Fanfic / The Karma of Lies

Adrien Agreste knows that Lila Rossi is more than what she seems. That all of her claims of high-profile connections and charitable works are nothing more than hot air.

Yet despite Marinette's pleas, he refuses to expose her. After all, so long as both of them know the truth, what does it matter if the rest of their friends are being fooled? He doesn't want to deal with the drama of her being revealed — not her possibly getting akumatized again, not their classmates' disappointment or anger, and above all else? He doesn't want to risk his own friendships by telling them something they don't want to hear.

Besides, it's not like she's doing any serious damage, right? Not to him. He knows not to let her rope him into her schemes, so as long as he's not being hurt, what's the big deal? And anyway, it's only a matter of time before the truth comes out on its own, without him having to do anything about it. He can just sit back, relax, and let karma take care of it.

...Well, karma is coming. It seems that fate has a way of looking out for holders of the Ladybug Miraculous like Marinette Dupain-Cheng, and given how much Lila's deceptions have hurt her, fate intends for her to suffer an appropriate punishment. If Lila's being shielded from the consequences by somebody else? That karmic backlash will fall upon her protector as well.

The Karma of Lies is a Miraculous Ladybug fanfic by CartoonAddict564. It is complete at 12 chapters. See also Two Letters, another work by the same author that takes a similarly deconstructive look at certain aspects of the series.

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This fanfic contains examples of:

