his accusation, characterizes Lila as a Consummate Liar, Con Artist, and routine thief who defrauded everyone in the class for months, and details the scams that he'd noticed since she first joined the class while noticeably leaving out an explanation for his relationship with her. Because their public relationship was allegedly romantic and her reputation was that of a well-connected Good Samaritan, him turning around after months of an outwardly happy relationship with an apparently kind girl to foundationally besmirch her character, then explain that he'd conveniently shown this allegedly extremely untrustworthy person his account credentials and accuse her of draining the account in the aftermath of his father's arrest... looks like a lie to cover up his own attempts to hide some of his family's assets from the law. Adrien doesn't even realize it's a confession because he doesn't understand that, whether they believe him or not, he's just explained that he has no moral backbone or concern for others in a police interrogation room.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Adrien has equated what's best for him with what's right for everyone, and seemingly cannot fathom that other people can value things differently than him. Marinette is fine regardless of her admitting she's in pain because from his perspective he judges that she can endure it and if she does then everything's easier for him. Lila's actions are forgivable up until she robs him personally because from his perspective everything she steals isn't worth much to him. What do you mean you can't replace your dozens of handmade garments, expensive athletic gear, and years of dedication and hard work? Surely the fruits of your labors weren't worth that much? Why are you all suddenly mad at me?
• Punished for Sympathy: Justified example; Adrien's "sympathy" and "kindness" manifest only as enabling, apologist, and victim blaming rhetoric that seeks to benefit and protect intentionally harmful people at the expense of their victims for the sake of "get[ting] everything back to normal" and maintaining the status quo. At one point, he even advocates for a terrorist that made thousands experience the sensation of death and almost started a nuclear war to get off with a "reasonable" "short" sentence of counseling, community service, and donating "some" of his vast fortune to charity (and, implicitly, keeping the rest to still live in the lap of luxury). As such, Adrien's "sympathy" shows him to actually be incredibly callous towards the suffering of the actual victims, whose increasing upset with Adrien leads to distrust in Adrien's moral character, his increased alienation, and the suspicion that he's the villains' accomplice. Further, once Lila betrays Adrien himself, his ideals of mercy and forgiveness are revealed to be nothing but self-serving talk.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Adrien does his best to shield Lila from being challenged about her deceit. He succeeds and it costs him everything.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Adrien has no earthly idea what it's like to potentially want for anything that money can buy, and doesn't care about his classmates enough to consider the idea that they can't just replace things easily.
• Riches to Rags: Played With. After the revelation of Gabriel being Hawkmoth, his business takes a severe PR hit, which of course impacts Adrien as well. It's also revealed that his father dodged taxes by incorporating as many of his family's possessions into the company estate as possible, which bites him hard once said company's stock falls. As a result, the Agrestes lose almost all of their personal posessions when Gabriel loses control of the company, including all of Adrien's nice clothes, since he worked as a company model. On top of all this, thanks to Gabriel being such a Control Freak, Adrien is unable to access his own personal account and the money he made as a model until he's a legal adult. By the end of the story, Adrien is left financially dependent on his aunt, who forces him to live more austerely, hiding away from the city that hates him in a cramped apartment. While his family isn't actually poor, he has no access to any of their wealth himself, stripping him of the resources he once took for granted.
• The Scapegoat: Lila sets Adrien up as her fall guy, setting it up so that it appears that Adrien is the one trying to throw her under the bus instead.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Adrien attempts to pull this by having Ladybug report Lila stealing from him so the police will prioritize his case to please her, only to find that she refuses to abuse her position that way.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Thanks to the Agrestes being obscenely wealthy, Adrien doesn't understand the value of money, seeing nothing wrong with throwing around large sums of it... or with Lila scamming his classmates.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Adrien starts considering this after falling out with his classmates, plotting to go after Lila as Chat Noir, get his money back, and then ditch Paris and everyone he supposedly cared about for good.
• Secret-Keeper: Adrien effectively acts as one to Lila, thanks to his refusal to expose her. Naturally, she exploits this.
• Secretly Selfish:
  • Plagg suggests that, far from wanting to take a moral high road, the real reason Adrien doesn't want to confront Lila is because he doesn't want to be seen as responsible for any tension that results. Plagg's proven right when Lila comes to Adrien for money for help funding "security" due to her family being in danger, and Adrien doesn't care until she flatteringly convinces him that she's turned over a new leaf because of him and he'll be able to prove he was right about how things would go with her. He agrees to give her thousands of euros in exchange for her supposed confession to the class at the end of the week because he'll be able to prove himself right to Marinette.
  • Adrien believes he's a good person trying to do what's right for everyone, but this turns out to be a flattering self-delusion, as he equates what's right for everyone with what's best for himself. While Adrien had initially come across as gentle and charming, unless a given situation directly impacts him in a negative way, he won't feel any urgency in solving the problem, which of course gets exposed for everyone to see when he doggedly tries to get Lila back for robbing him after months of being her Accomplice by Inaction and covering her while she defrauded everyone else.
• Self-Serving Memory: Adrien declares that the others 'hogged' the Final Battle with Hawkmoth, despite him choosing not to go because he deemed staying with Lila to be more important.
• Sheltered Aristocrat: Deconstructed. Adrien's incredibly sheltered life has left him with no ability to empathize with others, no ability to process information that conflicts with how he thinks the world works, and no ability to manage his own life once his controlling father is out of the picture, and his naivete is portrayed not as an endearing quality but as a genuine character flaw that makes him a danger to himself and everyone around him. The results are catastrophic for him, pun not intended.
• Sins of Our Fathers: A lot of his problems come about when Hawkmoth is exposed as his father Gabriel and people start to believe he knew and aided him. His supreme talent at digging himself deeper doesn't help.
• Skewed Priorities: Played for Drama with Adrien; his selfishness and misguided moralizing causes Marinette no end of trouble in both identities, culminating in him prioritizing protecting his reputation over helping fight Hawkmoth.
• Slave to PR: Adrien feels unable to leave the class' party and fight Hawkmoth due to Lila faking fear as an excuse to cling to him. Both he and she know that pushing her away or ditching her in this "state" will cause the class to judge him harshly, so he decides that leaving the party to help Ladybug isn't worth causing the class to think badly of him and stays. Ironically, this just causes damage to his reputation as Chat Noir instead, especially after he fumbles his attempt to explain his absence during Nadja's interview.
• Spanner in the Works: He acts as one to his own father: his plan to use the Agreste emergency fund to pay the manor's electric bill and keep his wife's life support running is skewed by Adrien inadvertently giving Lila the chance to empty it out.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Marinette serves him this. While Adrien claimed he and Marinette were friends and that he was supporting her, Adrien didn't really treat her like one. Over the months that Marinette was suffering from Lila's actions, Adrien asserted that everything would work itself out, that Lila wasn't doing any serious harm, and that any action taken against Lila would only make things worse, leaving Marinette to shoulder the brunt of Lila's cruelties alone. Marinette returns the favor when the situations flip by refusing to act in support of him, citing how, as someone he abandoned time and again to provide cover for her bully, she is not obligated to clean up the mess he made in doing so, that using her influence as Ladybug to tamper with an unrelated police investigation could make things worse, and that if Adrien goes through the proper channels, the problem may sort itself out. And unlike him, she is very honest about the fact that they're not friends and she is absolutely abandoning him to the hell of his own making that becomes his life since he and the class now can't convince anyone that Lila's a liar.
• Tempting Fate: Adrien does this an impressive amount of times, emphasizing his arrogance and naivete about the true dangers of his circumstances.
  • Early on he notices that Ladybug is acting particularly terse and tense around him, but dismisses it, reassuring himself that there will be plenty of patrols they'll be sharing in the future since they're going to be dealing with Hawkmoth for the foreseeable future.
  • Adrien tells Plagg he doesn't see the problem with Lila conning his friends out of some clothes because he could lose 100 outfits and still have more than he could wear in a year. When Audrey Bourgeois takes over Agreste Fashion, he's left with no more clothes than needed to last through a week because every other outfit he had is company property.
  • When Plagg explicitly warns him about the potential karmic backlash, Adrien just smiles and declares "Why would I suffer any karmic consequences? I didn't do anything! All I want is for everyone to be friends, and we will. And there's nothing wrong with that."
  • After his disastrous showing at Nadja's interview, during which he acts callous towards the suffering of Hawkmoth's victims, advocates for giving the terrorist a slap on the wrist, and makes many clearly unwanted advances towards Ladybug, Adrien declares that he "missed one fight and it’s like they think I defected to Hawkmoth’s team." Guess what the public eventually concludes?
• They Just Dont Get It: No matter how many times Adrien is warned about the potential consequences of his behavior, or about the dangers of letting Lila go unchecked, he simply dismisses it outright, convinced that he knows better than everyone else.
• Thicker Than Water: When Gabriel is exposed as Hawkmoth, Adrien is as disgusted as the rest of Paris, but because the man is the only family he has left he decides to do what he can to reduce his father's punishment.
• Thinks Like a Romance Novel: In his own narratives, he believes that he and Ladybug are destined to be together and that one day they will be one of those celebrity couples people see on the covers of magazines. Never mind that she's rejected him in both identities.
• Too Clever by Half: Exploited. Because Lila presents herself as a worse liar than she actually is, she's able to play on his ego by flattering him into thinking his "high road" has shown her how to be a better person, and now she needs his help in order to change. Plagg points out that trusting her is a very bad idea, but Adrien brushes it off because he thinks she isn't that smart and he has her game figured out. Sure enough, he makes the supremely stupid mistake of typing the passwords to an emergency account filled with millions right in front of her.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • He agrees to give Lila thousands of euros despite knowing her history and then, to accomplish this, accesses his family's multi-million euro emergency fund directly in front of her, cheerfully telling her about its lack of serious security measures.
  • He reaches to help the downed villain Mayura up with his Ring hand. You know, the one with the Ring that everyone knows gives him the power to destroy anything. Unsurprisingly, she takes it. If he weren't her boss's son, she would have killed him on the spot.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Chloé accuses him of this, arguing that his refusal to 'rock the boat' and challenge her bad behavior enabled her to become even more of a Spoiled Brat.
• Tragic Hero: Of the Fallen Hero variety. Adrien was a lonely teenager seeking freedom, love, and acceptance, with noble qualities such as courage, inventiveness, kindness, and the ability to keep cool under pressure. But his Secretly Selfish qualities end up eclipsing and even eroding his heroic ones when he insists that confronting Lila will make things worse and that the truth of her actions isn't need-to-know information as long as her lies only affect those who can handle the consequences. It's made clear that despite the inconvenience and pain this status quo is causing to others, he deeply treasures that status quo and fears disrupting the peace of it would threaten his new friendships, greater freedom, and perceived chance at romance. He's also too inexperienced with people to predict the dangers to those very treasured parts of his life that he's incurring by shielding Lila. His readiness to die on the hill of his Protagonist-Centered Morality ends up ruining his life, as his existence devolves into a cruel mirror of the consequences everyone else suffered because of the choices he refuses to accept were wrong, proportionally amplified to match his relative financial privilege. The last scene of him in the story is of him alone and crying in his apartment, witnessing those involved in his former life going about their current lives from his window.
• Underestimating Badassery: He takes Lila's Smug Snake facade at face value, not realizing how dangerous she truly is until she makes off with 50 million of his euros.
• Uninvited to the Party: He crashes Nadja's interview with the heroes who defeated Hawkmoth under the assumption that, as Chat Noir, of course he's invited, regardless of whether he was sent an invitation or was at the fight in question.
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: After learning Marinette's Secret Identity, Adrien happily reveals that he had a crush on Ladybug and is perfectly happy to start dating her, only for Marinette to bluntly reject him.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: To his family's fortune. Adrien shows Lila his access code for the Agreste emergency bank account, which she promptly transfers into her own secret accounts and withdraws in eurobonds as soon as she's alone to do so. Losing the secret emergency account means Gabriel can't fund the manor's electricity bill to keep Adrien's comatose mother alive in the basement while the house is in arbitration following Gabriel's sentencing. Unable to afford fighting Audrey's takeover without killing his wife, Gabriel consents to signing over his controlling shares of the company to her, with ownership of the mansion and most of the Agreste family's belongings transferring with it.
• Unwitting Pawn: Adrien becomes one to Lila... or rather, he was one the whole time and never realized it, taken in by the notion that he saw through her schemes and severely underestimating her as a result, letting her manipulate him without him realizing it.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Both of his identities get hit with this a LOT by everyone throughout the whole story, for both their Skewed Priorities and selfish actions.
• What You Are in the Dark: Adrien ultimately reveals where his true priorities lie when he decides that he'll abandon Paris, his classmates, and everybody he claimed to care about out of spite over not getting what he felt he deserved.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • It's implied Adrien is so extremely confident in his moral righteousness because he sees being given a Miraculous as tacit support for his goodness—clearly, since he's The Hero, he is therefore right, and will get the girl and his happy ending simply by virtue of being himself and being right, just like in all the media he loves. Unfortunately, he doesn't realize what kind of hero he is. For one, not the kind defined by their righteousness.
  • He also falls hook, line and sinker for Lila claiming that he's helped her see the error of her ways, since that's exactly what he wants to hear.
• You're Not My Father: Attempts using this against his Aunt Amelie, declaring "You're not my parent. I don't have to listen to you." Amelie counters by declaring that if he falls behind in his online classes, she'll happily ship him off to military school.

