The problem with Lila Rossi is that she is, at her core, an Entitled Bitch. She believes she deserves the life of a celebrity, full of fame and riches, to have everything she wants just handed to her on a silver platter without having to work for it. Which is why she gets upset when she sees other people, like Marinette and Adrien, get all the things she wants.
So when she defeats Ladybug and Chat Noir and gets her hands on their Miraculous, she sees her chance to change the world to how she thinks it should be, and wishes to have everything her classmate and former target of her lust has, expecting a new existence for her, one full of glitz and glamour. But Lila is about to learn there’s a reason people say "Be Careful What You Wish For".
After penning The Lament Series (ChaoticNeutral), author ChaoticNeutral
wrote a simple prompt for what Lila’s Lament would look like. After reading DemiGoddess28’s take, author BroadwayCutie16 decided to throw their hat into the ring and write their own version, with writing to imitate ChaoticNeutral’s style, a deeper detail into the changes in Lila’s new life and why they occur, and some key differences in the new reality Lila creates with her poorly-thought out wish. The full story can be found on Archive of Our Own here.
This work involves the following tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Lila actually thought Adrien was lying to everyone about his father being a jerk to him to garner sympathy and manipulate the class into bending over backwards to accommodate him. She finds out for herself after making the Wish that no, Adrien wasn’t lying, his father is just as controlling and strict as he said, as upon becoming Lila’s father, he has the school staff watch her every move to keep her out of trouble and even yells at her in front of the principal, threatening to pull her out of school.
- Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: Invoked as per the Wish.
- Adrien was, as Marinette puts it, the closest thing Lila had to a friend. He was the only one who knew Lila was lying and believed she could be better if she just made an effort to actually be nice, but this was due to him being an emotionally abused child. When the wish happens and he gets a new dad in the deal, Adrien is much more assertive and much less forgiving of Lila’s lies, and even takes Marinette’s place as the one to directly call her out.
- In the old reality, Marinette saw Lila as her Arch-Enemy for being a Consummate Liar and a romantic rival for Adrien, the latter which was very much a big part of it, despite any denial from Marinette otherwise. After Lila reshapes the world with her Wish, ensuring that Marinette meets her before Adrien, it changes Marinette’s attitude towards her. Without her crush on Adrien as a factor, and with Lila coming from a Friendless Background, Marinette is actually the only one who is trying to support Lila, out of kindness and pity towards her, seeing her constant stream of over-the-top lies as a desperate cry for attention and companionship.
- Lila has lost her power over the whole class. They may not have been Super Gullible, but they still believed all her lies and did her favors when she asked. But when Lila becomes a famous celebrity, all her lies have been widespread and later debunked by the day she wakes up in the new reality, meaning the class is well aware of her lying tendencies. While they are no way mean to her, they are wary of her at best, and only reach out to her on Marinette’s request. When she spins a lie to Adrien about knowing Prince Ali, the kids become awkward and embarrassed for her.
- Alliterative Name: After reality is altered to make Adrien no longer Gabriel's son, his new name is Adrien Allard.
- Always Need What You Gave Up: Lila’s source of happiness is to the ability to make those around her cater to her whims and do whatever she wants without consequences. When she wishes to have Adrien’s life, she loses that ability, as now with her new position as a public figure and her new Control Freak father, Lila is unable to lie without it spreading around the media, or lie low when it gets debunked until the fuss dies down, nor is she able to get out of doing work with having everyone looking over her shoulder.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Lila wishes to have everything Adrien has, feeling entitled to his wealth and status. While she does get the money and luxury she wanted, she soon finds out that the life of a celebrity voids what she relied on most—control over her life and what happens in it. As a public figure, Lila’s lies are constantly subjected to scrutiny and backlash from the subjects of her stories, making her lying tendencies easily exposed. Not only that, Gabriel as a father is very controlling and constantly makes sure she is always under watch by someone to keep her out of trouble.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Lila firmly believes Adrien is this, as she believes he is The Chessmaster behind Marinette’s vendetta against her. She interprets his kindness and belief that there is good in her as him acting Holier Than Thou and looking down on her with his Black-and-White Morality.
