Fanfic / Karmic Backlash

Due to being a Recursive Fanfiction, all spoilers for The Karma of Lies are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

It's been a year since Marinette triumphed over all those that hurt her, thanks to her own quick thinking, the actions of her few loyal allies, and her foes' karma finally catching up to them. Gabriel Agreste and Nathalie Sancoeur were exposed as supervillains and arrested, her classmates suffered for taking advantage of her, and Adrien—the boy she had loved until she realized the depths of his selfishness and his betrayals—wound up robbed blind by Lila, stripped of his Miraculous by Marinette, and then put under the strict supervision of his cruel Aunt Amelie. Only Lila remained, now fifty million euros richer as a result of looting the Agreste bank accounts, but even she was forced to flee to Marseilles and was then tormented by Ladybug's warnings of the unfortunate fate which would await her should she keep scamming.

But that's all in the past, and Marinette has stopped thinking about how her friends and classmates hurt her. She's the face of Audrey Bourgeois's fashion studio and a major celebrity, and those true companions who stuck by her side—including Kagami, Juleka, Rose, and of course her wonderful boyfriend Luka—are happy to celebrate with her while also using the Miraculouses they recovered to protect Paris from lingering threats. They're rich, they're popular, and in general they've hit the karmic jackpot... especially Marinette.

But karma can be a funny thing, and it may have its own ideas about who deserves what. Should karma determine that Marinette was too cruel to her enemies, or that she should have protected them from the heavy consequences which fell on their shoulders? Then Marinette might be due for a karmic backlash of her own.

Karmic Backlash is a Miraculous Ladybug fanfic and a recursive fanfic to The Karma of Lies.

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Karmic Backlash contains examples of:

• 0% Approval Rating: As soon as news of the truth about Adrien losing to ring to Mayura and Marinette letting Lila run off with 50 million Euros at the end of the original fic breaks out, her reputation bottoms out and she becomes a pariah to the entirety of Paris. Both her attempts to salvage her reputation (holding an interview and retrieving the Miracle Box from Lila) only results in her digging herself deeper. The other new heroes are spared from this at the end as Adrien calls out the mob for nearly succumbing to the same cycle of revenge that did Marinette in.
• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • Luka is crueler to Juleka in this story than in the original, where he was gentle with her as he tried to chart a course between his love for her and his knowledge of how she'd hurt his crush Marinette. Here he yells at her in the middle of a party after she says she is worried about Adrien's fate.
  • Su-Han may be an abrasive jerk in the original show, but he takes it to the next level in this story. He first plans on leaving Marinette to be lynched by an angry mob. When Marinette points out that she saved him and the rest of the Order from being kept in Feast's belly for all eternity, meaning he owes her, he relents... only to exploit how she has nowhere else to go by turning her into a virtual slave in his monastery.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • The original story's Lila was greedy and willing to hurt people to get what she wanted, but she wasn't so sadistic as to hurt people just for the sheer thrill of causing them pain. In this story, though, Lila does things to hurt Marinette (such as posting evidence of her stalking Adrien online) for seemingly no reason other than to enjoy seeing Marinette suffer.
  • Juleka, Rose, and Marinette have been retroactively made more villainous too. Whereas the originally story indicated that after a certain point Adrien was doomed no matter what and nothing could help him, Juleka, Rose, and Marinette are now characterized as having been able to save Adrien but refused to do so. This continues into the main story as well, with all three of them initially (and then Marinette for several more chapters) refusing to reveal what they know and thus help salvage Adrien's life.
  • Given how Su-Han was willing to leave Marinette for dead and—when he was talked out of that—ultimately chose to enslave her, he qualifies for this trope as well.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • For a salt fic, Marinette's fate is treated with a surprising amount of pathos and solemnity. While she's unambiguously Hated by All by the end of this fic. Her final scene with the Guardians in Tibet is treated as a tragedy, and paints her in a very pitiable light.
  • "Villain", might be stretching it for Chloé, but her attempts to Take A Level In Kindness ultimately end up for nothing, as her sticking with Marinette, and not admitting to or apologizing for all of her past sins ends up biting her so hard in the present day that she backslides. And the sight of Adrien in the hospital is enough to convince her that she's incapable of being good, causing her to have a psychotic break, leading to her admission to a mental health hospital. Even Adrien feels sorry for her.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Deconstructed. Adrien was infuriatingly annoying to Marinette, sure, and all of his former friends admit he deserved a peg knocked off for his actions regarding Lila, but outright claiming that he "deserved" what happened to him (in all of its overkill) was most definitely not Marinette's call to make, especially not when she allowed the actual villain of the situation to walk away scot-free with what Marinette assumed was a Cruel Mercy... but neither Lila nor the actual karma of the universe thought so. The rest of Adrien's former friends finally draw a line when Adrien tries to kill himself. Further deconstructed when this is literally the only defense she can give for herself after things are going From Bad to Worse and people establish the connection to her decision to let Lila go.
  • Also deconstructed with Lila. While no one else is really happy Lila is dead only because they cannot bring her to justice anymore, her mother makes it perfectly clear that she'd rather see her behind bars than six feet under had Marinette actually done her job and arrested her to begin with, and rips into her for daring to suggest that 'her being dead is better'.