Lila Rossi

A thousand layers of deception and plenty of guts, Lila Rossi's in the game to go big or go home. And she may yet do both...

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• 419 Scam: She compares her more over-the-top celebrity lies to this, in that like the Nigerian email scam, the lies' implausible nature are part of the point. By telling lies which strain credulity, Lila can know that the people who fall for them are easy to fool and thus are good targets for scamming. She can also know that the people who don't fall for those lies will require more sophisticated deceptions if she wants to manipulate them.
• Adaptational Intelligence: She's shown to be much savvier than her canonical counterpart, with her reliance upon Celebrity Lies and her victims not doing any research being just one layer of her deceptive abilities.
• The Bad Guy Wins: She ultimately escapes to Marseille with 50 million of the Agreste family's euros and no punishment whatsoever, and it's made abundantly clear that she's not going to quit while she's ahead and is instead going to continue to harm everyone around her for her own selfish benefit. The only possible hint of karma comes when Ladybug implies that she saw a future in which she is ultimately murdered after a con gone awry, but it's left deliberately ambiguous whether Ladybug is telling the truth.
• Batman Gambit: Fearing retaliation after it is publicly revealed that Marinette is a superhero, Lila arranges one of these that will discredit Ladybug. She planned to steal money from Adrien by lying about what she'd use the funds for (paying back their classmates as part of a grand apology). Adrien wouldn't be able to help himself because it would mean admitting to police that he not only knowingly interacted with a con artist, but that he'd willfully ignored said con artist grifting his classmates for months; meanwhile, Marinette's attempts to help by leveraging her superhero identity would fall flat because everyone would believe she'd be doing it because she has a crush on him rather than altruism. It turns out Lila didn't need to do anything, as Marinette wasn't planning to get revenge at all, and no longer cares enough about Adrien to help him on any level. That isn't to say Lila didn't benefit however, as Adrien's own foolishness allowed her to not only get far more money than she initially intended, but actually keep it all for herself rather than have to donate most of it to a random charity in order to keep up appearances.
• Con Man: She's practically a prodigy at this. She's put intense research and effort into the logistics of financial scams and ensuring her ruses are credible enough to get her what she wants and slip below the radar, and is astonishingly talented at weaponizing her keen social and emotional intelligence for her own gain and discarding any and all liabilities at the drop of a hat. She's also incredibly good at adapting and pivoting her schemes on the turn of a dime.
• Crazy-Prepared: Lila made plans for being a Con Man and we do mean plans. She has several measures set up to be an effective swindler, long before she's ever truly needed them.
  • She has bank passwords and account information written in her poetry book in code, just on the narrowest chance that anyone sees what's written in it.
  • She set up a well hidden bank account in Switzerland years ago, merely on the chance that she had the opportunity to obtain a huge amount of money and had to keep it hidden.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Villainous example. Lila goes to incredible lengths and efforts to save herself from karma and escape with her ill-gotten gains, and as a result, she gets clean away with nearly 50 million euros.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Downplayed; it's explicitly mentioned in the narration that Lila is lying when she supports Adrien in claiming that Gabriel shouldn't be charged for treason.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • Lila struggles to understand her mother's insistence upon honesty and ethics, as she's seen firsthand how this has negatively impacted her career.
  • After Marinette is unmasked as Ladybug, Lila naturally expects her to go on the offensive against her, and is honestly confused by her failure to engage.
• Evil Counterpart: Played With in that Lila presents herself to her classmates as an even better version of Marinette, pretending to be just as kind, thoughtful and helpful as her, with superior connections and perfectly willing to use them to help them achieve their dreams.
• Exact Eavesdropping: Lila spies on Marinette and Adrien several times, listening in on their conversations.
• Fake Charity: Lila has a habit of making these. The one she's using at the start of the fic is a fake program that allegedly gives fancy clothes to poor people so they can go to job interviews and otherwise participate in society. Lila, of course, just keeps the donations that she likes and dumps the rest at a second-hand store in another city.
• False Friend: Naturally; she's of the Manipulative Bitch in Sheep's Clothing variety, feigning generosity while stringing her marks along.
• False Reassurance:
  • After Adrien helps her out, she sincerely thanks him, declaring that "I feel like you've given me a second chance." He takes this at face value, unaware that she's actually referring to how she got a chance to see the password to the Agrestes' emergency account.
  • When she transfers a large sum of stolen money into eurobonds, the teller cautions her that they're like cash in that they're untraceable, so she needs to be careful with handling them. Lila reassures them that "I'll be sure to watch out for thieves."
• Foil: To both her fellow main characters, as detailed on the story's foil page.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: Among the three viewpoint characters, she's actively malicious Evil to Marinette's kind-hearted and selfless Good and Adrien's blindly self-serving Bad.
• It's All About Me: Full stop. Her mother's ethic lead to her career getting sabotaged? All Lila can see is how foolish her mother can be. Adrien winds up under suspicion of being an accomplice of Hawkmoth? Better set him up so it does look true so no one looks her way.
• Kansas City Shuffle: How she plays Adrien to her favor: she's such an obvious scammer around Adrien that he becomes comfortable in his knowledge of how she works... all while Lila manipulates him into walking right into her real trap.
• Karma Houdini: Played straight in the story proper. Thanks to Adrien's help, Lila evaded the worst of the karma she had coming for her, and ultimately escapes Paris with her ill-gotten gains. However, in the epilogue this is Played With, as Ladybug tracks her down and warns her that continuing down her current path will ensure karma does take its toll. It's left deliberately ambiguous whether Ladybug used the Rabbit's Time Travel power to see Lila's fate.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Lila is ambitious but she's also smart. She knows when to cut and run if her fortunes turn. Which proves necessary after Marinette is revealed as Ladybug. Lila knows Marinette can ruin her at any moment so she orchestrates things to get out of Paris, ASAP. She bemoans what it will cost her but also sees that it's better to get while the getting's good.
• Lack of Empathy: Like Adrien, Lila doesn't care about the problems of others as long as the circumstances are beneficial to herself. Unlike Adrien, she's extremely perceptive and fully aware of everything that goes on around her, which makes her lack of empathy a lot more malicious.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: During one of Hawkmoth's assaults, Lila latches onto Adrien's arm and makes a big scene out of how terrified she is, hoping their classmates will snap pictures of them and further spread her claims of their 'relationship'.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: Mrs. Rossi has an extremely strong sense of ethics and personal morals, while her daughter doesn’t and in fact blames her mother’s ethics for damaging their futures.
• Little Miss Con Artist: The story's interpretation of Lila Rossi. Her lies are either to swindle someone, or to gauge their character so she knows how to swindle them (or whether it's worth it in the first place).
• Manipulative Bitch: Lila emotionally manipulates the people around her through Your Heart's Desire, playing deftly on their exploitable flaws and weaknesses. She plays on the class' greed for success and Adrien's proclivity for self-flattering narratives. For those who don't want anything from her, she presents them with plausible narratives and then manipulates others into seemingly confirming them, as she does with the police when she wants Adrien to take the fall for her crimes, knowing that Adrien's self-delusions will shoot a hole straight through his own credibility if he tries to correct the record.