#-I

• 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.
• 419 Scam: Lila 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.
• Abusive Parents: After Gabriel is exposed as Hawkmoth, Adrien is placed under the care of his aunt Amelie, who quickly proves to be just as emotionally neglectful as Gabriel was. She immediately shoots down the idea of him coming to England to live with her out of fear for her own reputation (when getting Adrien out of Paris is honestly probably the best thing that can be done for everyone involved at this point), allows him to get thrown out of school based on rumors of his collusion with Hawkmoth, and keeps him completely isolated "for [his] own safety" just like his father did.
• Accomplice by Inaction:
  • Played straight with Adrien. 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.
  • Exploited by Lila, who is fully aware that he knows her true nature and relies on the fact that he won't expose her if it means risking the others becoming aware of how long he's known that she was lying to them.
• Accusation Fic: The story is harshly critical of how Adrien neglected to call out Lila's lies and insisted on 'taking the high road' instead of revealing what he knew. It also calls out his complacency in general and his lack of action overall in problems unless he's the one affected.
• Adaptational Heroism: Unlike in canon, here Chloé is willing to take criticism from Ladybug to heart and put in the effort to change, which leads to her quite literally becoming a hero (a real one, this time) by the end of the story.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Lila is 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.
• Adults Are Useless: Principal Damocles's and Miss Bustier's status as enabling Lila at everyone else's expense comes back to bite them when the school board finds out. They assume that the money they requested for Lila's fake, undocumented disabilities was embezzled (and even if they accepted that Lila was the one who lied about said disabilities, it's still a display of gross negligence on their part), Bustier is sacked on the spot, and Damocles is strongly encouraged to retire at the end of the year.
• An Aesop:
  • It’s not the responsibility of victims to make life easier for those who hurt them, and acting like it is only enables the people doing the harm.
  • Putting in the work to truly change is hard, but it will pay off and you'll be better off for it in the long run.
• All for Nothing: Played With. Adrien spent months shielding Lila from the consequences of her lies, largely because he didn't want to deal with the side effects and fallout of her exposure. When Hawk Moth is exposed and arrested, signalling the expiration of both Adrien and Lila's Karma Houdini Warranties, Adrien continues trying to protect Lila — which enables her to dump all of her karmic backlash onto him and get away scot-free while Adrien takes the fall for her crimes. Adrien succeeded in protecting Lila just like he wanted...but failed to salvage his reputation, his partnership with Ladybug, or any of the other things he really wanted to maintain by helping her.
• Answer Cut: After her identity is publicly revealed while taking down Hawk Moth, Marinette spares a moment to wonder if any of her classmates regret how they've been treating her. Cut to the Agreste Manor, where the entire class has been watching on live television, and it turns out that no, they're busy being excited that they're friends with Ladybug (or, in Adrien's case, reassuring himself that he didn't mess up that badly by missing the fight and can easily smooth things over). The only one who feels any regret is Lila, and only because she realizes that all her lies are about to come crashing down and she needs to move fast to have any chance of escaping the fallout.
• All Take and No Give: Marinette's classmates take her assistance completely for granted, convinced that they deserve the things she's worked so hard to give them. Adrien encourages this mentality by casually declaring that it's no big deal if they get rid of the outfits she's 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.
• Ambiguous Situation: In the Epilogue, it's left unclear whether or not Marinette actually DID use Fluff to pop into the future and see where Lila ended up, or if she merely leads Lila to suspect as much in one last-ditch effort to make her reconsider her ways.
• Armor-Piercing Response:
  • Subverted with Adrien; when Marinette counters his query of "What's the harm of overlooking a few lies to keep everyone happy 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.
  • Marinette gets a torrent of more effective ones in Chapter 7, when her (former) class tries to throw her a party. When Adrien claims that despite their disagreements, he's still her friend, she tells him point blank that they aren't, and confirms that she isn't joking when Alya tries to play it off as a bad joke. After Marinette leaves, 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 was publicly revealed as Ladybug.
• 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.
  • 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 treat the fight seriously.
  • While 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 something new:
    Marinette: Be honest. If you didn’t know I was Ladybug, and if Lila were still here telling you that I was bullying her, would any of you have cared when I transferred classes?
    [the class sits in uncomfortable silence]
  • Chloé 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.
• Artistic License – Law: At one point, Ladybug says she's planning to recommend that Gabriel receive the maximum possible punishment short of the death penalty for his crimes as Hawk Moth. France abolished the death penalty in 1981, so he couldn't receive that sentence anyway.^note This could be hand-waved as Gabriel being tried by an American court for his actions during the New York special; while New York is not a death penalty state and the United States currently has a moratorium on federal executions, they might make an exception due to the severity of Hawk Moth's crimes. Hawk Moth also attacked Shanghai in another special, and since China is an active death penalty country, there's a good chance they'd want his head.
• Asshole Victim: Most of the people who are screwed over by Lila are framed as this:
  • Adrien showed no sympathy when his classmates were being scammed; when he's later robbed himself, Marinette shows just as little sympathy for him, laughing in his face when he asks her to "pull some strings" for him. His classmates are initially supportive, but lose all sympathy for him after learning about his Betrayal by Inaction, considering the loss of his money and home his just deserts for letting Lila ruin their futures.
  • Marinette's classmates turned on her in favor of Lila, hoping to exploit her supposed connections to help them in their careers. Lila exploits their selfishness to scam them out of their hard work and sabotage their dreams for profit. By the time they realize they've been had, Lila is long gone and they have no way of seeking restitution — and Marinette is no longer interested in helping them out thanks to their toxic expectations of her.
  • Ms. Bustier and Principal Damocles both enabled bullies at the expense of their victims, Marinette in particular, and were generally lax and incompetent in their roles. Lila took full advantage of this to get all sorts of special treatment for disabilities she didn't really have, with the teachers going so far as to request extra money from the government to help them accomodate her. Once it comes out that none of Lila's "disabilities" were properly documented, Bustier and Damocles get into trouble for trying to defraud the government, which costs both of them their jobs. Bustier is fired outright, while Damocles is allowed to stay on until the end of the school year before stepping down. Notably, Chloé is the one who reported them, having realized in the course of her Heel–Face Turn that they were horrible enablers who encouraged her bullying ways for years by letting her go unpunished.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Lila ends the story quite well as it seems. Adrien takes the fall for her association with Hawkmoth, and she makes off with the Agrestes' emergency funds. However, it's possibly subverted when Ladybug comes to warn her that she will eventually meet a bad end, bleeding out in a jail cell with everyone hating her if she doesn’t stop her scamming ways. It's left deliberately ambiguous whether Ladybug used the powers of the Rabbit Miraculous to see Lila's fate or she's resorting to a last desperate bluff to convince her to change.
• Batman Gambit: Lila, fearing retaliation after it is publicly revealed that Marinette is a superhero, 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 initally 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.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Adrien wanted Marinette to stop trying to expose Lila because her scams weren't personally hurting him and he didn't want to deal with the drama and fallout. Marinette gives him what he wants, cutting ties with him and the rest of her ungrateful classmates and deciding that Lila's scams are no longer her problem. When Lila finally robs Adrien himself, he discovers that Marinette is sticking to this decision and refuses to help him out just because he's suddenly decided Lila is a problem after all.
• Because You Can Cope: Adrien justifies his inaction this way, assuming that Marinette can deal with Lila's myriad cruelties without risking akumatization.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • Adrien presents himself as a kind, caring person who just wants to have friends; however, by the beginning of the story, the cracks in this facade are already starting to show, with Marinette realizing that she was Loving a Shadow and the real Adrien is too self-absorbed to empathize with or care about anyone but himself. The cracks only deepen as his Karma Houdini Warranty starts to expire, with more and more people seeing through to his underlying Secretly Selfish attitude when he continues to act entitled to a happy ending he hasn't earned.
  • Lila puts up a facade of a sweet, somewhat naive girl who would love to use her celebrity connections to help her friends, but as segments from her perspective reveal, underneath she's a Con Artist and The Social Expert who is manipulating her marks into giving her anything she can make a profit on — and into disbelieving the few people who see through her lies and scams.
• Berserk Button: Being called an "Everyday Ladybug" becomes one for Marinette once she realizes how much her False Friends took advantage of her kindness.
• Betrayal by Inaction: Adrien stood by for months and let Lila scam his classmates out of money, valuable possessions, and personal keepsakes, not caring about it because in his eyes, none of their possessions were worth enough to really matter. Needless to say, they are deeply upset with him when they find out. As Chat Noir, he commits this when he misses what turns out to be the Final Battle with Hawk Moth, leaving Ladybug and her allies hanging after being specifically told he'd be needed.
• Betrayal Fic: Marinette makes it clear she thinks Adrien (and, to a lesser extent, her classmates) betrayed her with the way they treated her. Most of the class abandoned her and shunned her thanks to Lila's manipulation, and while Adrien knows Lila is lying, he refuses to do anything about it.
• Betrayal Insurance: As part of her plan to scam Adrien, Lila promises to admit all her lies to the class, and that Adrien can expose her himself if she doesn't show up for their meeting on Friday. Adrien additionally threatens to report her to the police if she backs out. He doesn't realize that Lila is exploiting his Fatal Flaw by telling him what he wants to hear, has already fed her own story which incriminates him to the police, and plans to be long gone by Friday, so his "insurance" is actually worthless.
• Beware the Honest Ones: After Lila scams him, Adrien believes that Honesty Is the Best Policy when reporting her to the police. However, his view of reality is so skewed that he expects to be believed simply because of who he is, without taking into consideration that his honest story sounds incredibly suspicious to an outside observer. He starts by admitting that Lila was a liar and Con Artist who scammed his classmates for months, and that he didn't see anything wrong with that. Needless to say, it goes downhill from there. By the end, the police are convinced that Adrien committed all the crimes he's accused Lila of, including stealing millions of euros from a hidden bank account right as the Agrestes' assets were being frozen, because Who Would Be Stupid Enough? to act the way Adrien did? The only reason they haven't arrested him is because they have no proof to justify it.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Lila presents herself to the class as an even better version of Marinette, with better connections and nothing against using them to help her classmates out. The problem is, none of it is true, and Lila's grand promises are actually schemes to bilk her classmates out of anything she can convince them to hand over. While they think Lila is their ticket to making it big, Lila is stealing their hard work and selling it off, often sabotaging or outright ruining their futures in the process.
  • Played with by Adrien, who genuinely thinks he's a good person who's looking out for his classmates and Lila by not exposing her lies, but in reality he's simply too self-absorbed to recognize the genuine harm Lila's scams are causing or to care as long as he's not the one getting hurt. As Chat Noir, he thinks of himself as a hero, but sees no problem with goofing around, flirting, slacking off, and performing Stupid Sacrifices because Ladybug's Miraculous Cure always fixes everything in the end, so it doesn't matter if people get hurt when it could have been prevented...right?
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Unambiguously sweet: Marinette is exposed as Ladybug, becomes beloved by the people of Paris, cuts the toxic people out of her life, and is free to pursue her own dreams and mental well-being. Hawkmoth and Mayura are caught and set up to spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars.
  • Unambiguously bitter: Lila worms her way out of any consequences and scampers off to Marseille with 50 million stolen euros, and her final narration makes it clear she is never going to be satisfied with what she's already taken and is going to keep exploiting everyone around her.
  • Somewhere in the middle: Adrien suffers the karmic backlash of his own mistakes, Lila's crimes, and even his father's actions, and his life as he knew it is completely ruined. It's possible that he could leave town with his modeling money and try to live a new life when he turns 18, but everything else from his life before meeting Lila is gone.
• Blaming the Victim:
  • Adrien sees no problem with Lila scamming his classmates, reasoning that they would never give up more than they can afford to lose. He also reflects that Lila isn't that good of a liar, implicitly blaming his classmates for not seeing through her lies themselves...and playing right into Lila's hands when she starts using more subtle methods to manipulate him.
  • Lila treats Adrien entering his banking information, including his passwords, into his computer in front of her as him practically begging her to take advantage of that information. This mistake also gives Adrien a lot of trouble when he goes to the police, as they struggle to believe that he would have been so careless around someone he knew was a Con Artist, landing him in a Cassandra Did It scenario.
• Break the Haughty: Adrien starts the story as a self-centered, staunch believer in Protagonist-Centered Morality who takes his privileged life for granted and feels entitled to a happy ending. However, his father's defeat invalidates his Karma Houdini Warranty, and his refusal to change his ways leads to him taking Lila's Laser-Guided Karma on top of his own, slowly stripping him of everything he once took for granted. By the end, he's peniless, Hated by All, and trapped in a small apartment under the care of his neglectful aunt, with nothing to look forward to but the day he turns eighteen and can get back some control over his life...though even then his future is uncertain because everyone knows he's Hawk Moth's son and thinks he was his father's accomplice.
• Broken Pedestal: Chat Noir to Paris. 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.
• Brutal Honesty:
  • Upon hearing that Ladybug is used to her friends not believing her when they hear she's in pain, Kagami remarks that she needs better friends.
  • When prompted by Alya during a televised interview to explain why she replaced Alya on the team with Kagami, Ladybug bluntly announces that Alya's behavior as a civilian caused Ladybug to reconsider Alya's qualifications as a hero, that Ladybug 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, Ladybug, when prompted by Chat Noir and Nadja, explains that while Chat Noir has been an asset on many occasions and he’d been a welcome partner in the beginning, he’s 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.
• …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.
• Call It Karma: It's explained early in the story that the Universe tends to reward deserving people, especially deserving Ladybug holders, and punish those who wronged them. Much of the story focuses on a wave of rewards and punishments from the Universe triggered by Ladybug's victory over Hawk Moth, which both Tikki and Plagg refer to as karma, and how people's reactions to this affect their fortunes. Some, like Luka and Kagami, get a Karmic Jackpot for their loyaty to Marinette, others (the class, Bustier and Damocles) flounder as their Karma Houdini Warranties suddenly expire, and some either manage to negate the worst of their karma by working to make up for their previous wrongs (Chloé, Juleka, and Rose) or dump the entirety of their karmic debt onto an Unwitting Pawn, getting off scot-free (as Lila does to Adrien).
• Cassandra Did It: Adrien winds up in this position after he attempts to report the theft of the Agreste emergency funds to the police. While he's completely honest during his interview with the police, his story is loaded with Who Would Be Stupid Enough? due to Adrien's skewed ideas of how reality works, leading the police to conclude that Adrien committed the crime and is trying to use Lila as a scapegoat.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Plagg is constantly telling Adrien how bad his ideas are and just why they're not great. Adrien brushes him off time and again.
  • When Adrien finally, finally realizes that he's been had and blurts out that Lila cheated him, Alya immediately rejects the idea, stating "We know that Lila doesn't lie." Despite this, and Plagg reminding him that Marinette ran into the exact same issue, he insists that it'll be different this time because it's him.
  • The rest of the class runs into this after Principal Damocles and Miss Bustier get into trouble with the school board. While they know that Lila tricked them with false disability claims, they have no documentation to prove it, and the board thinks that they're merely supporting Adrien's bid to slander her.
• Caught on Tape: Proves critical to Hawkmoth's defeat, as he detransforms in front of a crowd of witnesses while the battle is being broadcast live.
• Central Theme: The idea that Laser-Guided Karma will eventually catch up to those who deserve it, and how their reactions to this affect the consequences. To a lesser extent, the story has a theme of action vs. inaction; those who actively take steps to improve their situations either hit a Karmic Jackpot or manage to avoid (or at least greatly lessen) the karmic backlash coming for them. Those who refuse to be proactive and expect everything to work out without any real effort on their part get hit by the full force of their karma, and in some cases end up making their situations even worse.
• The Chains of Commanding: Marinette takes her responsibilities as Ladybug very seriously, and feels the weight of the pain any mistakes on her part might cause for her friends, the temporary heroes, innocent bystanders, or potentially the whole world. This is highlighted when she has to make a decision that could potentially cause casualties during the final battle with Hawk Moth; while it's the only reasonable decision under the circumstances, and she knows her Miraculous Cure will bring back anyone who is killed if she wins, she still doesn't take the fact that people could die because of her lightly. This is directly contrasted with Chat Noir's tendency to goof off during battles, brushing off any consequences of his actions on the grounds that Miraculous Cure will fix everything in the end.
• The Charmer: Adrien certainly sees himself as this, able to smooth over any situation with a dazzling smile and some friendly reminders about the importance of forgiveness and getting along. In reality, his act is just that — an act, and once things stop going his way with the expiration of his Karma Houdini Warranty, his charm is revealed to be a shallow facade covering his entitlement and Lack of Empathy.
• Condescending Compassion: Chat Noir is full of this when talking to the new superheroes after crashing Nadja Chamack's live interview, declaring that of course temporary heroes aren't going to really understand their line of work as well as he does. No one is impressed with this, especially since Chat missed the final battle with Hawk Moth and has no good excuse for it, unlike the heroes he's talking down to.
• Con Man: Lila is portrayed as one of these. For instance, she manipulates Nathaniel into giving her hard-to-obtain passes to art galleries (which she then resells) by conning him into believing that his work is being looked at by an editor friend of hers at Marvel and then exploiting his gratitude. She also manipulates the class into giving her fancy dresses and outfits Marinette made for them by not only pretending that she would give those clothes to charity, but also by tricking them into thinking that a famous fashion mogul would see the class's donations and be impressed. Her ultimate con is tricking Adrien into trusting her, and using him to drain the Agreste family's emergency funds and leave Paris for good.
• The Confidant: Marinette confides in Luka as Ladybug, informing him of the stress she's facing in her civilian life without revealing her Secret Identity.
• Conspicuous Consumption: Exploited by Lila after she empties the Agreste emergency account. In order to wire the money to her secret account in Switzerland without arousing suspicion, she goes to a place that's popular with the Nouveau Riche and withdraws it all as untraceable eurobonds, which no one questions because plenty of rich kids who frequent the place do the same thing to flaunt their wealth.
• Contagious Cassandra Truth: After Lila robs him, Adrien is unable to convince anyone that she was behind it. His classmates believe him upon realizing how Lila scammed them, but by this point their association with Adrien has damaged their reputations to the point that the police believe they're just trying to help Adrien slander Lila and pin his crimes on her.
• Convicted by Public Opinion: Adrien. 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 circumstancially 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.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Gabriel has Nathalie use sentimonsters to settle union strikes by having them impersonate union leaders and then get caught doing illegal or immoral things, thereby undermining the union.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: The story itself notes that the troubles Adrien faced throughout the story could have been avoided had he revealed Lila at any point or at least not tried to protect her, and that his ultimate fate was a show of his efforts paying off and forcing him to suffer in Lila's place as a result.
• 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.
• Crossing the Burnt Bridge: This begins to happen left and right as karma closes in.