• At Least I Admit It: If there's one thing Lila is honest about, it's that she doesn't attempt to justify her Virtue Is Weakness mentality. She knows what she does is wrong and doesn't care so long as she's left standing.
  “Justify? I’m not trying to ‘justify’ anything. There’s a difference between justifying and accepting. Justifying is being in denial. It’s making excuses to convince people that what you did was okay or even the right thing to do. I know what I did was wrong. I know that it was horrible and despicable. I’m not trying to convince myself or anyone else that it was alright for me to do it. The difference is, I don’t care whether or not it was ‘the right thing to do’. Because I know it was the right thing for me. And in this world, I’ve learned that’s the only way to survive.”
• Arc Words: The phrase "Do better, be better", is repeated several times over the course of the story.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Downplayed. Lila's scheme to ruin Marinette by stealing the Miracle Box is one of the big pushes that bring her downfall, but the more long-term benefits she wished to gain from the plan are brought to a grinding (not to mention fatal) halt by the next girl she bullies.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Tikki utters this word-for-word in Chapter 5 while pointing out to Marinette that while Adrien may have had financial freedom before, she had physical and emotional freedom, the same thing he found himself longing for for so long.
  “You wanted Adrien’s life, and now you got it. Both the rise… and the fall.”
• Bittersweet Ending: The level of bitterness and sweetness varies depending on the character. Marinette ultimately ends up losing absolutely everything, not unlike Adrien, and the friends who stuck by her also suffer for it (Chloé in particular ends up undergoing a nervous breakdown). Lila seemingly gets away with everything once again, but is stabbed to death by one of her victims off-screen. Master Su-Han claims the Miracle Box back and states that the events of the past year have convinced him to never again trust emotionally immature teenagers with superpowers, meaning none of our cast will be heroes again. However, Adrien, Alya, and the rest of the old class recover their reputations and have a second chance at life, with Adrien in particular resolving to never make the same mistakes again.
• Book Ends: The story begins with Marinette and her friends at an incredibly fancy party, celebrating how wonderful their lives have become (and, for Marinette, being untethered from the "toxic" people in her life). It ends with Adrien and the old class having an impromptu get-together, celebrating their fresh start now that the entire circus is, for the most part, over.
• Broken Pedestal: Marinette turns into this as her actions, especially those done out of disproportionate spite, and her hypocrisy are brought to light. By the end of the story, she's Hated by All.
• Clear Their Name: The plot is kick-started when Alya, ironically in an initial effort to incriminate Adrian and prove he gave the ring to Mayura in the final battle, getting her hands on the footage that reveals that he actually lost the ring by mistake. In another stroke of cruel irony, the same footage reveals that Rose and Juleka was actually close enough to see the theft in action, but did nothing to correct the crowd, letting Adrien's reputation fall into tatters.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Befitting this fic's nature as a classic Tragedy, while everyone does point this out to her throughout the entire fic as they proceed to learn the truth of what actually happened at the final battle, only at the end does Marinette actually realize none of the events of the fic would've actually happened if she set aside her petty grudges and actually did the right thing when she still could, instead of willingly letting her petty grudges get in the way of it and letting a known criminal run free with somebody's riches just because the target was (in her eyes, anyway) a deserving Asshole Victim.
• Covered in Gunge: Shortly after the truth of Adrien's loss of the ring is revealed, one of the many misfortunes that befall Marinette and most of the new heroes is they get covered in various foodstuffs by other students. Only Rose and Juleka are left pristine by coming clean about Adrien's true role.
• Cruel Mercy: While Master Su-Han does save Marinette in the mob and take her to the Miraculous Temple, he doesn't mince words that she's never seeing Tikki or the other Miraculous again, and essentially makes her a slave, complete with a horrible living space that makes Adrien's home at the end of the original fic look luxurious.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The one time Marinette and Lila meet after the latter steals the Miracle Box, the liar/thief has all of the powers of the Miraculous on her side (and has become an expert extremely quickly) and Marinette only has the Ladybug Miraculous. Fusing the Ox and Monkey Miraculous, Marinette can do nothing as Lila wipes the floor with her and escapes.
• Darker and Edgier: While the original story could get heavy in places, the worst that happened to anyone was being robbed and publicly shamed (which happened to the class), losing a Miraculous and being put under the guardianship of a strict relative (which happened to Adrien along with also being robbed and shamed), and being arrested (which happened to Gabriel and Nathalie). This story, however, involves darker and edgier outcomes, including Tom being shot, Adrien attempting suicide, Marinette being disowned by her parents and banished to the Himalayas, Lila being murdered, and Chloé having a psychotic break and being institutionalized.
• "Dear John" Letter: Marinette gets two of these in Chapter 6, in a short span of time no less. The first one comes from Tom and Sabine as they declare that they "can no longer be a family" and have left Paris for good, while Grandpa Roland leaves a second one that also makes it clear he never wants to see Marinette again.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Marinette and her team, both former and current, are this for the Kid Hero archetype, as their youth makes them emotionally immature and prone to abusing their powers, as evidenced by Adrien's Entitled to Have You and I Reject Your Reality attitude in the original fic and Marinette's own spiteful interest in Disproportionate Retribution and her constant insistence that it's Never My Fault. It's telling that by the end of it, Su-Han and the Guardians resolve to ensure that a disaster like the Lila debacle never repeats itself by ensuring that children are never entrusted with such power again.