• Mirror Character: Marinette and Lila are clever, sociable, and the only two human characters who take the consequences of their conflict seriously. As a result, both are able to come up with ways to escape the seemingly insurmountable odds against them and end their conflict having earned their ideal outcome, while everyone who brushed it off is left holding the bag.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Played With; one of the reasons that Lila makes far-fetched lies about knowing various celebrities is that the students who do see through them will think that she's not as smart or as good at deception as she thinks. This makes those students easier to fool later when Lila comes up with smarter and more subtle lies. When dealing with Adrien, this ends up working out far better than expected, to the point she's completely shocked and thrown off when he foolishly allows her to watch him enter this banking information, allowing her to up her con from making him lose a few thousand euros (that she would have had to give most of to charity to maintain her image) to being able to steal an additional tens of millions that she can keep for herself with no consequence.
• Oh, Crap!: This is Lila's reaction to Gabriel and Marinette being unmasked as Hawkmoth and Ladybug, respectively, realizing that this severely threatens her plans and she needs to get out while the getting's good.
• Playing the Victim Card: How she influences her 'friends' into avoiding Marinette. Also how she got out of answering for the discrepancies in her claims about being Ladybug's friend, given Ladybug is Marinette: she said she had a good reason, but asked to discuss it later since she was still too upset from realizing she'd worked as a model for Hawkmoth. She then used the bought time to steal Adrien's 50 mil, set her Frame-Up in motion, and hightail it out of Paris before "later" came.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Lila might be ambitious and greedy but she's also sensible, which is what enables her to keep her head above water when the consequences start hitting Gabriel and Adrien. She's willing to take a loss that she can walk away from instead of stubbornly trying to force things to be how she wants. If fortunes turn and it's in her best interest to cut losses, she will do it in a heartbeat even if she bemoans the prospects she's walking away from. She's also quite careful about her manipulations, gauging how people will respond to her deceptions and never trying to overreach because it could expose her.
  • Lila also tries to know her own limitations. For example, when she wants access to a bank account which isn't in her name, she dismisses the idea of trying to forge a fake identity well enough to trick a bank teller into setting up an account for that identity; she knows she doesn't have the needed skills to make a fake identity that can fool a bank, nor does she have any contacts who can do it for her. Instead she works out a way that she can get what she wants using the skills that she has, in this case by coercing an elderly woman into setting up a new account while Lila is in the room and able to get access to the passwords and login information so she, Lila, can use the woman's account later.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!:
  • Lila got Nathaniel to trust her with his submission to a writing contest held by Marvel this way, claiming she had ways to ensure his work got seen.
  • She also predicts others will try this and exploits it by pulling a Frame-Up on Adrien. If Ladybug were to intervene to try to set the police after Lila, the lack of evidence against Lila and mounting circumstantial evidence against Adrien would likely drag Ladybug's reputation down with his from the perceived attempt to abuse her influence and bias the investigation in order to protect her crush.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Lila starts making plans for this after Gabriel's exposure, realizing that her lies are on borrowed time and she has to get out before the consequences hit.
• Shout-Out: She likes to borrow quote famous media.
  • Lila quotes Going Postal when thinking to herself about the importance of remembering her bank information, instead of writing it down where others could find it and expose her secrets. Ironically, she reveals she doesn't really understand the point of the book.
  • Later, Lila quotes Spy Game when thinking about the importance of preparation.
  • And in the epilogue, Lila quotes Todd from Breaking Bad when musing on how she'll always want more money no matter how much she has.
• The Social Expert: This is why she's such an effective manipulator. She has a knack for figuring out just the right thing to say to people and for gauging just how people will respond to her lies. Notably she makes herself look like a worse liar than she actually is in order to take those who do see through her by surprise.
• Too Clever by Half: An Exploited Trope by Lila. She tends to present herself as a worse liar than she actually is so that anyone who does catch onto her tricks will think they can't be fooled by her at all.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Lila encourages Alya and the rest of Marinette's classmates to turn on her by making her out as jealous of her 'relationship' with Adrien, with Adrien doing nothing to stop it.
• Tritagonist: The tertiary main character. Her efforts to enrich herself and escape Paris are initially prominent, but once she completely succeeds halfway through she drops out of the plot and only makes two brief appearances afterwards.
• Unwitting Pawn: She frames herself as this after Hawkmoth's exposure, claiming that Gabriel often asked about her class, fishing for information. She takes this further by making it appear that Adrien manipulated her as well, acting totally devoted to her 'boyfriend' and unwilling to believe he could possibly be involved in his father's crimes while telling anecdotes to the police about him behaving in ways she knew they would find suspicious.
• Villain Has a Point: Lila is deceptive, manipulative and self-serving to an extreme... and she is also highly perceptive about the people around her, making pinpoint precise observations about them.
  • She realizes the class' true nature as Secretly Selfish long before Marinette catches on to how bad they are and recognizes just why they are that way, noting that they treat all of the good breaks they get as pure luck instead of Marinette's hard work, which not only convinced them that good things are simply due to them, but also makes them the easiest targets she's ever had because they've come not to question anything.
  • She knows that Adrien is a complete non-threat to her because he wants to keep the peace and doesn't want to make waves because of how it would impact himself. Plagg makes the exact same observation about Adrien as she does.
  • While she doesn't understand why her mother would stick to her morals despite the cost, she is right about the fallout of her mother's ethics. Mrs. Rossi made an enemy that could hit back against her far harder than she could to start with and has paid an unfair price for doing the right thing. Lila may have learned the wrong lesson from this, but the objective observation of what was lost is still valid.
• Villain Respect: Implied and Downplayed. Lila never explicitly compliments Marinette, but Marinette is the only person Lila interacts with that she doesn't even try to lie to or manipulate throughout the story. Lila is also the only one in the class to appreciate just how hard Marinette works and notes internally how out of line the rest of the class are. She still has zero qualms with hurting Marinette as deeply as she deems necessary to attain what she wants, but her actions imply that, of the people she encounters, she holds Marinette up as the biggest threat to her and thus, ironically, in highest regard. Both are quite civil towards each other in the final scene.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Lila starts playing this after Gabriel's exposure, making plans to protect herself... and quickly readjusting them in response to new information and shifting circumstances, like the passwords to the Agrestes' emergency fund getting dropped into her lap. Ironically, she didn't need to do any of this, as she was doing all of this to protect herself from Marinette, who couldn't care less about her by that point.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Lila is completely flummoxed when she realizes that Adrien is typing in his passwords right in front of her.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Lila pulls a variant of this upon Adrien, realizing that he's no longer a valuable asset to her after Hawkmoth and Ladybug's unmasking.
• Your Heart's Desire: A key part of her manipulation strategy is figuring out what people really want to achieve and then telling them what they want to hear about it (usually that she has connections which can make those dreams come true without the people having to put in any work). She exploits this to rob her victims, who usually find themselves further away from their goals than they were before; be it them now unable to take credit for their own work (Nathaniel, Max, and Nino), losing out on actual networking opportunities (Kim and Alix), or getting blacklisted by various people and organizations (Sabrina, Mylene).