  • Adrien left Marinette to deal with Lila's lies alone and completely dismissed her suffering when Lila was bullying her and her classmates were ignoring her, finally prompting her to realize that he was a False Friend who never really cared about her. After Adrien realizes that Lila robbed him, he expects Marinette to help him out the same way he "helped" her — and Marinette does, by leaving him to deal with it completely on his own. She's not going to hinder his efforts to get his money back in any way, but she also makes it clear that after how he hung her out to dry, she has no intention of doing anything to help him, either. She reaffirms this several more times as Adrien's fortunes continue to sour and he refuses to accept that she's not going to fix all his problems for him.
  • Gabriel tries to convince Audrey Bourgeois not to buy out Agreste Fashion by appealing to their long friendship, as it's the only bargaining chip he has with his stock plummeting and his assets frozen by the police. Audrey responds by bringing up how he akumatized her into Style Queen and used her to attack innocents, then goes right back to negotiating her corporate takeover.
  • Marinette's classmates constantly ditched and ignored her while taking her generosity for granted, finally leading Marinette to a Self-Care Epiphany that prompts her to cut them out of her life. Then they find out that Marinette is Ladybug and eagerly clamor to make up with her. However, Marinette realizes that most of them aren't really sorry for how they acted and just want to ride her coattails and take advantage of her like before. As a result, she flatly rejects all their efforts to apologize. Only the ones who really work to show they've changed, like Chloé, get a second chance.
• Crying Wolf: Inverted. Adrien kept quiet about Lila's lies and scams for months, not caring since they didn't affect him and even helping reinforce the perception that she was an honest person. When she finally scams him, he changes his tune and goes to the police, only to find that after staying silent for so long, his claims that she's a Con Artist sound far less believable than the idea that he stole his own money and is now trying to frame her for the crime.
• Cutting the Knot: When Dark Owl shows up as the latest in Hawk Moth's barrage of akumas, Viperion is able to determine where his akumatized object is hidden using Second Chance, but realizes that none of the heroes can reach it within his five-minute time limit, which would reveal their trap to Hawk Moth. With no better alternative, Ladybug reluctantly orders a missile strike on the building where the object is hidden to destroy it, aware that her Miraculous Cure will repair the damage and revive anyone who was killed...if she wins the fight.
• Cynicism Catalyst: When Lila was young, her mother uncovered a more senior diplomat's embezzlement schemes and turned him in. The diplomat retaliated by using his connections to sabotage Mrs. Rossi's career and ensure she would never reach any high-paying positions, after which Lila's father left them in order to salvage his career. After seeing all this, Lila decided that Good Is Dumb and it's smarter to only worry about herself, viewing her mother's continued belief in honesty and integrity as stupid and self-destructive.
• Deconstruction Fic:
  • The entire story can be framed as answering: if Adrien stuck by the enabling position he expressed regarding Lila in "Chameleon,"^note "[Lila's] a liar. Yes. I know. But do you really think exposing [Lila] will make things better? As long as you and I both know the truth, does it really matter?" what would be the logical consequences? What would this choice say about him, and what would be its effect on him? The answer is that this position shows itself to not only be wrong, hurtful, and destructive in a myriad of ways, both moral and practical, but also selfish if continued even when the effects are too obvious to deny, and that, if given enough time, not only will the downsides of this position eventually hit Adrien as well, but by then he could easily have burned so many bridges that he will no longer have the social support to help weather life's difficulties, be they self-incurred (by enabling Lila) or circumstancial (through his father being Hawkmoth).
  • Highlights just how self-centered and short-sighted somebody would have to be to honestly believe that Protagonist-Centered Morality applies to them.
  • The existence of a World-Healing Wave does not mean that everything is magically erased upon its use. Repairing the physical damage done to the city and bringing people Back from the Dead does not erase the horror of what happened or its psychological impact upon others.
  • Adrien's canonical behavior is often defended as him simply 'not knowing better' due to his sheltered upbringing. Here, it's highlighted how frequently he brushes over any and all warnings regarding his attitude, showing that it's more of a willful ignorance. In addition, his being sheltered means that Gabriel failed to teach him how to properly safeguard against potential threats, leading to him entering the passwords to the emergency fund right in front of Lila.
  • It also deconstructs the idea that being a good person means good things will automatically happen without you doing anything to make them happen. Being Ladybug and an "Everyday Ladybug" did nothing to protect Marinette from Lila's cruelty, while her classmates took her kindness completely for granted. Her situation only improves when Marinette decides to start taking better care of herself and actively makes the changes she wants to see in her life. By contrast, Adrien assumes that everything will go his way because he assumes he's a good person and a hero; therefore, he never questions his hands-off kids' gloves method of dealing with bad faith actors even when others point out how much pain it's causing, and only realizes the need for action when it's his own wellbeing on the line.
  • There's also the notion that a good person is obliged to help bad ones regardless of what they do. Adrien's attempts to help Lila only cause her karma to come crashing down upon him, and she betrays his trust. The same happens when he decides to offer Nathalie a hand up after unmasking her, giving her a chance to steal the Ring right off his finger. All because of his insistence on 'helping' those he knows have harmed and manipulated others without considering that they could do the same to him. By contrast, Marinette chooses not to help those who have already shown themselves to be Ungrateful and Entitled Bastards, and is much better off for it.
  • Above all else, the story very specifically deconstructs Adrien's and Bustier's "high road" by showing that in practice it amounts to enabling appeasement that doesn't encourage any bad faith actors to actually want to change and instead places the emotional burden of the conflict solely onto the victims, who are told to endure until the people who harm them choose to stop on their own.
• Detrimental Determination: Adrien is firmly convinced that he benefits from Protagonist-Centered Morality and everything is going to just work out for him without him having to put in any effort. When his Karma Houdini Warranty begins to expire one clause at a time, he digs his heels in and continues to insist that he's owed a happy ending just for being him, even as everything he does makes his situation worse.
• Did You Think I Can't Feel?:
  • Adrien's Establishing Character Moment is him listening to Marinette tell him exactly how much Lila's lies and her classmates shunning her is hurting her and immediately blowing off her feelings to her face, blithely telling her that she's "strong enough to handle it." This rebounds on him later when he tries to start a relationship with Marinette after learning she's Ladybug and gets turned down flat, with Marinette bluntly telling him that she could never love someone who dismissed her suffering like that.
  • Later, Marinette calls her former classmates out for abandoning her and taking her for granted, spelling out how they expected her to cater to their desires without ever sparing a thought for her feelings until they suddenly learned that she was Ladybug, and are clearly only apologizing to try and get back in her good graces so they can keep exploiting her.
• Disappointed in You:
  • The Gorilla gives Adrien a deeply disappointed stare when his charge attempts to argue that, because all of the damage Hawkmoth did while terrorizing Paris was repaired by the Miraculous Cure, he shouldn't be charged for any of it.
  • 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.
• Disaster Dominoes: Adrien set up a figurative chain of these for himself prior to the beginning of the fic through his actions and inactions, but lacks any awareness of how precarious his position really is. The first domino tips when Marinette tells him Lila is hurting her and he completely ignores it, prompting her to go to Luka for support and make the decision to take the fight to Hawk Moth in an all-or-nothing gamble. Ladybug's victory kick-starts a wave of Laser-Guided Karma that hits Adrien head-on, pushing even more dominoes that tear down things he once took for granted. Adrien's frantic efforts to stop the dominoes from falling just start even more dominoes, making his situation worse and worse until by the end he's lost everything he once took for granted.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Played With in regards to Adrien. The premise boils down to him bringing Lila's karma down upon his own head in addition to his own; as a result, he ends up Hated by All, with the majority of Paris convinced that he helped Hawkmoth and Mayura terrorize them, while his former friends turned on him for his Betrayal by Inaction. It is explicitly stated that he would have faced lighter consequences if he hadn't actively chosen to shield Lila for so long, and his actions throughout the story keep digging him even deeper, as he continues doggedly insisting that he hasn't done anything wrong.
  • It's also implied that Adrien brought even further backlash upon himself by trying to use his influence as Chat Noir to subvert justice for Hawkmoth's victims, as his attempts to argue that Gabriel should be shown leniency is taken as evidence of their collusion once he's unmasked.
  • Marinette's former friends took her kindness for granted, abandoning her in favor of Lila's Too Good to Be True promises of helping them achieve their dreams. Lila effectively destroyed each and every one of their ambitions, stealing the results of their hard work and selling them off while ruining their reputations.
• 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.
• Doublethink: Adrien is full of this, largely due to his belief that he benefits from Protagonist-Centered Morality and things have to go his way. This seems to stem mainly from his completely self-absorbed attitude; if something doesn't have a direct negative impact on him, he simply doesn't care. Even when he does directly experience something bad, he has so little empathy for others that he can't seem to grasp why the same thing happening to them is a problem. It's not happening to him, so it can't be that big a deal...
  • Adrien justifies letting Lila's lies go unchallenged because they "aren't really hurting anyone." When Marinette tells him point-blank that they're hurting her, he just shrugs it off and says that it's fine, because she's strong enough to handle it. He later amends this when Lila takes advantage of him, insisting that she "deserves to suffer" for stealing the Agreste emergency funds, yet still dismissing the way she scammed his classmates as "no big deal."
  • As Chat Noir, Adrien advocates for leniency for Hawk Moth and completely dismisses the suffering and emotional trauma of his victims, but then turns around and, in the same conversation, insists that he should be well-paid as compensation for all the times he was temporarily killed while fighting akumas.
  • Adrien's classmates do this too, after learning about how he did nothing to stop Lila from scamming them. They angrily turn their backs on him, ignoring his pleas for them to forgive him, all the while maintaining that Marinette has to forgive them for doing nothing to stop Lila from bullying and ostracizing her.
• Downer Beginning: The first chapter is primarily from Lila's point of view, as she gleefully reflects on various ways that she'd defrauded and exploited her classmates. She sees that many of her classmates have donated the clothes Marinette personally made for them to her fake charity drive, and eavesdrops on Adrien as he tells Marinette that it's no big deal and she shouldn't make such a fuss about clothes.
• Downer Ending: For Adrien. By the end of the story, he has lost everything. His father is going to prison. His money was stolen. His home is gone. His mother is in the hospital and it's doubtful he'll be allowed to see her. His former friends want nothing to do with him. His credibility and what money he would have gotten as Chat Noir is gone. All of Paris hates him and believes he's his father's accomplice or at least had some awareness of his actions. He lost the Ring and Plagg. And as if to add insult to injury, he witnesses Ladybug and Viperion confessing their love for each other. He ends up breaking down in tears.
• Dragon Their Feet: Mayura doesn’t get involved in Hawkmoth's Final Battle, with Nathalie spending time plotting out the best way to strike back at Ladybug and Paris.
• Dramatically Missing the Point:
  • Adrien, frequently.
    • When Marinette's classmates donate clothes she made specifically for them to Lila's Fake Charity, Adrien can't fathom why Marinette would be upset over this, insisting that "they're just clothes," and she can easily make more. He then compounds this by insisting that Lila's lies aren't hurting anyone, even after Marinette spells out that she's being hurt; he simply declares that she can handle it, ignoring the fact that Marinette is clearly on the verge of breaking down.
    • Plagg tries to get through to Adrien that his classmates don't have the same level of financial privilege as him and can't necessarily replace what Lila is stealing from them, Adrien shrugs it off, insisting that they would never give away anything they couldn't afford to lose.
    • After Ladybug defeats Hawk Moth, Plagg warns Adrien that her victory is unleashing Laser-Guided Karma and that if he keeps trying to shield wrongdoers like Lila and his father, their karma could hit him instead, on top of his own deserved punishments for ignoring Marinette's plight and slacking off as Chat Noir. Adrien completely ignores these repeated warnings, refusing to give the concept any credence at all until he's already in deep trouble. Even then, he only accepts the existence of karma because it allows him to insist that it's Never My Fault and the Universe is just out to get him for no good reason.
    • Marinette rejects Adrien, telling him that "I can't love someone who let Lila do what she did to me." Adrien somehow twists this around into Marinette being jealous of his Fake Relationship with Lila, convincing himself that he just needs to go let Lila down gently and then Marinette will happily fall into his arms.
    • Chat Noir manages to shred his own reputation by crashing a live interview where Ladybug calls him out for his persistent and unwanted advances and then displaying his callous disregard for the terror and suffering Hawk Moth caused. Afterward, he complains that Ladybug should have tried harder to explain that she wasn't interested before (ignoring Plagg pointing out that she did and he just has No Listening Skills) and acts as though the public is being ungrateful for the way he fought to protect them.
  • A non-Adrien example: after the Final Battle ends with her identity being publicly exposed, Marinette and her family spend the next few days in a secret location to avoid swarms of Paparazzi and nosy reporters. Alya tries to invite herself to a sleepover with her "bestie" to get all the details about Marinette's Secret Identity and an exclusive interview despite Marinette repeatedly telling her no, completely missing that she's exactly the sort of person the Dupain-Chengs are trying to avoid.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Alya and Nino flag Ladybug down and ask when they'll get to be superheroes again, unaware that she no longer trusts them thanks to their betrayal of Marinette. They then start complaining about Chloé acting entitled to the Bee, forgetting how they just casually assumed that they'll be getting 'their' Miraculouses back.
  • Chloé wanted the recognition and glory she associated with being a superheroine, hence her immediately revealing herself as Queen Bee. Instead, she is ultimately asked to assist Ladybug secretly with her plan, knowing that she cannot share her story and will not be lauded as a hero, while having to watch Marinette, Luka and Kagami be celebrated instead after being unmasked in the Final Battle with Hawkmoth.
  • Adrien allowed Lila to do as she wished for months while he did nothing to either warn their fellow classmates of her true nature or help Marinette despite his earlier promise to her. While the classmates were getting conned out of things and Marinette was being alienated, he offered no help or sympathy on the basis that what Lila conned the classmates out of was "not that much" and that Marinette could handle whatever happened and forgive Lila in the end. Over the course of the story, he ends up swindled by Lila in an equivalent fashion as the classmates and ostracized by most of Paris, with no one to show him sympathy just as he gave none to anyone else.
  • Because Hawkmoth goes about trying to get the Miraculous by victory in combat, when he finally gets them, they're completely out of power. Despite finally succeeding in obtaining three of his enemies' Miraculous, including the Ladybug Miraculous, he's the weakest he's ever been, and easily subdued by the cops.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Lila notices that several of her classmates donated clothes that Marinette made for them to her false charity drive, and muses that they don't really appreciate just how hard she worked. Since after all, they can just badger her into making more, right?
• 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.
  • Also applies to Chloé, Juleka and Rose, the only three members of her former class who actually recognize what they did wrong and work to make amends rather than demanding to be Easily Forgiven. All three of them are able to earn back Marinette's trust to the point that she gives each of them a Miraculous for the Final Battle with Mayura, and they become part of her True Companions.
• Easily Forgiven: The story as a whole is harshly critical of this trope, as forgiveness is emphasized as something one should earn through change.
  • Adrien and Bustier are both essentially embodiments of toxic forgiveness. They coddle wrongdoers by never holding them to any behavioral standards, forgiving them repeatedly despite them showing absolutely no sign of trying to change their behavior, and expect their victims to police their own behavior, "take the high road/be a good example," show understanding towards those who hurt them, try harder to make things work, and bear the brunt of the consequences for the perpetrator's actions because of the belief that peace is preferable to justice until they themselves want justice for wrongs against them, and receive none.
  • 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.
  • 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. 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.
  • Averted with Chloé. Chloé assumes this trope is in play when Ladybug comes to her asking for help, only to have it spelled out to her that this is not the case, she will not be given a Miraculous again, and Ladybug is only trusting her because there's no better option. However, Chloé takes this to heart and starts sincerely working to change her behavior, which convinces Marinette she's worthy of a chance to redeem herself and spares her from being cut off like the rest of the class after the Internal Reveal of Ladybug's identity. Chloé's continued efforts to atone for her mistakes and improve as a person, including making amends to many of her past victims without seeking attention or praise for it, eventually pay off, earning her Marinette's complete forgiveness and friendship, another chance to be a superhero, and even the public respect and recognition she wanted all along. It's also discussed that Adrien and Ms. Bustier's love of this trope actively encouraged Chloé's bad habits, and it took being told she wouldn't be forgiven to motivate her to change.
• Elder Abuse: Under various fake names, Lila volunteered at several senior care homes until she found Ms. Agnes Delacroix, a woman without any family left. She then 'helped' her set up a new bank account which she secretly registered for herself, intercepting her ID card, and conned her into entering the minimal balance to keep the bank from closing it. Because Ms. Delacroix never used the account after opening it, no one knew to close it when she passed away, leavng Lila with this secret account all to herself.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: This is how Audrey Bourgeois seems to handle business decisions, in contrast to her less-than-stellar treatment of her family.
  • While in the process of buying out Gabriel's company, Audrey hits a snag when it's pointed out that the government will want a chunk of things as well, which would mean arbitration proceedings that leave her negotiations dead in the water. Audrey proposes a deal where, after buying the majority stake, she donates one-seventh (14.3%) of the company to the government, entitling them to one-seventh of the profits while allowing her to remain a Majority-Share Dictator. She also quickly realizes how this can be spun for marketing purposes, as she can say that all profits earned on a certain weekday will go toward compensating Hawk Moth's victims.
  • When Audrey offers to let Marinette and her family move into the former Agreste mansion, now the Style Queen Fashion Estate, Marinette is leery until Audrey explains that it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. Marinette’s family will get a nice place with good security for reasonable rent, and Marinette will get a well-stocked workspace to push her limits with her designs and kick-start her career in the fashion industry. Meanwhile, Audrey will benefit from the positive publicity of directly associating with Ladybug, will not have to go through bankruptcy proceedings for the newly-acquired Agreste Fashions, which has the side effect of saving thousands of people from losing their jobs, and will get the right to sell some of Marinette’s designs under her own brand (with Marinette getting a cut of the profits, of course).
• Entitled Bastard:
  • The class treats their good fortune as something they deserve, fully expecting things to work out for them just because they want them to. They fail to realize that they've been so blessed because of Marinette going above and beyond to help them all.
  • Adrien takes his position completely for granted, and encourages everyone's entitlement by casually 'reassuring' Marinette that she can just replace the donated clothes.
  • Alya expects that Marinette will welcome back her 'bestie' with open arms even after she repeatedly ignored, dismissed and belittled her. She also throws a fit upon realizing that Kagami has 'her' Miraculous.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Nino and the rest of the class feel this way upon learning that Adrien knew that Lila was scamming them the whole time and never bothered saying anything until he was victimized.
• Entitled to Have You:
  • Played with through Lila; she's not actually attracted to Adrien, but recognizes how being seen with him could boost her credibility. Since Adrien is too concerned about his precious reputation to contradict her or tell her to stop despite his discomfort, she takes every opportunity to pass herself off as his girlfriend, milking their "relationship" for all it's worth. At least, until Hawk Moth's identity is revealed and she decides he's more useful as a scapegoat.
  • Adrien believes that he and Ladybug are destined to be together, completely ignoring her repeated rejections. When she's revealed to be Marinette, who he knows has a crush on him, he expects her to leap into his arms once he reveals he has a crush on Ladybug...completely ignoring the fact that he hung her civilian identity out to dry when she asked for his help with Lila and his behavior might have prompted her to rethink said crush. Unsurprisingly, Marinette shoots him down, and when he tries again as Chat Noir, he gets a long lecture about his sexual harassment, Skewed Priorities, and Dogged Nice Guy attitude that finally convinces him she might not be interested.