• Deconstruction Fic:
  • The story sets out to deconstruct the karma system depicted in the original fanfic. Adrien and the rest of Bustier's class ended up taking the brunt of Lila's karma by virtue of wanting to "protect Lila" and not understanding the consequences. Karmic Backlash points out that a cosmic force that's willing to distribute karmic punishment regardless of people's intent is not necessarily going to eliminate Marinette's tormentors and then just stop; it's equally likely to decide that letting Lila escape, allowing Adrien's life to be ruined, or even just being self-satisfied about the rewards she earned qualify as reasons to judge Marinette as equally responsible for the karmic debt and tear her down in response.
  • The fic also takes a sledgehammer to the original fic's Broken Aesop of 'evil wins when good does nothing'; Marinette doing nothing to stop Lila outside of giving her a vague warning backfires when Lila breaks into her home with the help of a hacker she paid off and shoots Tom in the chest, resulting in the others learning that Marinette let a criminal run off with a ton of money. It all goes downhill for her from here.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Marinette knew that Lila was primarily out for money so she could live a luxurious lifestyle. Because of that, she never stopped to think about how dangerous Lila could be with her newfound wealth. Lila eventually infiltrated Marinette's home, stole the Miracle Box, and shot her father by paying a hacker ten thousand euros out of the haul Ladybug let her keep.
  • Marinette also didn't think through the consequences of tying her professional reputation to Audrey Bourgeois. The Style Queen is a wonderful ally to have as long as you're putting out gorgeous designs and making her look good. If your reputation starts costing her money or getting her kicked out of country clubs, though, she's your worst nightmare.
  • The crux of almost every "The Reason You Suck" Speech Marinette gets through the story revolves around two points: she placed too much emphasis on getting even with Adrien and not enough in Lila (the actual criminal, on top of hurting Marinette), and a Paranoia Gambit was the wrong thing to apply with a girl who hates not being in control and terrorized people for less.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Luka is an interesting variant as he is already in a happy relationship with the girl of his dreams at the beginning of the story. The cracks begin to show when he begins to discover that he was always just a runner up to Adrien and Marinette is no longer the girl he thought she was, ultimately realising he was always this archetype.
• Driven to Suicide: Adrien tries to kill himself by hanging himself with the scarf Marinette gave him once he feels he truly hit rock bottom. Alya finds him just in time.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: The death of Lila is sudden, off-screen, violent and casually explained by her mother after the fact, bringing Marinette's plans to hunt her down to get the Miracle Box (and vindication, somehow) back to a screeching halt.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Downplayed. While the old class does not quite forgive the new Miraculous bearers, they recognize that holding grudges is just going to perpetuate the Vicious Cycle and agree to give them a second chance.
  • Marinette expects this trope to be played straight when she plans to retrieve the lost items for the old class and the Miracle Box from Lila. However, the rest of the new heroes point out that stopping Lila from causing more havoc is way more important than earning Adrian's forgiveness just so she can feel better about herself. She never gets the chance to do this, and Adrien ends up "stealing" her chance to redeem herself.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • The members of the cast who hadn't decided to stop hating Adrien because Alya found evidence of his alleged treason to Mayura being false certainly did so when he tries to kill himself. Even Marinette, who digs herself deeper by trying to hang on to the "Asshole Victim” card for as long as she can to defend her decisions, is still horrified when she sees him in the hospital bed.
  • Despite their anger at him for his role in the whole mess, neither Alya nor Nino are comfortable with letting Adrien suffer for a crime he didn't commit, hence why they visit his apartment to tell him about what they found.
  • Lila is the furthest person from a saint but after using the Rabbit miraculous to travel back in time and gather evidence of Marinette's obsession with Adrien, even she's disgusted with the municipal workers who actively enabled her stalking.
  • All the new heroes, including Luka, see that Marinette's crossed a line when she physically snaps at Benigna after the woman gives her a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech. To her credit, Marinette herself is deeply ashamed about this action afterwards.
• Evil Is Petty: Lila has this to spare. After she gets even with Marinette, the only thing she can think of doing with the Miraculous is to use them to flawlessly frame the next girl she bullies so she will go to jail. It also becomes an example of a Fatal Flaw when it gets her killed.
• Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: Gorilla gets a new job working at a theme park after being let go. At least the pay makes up for it.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Marinette spends quite a bit of time digging a deeper hole for herself through her vindictiveness and hypocrisy. It's undeniable that Marinette hurt people through her inaction- but then again, so did Adrien. Considering how many of the people pointing fingers at Ladybug now are the same ones who feel that Adrien may have gotten a raw deal, it might be possible to come to an agreement for both heroes to get the benefit of the doubt based on their prior services for Paris and claimed good intentions. But whenever someone points out to Marinette the ways her actions hurt Adrien, her first response is always "He deserved it!" And considering she spent the last year decrying her classmates for their wrongdoings, people are all too happy to apply the same moral standards to her.