Other Miraculous Holders

Luka Couffaine / "Viperion"

Marinette's Second Chance, in more ways than one.

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• Armor-Piercing Question: While figuring out how to deal with Hawkmoth in a final confrontation they're aiming to force, Luka asks Ladybug whether she actually wants Chat Noir to be involved with planning it, which makes her realize that while he's nominally her partner, she doesn't actually trust him to take the fight seriously.
• The Confidant: To Marinette as Ladybug, kicking off the plot. She seeks him out for emotional support, informing him of the stress she's facing in her civilian life without revealing her Secret Identity. He, in turn, gives his perspective and advice, and together they plot to invoke the Godzilla Threshold.
• Official Couple: With Marinette.
• The Reliable One: Invoked. Realizing Marinette's crumbling under the pressure and feels totally unsupported by her "friends" and partner, Tikki encourages Marinette to reach out to someone whom she can depend on. In the next chapter we learn this meant Luka. He dutifully volunteers himself for the fight and even when realizing that Marinette's in conflict with his sister Juleka, he still stands by Marinette and respects and supports her feelings and decisions on the matter. With the support of both, he later works to help the two come to an understanding.
• Second Love: To Marinette, after Adrien's lack of support forces her to realize she'd been Loving a Shadow.
• Secret Test of Character: Luka gives one to Juleka, inviting her to talk about her feelings regarding the situation with her classmates while she's unaware that Marinette is right outside the door listening in.

Kagami Tsurugi / "Kitsune"

Disciplined, duty-bound, and dependable, Kagami is again called to the service of Paris... as a Fox.

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• Brutal Honesty: Upon hearing that Ladybug is used to her friends not believing her when she says she's in pain, Kagami remarks to Ladybug's face that the latter needs better friends.
• Opposites Attract: Downplayed. She ends the story dating a known class clown, attracted to his levity, but it's noted that they share the same drive and sense of duty.
• The Reliable One: Shares this with Luka, and something she discusses when implicitly contrasting herself against the previous Fox holder.
• True Companions: While initially she becomes one of Marinette's battle partners for her reliability, the two form a genuine friendship. She becomes a permanent member of the team and very protective of Marinette and, with her permission, is noted to have intimidated Marinette's former classmates away from stalking the Dupain-Cheng parents.