  • Marinette's classmates (with a few exceptions) feel completely entitled to her friendship, and when she cuts ties with them due to their toxic behavior, they continue insisting that she has to forgive them and help them deal with their problems like she did before, not realizing that this ungrateful All Take and No Give attitude is exactly what drove her away.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Lila feigns surprise and gratitude at how her classmates threw a surprise picnic for her while her internal monologue reveals how she planted subtle hints to manipulate them into throwing the picnic in the hope of meeting one of her fictitious celebrity connections.
  • Marinette shows up on her way home and angrily confronts her classmates about how she was throwing a party to try and reconnect with them after Ms. Bustier pressured her to "Turn the Other Cheek" to Lila's bullying, but gives up in the face of their blatant entitlement and goes home.
  • Adrien shrugs off Marinette's pain and the way Lila is scamming his classmates, dismissing both as "no big deal." When Marinette tries to get through to him that it is a big deal, he simply tells her that she can handle it, demonstrating that he doesn't care about any problem that doesn't personally affect him.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • As self-centered as he acts, Adrien 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.
  • 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 purely because he doesn't realize 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.
  • 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.
  • Chloé, after she Took a Level in Kindness, is livid with Adrien not just for enabling her awful behavior for years but because he did so for his own benefit rather than actually to support her. She fully admits that her actions are her own but she's come to recognize that a real friend would help her be better instead of just placate her like he did. She'd even be able to look past that if he honestly did support her but he knew what she was doing was wrong and said nothing to her, choosing silence because it served him better.
  • As upset as she is with him Marinette does agree with the class that Adrien doesn't deserve to be robbed as Lila did to him.
  • Marinette refuses to use her influence as Ladybug after she's exposed to give Adrien being robbed priority. She sees it as unprofessional to put personal friendships ahead of her duties and this qualifies.
  • The kwamis disapprove of the behavior of the temporary holders in the class and ask Marinette to seek out new holders for them.
  • When Ladybug tells Alya on live television that she's no longer worthy of a Miraculous thanks to her actions as a civilian, Nadja wonders if she's being too harsh.
  • While responding to the above point and clarifying that all of the previous temporary heroes (sans Luka and Kagami) have been permanently retired for the same reason as Alya, Ladybug doesn't denounce any of them by name. She also only called Alya out specifically after she outed herself as the former Fox.
  • Vincent Aza calls out Chat Noir’s complete disregard at the lives lost by Hawkmoth.
• 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 Gloating: Hawkmoth engages in this when he gets his hands on the Ladybug Earrings, insisting that Nothing Can Stop Me Now.
• Exact Eavesdropping: Lila spies on Marinette and Adrien several times, listening in on their conversations.
• Exact Words: Adrien justifies letting Lila scam his classmates by claiming she isn't taking anything they "can't afford to lose." After Lila robs him, Marinette turns this logic around on him; sure, Adrien has no accessible finances left, but the Agreste family is still wealthy and he's still being cared for by his guardian, even if it isn't the lavish lifestyle he's accustomed to. Thus, he hasn't lost anything he couldn't afford to lose to Lila...so stopping her can't be that important.
• 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:
  • The majority of Marinette, Adrien, Chloé, and Lila's classmates prove to be this. After everything Marinette has done to help them as their "Everyday Ladybug", they instantly abandon her once Lila presents herself as an even better version of her, claiming to have better connections. It's very telling that out of all of them, only Juleka and eventually Rose realize their mistakes and don't act entitled to Marinette forgiving them for their abandoning and isolating her.
  • Adrien himself also proves to be this; 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.
  • Ironically, the class subverts this with Adrien. They're willing to stick by him when he's Convicted by Public Opinion of aiding Hawkmoth... until Adrien's exposed as having known Lila was a Con Man and not done anything to protect them. Then they kick him out of their friend group and blame him for their problems just as much as they blame Lila.
• Fair-Weather Foe:
  • Downplayed by Chloé. In sharp contrast to Marinette's classmates, teachers, and Adrien, she doesn't immediately start sucking up after everyone finds out Marinette is also her idol, Ladybug, and at one point acknowledges in front of Marinette that she still doesn't really like her personally — but she's sticking with Marinette because she genuinely wants to change and improve, and she knows Marinette will tell her off instead of enabling her when she starts acting like a Spoiled Brat.
  • Averted by Lila; she doesn't even bother trying to make nice with Marinette after the Internal Reveal of her Secret Identity, recognizing that it's only a matter of time before her lies fall apart regardless of whether Marinette is on her side. Unlike the rest of the class, who still feel entitled to Marinette's friendship, Lila recognizes that her time is better spent getting out while she can.
• 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:
  • Lila, naturally, is of the Manipulative Bitch in Sheep's Clothing variety, feigning generosity while stringing her marks along.
  • Adrien also proves to be one, preferring to let Nino and the rest of his friends be fooled rather than deal with the inconvenience of telling them unpleasant truths. Chapter 6's title explicitly calls him out as such.
• False Reassurance:
  • After Adrien helps her out, Lila 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 Lila 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."
  • Audrey tells Adrien that "As long as you're in my care, I will treat you as if you were my own child." Knowing exactly how she treated Chloé, he can only shudder in revulsion.
• The Farmer and the Viper: Adrien's inability to learn this lesson is his most debilitating Fatal Flaw. No matter how many times someone has proven they cannot be trusted and will take advantage of others given the chance, Adrien will trust them anyway and pay for it.
  • Adrien firmly believes that since he knows Lila is a liar and Con Artist (and a blatantly obvious one at that), he's completely immune to her tricks. Lila takes full advantage of his willingness to underestimate her to convince him to give her ten thousand euros...and then make off with the entire Agreste emergency fund when he makes the mistake of typing in the passwords while she was in the room. When Adrien goes to the police, no one believes his story because Who Would Be Stupid Enough? to trust someone they knew was a Con Artist with any amount of money?
  • When Adrien as Chat Noir manages to disable Mayura, learning her identity, Nathalie claims she can't walk and asks him to help her up. Chat makes the mistake of offering her his hand, and she promptly swipes the Ring off of his finger, revealing his identity in a way that makes it look as though he gave her the Ring on purpose. Again, no one believes that he would really be dumb enough to trust the word of a supervillain, so the media jumps to the most obvious conclusion, leaving him Hated by All.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Adrien has three: his Moral Myopia, Lack of Empathy, and naïve belief that the world works the same way it does in media. He firmly believes that he's a good person, and that therefore, everything he does is automatically right. It doesn't matter how others are hurt by his actions so long as things are aligned with his Skewed Priorities, and no amount of trying to convince him otherwise or get him to consider other points of view works. This costs him dearly when he misses out on the Final Battle due to a deadly combination of Ladybug not trusting him and his deciding to skip the fight in order to placate his friends instead. This forces Marinette to pull an Indy Ploy that exposes Gabriel as Hawkmoth, leading Lila to exploit his faith in her 'seeing the error of her ways' in order to set him up.
  • The class has a collective one in being Secretly Selfish. They don't appreciate all that Marinette has done for them because they honestly think everything they've gotten is because they're just that lucky. They cozy up with Lila and start snubbing Marinette without a care because they see it as another good opportunity that fell in their laps and hope to use it to help themselves. The end result is Marinette cutting ties with them all for good after she's revealed as Ladybug, denying them any of the benefits they believe they could get from being her friends.
  • Gabriel is a Control Freak. 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.
  • Lila has greed and selfishness as hers. While this is subverted in the story proper, as she manages to set Adrien up to take the fall for her and swindles him out of millions of euros in the bargain before skipping town, the epilogue implies this will prove to be her downfall someday. Lila is completely unsatisfied with the massive sum of money she's stolen and notes that she'll always want more, affirming her intent to keep lying and swindling people. And while Ladybug acknowledges that Lila has gotten away with it this time, she declares that if Lila continues as she has, one day she'll scam the wrong person and pay for it with her life. Knowing Ladybug has a Miraculous that lets her see the future, Lila is left very unnerved and unsure whether Ladybug was telling the truth.
• Financial Test of Friendship: Played with. Adrien's fortunes suffer greatly after his father is exposed as Hawk Moth, as the government promptly freezes the Agrestes' assets and their company's stock plummets. This only gets worse when the only account he has any level of access to is emptied out by Lila after Adrien foolishly types the passwords in while she's watching. Despite all this, his classmates stick by him and offer to help him get the seriousness of his situation through to the police. This changes when they learn that he knew Lila was scamming them all along and did nothing to stop it. Realizing that he didn't bother to help them when they needed it, they turn their backs on him and leave him to his fate.
• Flaw Exploitation: This is Lila's favorite tactic; as The Social Expert, she's very good at figuring out what people's weaknesses are and taking full advantage of them.
  • Lila quickly realizes that Marinette's classmates are Secretly Selfish and prone to Taking Advantage of Generosity. She then exploits this by presenting herself as a better version of Marinette, dangling the promise of using fictitious celebrity connections to make her classmates' dreams come true to convince them to trust her with their hard work and most valuable possessions — which she promptly sells off behind their backs.
  • Adrien genuinely believes that everything he does is morally right and that things will work out in his favor without him having to put in any real effort, while simultaneously being completely apathetic toward anything that doesn't directly affect him. Lila first leverages this to keep him quiet about her lies, correctly anticipating that he would rather let her scam his classmates than have to deal with the drama if she was exposed. When the tides later turn, she feeds into his delusions by claiming to have had a change of heart thanks to his influence, and Adrien is so thrilled about being proven right that he walks right into her trap.
  • Subverted when Lila tries to discredit Marinette; she assumes that if she targets Adrien, Marinette will leap in to help her crush and destroy her own reputation by making claims against Lila that the evidence doesn't support. While this would have been true a few weeks prior (and worked when Lila was trying to discredit Marinette to her classmates), Marinette has since realized that Adrien was a False Friend and Stopped Caring about what happens to him or exposing Lila, washing her hands of the matter entirely.
• Foil: Has its own page.
• Freudian Excuse: One of the reasons Lila is such a manipulative liar is due to her mother's experiences with her job. Mrs. Rossi reported another diplomat's embezzlement schemes; in retaliation, he used his connections to sabotage her career. Seeing how much this cost their family, with her father leaving and her mother unlikely to reach any high-paying positions, Lila believes it's better to do whatever it takes to secure her own interests.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse:
  • Once Gabriel's motives for terrorizing Paris as Hawkmoth are revealed — namely, that he wanted to use the Miraculous to reawaken his comatose wife — Adrien immediately latches onto the idea that this could earn him a lighter sentence. Ladybug shoots that down; nothing excuses the extremes he went to in hopes of achieving his goals.
  • Also applies to Adrien himself, who 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 inaction.
• A Friend in Need: Adrien's classmates stand by him as the public's opinion of him sours and his family's fortune is seized by the government after his father is outed as Hawk Moth, even though their reputations suffer by association. They're blissfully unaware that Adrien stood by and did nothing when they were taken in by Lila's scams. Once they learn about his Betrayal by Inaction and that they threw away their reputations for a False Friend, they call him out and refuse to have anything else to do with him.
• Gaslighting: Adrien insists to Marinette that Lila's lies and scams aren't hurting anyone. Even when Marinette tells him outright that she's being hurt, he just smiles and tells her she's strong enough to handle it, dismissing all evidence to the contrary as her being "mistaken." Throughout the story, he continues to insist that he knows how Marinette feels better than anyone else, maintaining that she's "just confused" and "upset over nothing" and trying to pressure Chloé into helping him impress this belief onto Marinette. Neither Marinette nor Chloé is having it, though their former classmates lap this idea up because it allows them to insist Marinette is in the wrong for refusing to fix all their problems for them.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Luka tells Marinette that they should try to lure out Hawkmoth by making him think the Ladybug Miraculous is vulnerable, then vanquish him once and for all. Ladybug notes the obvious danger that Hawkmoth might actually get the Earrings, which would be a disaster. However, Luka points out that their situation is already very dangerous since Marinette is drowning in negative feelings caused by her class and is vulnerable to being akumatized at any time, which would also allow Hawkmoth to instantly win. They therefore decide things are bad enough that it's worth gambling the Ladybug Miraculous on one final all-or-nothing battle.
  • During the Final Battle, Ladybug has a massive Oh, Crap! moment when Dark Owl shows up, because he doesn't keep his akumatized object on him. It eventually turns out to be in a place none of the heroes can reach in time to destroy it without exposing their trap. With no good options left, Ladybug reluctantly orders that the building where the akuma is hidden be hit with a missile to destroy the object, knowing that her call might have just gotten some unlucky civilians killed. She's deeply relieved when Chloé calls her back after the battle is over and assures her the building was empty when the missile hit.
  • During Mayura's assault, Ladybug decides to entrust Juleka and Rose with the Tiger and Pig, respectively, as she needs all the firepower she can muster.
• Gone Horribly Right: The story itself noted that this was the case in regards to Adrien's attempts to protect Lila. He did succeed in protecting Lila, but by doing so, helped ensure that she wouldn't face any consequences for her actions, ultimately taking that bad karma onto himself as a result.
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • Nadja's interview with Ladybug shows that while Marinette is still perfectly nice to most people, she 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 said interview, she's brutally honest about how she feels about her partner and former classmates, referring to most of the latter as "failed holders". While harsh and addressed by Nadja as such, this is not portrayed as a wrong thing to do, since Chat Noir kept spreading misinformation 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, recognizing how dramatically ironic the situation is.
• Good Is Not Soft: Discussed in an early conversation, when a frustrated Plagg spells out to Adrien that sometimes, bad people like Lila have to get hurt to stop good people like Marinette from suffering. Adrien neatly demonstrates his Fatal Flaw by blowing this off and suggesting a Superficial Solution that amounts to changing the subject and pretending the problem has gone away.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Downplayed. One of Ladybug's conditions for accepting Chloé's help with preparations for the Final Battle is that Chloé's involvement will be completely anonymous. Though she'll play an important role in taking down Hawk Moth, nothing she does will ever be made public, which would satisfy her desire to be lauded as a hero. It's a sign of Chloé beginning to go through Character Development that she agrees. After the battle, Marinette relents a bit and tells Chloé that she can take credit for supplying funds and helping the heroes coordinate with the police, but she doesn't get to claim she participated in the fight in any way.
• Guilt by Association:
  • Adrien runs headlong into this due to his willingness to support Lila through his inaction and his father being unmasked as Hawkmoth.
  • Inverted/Played With with Marinette's classmates; after she cuts ties with them and transfers over to Mendeleiev's, people notice that she's treating her former friends like strangers. This leads many to the conclusion that because Marinette is such a good person — especially since it's now widely known that she's Ladybug — that must mean she's avoiding them for good reason.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • People are not guaranteed to appreciate the hard work you do for them. Just because you do nice things for people, they may not recognize your work as such. Marinette learned that the class simply would not appreciate her properly and that she had to leave in order to be happy.
  • Forgiveness can be detrimental to you, the wronged parties, and the wrongdoer if it's allowed to cross into complacency and an enabling tolerance for bad behavior. If forgiveness is granted without genuine recognition and regret on the wrongdoer's side, it can become reinforcement for that bad behavior. Chloé is Hated by All by the beginning of the story because of her long history of terrible behavior and she only realized it was a problem when she couldn't make Ladybug forgive her. While she accepts her actions are her own, she also eventually calls Adrien out for constantly reinforcing to her that her behavior was acceptable. And Marinette constantly trying to appease and forgive the people who hurt her for months and continuously giving up more of herself to try to maintain a positive relationship with them only eased them into thinking such an exploitative dynamic was acceptable.
  • Relatedly, there are simply some people upon whom your sympathy is wasted, and cutting off your emotional investment in them is sometimes the only healthy option you have, even if it hurts. Marinette cut off her relationships with Adrien and the class to focus on taking care of herself and comes out healthier and happier for it; Adrien refuses to stop enabling bad faith actors and keeps pacifying them even when they continue to hurt others, and his staunch refusal to stop engaging with and shielding them ruins his life.
  • Establishing boundaries is important, and a lack of boundaries is not an expression of love. Marinette's boundary-less devotion didn't create healthy relationships or actually help her become appreciated, it only demonstrated her obvious willingness to do near-anything for her class' sakes and gave her a reputation for extreme behavior when it came to Adrien. Her devotedly giving nature just spoiled her class into expecting huge favors from those around them for little to nothing in return, which Lila implies made them easy pickings for her scams. And Marinette herself only avoids Lila's trap by cutting Adrien off after he asks her to use her credibility with authorities to influence a police investigation. Generosity may be a virtue, but giving so much of herself without limits ultimately hurt both Marinette and the class she wanted to help in the end.
  • One way to read the Plot Parallel between the experiences of Marinette and Lila's mother is as saying that challenging evil doesn't work without support. Lila's mother successfully exposed a fellow diplomat's embezzlement by herself, but it came at the cost of her career being permanently hamstrung when he used his superior connections to get revenge, with no one backing her up to counter this. Marinette tried to turn to Adrien for help with Lila only to be abandoned, leaving her with no way to expose the liar on her own. As Ladybug, she struggled to keep the upper hand with Chat Noir's flirting and refusal to take akuma fights seriously holding her back and only managed to defeat Hawk Moth by enlisting the help of allies she could actually count on for the Final Battle.
  • Sometimes, you have to accept that what you're trying to accomplish is a lost cause and give up, because continuing to push for it will cost you far more than you'll ever gain. Adrien keeps pushing for things it's clear he can't have, like a Relationship Upgrade with Ladybug or his money back after Lila robs him, long after most people would have realized they were wasting their time. Not only does he not get what he wants, his efforts keep digging him deeper into trouble, until he's completely destroyed his reputation and thrown away the few good things he had left out of a stubborn refusal to accept his losses and move on. This is directly contrasted with Marinette, who manages to pull back from her breaking point and start taking steps in a healthier direction by accepting that her classmates will never stop taking advantage of her, cutting them out of her life rather than waste further effort on Ungrateful Bastards who have no intention of appreciating what she does for them.
• Hated by All: By the end of the story, Adrien, 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:
  • One of the things Marinette needs in order to put her plan into action is money, in order to purchase the equipment necessary to pull it off. With no way to get it herself, she's forced to choose between asking Gabriel Agreste and Chloé for help.
  • Zig-zagged later on when the city starts putting together a reward fund to thank the superheroes for finally defeating Hawk Moth. Adrien seizes on this as a solution to his financial woes after Lila robs him and his father loses his company, as he is initially set to receive part of the reward. However, the actual payout keeps getting delayed because more and more people keep showing up and wanting to contribute. In the meantime, Adrien's callousness toward the suffering of Hawk Moth's victims as Chat Noir reveals to the public that he's The Poorly Chosen One and a Nominal Hero, prompting people to reconsider whether he really deserves part of the reward. He's ultimately excluded from the benefits after his identity is revealed in a way that strongly implicates him as his father's accomplice.