  • Literal example with Lila: She has fifty million Euros, she has the Miracle Box, she has become one of the butterflies that will ruin Marinette's life. And still she walks into another school to do the exact same song and dance with the Celebrity Lies and bullying the one girl who dares question them because she just cannot help herself. And this girl ends up answering to said bullying by killing Lila.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: An Aesop brought up by many characters whenever Marinette insists that the Disproportionate Retribution she dished out was justified. Yes, she's suffered but that doesn't mean she gets a free pass to inflict just as much (if not more) suffering onto others out of sheer spite; nor does it guarantee her immunity from more suffering in the future, have it be from forces outside of her control or the consequences of her own actions (both past and present) coming back to bite her.
• Hated by All: By the end of the story, this is Marinette's fate. She even ends up running away from Paris chased by a full-blown Torches and Pitchforks crowd and is disowned by her parents, and the epilogue shows that there are people out there who hate her friends and have almost ruined Paris and Audrey Bourgeois' brand just because of the smallest association to Marinette (Adrien is, at least, able to shame one such crowd by pointing out that they are acting exactly like Lila and Marinette). In an added twist of fate, Adrien's reputation as this ends up reversed throughout the fic as the rest of the world learn of his suicide attempt and the truth of the Mayura incident that cost him the ring.
• Heel Realization: A tragic example at the end of the fic that comes after it's way too late to do anything about it: Marinette realizes everything that happened to her over the course of the fic could've been avoided had she actually exposed Lila in the first place, cleared Adrien's name when it mattered most, and retrieved all the stolen money and goods instead of letting her own personal vendetta get in the way of everything. The fic even spell this out for good measure:
  If Marinette had only done better, been better, instead of letting her own spite consume her and turn her into a hypocritical version of Lila Rossi, none of that would have happened. But now, it was too late. Her old life, and everything in it that made it great – her family, her friends, her own personal successes and accomplishments and victories… it was gone. Even her life from before Lila had skipped Paris, when she was just a baker’s daughter being iced out by her class — which, in retrospect, actually didn’t seem so bad, after all. But now, it was all gone, and it was never coming back.
• Heinousness Retcon: The story retcons details from the original story in order to make Marinette and her 'new hero squad' more villainous.
  • In the original, Adrien went into the final fight against Mayura without anyone else around to back him up, thus taking a huge risk just so he could show off and convince people he was still heroic. As a result, when Mayura stole his ring, there was nobody who was close enough to see what really happened; Juleka and Rose only saw the theft by watching Nadja Chamack's helicopter broadcast, and Marinette and the other heroes only heard about the theft second-hand after Juleka phoned them. In this story, however, the original events are retconned such that Juleka and Rose were indeed close enough to the fight that they not only saw Adrien losing his ring in person but also saw that Mayura stole it (as opposed to Adrien just handing it over, which is what the people watching the broadcast thought happened). This makes Marinette and the new heroes look even worse for not correcting the record, since members of their group personally witnessed proof of Adrien's innocence.
  • At the end of the original story, Marinette told Luka that she was unable to come up with the evidence needed to have Lila arrested and so had to settle for just pulling a Paranoia Gambit on her. In this story, however, it's explicitly stated by several characters that Marinette could have had Lila arrested by using her magic powers to come up with evidence (e.g., by using Fluff to go back in time and videotape Lila doing the thefts, or by creating an akuma or sentimonster with the power to find stolen goods and/or proof of crimes) but simply chose not to, which makes Marinette come across as more callous than in the original. ^note The original doesn't state why Marinette couldn't use a Miraculous to fix things, but the show eventually had Tikki tell Marinette that her powers can only be used to fight villains or stop wide-ranging disasters and can't be used for personal uses without backfiring horrifically (as in Chat Blanc, where Marinette used her powers to give Adrien a gift and inadvertently ended the world, or Strikeback, where Hawkmoth was able to steal almost all the Miraculouses thanks to Marinette trying to use her powers to bring Adrien back from London and accidentally bringing back Felix instead). Since using her powers to bail out her former friends (or arrest someone for hurting them specifically) could have counted as 'using the Miraculouses for personal reasons,' it's possible Marinette couldn't have safely used the Miraculouses to deal with Lila or recover her friends' stuff.
  • 'Karmic Backlash' has characters say a few times that Marinette's situation in the beginning of the original story wasn't nearly as bad as the situation that Adrien wound up by the original story's end; her class had been turned against her but she wasn't hated or even disliked by all of Paris, while Adrien ended the original story despised by virtually everyone. However, a major point in the original story was that Marinette's situation was awful precisely because it could result in her being akumatized, which would add in some additional major trauma. The fear of being akumatized itself caused Marinette immense additional pain and angst in the first chapters of the original story, even pushing her into implementing the last-ditch all-or-nothing gambit to stop Hawkmoth for fear that, if she didn't do it, she would eventually crack, get akumatized, and bring Hawkmoth closer to permanent victory by giving him her Miraculous. Whereas Adrien's suffering, as bad as it was, only took place after Hawkmoth was safely defeated and there was no chance of Adrien being akumatized, making it less bad than Marinette's in at least one major respect. 'Karmic Backlash,' however, leaves this out and thus makes Marinette look more heinous for ignoring that factor and comparing 'just' being disliked by her class to Adrien being hated by all.