Chloé Bourgeois / "Queen Bee"

Local rich girl with Mommy Issues and a lot of mistakes to make up for.

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• Armour-Piercing Question: In Chapter 7 she observes that Adrien always told her that her bratty behavior was okay, then asks "You were lying, weren't you? You knew I was making myself and everybody else miserable." Adrien reluctantly affirms it, but insists he was just trying to keep the peace and not set off more tantrums.
• Disappointed in You: Seeing how disappointed Ladybug was by her betrayal caused Chloé to realize that not everything she did could be brushed away with an apology or her father's money, motivating her to actually try and change her ways.
• Easily Forgiven: Averted; while Ladybug is forced to request Chloé's aid, she makes very clear to Chloé that this is purely a matter of necessity, and not a sign that Chloé will get to become Queen Bee again or gain any recognition as a hero. Chloé, however, accepts this and is willing to help Ladybug for nothing in return to make amends and become a better person. Chloé also, without ever telling Ladybug, goes to the people she hurt and asks if there is any way she can help them to make up for what she did. If they accept her offer, she quietly performs the tasks desired to the best of her ability. Because of this, Ladybug forgives Chloé, gives her a second chance to be a superhero, eventually becomes friends with her, helps her with her relationship with her mom, and by the end, even gives Chloé the public recognition she's always desired, because after all the work Chloé's put into being a better person, Ladybug decides Chloé's earned it.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Averted. Chloé works very hard, without any recognition or prompting at all, to be of service to the people she's harmed in the past in order to make right the damage she's done and learn from her mistakes. She's unexpectedly rewarded by Marinette with being allowed to join the other Miraculous holders in the spotlight, being recognized for all of her efforts to help others and be a better person.
• Must Make Amends: She realized after Ladybug refused to forgive her for Miracle Queen that her actions have consequences that can't be smoothed over with her father's influence or money. She resigns herself to working very hard to try to make up for what she did without any reward besides personal growth, because if she hadn't been terrible to others, she wouldn't have to put forth this effort in the first place.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: She combines this with a 'The Reason I Suck Speech' when Adrien pleads with her to "help Marinette see sense," realizing that Adrien enabled her bad behavior for years for the sake of 'keeping the peace'.
  Chloé: I'm done with that, and I'm done with you. I'm going to stick with Marinette and the others, because as annoying as Dupain-Cheng can be sometimes? I know that she'll be honest with me and demand I do better when I screw up. You won't.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: After Miracle Queen, she never bullied anyone or made Sabrina do her homework, hoping it'd be enough for Ladybug to make her Queen Bee again. Ladybug points out "Not being a bully is just basic decency".
• What You Are in the Dark: She craves positive attention, but after having the public role of a hero refused to her because of what she's done in the past, she still agrees to quietly serve on the sidelines in order to help Ladybug and Paris.

Juleka Couffaine

Quiet and grateful for her friends, Juleka wasn't looking for a fight.

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• Ascended Fangirl: Because Marinette needs all trustworthy hands on deck for the battle with Mayura, Juleka is entrusted with the Tiger Miraculous in the second-to-last chapter.
• Jerkass Realization: Juleka has one upon hearing Alya and the others planning to make amends with Marinette and realizing that they weren't really going to be apologizing, as they expected everything to go back to how it was before:
  Juleka: An apology is supposed to mean you've figured out that you were wrong and so you've changed, right? 'I was like this, and I realized now that was bad and hurtful, so now I've changed myself for the better and I'm sorry for what I did in the meantime.' But there wasn't any realization; I knew all along what we were doing was wrong. I think most of the others were the same. So our apology wouldn't really be, 'we see now that we were wrong,' but instead would be, 'we always knew that we were wrong, but now we want you to like us again, so we're hoping you'll just overlook everything.'
• The Mole: After the class takes to stalking Marinette's family to try to pressure Marinette to help them, Juleka becomes this for Marinette so she can know enough about their plans to avoid them.
• Must Make Amends: Discussed and played straight; Juleka had realized long before that how the class treated Marinette was wrong, but didn't want to make waves and risks losing her new friends. She stops being complicit and works to earn Marinette's trust back over the course of the story.
• Positive Friend Influence: Positive girlfriend influence, towards Rose. She encouraged the very naive Rose to think critically on Lila's stories and to not trust her with anything important. She also helped counsel Rose into braving her apology to Marinette.
• Secret Test of Character: Passes one given to her by her brother Luka, who talks with her about her feelings regarding the situation with her classmates while she's unaware that Marinette is right outside the door, listening in.
• Walking Spoiler: Discussing her gives away the mid-story reveal that she'd known Lila was probably lying and that treating Marinette the way they did was wrong, as well as that she's the first classmate who contributed to Marinette's mistreatment to sincerely take responsibility for their actions and apologize.

Rose Lavillant

Naive and kind-hearted, Rose didn't want to hurt anybody.

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• Ascended Fangirl: Because Marinette needs all trustworthy hands on deck for the battle with Mayura, Rose is entrusted with the Pig Miraculous in the second-to-last chapter.
• Foil: To the rest of her class aside from Juleka. Though the idea of apologizing clearly made her anxious, doing it and taking responsibility for her actions ultimately earned her forgivenesss, a second chance at Marinette's friendship, and the reclamation of her chance to be a hero, while the rest of the class refused to take responsibility for the damage they'd done, demanded Marinette forgive and reward them for nothing, and end the story still suffering from the stigma of the consequences without any forgiveness to alleviate them in sight.
• Godzilla Threshold: How she got her Miraculous. Mayura was such a threat after taking the Cat Ring that Marinette needed everyone she could trust fighting with her.
• Karmic Jackpot: A delayed example. Although she was late to do so, her taking responsibility for her mistakes and working to correct them leads to her ultimately being rewarded with Marinette's forgiveness and a reputation-saving hero status.
• Must Make Amends: While she initially hid from Marinette, uncomfortable with Marinette knowing she was there given where Marinette has made clear she stands on the subject of their class, Rose eventually faces her and apologizes for her part in hurting her, making clear that she's working to make up for the trusts she failed to live up to, both to Marinette herself and to Rose's family, whose gifts she foolishly gave away.
• Out of Focus: She's not given any particular attention for three quarters of the story.
• Walking Spoiler: She only becomes notably involved with the main story later, and everything about it exposes who manages to redeem themselves to Marinette and the circumstances of the Final Battle, since the dire twist of Mayura getting Chat's Ring is why Marinette needed Rose to have a Miraculous.

Gabriel Agreste / "Hawkmoth"

Fashion icon. Neglectful father. Supervillain. A proud man from a proud family with a proud son.