His Own Worst Enemy:

• Adrien believes that being chosen to be Chat Noir gives him the benefits of Protagonist-Centered Morality, meaning everything he does is right by default and he's automatically guaranteed a happy ending just for being him. No matter how many times he's warned that he needs to start taking his heroic duties and Lila's scams more seriously, he keeps insisting that everything will work out in his favor on its own. When he finally realizes he needs to act, he focuses entirely on things that will benefit him, which just makes his situation worse. He continues insisting to the bitter end that he was right all along, failing to realize how this deluded mindset brought about his downfall.
• Ladybug discusses this with Lila in the epilogue. Even though Lila managed to get away with everything she did in Paris, she has no intention of quitting while she's ahead and intends to keep scamming people. Ladybug speculates that Lila is addicted to the thrill of getting away with a con and couldn't stop even if she decided she wanted to — which is inevitably going to be her downfall one day, with Ladybug presenting a possibly-true future scenario where Lila is murdered by someone she conned and dies alone, Hated by All.

• Hitler Ate Sugar:
  • Adrien runs headlong into this after his father is unmasked as Hawkmoth, with people acting leery of him because he's Gabriel's son. Lila takes advantage of this by setting Adrien up to take the blame if anyone notices a connection between Hawk Moth's actions and hers, making herself out to be an Unwitting Pawn whom Gabriel hired as a model so he could keep tabs on teenage drama that he could potentially exploit and implying that Adrien had some hand in this as well.
  • Inverted with Marinette's former classmates once she transfers into Ms. Mendeleiev's homeroom. Others quickly notice that she's cut ties with them and, knowing that she's a good person, conclude that she must have had good reasons for doing so. All the more so since everyone knows she's Ladybug now. The result is that Marinette's classmates wind up being shunned by the rest of the student body, especially once they continue to stick by Adrien amid the suspicions surrounding him after his father's arrest.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Adrien, several times over.
    • His putting his reputation and desire to avoid personal conflict over his moral responsibilities bites him in the butt 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.
    • 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.
    • Further, 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, prejudices the investigation with his own poor display of 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 and Lila 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.
  • Gabriel, thrice.
    • Gabriel's 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 could probably have figured out a way to beat or evade it; instead, he fell into her trap and was defeated.
    • Gabriel uses Mayura's sentimonsters to discredit workers' unions so disputes always end in his favor. Because Nathalie was out doing this on his orders, she wasn't able to provide any meaningful aid or damage control during his final fight and exposure.
    • 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.
  • 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.
• Honest Advisor: Chloé uses this as the reason to maintain a friendship with Marinette; she may not like being told what she's done wrong but she needs someone who will be honest with her and Marinette won't even think about lying to her about anything.
• Honesty Aesop: Adrien spent months ignoring the fact that Lila was scamming his classmates and even helping to cover up her lies because he didn't see it as a big deal. His tune changes in a hurry when she manages to con him out of a large sum of money, but the timing of his sudden shift in opinion makes him look suspicious when he goes to the police, especially since Lila already gave them a statement which "accidentally" implied that Adrien might have been working with his father. With his own past behavior working against him, Adrien winds up being a Cassandra Truth and prejudicing the police against anyone connected to him who makes accusations against Lila later, which infuriates his classmates when they finally learn he was letting them get scammed. In short, Adrien's earlier refusal to speak up comes back to bite him when he finally tells the truth about Lila, ruining his credibility when it matters most.
• Honesty Is the Best Policy: Deconstructed when Adrien reports Lila to the police. He tells them the complete truth...including that he knew Lila was a Con Artist but chose not to do anything about it because it wasn't personally affecting him. This self-serving behavior and complete disregard for the moral problems with lying and stealing lead the police to conclude that Cassandra Did It and Adrien is making a poorly-thought-out attempt to use Lila as a scapegoat.
• Hope Spot: Deliberately engineered by Lila with the Marvel writing contest; not only does she convince Nathaniel that she has connections, she sends him a letter claiming he made it past the first round of judging. In reality, nobody at Marvel has seen his submission, and she's stringing him along while planning to eventually claim it was destroyed by a jealous executive.
• Hourglass Plot: Over the course of the story, Adrien and Marinette effectively trade places, as Adrien loses everything he took for granted while Marinette hits the Karmic Jackpot. This is cemented by Adrien ending up in her old apartment while she moves into the manor courtesy of Audrey.
• Hypocrite:
  • Adrien 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 he 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."
  • Adrien demands that the victims of other's misdeeds forgive and grant leniency to the perpetrators who hurt them, because that's what good people do, and considers the victims themselves to be wrongdoers if they don't instantly forgive the perpetrators like he has. When Lila betrays and steals from him in particular, however, he decides, quote, "she deserve[s] to suffer." He shows no awareness of this double standard, and indeed continues to insist his father receive leniency for his crimes because forgiving is what good people do.
  • Even while they're planning to force Marinette to forgive them for how they mistreated her, Alya and her co-conspirators grouse about how unfair it is that she's ignoring their pleas and treating them like strangers rather than friends... despite that they had done that and worse to her which included bullying her. Alya even gloats about how much fun it'll be teasing Marinette about it and never letting her forget this mistake.
• I Have This Friend: In a variation, Ladybug tells Luka 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.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Adrien has been sheltered and enjoyed immense financial privilege all his life, so he genuinely doesn't understand why his classmates losing expensive belongings like nice clothes or hundreds of euros is a big deal; in his world, those are things that can easily be replaced or are too small to really matter. His isolated upbringing also means his worldview has been largely shaped by media, leaving him fatally Wrong Genre Savvy regarding Lila's motivations and convinced that Protagonist-Centered Morality is real and applies to him as one of Paris's heroes.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Marinette responds to Adrien's claim that Lila's lies aren't hurting anyone by pointing out that she's being hurt. Adrien immediately responds that it's fine, because he knows she's strong enough to handle it ...implicitly admitting that he knows his previous statement about Lila not hurting anyone was wrong but that he just doesn't care.
• Impoverished Patrician: After Gabriel's arrest, the police immediately freeze all of his assets, and it's heavily implied they'll be seized by the government once he's convicted for his crimes as Hawk Moth. Adrien experiences a twist on this trope after he's placed in the care of his aunt. Though she's as wealthy as Gabriel was, she refuses to furnish Adrien with any of the luxuries he's used to, instead moving him to a middle-class apartment that he complains is smaller than his old closet. Also played with in that Adrien has wages from years of modeling, but they're stored in an account his Control Freak father has him completely locked out of; that money is out of his reach until he turns eighteen.
• Incredibly Obvious Tail: While following Marinette's parents, Nino disguises himself with a deerstalker cap, fake glasses, and a silly coat. Nino thinks it's an amazing disguise; Marinette's parents pick the absurd costume out right away and think he's crazy.
• 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 dismisses her anguish at seeing they've donated the clothes she worked so hard to make for them by declaring "They're just clothes" and that she can easily replace them.
  • 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 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.
• Instant-Win Condition: Marinette recognizes one just when Hawkmoth is on the verge of claiming the Ladybug Miraculous. He needs both that and the Cat Miraculous to achieve his goals. But because the fight is televised, all she needs to do is remove his Miraculous to expose his identity to all of Paris.
• Interclass Friendship: Deconstructed by Adrien, who simply cannot comprehend how badly Lila's scams are hurting his classmates personally and financially because he's never wanted for any material luxury in his life and views everything they've lost as easily replacable. Both Marinette and Plagg try to explain to him that it is a big deal and not everyone can afford to be conned out of hundreds of euros, to no avail.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Ladybug's battle with Hawkmoth ends with his Secret Identity revealed to all of Paris, along with Luka, Kagami and her own exposure as heroes.
  • At Nadja's post-final battle interview with the heroes, Alya learns that Kagami is Kitsune and angrily outs herself as the former Fox Heroine, spurring Ladybug to officially announce that none of the other temporary holders will be getting their Miraculous back. Ladybug also makes clear what she really thinks of Chat Noir, affirming once and for all that there is NO Relationship Upgrade in the cards, and that the only reason she put up with his sexual harassment was to avoid risking akumatization herself.
  • After Sabrina pulls the transcripts of Lila and Adrien's police interviews, the whole class learns about how Adrien knew the truth about Lila the whole time and never bothered warning them.
• Ironic Echo:
  • A double example after Lila steals from Adrien. Marinette reminds him how he previously claimed that it was "no big deal" so long as somebody didn't lose money they couldn't afford to lose; Adrien attempts to counter by claiming she wouldn't want Lila to profit from her theft and deception.
  • After an upgrade to her living situation, Marinette comments that the closet in her new place is bigger than her old bedroom was. Much later on, Adrien gripes about how his new bedroom — Marinette's old place — is smaller than his old closet.
• Ironic Hell: Non-literal variant. Adrien and 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 the class 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.
• It's All About Me:
  • Lila, full stop. Her mother's ethics and moral beliefs 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.
  • Adrien is this. As the story goes on, 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 that's been attacking Paris and fighting her. 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. Who cares if she doesn't feel the same way?
  • Amelie. Her entire guardianship of Adrien prioritizes minimizing his effect on her with no regard for the fact that Adrien has had his life completely upended by the revelation of his father's crimes.
• I Warned You:
  • Marinette spent months before the story begins trying to tell her classmates that Lila was scamming them, only to be ignored and ostracized for her efforts. Finally, realizing that they simply aren't going to listen to her, she gives up and cuts ties with them for her own well-being. When her classmates finally realize Marinette was right all along, Marinette spells out that she tried to warn them and it's not her responsibility to fix their mistakes.
  • Plagg spends most of the story telling Adrien that karma is coming for him and he needs to put some serious work into fixing his mistakes if he doesn't want it to hit him hard, as well as warning him against actions that will make his already-bad situation worse. Adrien ignores all of these, to the point where Plagg finally gives up. When Adrien notices and asks why, Plagg bluntly informs him that even if he would listen, he's wasted all his chances and his bad karma is now completely unavoidable, so there's no point.
  • Similarly, as Chat Noir, Adrien completely ignored Ladybug's repeated rejections of his advances. After this culminates in a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Ladybug on live television, Plagg points out that Ladybug told Chat she wasn't interested plenty of times before; it's not her fault he never bothered to listen to her.