• Hero for a Day: Bengina Rossi and Felix are both briefly lent the Butterfly and Peacock Miraculous to become Metamorphica and Argos respectively to help the victims of Lila to get their items back. Adrien also briefly becomes a champion in the form of Golden Boy, complete with a benelovent panther sentimonster, Platinum Retriever (justified, since he refuses to use Plagg ever again after the way the latter treated him in The Karma of Lies.
• Hourglass Plot: Marinette's circumstances in Karmic Blacklash deliberately mirror Adrien's in The Karma of Lies to illustrate the karma at work.
  • Last year Adrien walked himself into trouble in the first place by assuming that since he was a hero, events would work out in his favor, with Lila making a Heel–Face Turn and harmony returning to the class. Now, Marinette's troubles begin with her and the people around her believing that since she is a good person who went through so much pain to rack up good karma, her happy ending would work out just as planned; Lila would be too scared to hurt anyone else, and Alya, Adrien, and the others thoroughly deserved their punishments.
  • After Lila stole the Agreste emergency fund, Adrien was put in a position where he knew full well who was responsible, but couldn't convince the police- his testimony did not paint him in a good light, and Marinette refused to testify so she wouldn't "influence the investigation." A year later, Lila broke into the Dupain-Cheng's mansion to steal the Miracle Box and critically injured Tom in the process. Marinette instantly lets the police know that Lila was responsible, but it turns out that they need more than just her word to arrest Lila- especially since the record shows that Lila was just an Unwitting Pawn to Adrien and his father.
  • Adrien ends The Karma of Lies separated from his father by unavoidable circumstances, and from his mother by his poor reputation. Marinette gets a taste of this when her father is sent to the hospital in critical condition, and her mother ends up infuriated at her for enabling his injuries by letting Lila off with a warning and not trying to separate her from Adrien's money.
  • Both heroes end up getting a lot of flak when a Miraculous is lost on their watch- not because they handed it over, but because they really should've seen the thefts coming. Chat Noir let Mayura steal his ring when she spun a sob story for him and he offered her a hand up. Given his previous reputation, the public was happy to believe that he was The Mole the entire time, and willingly gave Mayura a powerup. A year later, Lila broke into Ladybug's home and stole the Miracle Box. This time around, no one suspects Ladybug of being an accomplice... but they're equally unimpressed that their hero let a villain gain such a huge advantage because she previously let her get away with a stolen fortune.
  • Adrien ends The Karma of Lies living in a very spartan room (which happens to be Marinette's old bedroom) lamenting that his actions brought his fate. Marinette ends this story living in a very spartan room in the Miraculous Order's monastery lamenting that her actions brought her fate.
• Innocently Insensitive: Many people In-Universe seriously don't think it's "innocent" at all, but it's very obvious that Marinette never gave thought on keeping tabs on how Adrien was doing and kept believing that he would be able to get over his adversity and become a better man, even as she is brought to the hospital room Adrien is in after trying to kill himself because there is no way his circumstances can be rose above.
• Irony: The second to last time Lila makes a major appearance in the Fic, she has gotten the Miracle Box and is gloating about having one over on Marinette and that with the Miracle Box she can do anything. The last time is just her in spirit, with her mother explaining that she used the Miracle Box to bully a girl who would stab her to death.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The warranty of Lila runs out in a spectacularly violent way offscreen, with her final bullying target stabbing her about a hundred times in a murderous rage when Lila's scheme is going to have her sent to jail and her life completely destroyed no matter what. The Heinousness Retcon of Marinette's decisions in ''The Karma of Lies'’ also makes her a recipient of this, and Karma comes down on her like the K-T event on the dinosaurs.
• Karmic Shunning: Part of Marinette's own karma backfiring on her is the entirety of Paris turning on her overnight once Adrien's true role in the final fight with Hawk Moth is revealed and how she and her allies did nothing to save Adrien from this fate back in The Karma of Lies. It only gets worse when Lila manages to record footage of Marinette's own creepy behaviour towards Adrien and by the end, even the Miraculous Temple and the rest of the Kwami are giving her the cold shoulder.
• Karmic Overkill:
  • An In-Universe example, as the forces of karma in this universe apparently don't do "subtle" and are easily misdirected. Just as Adrien had his life wrecked in The Karma of Lies for being self-absorbed and making well intentioned mistakes as a fourteen year old, it isn't pretty when the debt comes to roost on the fifteen year old Marinette. Once her poor decisions the previous year are revealed, her social life and reputation implode within days, her father is critically injured and both parents later abandon her, stores selling Marinette's creations are vandalized across the globe, and there are even discussions on how the whole mess might end Paris as a fashion mecca. The fact that both of them served as Paris's protectors for years doesn't seem to matter as they run Marinette out of town and force her to run all the way to the Miraculous Order monastery to save herself, where she is turned into a slave of the Order in all but name as punishment for her laxity as a Guardian.
  • The whole cast eventually tosses to Marinette's face, in one way or another, that prioritizing getting even with Adrien over giving Lila a slap on the wrist was just not worth it, especially because Marinette keeps trying to say a "Adrien deserved it!" spiel even as she is standing right next to his hospital bed after he tried to hang himself from the utter inescapable misery his life has become.