- Cassandra Truth: Lila doesn't believe Adrien when he says his father controls every aspect of his life and thinks he's just being ungrateful for his rich, pampered lifestyle. When she makes a Wish to have everything Adrien has, she becomes Gabriel's daughter and finds out the hard way that he now controls every aspect of her life, down to putting her on a strict diet of salad and grilled chicken so she stays in shape for her modeling career.
- Control Freak: At first, Lila believes that Adrien is lying about his father restricting his freedom and is simply ungrateful for the rich, glamorous lifestyle Gabriel had provided for him. Only when she becomes Gabriel’s daughter does she find out that no, Adrien wasn’t lying, Gabriel is indeed a overbearing parent who micromanages Lila’s life and has the school staff practically babysit her.
- Daddy's Girl: Subverted—now that Gabriel is her father, Lila expects that he'll be a Doting Parent willing to use his connections to get her out of trouble. Quite the opposite, actually; when she "accidentally" destroys Adrien's camera, he yells at her in front of the principal and threatens to homeschool her if she does anything else that might tarnish the name of his fashion brand. In the previous universe, Gabriel was willing to pull strings to get her out of trouble since she was a useful pawn and ally...but now that she's his daughter, any scandalous thing she does reflects badly on him, and he's not willing to let that blow over.
- Double Standard: Played Straight — Lila delivers a Breaking Speech where she blames Marinette for 'enabling her' to go unchallenged, with Marinette having a Heel Realization over how the Villain Has a Point. Lila also blames Adrien for her own actions and mistakes, but this is depicted purely as blame-shifting. In other words, Adrien's inaction is excused, while Marinette gets raked over the coals for it, despite how both are meant to be heroes.
- Dramatic Drop: Lila drops her phone when she sees Emilie alive and well in one of Adrien's photos and realizes that as a consequence of her Wish, the fate that was previously Emilie's has been given to her mother, Benigna—who is now gone and presumed dead.
- Entitled Bitch: Lila’s Fatal Flaw. She thinks she deserves to be pampered and catered to like a princess and have all of her demands and desires met without having to work for it. According to her, she was born into the wrong life. She believes she was meant to be a wealthy, beloved celebrity, and envies Adrien for getting everything she believes is rightfully hers.
- Equivalent Exchange: When Lila wishes to have Adrien's life, that also includes his Missing Mom—so in the new reality, Adrien's mother Emilie is now alive, and Lila's mother Benigna is now presumed dead. Lila is genuinely horrified when she realizes what her wish did to her mother.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Lila's sole redeeming quality is her love for her mother. Initially, when she realizes that Adrien's mother was gone in his old life, she takes refuge in the thought that even if her mother would be Adrien's now, she'd at least be safe and well. Realizing that she and Adrien switched FATHERS and not MOTHERS, and thus it is Benigna who is now missing, crushes her.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
- Lila interprets Adrien trying to encourage her to change and be honest as him manipulating her, looking down on her for her lies while constantly holding up Marinette as a example to aspire to. To her, Adrien’s kindness and willingness to see good in her is nothing more than manipulation and Holier Than Thou judgement for her lies.
- She also hates him for prioritizing Marinette over her. She thinks it’s because he sees Lila as less than Marinette, not because Lila is bullying Marinette and trying to make her life miserable.
- Lila sees her constant lying as working her butt off for popularity and fame, her way of earning the spotlight and everything else she feels entitled to. She doesn’t see Marinette and Adrien’s niceness and talents as working for popularity, only seeing the results and not the work they put into their friendships and passions. In her eyes, Marinette and Adrien get everything they want just handed to them, while Lila has to lie to even the playing field of life.
- Lila thinks Adrien intervenes in all her plans because of Black-and-White Morality and a Holier Than Thou attitude, not because all her plans rely on her ruining Marinette’s life and turning their other friends into her Gullible Lemmings.
- Lila envies Adrien not just for his luxurious lifestyle, but the way the class is always going out of their way to accommodate Adrien, from working their events around his schedule to include him to giving up things to make him happy. Even when Marinette points out that it’s because they know he’d do the same for them if the roles were reversed, she refuses to believe it’s so.