J-R

• 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.
• 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.'
• Kansas City Shuffle: As part of her exit strategy after Gabriel's exposure and arrest, Lila offers to come clean about all her lies and scams as long as Adrien gives her enough money to repay their classmates and buy a security system for her safety. Adrien agrees, but warns her that he'll go straight to the police if she backs out. He doesn't realize that Lila wants him to go to the police, who she's already fed a story that makes her look like an Unwitting Pawn to Adrien and his father. She knows that if Adrien does tell the truth about her, it will work against him, since he's had months to come forward about her crimes but didn't bother until she did something that personally affected him. Combined with his current circumstances, it will all add up to look like he's throwing her under the bus, not the other way around.
• Karma Houdini: Played With. 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, Ladybug tracks her down and warns her that continuing down her current path will ensure karma does take its toll... while implying that she used the Rabbit's Time Travel power to see her fate.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The story centers around these running out, with Adrien, Chloé, Bustier and Damocles, the classmates, and Gabriel and Nathalie suffering the consequences of their actions and having to deal with the fallout. This would have been the case for Lila as well, except that Adrien took the karma for her. In the epilogue, Ladybug visits Lila to warn that this could still be the case in her future, but Lila (and the reader) can't be sure if Ladybug really did see her future via Fluff to verify that Lila will continue to run scams until she suffers an unfortunate fate, or if she's just making things up.
• Karmic Jackpot: Just like karmic retribution hits those who deserve it, karmic reward comes the way of those who earn it.
  • 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 that she winds up winning. This exposes Gabriel Agreste as the man behind the mask, guaranteeing his downfall. Marinette is also revealed as Ladybug, making her an untouchable and adored figure in the city. The experience gives her the self-assurance to cut out the class from her life, recognizing how toxic their dynamic is.
  • Juleka realized from the start that the class' treatment of Marinette was wrong, but was too afraid of what it would cost her to speak up. When the class tries to smooth things over after Marinette is revealed as Ladybug with the idea of having things return to how they used to be, she refuses to take part in it and acknowledges that Marinette is fully within her rights not to forgive her. This leads Marinette to being open to restart their friendship while the class is left to flounder on their own. She even gets a Miraculous during the final battle.
  • Rose is convinced by Juleka to stop following the class and to realize their treatment of Marinette is wrong. Since she's now willing to realize what she did wrong, Marinette is also open to restarting their friendship and, much like Juleka, giving her a Miraculous to wield during the final battle with Mayura.
  • Downplayed with Chloé. She did a lot wrong before the story began and is suffering the consequences dearly. When Ladybug comes to her for help in dealing with Hawkmoth for good, she makes it clear that Chloé will not be benefiting from this in any way. While upset, she ultimately chooses to do what's best for Paris instead of herself. This pays off immensely for her as it leads her to a friendship with her hero, Ladybug, and she manages to develop a strong bond with Marinette with the assurance that the girl will help her be a better person by not allowing her to get away with her antics like Adrien did. She may not be in for a fun time, but she does recognize she will grow into a better person by taking the unpleasant but necessary path, which is ultimately better for her in the long run.
• Karmic Misfire: A key point of the story is that once negative karma has been built up, it has to go somewhere. If it can't reach the person it was originally meant for, it has no problem with landing on whoever got in the way instead. Adrien learns this the hard way when he keeps trying to protect and enable Lila despite Plagg's warnings; she's savvy enough to set him up to take the fall for her crimes and then skip town, leaving Adrien saddled with the full weight of her karma. Plagg even lampshades that it wouldn't have happened if Adrien hadn't gone out of his way to protect Lila. More chillingly, the author has confirmed that if Marinette lost her battle with Hawk Moth, all the accumulated negative karma would have come down on her head, completely ruining her life as retribution for deeds that weren't even her fault.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Lila is ambitious but she's also smart. She knows when to cut and run if her fortunes turn. This 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:
  • One of Adrien's Fatal Flaws is that he has very little ability to sympathize with others, blowing off the pain Lila is causing Marinette because she's "strong enough to handle it." He also struggles to see things from other people's perspectives, as exemplified by his reaction to Lila's clothing scam: even when Plagg directly points out that his classmates don't have massive wardrobes like his and can't necessarily afford to replace their clothes the way he can, Adrien can't even comprehend the idea of having a limited number of nice outfits. Similarly, since he has ready access to designer clothes, Adrien has no appreciation for the sheer amount of time, money, and work that goes into making a bespoke outfit like the ones Marinette's classmates gave away and doesn't understand why Marinette can't just remake the same outfits again for free. His privileged upbringing has left him with no idea what it's like to want for any material resource, and his It's All About Me mindset means he's never bothered to consider that losing hundreds of euros worth of stuff to a Con Artist might be a problem — to him, that amount of money is trivial and any material objects can be easily replaced.
  • Lila, of course. Like Adrien, she 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; she's under no illusions that she's a good person and is actively malicious.
  • The class is a more subtle example, with the exception of Chloé, Juleka, and Rose. They simply do not concern themselves with what they put Marinette through, and breeze over this point when it's brought up by deflecting blame to Lila. 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: Kind of the point of the story, what with the title and all. Karma comes in and hits those who deserve it like a freight train. Even better is that Marinette barely has to do anything at all to cause it. This is just the universe looking out for her after all the work she's put in to doing her job well.
  • Adrien defended letting Lila get away with conning his classmates because "no one was getting hurt" and they weren't giving away anything they couldn’t afford to lose. This rebounds on him in an ironic way after his father is arrested and the Agrestes' assets are all frozen by the police, and then Lila cons Adrien out of the Agrestes' multi-million euro emergency fund. Adrien isn't broke — even without his father's wealth, he has his earnings from years of modeling — but all of his money is locked away in accounts he can't touch until he's eighteen thanks to his Control Freak father. Thus, as Marinette points out, he technically hasn't lost anything he can't afford to lose.
  • Refusing to take his heroic duties seriously backfires on Chat Noir after he prioritizes his civilian reputation over showing up for a battle he'd been warned about in advance and ends up missing out on Hawk Moth's defeat. This shatters Ladybug's already weak trust in him and ruins his image with the people of Paris after she calls him out on his flakiness and for sexually harassing her on live television, with his blatant entitlement and Lack of Empathy doing him no favors. Trying to regain some glory for himself by facing Mayura without waiting for backup drives the final nail into his coffin by exposing his identity in a way that strongly implicates him as an accomplice to his father, losing him the Ring and leaving him Hated by All.
  • Alya and the majority of Marinette's classmates 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.
  • Since Miss Bustier and Principal Damocles didn't fact-check any of Lila's claimed disabilities, they get into serious trouble with the school board. All the more so since they applied to use funds specifically meant to help students with disabilities, making it appear that they were scamming the system.
• 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'.
  • 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.
• Liar Revealed:
  • In addition to staying quiet about Lila's scams, Adrien personally backed up some of her claims rather than "make everything unpleasant" by revealing her. The class eventually realize Lila was a liar after she skips town in the wake of Marinette's Identity Reveal and they figure out she was scamming them, but don't know about Adrien's role until Sabrina pulls transcripts of an interview Adrien gave with the police, revealing that he knew the truth all along and never told them. They are, understandably, very upset.
  • Discussed in the epilogue. During her conversation with Lila, Ladybug warns her that she will be keeping tabs on Lila, and if she finds out that Lila is trying any of her lies and scams at her new school, she will give Lila's victims enough information to figure her out.
• Like Father, Like Son: Just like Adrien, Gabriel is extremely arrogant, believing himself to be untouchable even after being slapped in the face with proof that he's anything but.
• 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).
• The Load: As part of her "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Chat Noir, Ladybug calls him out for frequently being this, if not The Millstone, in battle thanks to his Skewed Priorities. She critically picks apart how he tends to focus more on goofing off, making jokes, or flirting than actually fighting the akuma or makes Stupid Sacrifices, taking himself out of the fight and making her life harder, and makes it clear that she no longer considers him a trustworthy or reliable teammate. Notably, when Chat calls Ladybug up and asks how he can help in the fight against Mayura, Ladybug tells him to stay home, because she's been training with her newly recruited team of heroes and he would just disrupt their strategy. To her teammates, she expresses her fear that he'll make one of his usual mistakes and lose the Ring to Mayura if he shows up... which is exactly what happens.
• 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 they can 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 Miraculi yet no power. He's easily taken down by the police.
• Longer-Than-Life Sentence: It's heavily implied that Gabriel will receive this once he's put on trial for his crimes. Ladybug explicitly mentions that she intends to reccomend the court hand down the maximum possible sentence short of the death penalty — and with thousands of murders, hundreds of kidnappings, massive property destruction, terrorism, and treason to answer for, it's clear Gabriel will be behind bars for a long time.
• Loved by All: After being unmasked and defeating Hawkmoth, Marinette becomes Paris's biggest hero, with her becoming basically untouchable.
• Made Out to Be a Jerkass: When Ladybug's plan to trap Hawk Moth kicks off with an explosion, Adrien makes to transform, only to be dragged back into the middle of his classmates by Lila, who clings to him and wails about how scared she is. Adrien is forced to choose between prying Lila off him and looking like a jerk to his classmates or missing the fight Ladybug warned him about and leaving her trapped in a burning building. Since Adrien cares more about his reputation than his heroic duties, he decides to stay put.
• 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. Because the government wants to seize Gabriel's assets once he's found guilty and it might render the purchase null and void, Audrey proposes to give the government 14.3% of the company, which allows her to retain 51.7%, and the government won't have to wait until Gabriel's trial to make him lose the company.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Lila invokes and exploits this after Hawk Moth's defeat, confessing that she worked as a model for Agreste Fashions behind her mother's back and is afraid people will hate her for it. Her mother insists that Lila give a statement the police to clear up any potential misunderstandings, and Lila does, all the while "accidentally" dropping hints that both Gabriel and Adrien were using her as an Unwitting Pawn. It works, and by the time Adrien's interviews with the police wrap up, they're convinced he was secretly his father's accomplice.
• Mirror Character: Adrien and Chloé are both blond rich kids who believe they deserve everything they want and are willing to ignore or cause other people's suffering to get their way. However, Chloé has a Heel Realization upon being confronted with the consequences of her behavior and becomes The Atoner, sincerely trying to overcome her selfishness and make up for her mistakes. Adrien, by contrast, is told over and over again that what he's doing is wrong, but refuses to listen or learn anything even as the consequences begin to hit him hard. By the end, Adrien has lost everything he once took for granted thanks to his refusal to stop digging himself deeper, whereas Chloé's willingness to accept and atone for her mistakes has earned her a much happier ending.
• 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 offers to host a party for Lila at his mansion in order to pass the time, which of course is going on right when the big fight breaks out.
• Money Is Not Power:
  • Adrien is used to getting special treatment because his family is rich...even after his father is arrested for being Hawk Moth. He's deeply annoyed and confused when he reports Lila's theft of the Agreste emergency funds to the police and they don't immediately arrest Lila and bring the money back, even once they explain to him that they have to follow certain procedures and can't magically follow untraceable forms of currency like eurobonds.
  • This is also discussed during the epilogue; Ladybug acknowledges that Lila will never face justice for her crimes in Paris, but warns her that if she keeps scamming people, sooner or later she'll rip off someone who can't be pacified by some sweet-talking or a chunk of Lila's stolen wealth, and it will end badly for her.
• 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. 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."
• Mr. Exposition: Plagg generally serves this role, explaining to Adrien how karma works and, later, exactly why his bad choices aren't working out the way Adrien thinks they're supposed to. Ladybug briefly steps into this role to explain to Kitsune how the heroes are planning to lure Hawk Moth out and trap him in a Final Battle.
• 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.
  • Future!Alix abused her time-travel powers to come back as Bunnyx just to chat with her present-day self, offering her minor tips like avoiding wardrobe malfunctions or studying harder for upcoming tests.
• 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.
• Neutrality Backlash: Played with. Adrien certainly thinks he's staying neutral in the conflict between Lila and Marinette, but his actions clearly indicate that he was siding with Lila all along. On top of his Betrayal by Inaction, he actively vouched for Lila's honesty and dismissed Marinette's appeals to him for help and emotional support, claiming that she was strong enough to handle things without his help. This backfires on him when Lila betrays him and he goes to Marinette for help, only to be told that he's on his own, as Marinette has no intention of helping a False Friend.
• 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."
  • Alya and most of the class feel exactly the same way, blaming Lila and later Adrien for all their misfortunes and refusing to accept that they were the ones who drove a wedge between Marinette and themselves with their neglect and mistreatment of her.
• 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.
  • 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 Listening Skills:
  • Adrien suffers badly from this; when Marinette tells him point-blank that she's on the verge of breaking down under the weight of her isolation from the class and Lila's lies, he blithely tells her she's strong enough to handle it, revealing that he registered exactly none of what she just said. As Chat Noir, he's genuinely surprised when Ladybug calls him out for his Entitled to Have You attitude and for trying to pursue her despite her repeated rejections, acting as though this is the first time he's been told of her blatant disinterest.
    Plagg: Kid, you not listening isn't her fault.
  • Marinette gives her classmates a "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how they took her for granted and abandoned her in favor of Lila, ending with telling them not to bother her again. Alya immediately ignores this, running after Marinette and trying to convince her to give her another chance. The rest of the class falls into this as well, as they not only don't get the message that Marinette wants nothing else to do with them, they also don't do anything to address the issues with entitlement that she specifically called them out for, instead insisting that she has to forgive them and help fix their problems.
• 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.
• No "Police" Option: Played with. Adrien does initially go to the police, who are perfectly willing to do their due dilligence when investigating Lila's theft of the Agreste emergency funds, but thanks to a combination of Lila doing a very good job of covering her tracks and Adrien's story sounding incredibly suspicious, they quickly hit a dead end and don't have legal cause to investigate Lila any further. Adrien angrily declares that the Police Are Useless upon hearing this, thinking that they have to arrest Lila and get his money back while ignoring the fact that the same rules and procedures that protected Lila are the only thing stopping the police from arresting him, as his own testimony and circumstancial evidence have made him the prime suspect. He then decides he's going to go after Lila himself and get his money back, but never gets the chance before he loses the Ring to Mayura.
• 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 Helping Your Case:
  • Adrien spends the entire story doing nothing but this.
    • When he claims that he's overlooking Lila's lies to "keep everyone happy," Marinette counters by pointing out that she's not happy. Adrien completely ignores this, which convinces Marinette that he was a False Friend all along and provokes her to cut ties with him alongside the rest of her classmates.
    • When he reports Lila's theft of the Agreste emergency fund to the police, Adrien doesn't bother to consult a lawyer beforehand, reasoning that Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers and he hasn't done anything wrong. He then proceeds to admit that he knew Lila was a Con Artist for months and did nothing about it, putting his self-centered mindset on full display and implicitly admitting that he has no problem with lying and stealing, as long as it's not happening to him. His refusal to compromise or back down even when it's spelled out that all the available evidence contradicts his story only lands him in deeper trouble, with the police eventually concluding that Cassandra Did It and Adrien is doing a very poor job of trying to use Lila as a scapegoat.
    • Chat Noir missed the Final Battle with Hawk Moth because he prioritized his reputation over his heroic duties. This gets him into deep trouble with Ladybug on its own, since she specifically told him he'd be needed for a big fight. However, he then makes it worse by crashing a post-battle interview he wasn't invited to, continuing to joke around and make unwanted advances toward Ladybug, trying to argue for a lighter sentence for Hawk Moth on the grounds that since Ladybug fixed all the damage, it was like it never happened, and very obviously focusing on the monetary reward the city is putting together for the heroes. All of this completely tanks his reputation and makes people suspicious of his weak excuse for missing the fight.
    • Chat responds to the above by deciding to take down Mayura solo when she finally comes out of hiding, ignoring Ladybug's efforts to warn him off. He then accidentally reveals his identity to Mayura with some careless words, and she takes advantage of this knowledge to convince him to give her a hand up when he manages to expose her identity. She then steals the Ring off his finger in a way that looks like he willingly let her have it. The public reveal of his identity, coupled with his previous suspicious behavior as both Chat and Adrien, cements his guilt in the minds of the public, leaving him Hated by All.
  • Alya (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the class) doesn't do herself any favors, either. Upon learning Marinette's Secret Identity, she immediately switches back to buddying up with Marinette, dismissing the way she abandoned her "bestie" for Lila as not her fault. Later, during Nadja's interview, she makes a scene after the Internal Reveal of Kagami's alter ego, outing herself as Rena Rouge and getting told off by Ladybug on live television. When it becomes clear that Marinette has no intention of reconciling with her, Alya tries to go over her head and harass Marinette's parents until they force Marinette to forgive her former classmates... which just gets her grounded when her own parents find out.
• Not Proven: Ultimately, there's no real proof that Adrien stole his own money or acted as an accomplice to Hawk Moth and Mayura, but that doesn't stop him from being Convicted by Public Opinion, especially after being Caught on Tape offering a hand up to Mayura, who immediately swipes the Ring off of his finger. He's never arrested for any crime, but it's made clear that this is more due to a lack of sufficient evidence against him than because anyone really believes he's innocent.
• Not What It Looks Like: Adrien, Adrien, Adrien, and unfortunately, 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.
• 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, as they won't be suspecting such from her. When dealing with Adrien, this ends up working out far better than expected, to the point she's completely stunned when he foolishly allows her to watch him enter his 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).
• Obliviously Evil:
  • Adrien is the self-absorbed and empathy-deficient variant of this, which isn't helped by the fact that he believes being a superhero gives him the benefits of Protagonist-Centered Morality. It simply doesn't matter to him that he's watching Lila scam his classmates and ostracize Marinette, or that his goofing off and not taking things seriously during akuma fights has led to people getting hurt or even temporarily killed, because none of that directly affects him. Once Laser-Guided Karma moves in, his refusal to even consider that he might have been in the wrong hobbles his attempts to salvage his situation and ultimately just makes things worse for him.
  • To a lesser extent, Marinette's classmates were too focused on their wants and ambitions to realize how they were taking Marinette for granted, with it being directly discussed that their simultaneous ostracizaion of and entitlement to Marinette was putting so much pressure on her that she would have been akumatized and let Hawk Moth win if it went on much longer. Even after she calls them out for this, they selfishly insist that she has to accept their empty apologies, too wrapped up in a toxic idea of forgiveness to consider that she has every right to want nothing to do with them after how they treated her. In their eyes, the various things they do to force the issue, such as harassing Marinette's parents, are all in the name of getting through to her that she's being selfish and unreasonable.