  • Marinette ends up on the wrong end of this herself and drags almost everybody she has a personal connection to down with her. Only Adrien Shaming the Mob when they try to attack the new Miraculous holders stops it from going any further.
• Kick the Dog: The Miraculous Order take in Marinette after she is run out of Paris and turned into an apprentice (or rather a slave by any other name) as punishment, and refuse to erase her memories of being a Guardian (and thus this whole mess) as part of it. And then Su-Han reveals that he went to Paris and brought a little souvenir: Adrien's scarf, which Adrien had tossed away because of the bad memories (namely that he tried to hang himself with it), for Marinette to use to clean the temple's halls with.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Defied. The monks at the Miraculous Temple refuse to wipe Marinette's memories under the pretense that she needs to 'learn her lesson' from the whole debacle.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Karma still got to Lila in the end: Shortly after leaving Paris with the Miraculous Box, Lila began the same song at dance over on a school on Italy, using the Miraculous she had stolen to easily frame the girl who pissed her off of the day for alleged assault, and the girl, having completely lost it because nobody believed her, stabbed Lila to death in the court's restroom. And this was told to the heroes of Paris by Lila's mother, who had to identify her own daughter in the morgue and is returning them the Miraculous Box, which was among the personal belongings the police confiscated.
  • Amelie Graham de Vanily gets her own: once her abuse of Adrien hits the news, she is forced to step down from her company and Félix takes over.
• May It Never Happen Again: The Miraculous Order surely seems like they will implement this trope when they arrive to take the Miracle Box in the epilogue. They chalk the whole mess up as the result of teenagers (especially Marinette) not having enough emotional maturity to handle the responsibility of having a Miraculous and make it clear that they're going to do their damnedest to avoid such loose recruitment standards from appearing again.
• Meaningful Echo: One from The Karma of Lies; Plagg's "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Marinette after he gets rejected by Adrien is him telling her to accept her fate and what karma has in store for her. He even lampshades this by pointing out that it applies more to her now than it did to him at the time.
• Missing Steps Plan: Played for Drama. Nobody in the cast is impressed at all that Marinette's grand plan to punish Lila was just to say some vaguely intimidating facts and hope for the best.
• My Greatest Second Chance: The end of the fic outright has Adrien refer to his move out of Paris and to a new country as "his second chance at life". Considering everything he went through in both the original fic and this fic, it's not unwarranted.
• Never My Fault: Throughout the story, Marinette keeps pushing the blame on all her misfortunes to everything and everyone she can as her life falls apart around her. Only too late at the end of the fic as she's taken into the Miraculous Temple as a slave in all but name does she finally realize she could've avoided everything that befell her in the first place; if she got Lila in trouble while she still could instead of intentionally letting her go with not much more than what winded up as nothing more than a glorified slap on the wrist at the time, none of this would've happened to begin with.
• No Name Given: Both Lila's Rabbit form and Ox/Monkey hybrid form are never given any names by her, resorting to the narrative to still just call her Lila.
• Not So Similar: Adrien's fate is presented in The Karma of Lies as justified and as essentially being in Marinette's place at the beginning of the original fic, but many characters proceed to point out that Marinette still had her home, family, fortune, some friends, career as a superhero and a future in design to look to; being an unpopular kid in high school is an extremely temporary position that ceases to matter the second she graduates. Adrien on the other hand, lost his family, fortune, friends, career as a superhero and was left in the care of an extremely uncaring guardian who was almost certain to kick him on the streets the second he turned eighteen.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: After unifying the Ox and Monkey miraculous, Lila delivers one to Marinette/Ladybug who was foolish enough to confront her alone, even though Lila had her hopelessly overpowered with the entire Miracle Box at her disposal.
• Offscreen Karma: The revoking of Lila's Karma Houdini Warranty happens offscreen and explained to the heroes by Lila's mother when she returns briefly to Paris to return the Miracle Box, confiscated by the police as personal effects after Lila is murdered.
• Off with His Head!: In contrast to Adrien's locker having turned into a shrine wishing for his return, Marinette discovers her locker has been defaced by a decapitated plushie of her as Ladybug taped to the locker, just to rub in how much of a Broken Pedestal she is to the school.
• On the Rebound: By the midpoint of the story, Luka is forced to accept that he is nothing more than Marinette's rebound guy, he has burnt way too many bridges by standing by her side as she did some truly stupid decisions and now is refusing to see they were wrong, that he was too blind to see as Marinette became more awful as a person during this year that has passed and after he makes a probing question that maybe they went too far with Adrien (after his sister and friends confront him about it and kick him out) and Marinette instantly gets highly defensive, Luka accepts that it's best to walk away now while he still has some chance of mending things with the others and gives Marinette a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Panthera Awesome: Platinum Retriever, a golden-silvery panther sentimonster created by Felix (as Argos) made to accompany Adrian during his stint as Golden Boy.
• Pompous Political Pundit: As evidence of the karmic overkill going on, at one point of the story Marinette looks at video of a talk show with a pair of pundits going on about how her actions have single-handedly risked Paris losing its status as a heart of fashion and discussing which other city will pick up the slack.