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• Brought Down to Normal: In the final battle, Ladybug manages to filch his Miraculous, leaving him an ordinary man who is easily overpowered by police.
• Caught on Tape: As he reaches down to pull Ladybug's Earrings off, she steals his Brooch. He detransforms in front of a crowd of witnesses while the battle is being broadcast live.
• Control Freak: One of his Fatal Flaws, which backfires massively when he's arrested and his contingency plans fail, leaving everything he had been controlling in disarray and dysfunction since he ensured that as little as possible could function without him.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: He's filed most of his family's personal possessions as company property to dodge paying taxes and has his secretary Nathalie use sentimonsters to settle union strikes by having them impersonate union leaders and then get caught doing illegal or immoral things, thereby undermining their causes and forcing the workers' unions to settle on his terms.
• Disc-One Final Boss: He starts off as the main villain, but he's arrested a quarter of the way through.
• Evil Gloating: Hawkmoth engages in this when he gets his hands on the Ladybug Earrings, insisting that Nothing Can Stop Me Now.
• Fatal Flaw: Two: Arrogance and control. Much like his son, he naïvely presumes that he'll get what he wants, though in his case, it's because he forces things to go his way... or tries to. His arrogant overestimation of himself leads to his downfall, and his inability to compromise puts him ever further on the back foot, unable to recover. In addition, his failure to teach Adrien independence or how to better safeguard himself bites him hard, with Adrien's ignorance making him a Spanner in the Works to his plans.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Ladybug takes this position regarding him; whatever reasons he had for his actions, they don't excuse all the pain, suffering, and fear he caused so many others.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Because he sent Nathalie to sabotage the workers' union as scheduled, she can't provide much backup when Hawkmoth is tricked into an all-or-nothing battle on the Heroes' terms and loses, with his identity exposed on the live news coverage.
  • His habit of deliberately being rude to other people so that they would be upset and vulnerable to akumatization blows up in his face when Marinette, who was considering letting him in on her plot to beat Hawkmoth (because she needed financial and political backing and knew Gabriel had access to both) decided not to do so on the grounds of her not being able to stand the man. If she'd revealed her scheme to him, he would have known not to bite the bait when she appeared to be trapped under the collapsed warehouse and her plan would have been a total failure or even vulnerable to being countered; instead, he fell into her trap and was defeated.
  • Gabriel's controlling nature means he refused to teach Adrien any kind of independence or let doctors take care of his wife in an actual hospital. He instead micromanages all of his son's financial matters himself and keeps his wife secretly on life support in his basement. He's also declared his mansion a company property to dodge taxes. All of this comes back to bite him: Adrien is easily swindled out of the family emergency funds once Gabriel's imprisoned, the family company's stock plummets, and Gabriel's forced to consent to a buy out by Audrey Bourgeois or risk the arbitration over company ownership getting the electricity in his "company property" manor shut off... while his wife is still secretly on life support in the basement.
• Like Father, Like Son: Both Adrien and Gabriel are extremely arrogant, believing themselves to be untouchable even after being slapped in the face with proof that they're anything but.
• Logical Weakness: Hawkmoth's choice to obtain the Miraculous through combat means that even if one side manages to get the other's Miraculous, the Miraculous' powers would likely be used up, and the kwamis would need to eat before their powers could be used again. Marinette exploits this during the Near-Villain Victory by using the Ladybug's magical ability up right before he can take her Earrings and stealing his Brooch when he leans in to do so, leaving him with three Miraculous yet no power. He's easily taken down by the police.
• Majority-Share Dictator: Gabriel Agreste owns 66% of his fashion company and threatens to use that power to fire Gerard if he obeys an order from Audrey Bourgeois. Since he's already behind bars as Hawkmoth and Audrey is about to make a deal with the board of directors to buy his shares, it doesn't work.
• Near-Villain Victory: Hawkmoth comes within a hairsbreadth of successfully taking the Ladybug Miraculous for himself because Chat Noir can't make it to the battle on time. He fails because of Marinette taking his Miraculous at the same time he takes hers, which reveals his identity to Paris, and, because she used Lucky Charm right before he did, can't use it because Tikki needs to eat to restore his energy. This lets the police take him down and confiscate the Miraculous he did take during the fight.
• Never My Fault: During the argument in Chapter 9, Gabriel blames Adrien for forcing him to sell his shares of Agreste Fashion to Audrey Bourgeois because Adrien let Lila steal the emergency funds. While Adrien's stupidity certainly didn't help matters, the situation only escalated to that point because of a cascade of failures on Gabriel's part - he declared his mansion company property as a tax dodge, he went on a terrorist rampage against Paris, and he set up the safeguards in his company contract that are now being used against him.
• Oh, Crap!: Gabriel pales upon being asked why the Agreste Manor uses so much electricity.
• Parental Neglect: He's guilty of this (among other things). He barely ever interacts with Adrien and never taught him basic, common sense life skills to keep him out of trouble.

Nathalie Sancoeur / "Mayura"

Either the world's most loyal or the world's best paid secretary. Hobbies include identity theft, robbery, settling union disputes, and blue peacock cosplay.

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• Dragon Their Feet: Because Gabriel sent her to frame a union leader for misconduct, Mayura is unable to get directly involved in Hawkmoth's Final Battle. Instead, Nathalie sends Gabriel a sentimonster and, upon his loss, spends the aftermath plotting out the best way to strike back at Ladybug and Paris.
• Final Boss: Hawkmoth is taken down relatively early in the story but Mayura remains at large, leaving the heroes to prepare for a final battle with her before the city can be considered truly safe.
• Mundane Utility: Nathalie uses her powers as Mayura to, of all things, settle union disputes. She creates a sentimonster which looks like the union boss and then has the sentimonster get caught doing something scandalous or illegal so the union falls apart and is forced to accept Gabriel's terms.

Kwami

Tikki

Marinette's dutiful and well-meaning Kwami.

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• The Confidant: As Marinette's constant companion, she listens to Marinette's troubles and tries to provide an understanding ear. However, she comes to realize that she alone is not enough and encourages Marinette to reach out for more support.
• Innocently Insensitive: She's not trying to make Marinette feel like she isn't doing enough, she's just trying to keep Marinette focused on avoiding the danger they know is close at hand. Unfortunately, it hasn't been coming off that way.
• Jerkass Realization: She realizes after Marinette's Despair Speech that, while it is true that Marinette needs to stay strong in order to resist Hawkmoth, her constant reminders of Marinette's obligations with no offered solutions for the actual strain they impose has only been making Marinette feel like she's not living up to her obligations.
• Must Make Amends: Implied. She never explicitly says this is what she's doing, but in Chapter 1 it's clear she comes to a realization that she's been adding to the pressure bearing down on Marinette rather than helping her cope. After this, Tikki about-faces and reprioritizes Marinette's wellbeing in the conversation, encouraging actual self-care strategies, one of which leads to Marinette confiding in Luka.
• Servile Snarker: Very briefly. After she's briefly stolen by Hawkmoth, she "regretfully" informs her "Master" that she can only follow commands she is physically able to perform. Such a pity he hasn't fed her.

Plagg

Chat Noir's Kwami and shoulder devil. Or is he a shoulder angel? Either way, he's ignored.

