YMMV / The Wolves in the Woods (Miraculous Ladybug)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • With the revelations about Alya in "Once is Enough", readers may well question whether she was ever sincerely Marinette's friend, or was merely looking for a way to boost her own ego by 'playing the hero'. She specifically complains that Marinette was growing 'too confident'; was her fear of being left behind by her more successful friend born out of genuine concern/attachment to her best friend, or was she Driven by Envy and wanting to ensure she stayed an Extreme Doormat?
  • Related to the above, how sincere is her Villainous Breakdown? Is she actually having a Heel Realization when she pleads with her parents to "Tell me I'm not a villain", or playing for sympathy? Chapter 40 reveals that it's the latter.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Plenty of fics that depicted Lila in a sympathetic light aged poorly after Chameleon aired, establishing her to be a pure Hate Sink in canon. In parallel to that, this story's sympathetic portrayal of Lila aged poorly after the Miraculous Ladybug Bible leaked, as said document revealed that Lila was going to take over as the main villain after Season 5, describing her as being even worse than Gabriel.
  • Adrien's willingness to use Cataclysm as Disproportionate Retribution becomes this for multiple reasons thanks to Season 4 and 5. First, Chat Noir tries killing Scarabella, an ally, after assuming she's a sentimonster. Then comes Season 5's Destruction, where he's horrified at himself for accidentally Cataclysming Monarch. In the very next episode, he attempts to Cataclysm an opponent who's already been taken down out of rage over how the illusionary world they created played with his feelings. Then comes Derision, where Chat Noir tries to outright murder Kim with Cataclysm, thought after finding out he pulled a cruel prank on Marinette and was an unrepentant jerk about it, and he would at least apologize to Ladybug over getting overwhelmed by his feelings.
  • There's also his casual dismissal of the damage his advice did to Marinette, as in Season 5, Adrien actually apologizes for the advice in Revelation (even if the show's bizarre writing has him say he told her to wait).
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • If Adrien/Chat Noir didn't cross it when he suggested that they should let Rena Rage go after Lila unopposed, then he definitely crossed it by trying to Cataclysm Morrighan for the high crime of intervening when he was taking his temper tantrum out on Ladybug. As Marinette observes, he's fully willing to kill somebody just for getting in his way, when he's supposed to be a hero.
  • Alya is largely an entitled Jerkass who stubbornly refuses to admit her mistakes. But she crosses the line when she attempts to 'dig up dirt' on Marinette's new friends, then mocks one of them for having been homeless. She also fully sides with some of Lila's prior "victims" — namely, one who tried to murder Lila, with Alya lamenting the fact that they weren't able to finish the job. Hell, it's entirely possible that Alya crossed the line even earlier, as it turns out that she knew Lila was lying the whole time, but still goaded and encouraged the whole class into turning on Marinette out of envy over her professional successes, as well as to try to keep her an Extreme Doormat and relaying on her, as well as publishing Lila's lies just to get more viewers into the Ladyblog.
• Narm: Even by salt fic standards, the very idea of Alya and Lila outright getting their narrative positions flipped compared to the show (Alya gets heavily demonized to the point of becoming an unrepentant Manipulative Bastard while Lila has a Heel–Face Turn and is established as not being as horrible as she is in canon otherwise) is a bit of a stretch.
  • A notable example that's WAY out of character has to be (amongst other things) Alya calling one of Marinette's new friends lame because one of them is homeless. To say that the fic might be trying way too hard to make her extra unlikable would be quite the understatement.

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