• Pyrrhic Victory: A major plot point of the story is of Marinette's victory over Hawk Moth and her subsequent Karmic Jackpot at the cost of Adrien suffering the mother of all Laser-Guided Karma in The Karma of Lies ultimately becoming this for her, even if it doesn't happen immediately. As the story progresses, all of Paris learn the truth about the final battle, Adrian's true role, and how the heroes did nothing to stop it and subsequently turning against her, her father Tom gets shot and she loses the Miracle Box to Lila, resulting in both him and Sabine disowning Marinette once they learn the truth about her (in)actions with Lila in the past year, and her eventually getting chased out of Paris and winding up in the Miraculous Temple as a slave in all but name.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Heaps of them abound, with key players of The Karma of Lies getting verbally eviscerated for their actions in the fic, especially Marinette.
• Recruit Teenagers with Attitude: This story eventually deconstructs the whole idea by connecting the whole mess of both The Karma of Lies and this tale to too much "attitude" and not enough emotional maturity, to the point the Guardians come to take the Miracle Box away in the story's epilogue and make it clear that there's no way in Hell they are going to allow Miraculous holder recruitment standards to become this loose ever again.
• Recursive Fanfiction:
  • Is one to The Karma of Lies, of course.
  • The story also notes it was inspired by Karma Overbalance, a shorter Recursive Fanfiction to Karma which featured Adrien murdering Lila after the events of the original story.
  • Karma and Reality is Recursive Fanfiction of this piece in turn, where Marinette leaves the monastery decades after this story's conclusion and runs into an old friend.
  • And The Path of Lila's Karma is Recursive Fanfiction of this story too. It gives Lila some more Adaptational Intelligence and shows her working out a way to survive her untimely demise at the end of this story, use the Miraculouses to make a Wish, and ultimately become the god-emperor of a new world.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Used as one more point against Marinette. When her former friends question her about why she did not tried to use the Miraculous to get evidence about Lila's scams and try to get back the stuff she stole, she tries to shield herself by saying that using the Miraculous for personal reasons instead of for saving people from disasters and villains is forbidden^note this is canon, but the episode where Tikki tells Marinette this (and it came to bite Marinette in the rear end) was released after The Karma of Lies ended. The others instantly point out that the viciousness of Lila's cons and her support of Hawk Moth definitely made her a villain and her stealing the fifty million Euros, which she could then use to fund further schemes to hurt people (such as Marinette herself just a few days ago) counts as "a disaster". Which means that she just refused to use her powers out of apathy, not because the rules said so.
• Rejected Apology: Marinette apologizes to Adrien after Alya clears his name of willingly helping Mayura. While Adrien believes Marinette is truly sorry to an extent, he refuses to forgive her for letting him be Convicted by Public Opinion when she knew he was innocent. It's this that starts to hammer in the true extent the damage Marinette's done to herself and everyone around her.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: A major theme. As several characters note, Marinette was more concerned about getting revenge on those who had wronged her than bringing a criminal to justice, leading to Lila stealing the Miracle Box and bringing about her own downfall.
• Riches to Rags: Marinette starts the fic where The Karma of Lies ended; as a rich, popular celebrity rubbing shoulders with the elites and living a life of luxury. After everything is said and done and she loses everything she had, she ends the fic as nothing more than a slave to the Miraculous Temple, living in a cold damp cell and made to do mundane chores.
• Sanity Slippage: As Marinette's life continues to go downhill, so does her sanity, making her increasingly erratic and desperate. Chloé's is taken to another level as she suffers a full-on nervous breakdown and has to be admitted into a mental hospital.
• Screw Destiny: Lila decides to go back to Paris to fight Marinette again and try to seize control of her own future so Marinette's claim — that she used Fluff to pop into the future and verified that someday Lila will be arrested and then murdered by one of her scam victims — doesn't come to pass. Ironically, her actions end up causing the broad strokes of the claim to play out when the scam victim of her next attempt stabs her to death in retaliation for ruining her life.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Adrien's bodyguard (The one that replaced the Gorilla) ends up leaving Paris after being made redundant.
  • In the end, Emilie and her son decide to pack up and leave Paris for good; Adrien's name might be cleared and Emilie freed but it does not erase the months of hardship and trauma they both faced nor Adrien's genuine fuck ups in the original fic, and while his relations with the rest of the class might be repaired, everybody knows it will never be what is used to be. They decide to renounce their family names and live as private citizens in another country.
• Secretly Selfish:
  • Juleka suspects this of her brother Luka. For a long time, Luka was Always Second Best to Adrien in Marinette's affection. Juleka noted that Luka had built up some resentment towards the model that he never let show until Marinette came to hate him as well. Juleka believes that Luka's anger towards Adrien has less to do with protecting Marinette, and more to do with enjoying his former rival's suffering.
  • During the encounter between Marinette and Lila over the latter's theft of the Miracle Box, the latter claims every single person in the world is this, including her, except she at least embraces this aspect of her wholeheartily. And she makes a special note of Marinette especially being this by claiming that the Ladybug heroine was merely jealous about how Adrien and Lila could do whatever they want without consequence.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Used to deconstruct and call out the hypocrisy in the usual 'Saltinette' tropes. The old class admits that yes, they did take Marinette's kindness for granted. However, she went too far in the other direction, causing her to become an apathetic, vindictive, unsympathetic and entitled shadow no better (if not worse) than the very people she hates.