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• Cassandra Truth: He's constantly telling Adrien how bad his ideas are and just why they're not great. Adrien brushes him off time and again.
• The Confidant: As Adrien's constant companion, Adrien often narrates, explains, and attempts to justify himself to Plagg. Through this, we learn what Adrien thinks about the current circumstances.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Finally out of patience with Adrien, he drives this home in a magnificent "The Reason You Suck" Speech that takes careful pains to point out that the troubles Adrien faces could have been avoided had he listened to Plagg at all, revealed Lila at any point before he himself was robbed, or at least had not tried to protect her, and that the situation Adrien winds up in is the result of his efforts going horribly right, just as Plagg had warned him they would.
• Genre Savvy: He realizes about halfway through that nothing he can do or say will have any effect on Adrien's actions and resigns himself to what's about to happen, looking on Adrien's fate with pity until he's stolen by Mayura and retrieved by Ladybug.
• I Warned You: Adrien doesn't take any of his advice seriously, even when it proves to be accurate.
• Ignored Expert: Having millennia of experience working hand-in-hand with the Ladybug Miraculous, Plagg knows how it can influence the fortunes of others and what kind of danger Adrien is incurring by treating its current holder so poorly. Pity Adrien doesn't listen to anyone's advice but his own.
• Once per Episode: Every chapter until the eighth includes a scene of Plagg attempting to convince Adrien that he's got to change tactics before it's too late, frantically insisting that things aren't going to work out the way he expects. This only changes once Plagg gives up.
• Only Friend: After Adrien is exposed as having known about Lila all along and is thrown out of his friend group, Plagg is left as the only one who legitimately cares about his well-being. It's downplayed in that by this point, Plagg has largely given up on him and can only make pitiful attempts to get him to at least learn something from the ordeal.
• Only Sane Man: As Adrien's entitled and persecutory delusions get worse, Plagg is this in most of their shared scenes. He's constantly going on about the faults in Adrien's reasoning and explaining outright why he's in the wrong, for all the good it does him.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • He's usually lazy, cheese-obsessed, and irreverent, so him becoming the Voice of Reason in Adrien's life demonstrates just how much trouble Adrien is unknowingly brewing and how unhinged from reality his decisions increasingly become.
  • In Chapter 8, when Adrien comes up with another entitled plan to help himself, Plagg goes out of character from even his more serious Voice of Reason characterization, with Adrien noting that Plagg isn't commenting or giving advice. The kwami tells him that there's no point anymore because Adrien hasn't listened and isn't going to anyways so he's done. He also solemnly states that Adrien's karma is locked in now so no amount of his help from now on will change anything.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Plagg eventually spells out for Adrien how his own actions led to his downfall, as he proved himself to be so unreliable and untrustworthy that nobody can trust him, even when he's finally telling the truth, and this is all the result of his desire to help genuinely bad people get away with terrible deeds by helping them push the consequences away from themselves and onto others.
• Voice of Reason: He tries to give Adrien advice on how to help himself out of the situations he's in, avoid the karmic backlash that's coming, and mend bridges, reminds Adrien of where others have stated where their positions are on matters, and makes clear where Adrien's fantastical idea of how the world works differs from necessary reality, but Adrien doesn't listen.

Non-Hero Classmates

In General

• All Take and No Give: They take Marinette's hard work completely for granted, convinced that giving so much of herself is the friendly thing for her to do and her not wanting to give any further is just her being unreasonable. Adrien encourages this mentality by casually declaring that it's no big deal if they get rid of the outfits Marinette made for them, as she can just make more. After talking with Luka and Kagami, Marinette comes to realize how much this contributed to her feeling trapped and obligated in relationships, and so ends up cutting ties with most of her former friends for her own wellbeing.
• Cassandra Truth: Part of the Laser-Guided Karma they get hit with is that after refusing to believe Marinette about Lila and alienating her for her claims instead of hearing her out, the class runs into this themselves after Principal Damocles and Miss Bustier get into trouble with the school board for the misappropriation of disability funds. While they know that Lila tricked them with false disability claims, no one ever fact-checked those claims, so they have no documentation to prove it and the board concludes that their testimony is merely made up to support Adrien's bid to slander her.
• False Friend: To Marinette. After everything Marinette had done to help them as their "Everyday Ladybug", they instantly abandon her once Lila presents herself as a more advantageous friend claiming to have better connections. It's very telling that out of all of them, only Juleka and Rose realize their mistakes and don't act entitled to Marinette forgiving them for their abandoning and isolating her.
• Fair-Weather Friend: Played straight with Marinette, whom they abandoned once they thought she was the less beneficial option between her and Lila, but ironically they avert this later; perhaps because it wasn't as gradual as Lila's slow enticement to alienate Marinette, they are very resistant towards the idea of abandoning Adrien. Which makes The Reveal that he knew Lila was manipulating and stealing from them the whole time so much worse.
• Guilt by Association:
  • Initially Inverted: Marinette's refusal to be associated with them after being outed as Ladybug makes everyone who knows them come to unflattering conclusions about them as people.
  • Played straight with Adrien. Because he's suspected of helping his father akumatize people and they've all been akumatized so much, their continuing to stick by Adrien and defend him gets them side-eyes from the rest of the city, especially when they begin repeating his claims that Lila is a Con Artist, since the police and school board think Adrien's trying to pull a Frame-Up while hiding his father's assets from the law. This becomes part of the reason the class become so angry at Adrien after The Reveal—because they threw what was left of their reputations away to defend him, while he let Lila rob them and did nothing to stop them from alienating Marinette for no good reason.
• Hypocrite:
  • Most of the class grouse about Marinette ignoring their efforts to reach out and reconnect... much like how they ignored her attempts to reconnect in favor of Lila.
  • When Adrien asks them to put aside how he's wronged them because he's personally suffering now and needs their help, they turn him away and then go back to plotting how to make Marinette help them.
• It's All About Me: Aside from Rose and Juleka, the class continuously prioritizes concern for themselves over concern for Marinette, the person they hurt, while demanding any issues she has with them be put aside, taking absolutely no accountability for their own actions and choices, and thinking that if they emphasize how much they're suffering because of Lila, Marinette will have to help them, despite the fact that they all ignored Marinette when she was the one suffering because excluding her seemed more personally beneficial. They further discuss Marinette like she's the one who has to apologize for the distance between them and treat Rose, the only one among them who shows concern for Marinette's feelings like she's a traitor to their side. Naturally, Marinette hearing about this just reinforces her unwillingness to give them the time of day.
• Jerkass Has a Point: The whole class may be entitled and unwilling to own up to their own bad behavior, but they're absolutely justified in being furious at Adrien, who let Lila steal from them repeatedly and said nothing, costing each of them immensely and permanently ruining many of their future avenues for success.
• Lack of Empathy: With the exception of Chloé, Juleka, and Rose, the class as a whole simply don't concern themselves with what they put Marinette through, and breeze over Marinette's feelings when they're brought up by deflecting blame to Lila and later Adrien. Even when trying to make up with her, they do so by trying to make her feel empathy for them and their suffering, never once showing remorse for how they hurt her. They even treat the distance between them as Marinette's mistake, for which Adrien advocates for kindly forgiving her and Alya never wants to let her live down.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • The majority of the class latched onto Lila in hopes of getting their names out there and making it big. Instead, she stole from them, ruining many of their original prospects and leaving their immediate futures in doubt.
  • The class spent months alienating Marinette to appease Lila because it was personally more convenient for each of them. By the end of the story Marinette has "given them what they wanted" by severing ties with them right when being her friend would be the most advantageous, and Lila has bailed leaving her marks holding the bag for her actions, with the class now in Marinette's former circumstances, unable to convince anyone of Lila's deceptive nature and responsibility for their losses.
• Missed the Recital: The story starts with Lila convincing the class to throw a party for her "clothing charity" in the park right in front of the Dupain-Cheng Bakery. An hour or so later, returning home, Marinette, who wasn't invited, sees and confronts them. As it turns out, Marinette had gone to Ms. Bustier about how the class was excluding her and Bustier told her to try harder, so Marinette had planned a seperate party for that day and given everyone notice a week in advance. However, once Lila told the class that a famous fashion mogul would be there, everyone not only decided it would be okay to be late to Marinette's party without informing her (and then skipped her party entirely), but decided to give away their best clothes—which Marinette had made for them—to impress the mogul. Even after Marinette turns away, heartbroken, the class "console" her that she can throw them the party another time, and Kim asks for her to make sure she has his favorite desserts.
• Never My Fault: Most of the class entirely blame Lila and later Adrien for all their misfortunes and refuse to accept that they were the ones who drove a wedge between Marinette and themselves with their neglect and mistreatment of her.
• Secretly Selfish: Their collective Fatal Flaw. Lila exploited this about them in order to 'sweeten the pot' for her scams, leading her classmates to think they'll benefit from giving her things in various ways, such as getting to impress celebrities and/or make a name for themselves in their field of interest.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • Marinette's former class mistakenly believe that the reason they've been so fortunate is because they're all Born Lucky, failing to recognize or appreciate that much of their good fortune stemmed from Marinette working hard to help them all out. Lila takes advantage of their expectations to easily get by life's roadblocks via the generosity of others, and their luck runs out when Marinette being exposed as Ladybug causes Lila to flee and leave them holding the bag.
  • Thanks to Miss Bustier making students 'lead by example' by forgiving their bullies, Alya and most of her classmates believe that they can force Marinette to forgive them by going over her head and appealing to her parents. This only succeeds in getting them into deeper trouble with their own families.