- Fatal Flaw: Lila’s is her Greed and Entitlement. She thinks she simply deserves to have everything she wants just given to her, be it fame, fortune or popularity. This manifests into envy for others like Marinette and Adrien, for their lifestyles and popularity. She is never satisfied unless she has the most of everything, and only focuses on how someone’s life looks on the outside, never stopping to consider that they have their problems just like anyone else.Marinette: That's your problem, Lila. You only see people for what they have, not for who they are. You only care about what's on the surface. You never bother to look deeper, truly get to know what's on the inside. The only thing that matters to you is appearance, and you're always trying to make yourself look better than everyone else. You're never satisfied with what you have, always wanting more and more. You look at people, and you only see the things they have that you don't. You're just...not happy unless you have the most among your group, unless you're the most popular or powerful person in the room. It's a sad existence, really.
- Grass is Greener: Lila makes her Wish to have Adrien’s life, which she feels is better than her own and is the life she should have been born into to begin with, and that Adrien was over-exaggerating his father’s Abusive Parenting. She only realizes too late that Gabriel is actually every bit the overbearing parent Adrien claimed he was, and though she now has the money and fame she wanted, she has little to no freedom to do anything she wants, with Gabriel constantly looking over her shoulder.
- Heel Realization: Marinette sheds Tears of Remorse when Lila points out that she blamed everyone else around her for the Lila situation escalating to what it had become, when she was the only one who knew the true depths of Lila’s evil, but chose to do nothing herself and pushed the responsibility for Lila onto others, looking down on those who chose to believe what they truly though was a Nice Girl, if not an insecure one. Marinette is wracked with guilt that she blamed others for enabling Lila when of all of them, she is the one who enabled Lila the most, when she had plenty of chances to stop her and simply did nothing.
- Hourglass Plot: In the Chameleon episode, Marinette, a target of Lila’s lies, wants to aggressively call her out, seeing through her as a Manipulative Bitch, but Adrien convinces her to take the high road, wanting to give Lila a second chance. After reality is rewritten, on the day Chameleon took place in the old world, Adrien is the one who become a victim of Lila’s wrath and attempts to call her out on her lies, but is convinced by Marinette to let it go and be patient with Lila, who she believes to be too insecure in herself to be honest about who she is.
- If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You: On her first morning as Gabriel's daughter, Lila eagerly anticipates the luxurious meals she'll be served, now that she's rich. She's surprised to find that she instead gets things like plain toast, celery and salad to stay thin and healthy for her modeling career.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Lila voided hers with the Wish. She wished to have everything Adrien had. That included his Control Freak of a father who is constantly looking over her shoulder, and the never-ending attention from the media for every little thing she does and says, making it impossible for her to get away with lying.
- Literal Genie: Invoked. Plagg winks at Marinette before asking Lila to clarify that her Wish is to have Adrien's life, making it clear that he is intentionally interpreting Lila's words in a way that fulfills what she asked for even if it's not what she wants.
- Loving a Shadow:
- Lila’s lust towards Adrien was only based on the idea that he would be compliant to her desires, and that she could control him to be her perfect boyfriend. When she discovers his identity as Chat Noir—and thus faced with indisputable evidence that he is his own person with ideals and emotions outside her own—her lust turns to hatred, and she even blames him for her problems, accusing him of feeding Ladybug’s ego and pushing her to go after Lila.
- Marinette is forced to confront the fact that for all her insistence that she is above this trope with Adrien, she acts like just another Loony Fan around him, as she treats him like he can do no wrong instead of healthily disagreeing with him and accepting that he is not always right. Subverted, as Marinette insists that she truly does love Adrien and wishes she had the chance to express it properly.
- Mistaken for Pedophile: One of Lila's lies in the new reality was a movie producer based the female lead of one his films on her. This led to him being subject to rumors of him a pedophile until the lie was disproven.
- Never My Fault: Played straight and subverted:
- Even though she was the one who made the wish to change the world and in the process steal everything from Adrien, Lila, in the end, still blames him for her misfortune, insisting that he tricked her into making the wish to escape his Gilded Cage and lock Lila in it instead, even though he had done nothing but try to help her in his old life, and wasn’t even fully conscious when she made the Wish.