• Official Couple: Luka and Marinette enter into a very happy relationship once Luka makes it clear he's supporting her to the end.
• Off to Boarding School: Adrien finds himself potentially facing being shipped off to Military School after Amelie becomes his guardian.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Ladybug 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.
  • 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.
  • Gabriel pales upon being asked why the Agreste Manor uses so much electricity.
  • 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.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Discussed by Alya, who outright says she plans to never let Marinette live down the "mistake" of not immediately forgiving her classmates for treating her like dirt. This is used to highlight what a Hypocrite Alya is being, since she expects to be Easily Forgiven for turning her back on Marinette.
• One Last Job: As the last shreds of his Karma Houdini Warranty fall to pieces around him, Adrien decides he's going to salvage his reputation as Chat Noir by taking down Mayura, and then he's going to leave Paris behind for better things, like hunting Lila down and forcing her to give his money back. That plan is promptly dashed when Mayura swipes his Miraculous, which is then reclaimed by Ladybug.
• Only Bad Guys Call Their Lawyers:
  • Lila subtly invokes this to sell her Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot scheme when she gives a statement to the police in the aftermath of Hawk Moth's defeat. While her mother is present, Lila doesn't involve or mention any kind of legal counsel, as that would undermine her plan to present herself as too vapid and naive to realize that both Adrien and Gabriel were using her as an Unwitting Pawn.
  • When Adrien reports Lila's theft of the Agreste emergency funds to the police, he doesn't bother to get a lawyer despite Lieutenant Raincompix's suggestion that he might want one, declaring that he doesn't need a lawyer because he's done nothing wrong. He then proceeds to give multiple interviews under the assumption that Honesty Is the Best Policy, failing to realize that the police aren't reacting favorably to what he has to say. When he finally realizes that things aren't going his way and tries getting a lawyer involved, said lawyer is horrified by the massive hole Adrien has dug for himself and has to spell out to him just how bad his testimony sounds from an outside perspective.
• Only Sane Man: Plagg serves as this to Adrien, not that it does much good. 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Plagg spends the story being incredibly serious, trying to help get Adrien to clean up his act and take things seriously. In Chapter 8, when Adrien comes up with another entitled plan to help himself, he notes that Plagg isn't commenting. 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. It also helps that Adrien's karma is locked in by this point so there's no helping him regardless.
• Opportunistic Bastard:
  • Marinette's classmates ditched her in favor of Lila once they realized that her "connections" were even better than Marinette's, latching onto her in the hope of boosting their careers without having to really work for it. Since Lila is actually a Con Artist, this backfires on them hard, and they realize too late that they threw away a real friend for someone who stole everything she could wring out of them. Once they realize that Marinette is Ladybug, and thus much more potentially exploitable than Lila, they try to jump back over to her side, but Marinette has learned her lesson about catering to Entitled Bastards and refuses to give them the time of day.
  • Lila herself is always looking for new opportunities to scam others, and her skill at reading people combined with her aptitude for Xanatos Speed Chess makes her very good at it, allowing her to spin lies tailored to her victims' individual interests and convince them to trust her with their most valuable possessions, which she promptly sells off, often destroying their futures in the process. This is exemplified by how she reacts to Adrien typing in the password to a bank account filled with millions of euros right in front of her. Thanks to a combination of having some groundwork already in place and quickly coming up with a plan to make use of the resources she has, Lila is able to transfer the money to her secret bank account in Switzerland in a way the police won't be able to trace, leaving just enough behind to ensure Adrien won't notice the theft until she's long gone — upping her gains from a few thousand euros she would have had to give to charity to millions she can keep all to herself.
  • Adrien is also this, but he's extremely bad at it due to his poor social awareness and self-absorbed attitude. Despite knowing about Marinette's crush on him, he completely blows off her feelings, only to suddenly decide he cares about her a lot more when he learns she's Ladybug and he can get the Relationship Upgrade he's been pushing for by returning her feelings as Adrien. Marinette is not impressed. Later, he crashes an interview he wasn't invited to as Chat Noir in the hope of talking his way into a cut of the money the city is planning to reward the heroes with, but his obvious focus on the money and blatant Lack of Empathy for Hawk Moth's victims just turns the audience against him.
• Original Position Fallacy: Adrien, 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.
• Pacifism Backfire: Adrien's insistence on not exposing Lila because "it would just hurt her" hits him hard when she finally takes advantage of him, as the months he's spent doing nothing despite knowing about her lies and scams make his story sound incredibly suspicious to the police and lead to his former friends turning their backs on him when they find out.
• Pacifism Is Cowardice: Adrien's desire to not upset Lila by exposing her is portrayed this way, with Plagg calling out the fact that he's just using this as an excuse to avoid causing drama and conflict in the classroom. Lila takes full advantage of this to exploit him and set him up to take the fall for her crimes, correctly predicting that he'll play right into her hands if she tells him she'll come clean without him having to do anything about it (and thus get involved in the ensuing conflict).
• Paranoia Gambit: Ladybug's 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.
• Party Scheduling Gambit: Played with. Marinette spent an entire week preparing a party for her classmates, only for Lila to manipulate them into blowing off the party and throwing a picnic instead in the hope of meeting one of Lila's fictitious celebrity connections. To add insult to injury, they hold the picnic in the park across the street from the bakery, meaning when Marinette finally gives up on her party and goes home, she sees exactly why her classmates didn't show.
• Playing the Victim Card: Lila does this to influence her 'friends' into avoiding Marinette. Later on, once her true nature has come out, Adrien, Alya and most of the class do this to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.
• Plot Parallel:
  • The way Lila's father left his family to salvage his career after her mother's prospects were sabotaged for doing the right thing directly parallels the way Adrien left Marinette to deal with Lila's manipulations alone, ignoring her plight because his reputation was more important to him. This also had a major effect on the wronged party's outlook on life; Lila took away the lesson that it was best to look out for herself and do whatever it took to get ahead, while Marinette had a Self-Care Epiphany and realized she couldn't keep catering to False Friends who were All Take and No Give.
  • Gabriel trying to appeal to his friendship with Audrey Bourgeois to keep her from buying out his company mirrors the way Adrien tries to leverage Marinette's former friendship and crush on him to convince her to use her status to help him after Lila robs him. In both cases, the party seeking help is told in no uncertain terms that he wasn't a good friend when it mattered, so the "friend" he's begging for help has no intention of bailing him out now that he's the one in a mess of his own making.
• Poorly Timed Confession: Adrien finally reports Lila's crimes to the police after months of keeping quiet. Unfortunately for him, he's too honest in his police interview, openly admitting that she scammed his classmates for months, but didn't do anything to stop her — implicitly admitting that he sees no problem with lying and stealing. He's also doing this right after his father is exposed and arrested as Hawk Moth, and the money he's reporting stolen was in a hidden bank account the police didn't know about, giving them the impression that Adrien emptied the account himself to hide the money from the authorities and is making a clumsy attempt to cover his tracks by using Lila as a scapegoat.
• Positive Friend Influence:
  • Played with for Chloé and Marinette. While they're not friends, Chloé sticks by Marinette because she genuinely wants to change her ways and knows Marinette will call her out when she lapses back into her old Spoiled Brat behavior, which she directly contrasts with Adrien's enabling Toxic Friend Influence. As time goes on, Chloé continues to improve to the point where she goes to people she's wronged and does her best to make up for how she hurt them without telling Marinette, highlighting how she's genuinely improved as a person and isn't just trying to suck up to Marinette/Ladybug.
  • Luka serves as this for Juleka, encouraging her when she starts to distance herself from the rest of the class and their toxic behavior. Juleka in turn acts as this for Rose, helping her to realize that their classmates are Entitled Bastards and Marinette will be more willing to forgive her if she actually works to change and make up for what she did.
• Post-Support Regret:
  • Marinette poured months of effort into helping her classmates achieve their dreams and later into trying to win back their friendship. Eventually, she realizes that this All Take and No Give relationship was one of the main reasons she felt constantly stressed and overwhelmed and her classmates were too selfish to appreciate her anyway. As a result, Marinette cuts ties with them, realizing that her efforts to keep their friendship were completely wasted.
  • Adrien supported Lila even while she was scamming his classmates, letting her pass herself off as his girlfriend and publicly vouching for her honesty. He immediately changes his tune when Lila inevitably screws him over, but by that point their face-value relationship is in her favor, so when he tells the police that he knew she was a Con Artist for months and never said anything, they aren't exactly inclined to believe him. After all, if he knew her true nature the whole time, why didn't he say anything? Or, failing that, take better precautions to protect himself...?
  • When public opinion turns against the Agrestes after Hawk Moth's exposure and arrest, Adrien's classmates stick by him even though it negatively impacts their reputations by association. Then they realize that Adrien knew Lila was a Con Artist and did nothing to stop her from scamming them. They're understandably furious, especially when Adrien asks to be Easily Forgiven and insists they focus on how he needs their support despite the fact that their struggles are a direct result of his Betrayal by Inaction, highlighting how much of a False Friend is.
• The Power of Apathy: After Marinette is 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 her 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, Ladybug is 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.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Lila practices this in excess.
  • She might be ambitious and greedy but she's also sensible, which is what lets her keep her head above water when karma starts 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, and 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.
• Privilege Makes You Evil:
  • Adrien's sheltered, pampered upbringing works against him when he sees Lila scamming his classmates, as his father's immense wealth means he simply doesn't see their monetary losses as significant and, in his world, possessions are easily replaced. Lila's clothing scam in particular highlights his complete Lack of Empathy for resource-related struggles, as he sees no problem with his classmates giving away their best clothes even when it's pointed out they don't have massive wardrobes like he does and then claims in all seriousness that Marinette can simply make replacements, demonstrating no understanding of how much time, effort, and money it would actually take for her to recreate all those bespoke, custom-made outfits. In addition, his sheltered upbringing has left him with the serious belief that Protagonist-Centered Morality applies to him as one of the heroes of Paris, meaning he feels completely entitled to a happy ending and everything he thinks should come with it, even though he hasn't actually done any good deeds to earn that happy ending for himself.
  • Chloé grew up as a Spoiled Brat who could always get her way by throwing temper tantrums and using her father's money and connections to keep herself out of serious trouble. By the time she reached middle school, she was a selfish bully whom everyone in her class hated. However, when she's confronted by Ladybug's disappointment, a problem her usual tactics can't solve, she finally has a Heel Realization and undertakes the challenging task of reforming and making amends for her past behavior.
• Propping Up Their Patsy: While setting up Adrien as her scapegoat to the police, Lila plays the role of devoted girlfriend to the hilt, going on about how kind and attentive Adrien has always been to her — and simultaneously slipping in seemingly innocuous details intended to make the police conclude Adrien was working with his father all along. When she finally "realizes" what they're thinking, she doubles down on insisting that there's no way Adrien was working for his father, fully aware that they don't believe her and that she's cementing her image as an Unwitting Pawn who can't even comprehend she might have been used by her "boyfriend."
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Adrien believes this is how the world works, and that he's the protagonist, meaning that he's ultimately going to get everything he wants exactly how he wants it. Suffice to say, things don't turn out the way he expects.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Adrien was already sliding into Nominal Hero territory at the beginning of the story, but he still had some heroic ideals — namely, loyalty to Ladybug and a willingness to fight for Paris. However, when circumstances force him to confront his mistakes, he always makes the wrong choice, doubling down on self-serving behavior rather than admit he might have been wrong and sliding further into his delusions of Protagonist-Centered Morality. It starts with him skipping a battle he'd been specifically warned he'd be needed for rather than look bad in front of his classmates, but as circumstances continue to spiral out of his control he becomes an open apologist for his father, alienates his friends by insisting they stand by him even after the Internal Reveal of his Betrayal by Inaction, and destroys his own reputation with his increasingly Skewed Priorities. By the end, he's fighting Mayura for the glory rather than the sake of Paris and decides to abandon everything he once cared about to exact revenge on Lila, then outright attacks Ladybug when she refuses to give the Ring back to him, showing that he's lost sight of the few truly good things he originally stood for.
• Psychological Projection:
  • After the Internal Reveal of Ladybug's identity, Lila is genuinely confused about why Marinette isn't seizing the first possible opportunity to destroy her. She's well aware that she's spent the last few months systematically ruining Marinette's life and sees no reason for Marinette not to return the favor now that the tables have suddenly flipped. While it briefly occurs to Lila that Marinette might be enough of a do-gooder to not even bother, she immediately dismisses this idea, assuming that Marinette will want revenge for what Lila did to her. Even when it becomes clear that Marinette has Stopped Caring about what Lila does, Lila assumes she's just biding her time.
  • Adrien underestimates Lila in large part because he sees her as a Small Name, Big Ego who dramatically overestimates her importance and capabilities. He's unaware that Lila is deliberately cultivating this image, Obfuscating Stupidity to lure anyone who sees through her lies into a sense of security so she can use more subtle manipulations on them later. Adrien, who fits his mental picture of Lila much better than Lila herself, falls completely for her manipulations and continues to make things worse for himself with plans that are every bit as poorly-thought-out as he assumed Lila's were, not realizing that people aren't reacting favorably to his efforts at playing The Charmer until it's too late.
• 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 distaste 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.
• "The Reason I Suck" Speech:
  • Chloé gives one of these while calling Adrien out for enabling her, openly admitting that she was a Spoiled Brat who was constantly hurting others and made herself and everyone around her miserable. It wasn't until someone she genuinely respected told her she'd screwed up in a way she couldn't just ignore or fix with money or an empty apology that she had a Heel Realization and actually felt motivated to change her ways. It's played with in that she combines this with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Adrien, pointing out that the way certain people — including him — enabled her bullying behavior did her no favors.
  • Juleka gives one of these when asked why she didn't join the rest of the class in their attempt to reconcile with Marinette, admitting that she knew the way they were treating Marinette was wrong all along, but went along with the crowd rather than stand up for Marinette. She then adds that she doesn't feel she has the right to even try to apologize, because she knows she took advantage of Marinette and feels it would just be an empty effort to smooth things over and get back on Marinette's good side; she doesn't think she's really done anything to change and make up for her behavior in a way that would make her apologies genuine. This turns out to have been a Secret Test of Character, and Juleka's remorseful and self-aware response convinces Marinette to give her the second chance her classmates were denied.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • In "Consequences for Great Misdeeds", Marinette calls out her former classmates 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.
  • Chloé 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.
  • 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: [coldly] 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.
  • 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.
• Recursive Fanfiction: A couple other people created spinoffs of the original work, including Tales of Karmic Lies Aftermath, which acts as a series of stories taking place after the original story, What Goes Around Comes Around, which acts as an alternate version of the original, Down the Karmic Hole, which shows an alternate universe Alix and Fu being warned by Bunnyx that they need to act fast to stop the events of this story from happening in their world, Karma Overbalance, which takes a more critical view of the original, Karma's a Bitch, which acts as another alternate version of the original, this one incorporating Zoe Lee, and Karmic Backlash, which acts as a sequel where Marinette is in for some bad karma of her own. That last story has recursive fiction of its own, Karma and Reality, which skips a couple decades ahead to look into Marinette's final fate.
• Refuge in Audacity: When Lila empties the Agreste emergency account, she empties it all the way out, leaving just enough money behind to cover a few legitimate transfers Adrien set up and ensure he won't get suspicious until she's out of town. Upon hearing the story, including Adrien's correct deduction regarding Lila's reasoning, Adrien's lawyer points out that this would objectively be an extremely unwise decision, since it guaranteed the theft was noticed very quickly. If Lila really wanted to buy time to get away, as Adrien claims, it would have made more sense for her to leave a million or so euros behind, which, with all the chaos of Gabriel's arrest and the police investigation, might have kept the theft from being noticed for years.
• Rejected Apology: Marinette does this frequently once her False Friends scramble to make amends upon learning that she's Ladybug, as it's obvious they're not really sorry for how they treated her and are just looking to ride her coattails. She makes an exception for those who demonstrate that they actually understand what they did wrong, not accepting their apologies right away but giving them enough slack to prove they've changed and work to regain her trust.
• Reset Button: Deconstructed through how the various characters view Ladybug's Miraculous Cure. Chat Noir views the trope as being played straight, using it as an excuse to treat his superhero duties like a game and blow off the consequences of his missing the Final Battle. He takes it for granted that Ladybug will always win and fix everything, so it's not a big deal if he slacks off. He later adopts the same attitude toward the massive amount of suffering and death Hawk Moth caused, arguing that he shouldn't face charges for any of it because the Cure fixed it all. This is directly contrasted with Ladybug's awareness that the Cure doesn't erase the memories of what happened or the emotional and psychological impact of akuma fights and of Hawk Moth's campaign of terror. As a result, she takes her duties very seriously, and all the damage and suffering she can't prevent weighs heavily on her conscience, especially when she's the one making calls that could get people killed.
• Resigned in Disgrace: Principal Damocles' fate. He is made to take an early retirement after being assumed to have embezzled money from the school board to accommodate Lila's fake disabilities.
• Revenge Through Corruption: Downplayed. Lila makes good on her threats to steal all of Marinette's friends and make her a pariah, but notes that their classmates were already so entitled and used to Taking Advantage of Generosity that she didn't even really need to do that much; once she presented herself as someone with better connections than Marinette, the class flocked to Lila in the hopes of using her connections to their benefit, completely forgetting all the hard work Marinette did to support them and their dreams.
• 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.
  • Played with through Chloé, who at one point writes a check for fifty thousand euros without batting an eye. When Ladybug points out that she only asked for a third of that, Chloé counters that since it's for the final battle against Hawk Moth, she'd rather give Ladybug several thousand extra euros she won't need than force the heroes to compromise their strategy because they're short on funds. It's also discussed that Chloé has spent massive sums on frivolous things like diamond-studded phone cases before — though unlike Adrien, Chloé understands how much those things are worth and was deliberately indulging in Conspicuous Consumption rather than taking them for granted.
• Riches to Rags: Played With.
  • After the revelation of Gabriel being Hawkmoth, his business takes a severe PR hit, which 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 possessions 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 in the care of 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.
• Run the Gauntlet: Ladybug, Viperion and Kitsune themselves facing off against several familiar akuma in rapid succession once they put her plan into action.