Alya Cesaire / "Rena Rouge"

Teen blog author, "investigative" reporter, occasional superheroine, and alleged best friend—on a bygone day.

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• Entitled Bastard: Acts the most entitled to Marinette as her 'bestie', despite her earlier abandonment of her and casual mockery of her feelings.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Alya spearheads an effort to go over Marinette's head and harass her parents until they make her help them. This ends up getting all of the classmates involved into even deeper trouble, with the whole lot getting grounded.
• Hypocrite: Despite expecting Marinette to let all of Alya's mistakes against her slide, Alya also declares her intention to hold Marinette's slowness to forgive over her head forever once they 'make up'.
• The Leader: She spearheads the class' misguided attempts to get Marinette to be friends with them again, though all of her plans end in horrible failure. It doesn't help that the ones we see are either influenced by Lila or Adrien, both of whom are manipulating the narrative.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Alya loses the Ladyblog thanks to Lila gaining access to her account and deleting it, along with stealing her backup drive. Since Alya vigorously went after anyone who tried reuploading her videos anywhere, that leaves her with nothing and no way of rebuilding it.
• Open Secret: Treats Marinette's crush on Adrien as one, idly joking about how "It's about time" when Marinette pulls him aside for their private chat.
• Skewed Priorities: Upon seeing the results of Ladybug's battle with Hawkmoth, Alya squeals that she's Ladybug's best friend, prompting everyone else to stare at her. She then offhandedly offers her condolences over Adrien's father being Hawkmoth.

Nino Lahiffe / "Carapace"

An amateur DJ with aspirations of hitting it big, Nino has previously moonlit as a superhero.

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• Et Tu, Brute?: While The Reveal of Adrien keeping Lila's thefts a secret hurts everyone, it hits Nino especially hard. He calls off their friendship.

Alix Kubdel / "Bunnyx"

An athletic girl with dreams of going pro. She isn't a superhero yet, but she likes to think she will be.

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• …But He Sounds Handsome: Upon learning that Bunnyx is among the temporary holders who won't be getting 'their' Miraculous, Alix protests, trying to defend her future self without letting on that she knows who she is.
• Future Self Reveal: Inverted. Bunnyx is implied to have never actually been Alix's future self, but instead a sentimonster sent back by Marinette's team to keep the timeline stable after Marinette decided Alix was not trustworthy enough for a Miraculous. Once Hawkmoth is defeated and Marinette cuts ties with the class, Bunnyx is no longer needed, and never shows up again.
• Mundane Utility: According to Alix, Bunnyx used her time-travel powers to come back just to chat with her present-day self, offering her minor tips like avoiding wardrobe malfunctions or studying harder for upcoming tests.
• My Future Self and Me: Alix really feels like she bonded with her future self when she visited; as she explains to the class (with Marinette overhearing), Bunnyx used to give her heads-ups on tests and wardrobe malfunction tips. Bunnyx vanishes after Marinette declares Alix will never get a Miraculous; the timing, Marinette's voiced consideration for alternatives, and Bunnyx's described choice of interactions implies she was actually a subversion of this trope all along—a sentimonster sent back by Marinette's team to act as Alix had described her and ensure the timeline remained stable until after the battle with Hawkmoth.
• Power Loss Depression: Played With. She takes the loss of her hero identity harder than anyone save Alya, despite ironically never having actually had her powers yet. However, it's a combination of this and Lila and Adrien being revealed for what they truly are that hurts; further, it's implied she genuinely thought of her future self as her close friend and a source of comfort and self-assurance when things went wrong, so the implication that Bunnyx was and always had been an impersonator due to Alix's own untrustworthiness shakes her to her core. When Alix finds out that Adrien knew about Lila and wasn't being honest with them even now, her sorrow turns to rage.
• Rage Breaking Point: When she realizes what Adrien's police interview transcript means for their situation, all of her heartbreak turns to rage, not helped by Adrien again trying to minimize the suffering of the person who's angry with him.
• Thread of Prophecy, Severed: Ladybug eventually decides she's never getting a Miraculous in spite of Bunnyx's appearance suggesting otherwise. It's implied Bunnyx was actually a sentimonster made in her image.
• Tricked Out Time: Later events of the story imply the Bunnyx Alix met was a sentimonster sent by Marinette, impersonating Alix's future self as Alix had described her to others in order to ensure the timeline's stability after Alix lost her chance of ever becoming a real superhero.

Minor Characters

Audrey Bourgeois

Fashion icon. Awful mother. Surprisingly good boss?

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• Everyone Has Standards: She's not a pleasant individual and is an outright terrible parent to Chloé, but Audrey treats her workers well and reviles Hawkmoth for using her to terrorize innocent people.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Audrey sees the revelations and fallout of the Final Battle as the perfect opportunity to sweep in and snag the majority stake in Agreste Fashion while it's floundering.
• Majority-Share Dictator: Her deal with Agreste Fashion's board of directors gives her 51.7% of the company.
• Moral Pragmatist: She decides that once she buys out Gabriel, she'll give her employees all the benefits they were striking for and more, and give all proceeds earned on a given day of the week to financially compensate and support akuma victims struggling with the aftermath of what Hawkmoth put them through. She does this primarily to ensure the financial success of her rebrand and to morally flex on Gabriel Agreste, but it's undeniable that her plans will do real good for those involved.

Nadja Chamack

Reporter with a platform and a post-battle interview.

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• Adaptational Nice Guy: Downplayed. While usually nice, in canon Nadja has been shown to become quite disrespectful and prying towards the heroes' boundaries and personal lives for the sake of ratings. Here she behaves quite even-handedly to Team Miraculous; she never tries to spin the narrative in a particular direction, and while she does occasionally ask scrutinizing follow-up questions regarding the heroes' answers, these questions are almost entirely about the heroes' public-facing roles and behavior, even when everyone knows Ladybug's, Viperion's, and Kitsune's identities as citizens. Nadja's one personal question (about whether Chat Noir and Ladybug are dating) is only asked to clear up confusion in response to Chat Noir explicitly saying they are dating, which contradicts Ladybug's prior statements. It's implied by her uncomfortable mention of Prime Queen that this difference is the result of offscreen Character Development.
• Emergency Broadcast: Nadja reports a very important one in Chapter 3.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Nadja appears twice in the story and is mostly a background character, but both appearances are pivotal; during the first, she is the Breaking News correspondent who reports on the "fire" in the alleged anti-akuma weapon testing site, reporting that Marinette is counting on to lure Hawkmoth to their battle. During the second, she is the host of the Talk Show interview which unintentionally platforms Alya's self-exposure and Chat Noir's implosion.
• Talk Show: Hosts one that features heavily in Chapter 8.

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