- Subverted with Marinette. She blamed others around her for enabling Lila, when she was just as guilty for being the only one who knew how truly evil and manipulative Lila was and just choosing to Turn the Other Cheek. However, when Lila tears her one about how she had plenty of chances to discredit Lila and nip her reign in the bud, she owns up to her mistakes, shedding Tears of Remorse.
- No Sympathy: Lila towards Adrien. So what if his mother is missing? He’s a famous model living in a mansion! Money and arcade games in your room are a perfectly acceptable substitute for a mother’s affection!
- Revenge Before Reason: Marinette tells Lila that while she was indeed wrong to cruelly call out the latter over jealousy, it did not give Lila the right to team up with Hawk Moth and put Paris in danger over a petty grudge.Marinette: You don't have to be my friend! You just have to NOT team up with a supervillain just to get back at me, and put revenge over the safety of thousands! Chloe's been mean to me and humiliated me countless times! You never saw me bullying her back, or risking the ire of the Mayor to take her down! Because unlike you, Lila, I know where to draw the line! I focus on moving forward with my life, instead of clinging onto a grudge and letting that rule me! And you call Adrien petty?!
- Shout-Out: At the very end of the story, the narrative comments that Lila got what she wanted, but lost what she had.
- Tears of Remorse: Marinette sheds these during her Heel Realization, guilt-ridden upon figuring out that she is the one who let the Lila situation escalate to what it had become, knowing Lila’s true nature and doing nothing to stop her while simply waiting for her friends to suddenly realize Lila’s bad news with no precedent to just how bad she truly was under her Nice Girl act.
- The Unreveal: The identities of Scarletta and Pantheress, the new Ladybug and Black Cat holders after Lila's Wish rewrites reality, are not revealed.
- Villain Has a Point: While Lila has been mean to Marinette for petty reasons, she makes valid points that the latter is not entirely the perfect victim she thinks she is.
- Marinette is offended when her friends brush off her warnings about Lila under the justification of You're Just Jealous. She did, after all, try to help him with Kagami. But then Lila reveals she knows about the events of "Backwarder", where she went back to sabotaging his time with Kagami, which actually validates her friends’ belief that her hatred of Lila is based on jealousy over getting close to Adrien.
- Marinette is bitter over Adrien’s high road advice, but Lila correctly deduces that the reason she took his advice, despite not truly believing in it, was because she was so crazy for Adrien, she refused to acknowledge that he could be wrong about anything. Marinette is a Hypocrite for claiming to be above Adrien’s fanbase with Celebrity Crushes on him, when in reality, she’s just another Loony Fan who easily bowed to his whim because of the pedestal she has him up on.
- Despite Marinette having other valid reasons for hating Lila, her initial beef DID start because Lila was getting close to Adrien. As Lila points out, if Marinette had wanted her lying to stop because she was concerned for Lila’s safety from Hawkmoth for posting an interview about being besties with her, she would have simply gently talked to Lila in private, or even told Alya the truth so she could take the interview down, instead of harshly calling her out in front of Adrien.
- On the note about Alya and the blog, Marinette blames everyone else for Lila’s power growing—Adrien for taking the high road; Alya for posting the interview without checking sources; the others for easily buying her stories—but as Lila reminds her, she had plenty of chances go to Alya and the press and discredit Lila, but instead did nothing and pushed the responsibility of fixing the problem onto others, looking down on them for giving her second chances or not immediately seeing through Lila’s Nice Girl act. Marinette is just as guilty of enabling Lila as Alya or Adrien for knowing the truth about her being a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing and doing nothing about it while expecting others to pick up her slack.
- Weight Loss Salad: The first morning after switching lives with Adrien, Lila sits down to breakfast in the Agreste house, eagerly anticipating the luxurious meal she'll be served. To her surprise, she gets celery sticks and whole wheat toast, with Nathalie explaining that she has to stay thin for her modeling career.Lila: And what do I get for lunch and dinner?Nathalie: Well, for lunch today, during your photoshoot, you have a single salad and water, no dressing, and carrot sticks. Tonight's dinner is grilled chicken breasts without the skin and spinach on the side.Lila: No dessert?Nathalie: Of course not! Sweets are strictly prohibited!