S-Z

• Saying Too Much: During his police interview, Adrien admits to having known Lila was a Con Artist for months, assuming that the police will believe his claims simply because he's being honest and without considering how much his previous dishonesty will hurt his case. It takes his lawyer giving him a step-by-step breakdown of just how stupid his story sounds from an outside perspective for Adrien to finally realize he's implicated himself as the culprit — and even then, he just keeps insisting that he's told the truth and the police have to get his money back, completely ignoring the hole he's dug for himself as Lila's Accomplice by Inaction.
• The Scapegoat:
  • Lila sets Adrien up to take the fall for her affiliation with Hawk Moth after his defeat and unmasking, painting herself as an Unwitting Pawn to both Gabriel and Adrien. Adrien only gets himself into more trouble when he goes to the police, as his own self-centered behavior makes it easy for outsiders to conclude that he's the one trying to use Lila as a scapegoat by spreading Malicious Slander about her.
  • Lila also did this to Sabrina, using her name to sell off the contact information of some very rich and influential people. As a result, Sabrina might not ever be able to attend college because a lot of wealthy donors are very angry with her.
• 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.
  • 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.
  • Related to above, this was intended to be exploited by Lila. 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 bias the investigation with an abuse of influence.
• 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:
  • Lila starts making plans for this after Gabriel's exposure, realizing that it's better to get out of Paris before she's fully exposed.
  • Marinette transfers over to Ms. Mendeleiev's class in order to get away from Adrien, Miss Bustier and the rest of her estranged friends.
  • 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.
• Secret Test of Character: Luka talks to Juleka about the situation with her classmates while she's unaware that Marinette is right outside the door, listening in.
• Secretly Selfish:
  • Lila exploits this in order to "sweeten the pot" for her scams, leading her classmates to think they'll benefit from their generosity in various ways. Such as having a chance to impress celebrities with their generosity.
  • Plagg suggests that 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, which is proven in Chapter 5 when Lila gets Adrien to agree to help her by convincing him that he'll be able to prove he was right about how things would go with her. He does agree to help her because he'll be validating himself to Marinette in his eyes.
• Selective Obliviousness:
  • Adrien flat-out refuses to acknowledge when something isn't working the way he wants, dismissing Marinette's suffering and his classmates being scammed with flimsy excuses because he doesn't want to actually do anything about the problem. He also ignores the way Ladybug is clearly put off by his Dogged Nice Guy act and habits of joking around during fights, insisting that she's too serious and it would be good for her to lighten up a little rather than consider that he might not be acting appropriately. When his Karma Houdini Warranty starts to expire, he ignores all signs that his problems are the consequences of his own actions coming back to bite him.
  • Most of Marinette's classmates are completely blind to how badly they hurt her by abandoning her in favor of Lila, but complain bitterly when Marinette gives them A Taste of Their Own Medicine by refusing to welcome them back with open arms.
• Self-Care Epiphany:
  • Played With in that it's Tikki who has an epiphany about Marinette's well-being in the first chapter, realizing that she's been pushing Marinette to bottle up her emotions and offering empty platitudes that aren't really helping anything. After this, Tikki begins to take Marinette's struggles more seriously, encouraging her to reach out to someone who will listen to her and can offer a fresh perspective on the situation.
  • While planning her trap for Hawk Moth with Luka and Kagami, Ladybug finds herself wondering how long it's been since she talked to someone who actually validated her negative emotions and tried to offer realistic solutions to her problems instead of ignoring her or blowing them off, and who listened to her decisions instead of questioning her judgement or trying to change her mind. That, plus Kagami's firm declaration that if Ladybug's friends won't listen to her, she should get better ones, convinces Ladybug that maybe it's time to do just that and cut ties with her classmates in favor of people who actually respect her feelings.
  • When asked by Luka, Ladybug realizes that she really doesn't want Chat Noir involved in planning for the final battle because she knows he'll just keep flirting with her and won't take any of it seriously. She's proven right when Chat doesn't even show up for the fight, having prioritized his reputation as a civilian over helping her. This, combined with the fact that she can finally vent her hurt and frustration over Chat's antics and sexual harassment without risking being akumatized, gets him subjected to a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech on live television when Ladybug finally lets him know what she really thinks of him; namely, that he's selfish, irresponsible, doesn't listen to her, won't take anything seriously — including her repeated rejections of his advances — and that she will never, ever date him for all of the aforementioned reasons. To top it all off, she then firmly establishes that she is not going to trust him in battle anymore, because he's proven himself too unreliable to be counted on when it matters.
• 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.
• Shamed by a Mob:
  • Once Ladybug spells out to Gabriel that his identity has been exposed and directs his attention toward the crowd of bystanders who've been watching the Final Battle, people start screaming threats and insults at him.
  • After Hawk Moth's defeat, a group of angry protestors gathers outside the Agreste mansion and yells at anyone who enters or leaves the grounds. Adrien asks the police to run them off, but is told the police can't do anything about people on a public sidewalk. They do offer protection for anyone who needs to get into and out of the house.
  • During the disastrous live interview with Nadja, Chat Noir is subjected to this with increasing frequency by the studio audience, many of whom are former victims of Hawk Moth and are understandably upset at Chat advocating for the supervillain to get off with a slap on the wrist.
  • Adrien gets hit with this again when he loses the Ring to Mayura in a way that looks like he gave it to her willingly. He tries to spin the story in his favor to the media scrum that forms in the aftermath, but after the way all of his poor behavior throughout the story has undermined his reputation, no one is having it.
• Shout-Out:
  • 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.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Adrien's Karma Houdini Warranty takes its first major hit after his father is exposed as Hawk Moth, turning public opinion against the entire Agreste family. This isn't helped by Lila delibarately planting misinformation that implicates him to cover her own affiliation with Hawk Moth and Adrien having such a bad case of Moral Myopia that he unintentionally reinforces people's existing suspicions with his self-centered behavior.
• 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.
  • 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.
  • Future!Alix exploited her abilities primarily as a way to pop back and talk to her present-day counterpart.
• The Social Expert: This is why Lila is 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.
• Spanner in the Works: Adrien 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.
• Status Quo Is God:
  • Deconstructed; Adrien wants things to stay largely the same, as he directly benefits from the way things currently are. The only change he particularly desires is a Relationship Upgrade with Ladybug. Hawkmoth, on the other hand, can stick around as long as he likes, since the more he terrorizes Paris, the more fun Chat Noir gets to have.
  • Alya also assumes that she and Marinette are still best friends despite her doing absolutely nothing to maintain that relationship, what with constantly blowing off and ignoring her concerns.
• Stern Teacher: Miss Bustier's unnamed replacement is described as a hardass who demands that the students actually work during school time and hands out far more detentions than she did. Since this is coming from Marinette's former classmates, it's unclear if the new teacher really is terribly strict or if, after years of being coddled by Ms. Bustier, the class is just struggling to adjust to a teacher who actually insists they do the bare minimum that's expected of them as students.
• 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.
• Stopping the Blame Game:
  • Adrien spends most of the story blaming anyone and anything other than himself for his misfortunes. In some cases he has a point — it's not his fault his father was a supervillain who terrorized Paris — but most of the time, Plagg points out that Adrien is directly contributing to his own problems through his selfishness. Yes, Gabriel is the one who decided to become a supervillain, but the police would be a lot less inclined to think Adrien might be his accomplice if Adrien hadn't demonstrated his complete disregard for others by letting a Con Artist scam his classmates unopposed for months. Unfortunately, Adrien is too self-absorbed to actually heed Plagg's warnings, and Plagg eventually gives up.
  • Marinette's classmates try to blame Lila for how they turned on her, but Marinette firmly shuts that down, spelling out that they made their position clear when they flocked to Lila while still taking her for granted, and it's obvious the only reason they're bothering to apologize at all is because suddenly she's more useful to them than Lila again. The class (for the most part) doesn't listen, instead flipping to blaming Marinette for not forgiving them right away and trying to force the issue through a campaign of harassment. It's Played With by Juleka, who doesn't actually confront the rest of the class but acknowledges that they knew they were taking advantage of Marinette all along and have no right to blame anyone else for their actions.
• Superficial Solution: A problem many of Marinette's classmates share is a love of these.
  • When Plagg spells out for Adrien that Marinette needs more than just empty words from him to deal with Lila, Adrien suggests visiting Marinette as Chat Noir to cheer her up, acting as though this will make everything better. Plagg doesn't bother pointing out that this won't fix the way Marinette is being bullied and ostracized at school, which she's already told Adrien point-blank is the real source of her problems.
  • Ms. Bustier and Adrien constantly placated Chloé at the expense of her classmates, which kept her from throwing tantrums in the short term but, as Chloé lampshades, only enabled and encouraged her bullying behavior in the long run.
  • After Marinette's classmates see that she's apparently forgiven Chloé for bullying her, they clamor for her forgiveness as well, believing that if they can get Marinette back on their side, she'll solve all their problems without them having to lift a finger. This is true even after Marinette spells out that she's forgiven Chloé because Chloé is working to change and earn forgiveness; just letting her classmates off the hook won't solve the underlying problems with entitlement and disrespect for Marinette's boundaries that caused her to cut ties with them in the first place.
  • Defied by Chloé. Given the choice between continuing to spend time with Adrien, who enabled her bullying behavior by assuring her she was fine the way she was when she threw tantrums, and choosing to side with Marinette, who won't let her get away with being a Spoiled Brat, Chloé picks Marinette. She realizes that she's not going to enjoy being called out every time she lapses into selfish behavior, but also recognizes that putting in the work to change and improve will be better for her in the long run.
• Swiss Bank Account: Lila has one, though she privately observes that it's literally just a normal bank account that happens to be located in Switzerland... one that she hasn't touched since she opened it so it will be virtually impossible to trace back to her.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Downplayed. The Agreste emergency account is as secure as any normal bank account, though it's discussed that it trades off potential extra measures, such as two-factor authentication on login, for ease of access. The real hole in its security is Adrien, who not only admits the lack of extra precautions to Lila, but then logs into the account right in front of her, letting her see his login and passwords. Since she knows there are no additional security features, Lila simply goes to a public library and uses one of the computers there to access the account using Adrien's passwords, emptying it out. By the time Adrien notices the theft, it's too late to reverse the transaction or make use of other measures designed to stop fraudulent activity.
• 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.
• Taking Advantage of Generosity:
  • Marinette's classmates took her completely for granted, expecting clothes, sweets, and other favors from her without giving anything in return. The story opens with an example of this, as the class has just given away custom-made outfits Marinette gave them as presents, completely dismissing all the time, effort, and money she put into designing and making the outfits for them in the first place and showing how little they really value her efforts.
  • Exploited by Lila. She notes that this trope makes Marinette's classmates the easiest marks she ever had; all she has to do is dangle some too-good-to-be-true opportuniy in front of them by offering to get them in touch with one of her "connections" and they'll jump to take advantage of it, letting her easily swindle them out of their hard work and most valuable possessions.
  • Adrien tries this after his father is revealed as Hawk Moth, believing that Marinette will gladly advocate for him to get off lightly because she likes helping people, especially her crush. He's genuinely shocked when Marinette bluntly shuts him down.
• Taking the Bullet: Deconstructed through Chat Noir, who views Ladybug's Miraculous Cure as a Reset Button and thus sees no problem with making Stupid Sacrifices on a regular basis. This behavior not only makes life harder for Ladybug, who then has to fight without him, but has actually become a Trauma Button for her thanks to how many times she's been forced to watch her partner temporarily die. When another teammate ends up in a similar position, Ladybug completely freezes up, expecting a repeat of one of Chat's needless sacrifices; luckily, Viperion has thought a little further ahead and come up with a tactic that keeps them both safe.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine:
  • 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. 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.
  • Ms. Bustier's class shunned Marinette in favor of Lila, blatantly ignoring and ostracizing her while still expecting her to bend over backwards for them when they wanted something from her. After her identity is publicly revealed, Marinette cuts ties with them, going so far as to switch classes in order to ensure she has no contact at all with them, and ignores their efforts to get back into her good graces, showing them how it feels to be snubbed.
• Taught by Television: Both played straight and deconstructed.
  • Lila reads everything she can about con artists, both real and fictional, and their methods in order to expand her own repertoire of tactics. Some of the tricks she's learned in her studies come in handy when she's grifting her classmates and later Adrien.
  • Adrien serves as a deconstruction; having his worldview largely shaped by media has convinced him that the world genuinely revolves around "good guys" like him. Therefore, he believes that everything he does is automatically right and everything will naturally work out the way he wants. This belief causes him to dig himself deeper and deeper as his Karma Houdini Warranty runs out, as he simply can't accept the idea that things won't always go his way and refuses to adjust his self-centered behavior.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Marinette considered working with one of the Agrestes for the sake of her plan, but ultimately is unable to bring herself to follow through. Instead, she selects an alternative: Chloé, who also qualifies.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Chat Noir 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.
  • 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 Chat Noir's 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.
  • The same applies to Alya. The Epilogue shows that neither of them has learned anything from the experience, continuing to blame everyone else for what they've lost, with Alya intending to continue her campaign of harassment.
• Thicker Than Water:
  • Discussed after Luka realizes that Juleka is one of the people who hurt Ladybug's civilian identity and again when Marinette makes the decision to cut ties with her classmates. In both cases, he's pained by the tension between his sister and his crush, both of whom he sees as good people, but he agrees to respect Ladybug and Marinette's feelings. Marinette, in turn, makes it clear that she respects Luka's love for and desire to help his sister and won't try to stop him from reaching out to her, but she doesn't want to get involved with Juleka personally. Thanks to Juleka passing Luka's improvised Secret Test of Character, the two girls are able to reconcile and start rebuilding their friendship, easing Luka's conflict over the matter.
  • Adrien is just as disgusted with Hawk Moth's crimes as the rest of Paris, but since Gabriel is the only family he has left, Adrien decides to do whatever he can to reduce his father's punishment, rationalizing that they'll get through it "as a family" and ignoring Plagg's warnings that what he's planning isn't a good idea.
• Thinks Like a Romance Novel: Adrien falls into this as a side effect of his belief in Protagonist-Centered Morality. He genuinely believes that, with the threat of Hawk Moth gone and her identity no longer in the way, Marinette/Ladybug is going to fall into his arms and finally give him the Relationship Upgrade they're clearly destined to have. This, despite the fact that she's been rejecting Chat Noir for months and Adrien has completely blown off her feelings to her face because he considered his wants more important, which has completely destroyed her regard for his civilian identity.
• 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. Adrien falls victim to this when she comes to him for help after Hawkmoth's identity is exposed. Adrien is understandably wary, but after Lila offers to come completely clean and even give him some Betrayal Insurance, he decides to help her full stop with no hesitation, something Plagg points out is a very bad idea. Adrien brushes it off because he thinks he has Lila's 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.
• 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.
  • Marinette comes to realize that her classmates were toxic in their own right, due to how they took her generosity for granted.
  • Similarly, Chloé realizes that Adrien's 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 encurring 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.
• Tricked Out Time: When Alix says that Marinette can't fire Bunnyx without creating a temporal paradox, Ladybug responds that she can just make a sentimonster that looks exactly like Bunnyx and send her back to do everything Bunnyx did, thus averting the paradox and foiling Alix's attempt to compel Marinette to keep her on as a temporary hero.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • Alya and the majority of Marinette's classmates prove to be this, taking the various favors and kindnesses she's done for them completely for granted and expecting her to continue catering to them... especially after they learn she's not just their "Everyday Ladybug," but actually Ladybug. Out of the whole class, only Juleka, Chloé and Rose realize how they wronged and mistreated her; the rest get upset over her standing up to them and refusing to do any more thankless favors for them.
  • Adrien in particular enables the class in their toxic mindset, outright encouraging them to take Marinette for granted and devaluing the hard work she does for them, such as when he shrugs off the bespoke outfits she gifted to her classmates as "just clothes" and declares that she can easily make more. Later on, he leads the charge in insisting that Marinette will Easily Forgive them for everything and fix all their problems for them, once again taking her help for granted without actually appreciating anything she did before.
  • After his disastrous showing at Nadja's live interview, Adrien declares that the public is this, griping about how they don't appreciate how hard he worked to protect them. He completely ignores Plagg's efforts to point out that he's actually given the public good reasons not to be grateful, first with his constant goofing off and flirting during fights, then by outright skipping the Final Battle, and finally by showing a complete Lack of Empathy toward Hawk Moth's victims while advocating for the villain to get off with a slap on the wrist, giving off the impression that he doesn't really care about Paris.
• Uninvited to the Party: Combined with a Party Scheduling Gambit. Marinette spent a week planning a party for everyone after Ms. Bustier essentially told her that she had to earn her friends back, only for nobody to show up because they were throwing a surprise picnic for Lila instead ...one they didn't bother to invite Marinette to or even tell her about. They weakly try to justify this by claiming they know Marinette doesn't get along with Lila and were trying to keep events involving the girls separate. Then, they rub salt in the wound by claiming that they were going to finish up the picnic and come straight to Marinette's party after, but they just lost track of time because they were having too much fun with Lila. Of course, Marinette won't mind putting her party on hold until they finally show up, will she?
• Universally Beloved Leader: Part of Ladybug's Karmic Jackpot after she defeats Hawk Moth is that she becomes this. She was already popular and recognized as the leader of the heroic Miraculous wielders in Paris, but this role is cemented by her being the primary strategist in the Final Battle and ultimately facing Hawk Moth one-on-one after he takes down her teammates, with her victory skyrocketing her popularity until she's Loved by All.
• The Unmasking: Several.
  • At the climax of the Final Battle, Hawk Moth and Ladybug grab each other's Miraculous at the same time, revealing their identities to each other...and the watching television cameras. Moments later, Luka and Kagami emerge from the warehouse they were fighting in, revealing that they were involved in the fight as well, though since Hawk Moth already took their Miraculouses, the public doesn't learn who exactly they were.
  • Since Luka and Kagami were already outed as heroes during the Final Battle, Marinette okays them revealing their heroic identities to the public, which they do by transforming during a live interview with Nadja Chamack. This provokes Alya to reveal that she was Rena Rouge, as she starts yelling at Kitsune for using "her" Miraculous, only to be bluntly informed that she's been permanently retired.
  • When Mayura attacks the Agreste Mansion, Chat Noir manages to take down her sentimonster and expose her as Nathalie. However, he then makes the mistake of trying to help her up, and she steals his Ring, exposing him as Adrien Agreste.
  • Finally, with both Gabriel and Nathalie in custody, all of the heroes detransform in front of the media to announce that the city is safe, including new additions Aurore, Ondine, Jean, Mirelle, Rose, Juleka, and Chloe.
• 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: Played with. Adrien unwittingly set up his own downfall by refusing to do anything about Lila while she was scamming his classmates. While he knew Lila was hurting people, he chose to overlook the harm she was doing because it didn't affect him personally. Once it does start to affect him personally, it's already too late; his face-value relationship with Lila counts in her favor, and his story sounds so shifty and unbelievable that the police think he's just trying to use her as a scapegoat. As a result, Adrien loses the only funds he can access, shortly followed by most of his worldly possessions when Gabriel, unable to fall back on the money Adrien let Lila steal, is forced to sell his company and all the property associated with it.
• Unwitting Pawn:
  • Lila goes for this angle 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.
  • 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.
• Vengeance Denied: After Lila robs him and the police hit a dead end investigating her, with Adrien becoming the prime suspect for her crimes instead, Adrien decides he's going to leave town and track Lila down himself. This plan is derailed, however, when Mayura attacks the Agreste mansion and Adrien decides he's going to win back the public's respect by defeating her as Chat Noir first. Mayura steals his Ring, revealing his identity in a way that looks very incriminating, and Ladybug refuses to return it to him once she's defeated, as it's clear he can no longer be trusted with it, leaving Adrien trapped in the hole he dug for himself.
• 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.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: After Miracle Queen, Chloé 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".
• Wealthy Yacht Owner: Lila notices that "Senior diplomats routinely retired with sufficient wealth to buy country villas and yachts".
• What Have You Done for Me Lately?: Marinette's classmates take her generosity completely for granted, expecting all sorts of favors and gifts from her even while ostracizing her. When Marinette is revealed to be Ladybug, they naturally expect exclusive interviews and other perks, and are completely flummoxed when Marinette refuses to have anything more to do with them. Alya in particular finds all manner of ways to twist logic around to convince herself that Marinette is just being unreasonable and will come aound eventually, vowing to never let her live down her "mistake."
• What the Hell, Hero?: Both Adrien and Chat Noir get hit with this a LOT by everyone throughout the whole story, for both their Skewed Priorities and selfish actions.
• What Were You Thinking?: This is Adrien's lawyer's reaction upon being very belatedly called in to oversee Adrien's interviews with the police. After meeting with the detectives to get up to speed, he demands to know why Adrien didn't bring a lawyer from the beginning and spells out in detail what a deep hole Adrien has dug for himself with his poorly-thought-out admissions and accusations against Lila. He wraps up by telling Adrien that he's destroyed his case so badly, nothing can be done to get Adrien's money back and anything else Adrien tries will just get him into more trouble.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • When Ladybug goes to Chloé for help, the latter is clearly hoping this means she gets to return to hero work. Ladybug tears that idea to confetti and makes it very clear that what's she asking will mean that any help Chloé gives will be completely unknown. While Chloé is upset at the idea, she ultimately chooses to do what's actually heroic instead of self-serving.
  • On the flip side, 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.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: One of Ladybug's biggest hurdles in plotting her trap for Hawk Moth is that she needs specialized equipment that will cost thousands of euros to buy — thousands of euros she simply doesn't have. She considers asking Gabriel Agreste to supply the funds, but can't bring herself to go through with it. Instead, she goes to Chloé, who gladly gives her more than she needs.
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?:
  • As the Gabriel family lawyer spells out for him, Adrien's testimony about Lila's character contradicts itself. If she was really scamming his classmates for months, and he was fully aware of it, why would he treat her so kindly, let alone let her into a position where she could take advantage of him?
  • When Chat Noir is caught on camera offering his hand to Mayura, who takes his Ring, the public assumes he's a traitor because it's far easier to believe than the truth, which is that his judgement is just that bad.
• With Friends Like These...:
  • The majority of Marinette's classmates turn out to be Fair Weather Friends who are more interested in currying favor with Lila out of the belief that she'll help them out with her various "connections." They then attempt to flock back to Marinette's side after she's unmasked as Ladybug, and are shocked when she refuses to accept them back with open arms.
  • Alya is particularly bad about this, as she wastes no time trying to exploit her supposed status as "Ladybug's bestie" by promising exclusive interviews and content on the Ladyblog. When Marinette points out that she didn't bother getting permission for any of this from her, Alya makes clear that she believes she owes her all of this and more.
  • Adrien also proves to be a False Friend of the highest order, having refused to do anything about Lila conning his classmates with her Fake Charities and other deceptions. Ironically, the class is far more willing to stand by his side when times get tough for him... until they learn about how he let them suffer.
• World-Healing Wave: Deconstructed; Adrien treats the existence of the Miraculous Cure as a magical Reset Button that lets him goof off and ignore the consequences of his actions, assuming they'll all be wiped away after Ladybug carries the day. When he learns that Hawkmoth will still be charged with murder for his actions, he even tries to argue that none of those deaths counted since they were all brought back by Ladybug.
• Wrong Assumption:
  • Adrien spends the entire story under the assumption that Protagonist-Centered Morality means he's guaranteed a happy ending, and as a result just keeps digging himself deeper into trouble with his Secretly Selfish It's All About Me mindset. By the time he realizes how wrong he was, he has almost nothing left, and even then he decides he'd rather skip town than accept the consequences of his actions.
  • Alya and the rest of the class are convinced that Marinette has to forgive them and help them recover the things Lila scammed from them because they're her "friends". They dig themselves even deeper into this belief after seeing how she forgives Chloé (and later Juleka and Rose), never realizing the reason the latter was forgiven was because she realized she had lost the right to claim Marinette as a friend through her actions and worked to make up for her mistakes rather than digging deeper into an entitled All Take and No Give mindset.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • Adrien assumes that he's The Chosen One who's going to get the girl, redeem bad people through being understanding, and have everything go ''exactly'' the way he wants it, just like in all the media he loves. He also falls hook, line and sinker for Lila claiming that he's helped her see the error of her ways, since she tells him exactly what he wants to hear.
  • Along similar lines, Alya and the rest of the class mistakenly believe that the reason they've been so fortunate is because they've been incredibly blessed, 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 them taking the generosity of others for granted, and their luck runs out when they lose Marinette's favor.
  • 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.
• 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 Are Not Alone: Played With; the story makes a point of highlighting that it takes more than just empty words for this to work.
  • Adrien claimed to be supporting Marinette against Lila, but in practice he was just keeping her complacent with empty promises while letting her take the brunt of Lila's manipulations alone. This is best highlighted when Marinette outright tells Adrien that Lila is hurting her, only for him to blithely dismiss her words and insist she's strong enough to handle it — as the alternative would require that he actually do something about the situation.
  • Tikki initially tries to comfort Marinette with platitudes of this type, but after Marinette gives her a Despair Speech about how Hawk Moth is going to win because she'll inevitably break down and get akumatized, Tikki realizes her methods aren't working and switches her focus to providing Marinette with real support, encouraging her to find someone she can confide in and vent her negative emotions to before they spill over.
  • This is played straight with Luka and Kagami. The former acts as The Confidant to Ladybug and tries to help her find realistic solutions to her problems, leading to their coming up with the plan to defeat Hawk Moth for good. The latter offers Ladybug her unwavering support and later backs her up when she confronts her False Friends, with both providing support that had been sadly lacking in Marinette's life up to 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.
• You're Not My Father: Adrien 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.
• Your Heart's Desire:
  • Lila prospers by 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).
  • Uncovering this is the power of the Pig Miraculous, which is used in the final chapter to figure out what Mayura wants from the mansion.

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