• Shout-Out:
  • The author (and one reader who made mention of it and they thank them for bringing it up) directly compares Gabriel's swift devolution into evil while trying to justify it as "this is me protecting my family" to the Villain Protagonists of the Breaking Bad franchise in the epilogue (and uses a quote from Better Call Saul as its Epigraph).
  • The consequences Marinette faces for letting Lila go are almost the exact same as those faced by Peter Parker in Spider-Man.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech Lila gives to Marinette draws inspiration from Joker's infamous 'one bad day' quote and Lex Luthor from the Justice League episode "A Better World".
  • Karma Overbalance (the direct inspiration for this story) gets a more direct homage when Marinette, in a moment of being Innocently Insensitive, says that Adrien should not throw his life away when confronted with the revelation he tried to kill himself. The "The Reason You Suck" Speech they get back borrows extensively from Adrien's Despair Speech in the other story.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Juleka calls her brother and Marinette out on this in the third chapter. The fact that they watched Adrien be reduced to poverty and convicted of aiding in terrorism in the court of public opinion, but settled for tracking down Lila and scaring her to prevent her from targeting anyone else showed that they cared more about punishing the boy who abetted the bullying and thefts than in stopping said bully and thief.
  • Doubling as Dramatically Missing the Point, near the end, Marinette sets out on retrieving the Miracle Box and the stolen items from Lila. However, she wants to do this just so that she can get Adrien to forgive her, which the rest of the new heroes call her out on.
  • Played for Drama. After hearing of Adrien's attempted suicide, all Gabriel can think of is "Poor Emilie." Marinette is absolutely horrified by his utter Lack of Empathy towards his own son. Emilie isn't amused either, and promptly divorces him as soon as she learns of this. It's this that finally sends him over the Despair Event Horizon.
• Stupid Evil: In the end, what brings Lila down is her obsession with people worshiping her. She has fifty million Euros, she has the powers of the Miraculous, and she just walks into a different school with the same song and dance. She had the bad luck of running into a girl who won't take being put in the same position as Marinette with the same grace.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The last girl bullied by Lila Rossi, who had her life completely destroyed and was already looking at a prison sentence, really went to town on her when she could get revenge — Lila's mother describes that she stabbed Lila approximately a hundred times before the police pulled her away.
• Threat Backfire: For the most part, this story happens because of one of these being the Butterfly of Doom: Marinette's decision to deal with Lila in the final chapters of The Karma of Lies was to create a Paranoia Gambit. Lila then decides, not to just accept she walked away with a lot of money and the freedom to enjoy it, but rather to scheme Marinette's destruction.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Despite all the tragedy of the events preceding it, Adrien ends the story on a high note: he makes a full recovery from his coma, his name is cleared, he reunites with his mother, is forgiven by the rest of the old class, and ultimately gets a second chance at life.
• Time-Traveling Jerkass: One of the first things Lila does after stealing the Miraculous Box is using the Rabbit Miraculous to travel back in time and secretly record videos of Marinette mistreating Adrien, which she then releases on the present-day Internet. This destroys Marinette in two ways: more ammunition for the court of public opinion, and the Miraculous Order is outright enraged over how much she screwed up her role as a Guardian.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In the year between Karma of Lies and this tale, Marinette developed a streak of entitlement. Luka also became slightly more of a jerk.
• Tragedy: In a classical sense, the story is this, following Marinette ultimately losing everything thanks to her own vindictiveness and hypocrisy.
• Unperson: The story ends with Adrien and his mother Emilie renouncing their family names and leaving France to try to forge a new life elsewhere.
• Vengeance Denied: After Lila steals the Miracle Box, Marinette decides to get her back for it (and hopefully regain her good name). The amount of time Marinette had to postpone her search because of the messes her karmic backfire piled on her was long enough for Lila to master the Miraculous, leading to her inflicting a Curb-Stomp Battle on Marinette when she arrives to her apartment in Switzerland and running away. The next time anybody in Paris hears of her, it's a notification she was murdered, which becomes a footnote in the tragedy of Marinette's downfall.
• Villain Has a Point: During the confrontation between Lila and Marinette over the Miracle Box theft in chapter 6, the former goes on a vicious "The Reason You Suck" Speech that points out that Marinette is just as bad a liar as she is, considering that the latter let Adrien take the fall and be framed as a terrorist accomplice, and she's not safe from Laser-Guided Karma herself, making it abundantly clear that she let Adrian shoulder all the bad karma and be miserable for the rest of his days, all for the sake of petty vengeance. Gabriel also calls her out on the whole situation with Adrien, making it abundantly clear that no matter if he lives or dies, Marinette is a murderer (or at least an attempted murderer).
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: One point made throughout the fic is that while Marinette might not have been obligated as a civilian to help Adrien get his money back, as a superhero, it absolutely was her obligation to stop Lila from getting away from embezzlement.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: Chloé’s increase in kindness becomes collateral damage to Marinette's downfall. The bullying because she is an ally of Marinette first puts her back in her original levels of bitchiness and finally completely shatters her mind, with her father having to put her in a mental hospital.

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