Miraculous Ladybug

Yeah, his younger self is meant to parallel Marinette in a similar way Norman Osborn mirrors Peter Parker.

I get the sense he was a kinder person but eventually grew colder and crueler even before his wife died as he got a taste of the rich lifestyle and let it go to his head.

It's really telling that he's a massive hypocrite when forbidding Adrien from dating Marinette on the grounds she's poor and therefore unfit to be with Adrien, when he came from her exact lifestyle and class before he married into wealth.

"Marinette is just a low-class baker girl" hasn't made sense since her world-class chef great-uncle showed up. Her parents run a bakery, but it's very clearly a prestigious bakery, well known as one of the best in Paris, that caters to the rich and powerful. And both parents come from individually prestigious chef families. Marinette's practically culinary royalty.

It helps that her parents seem to be the only bakers in Paris.

Gabriel clearly try to wrap up any mention of his humble pass, his whole rant about fashion have the tingle of what it clearly a sell out of sorts: he dosent make art just sell desires to the masses and clearly belive sucess is not having good ideas just marketing them.

Which hilariously, it sound like a tech bro would said in private.

Marinette is definitely middle class, the only person calling her poor is Chloe. She lives comfortably in a nice house and her parents can afford to give her spending money to go on outings and buy stuff she doesn't need. That doesn't mean that she's even remotely close to Adrien, Chloe and Kagami when it comes to wealth and status. It makes sense that an elitist snob like Gabriel wouldn't want his son to date her.

Gabriel seemed to like Marinette well enough in the earlier seasons. We don't really see that side of Gabriel until he makes whatever deal he does with Tomoe, who's always been depicted as a more hard-core parent than Gabriel.

Yeah, from his POV, Marinette is poor. Which just adds to Gabriel being hypocritical because he was from a lower class bakery judging from the photos.

I always liked the idea that Gabriel would be fond of Marinette and approve of Adrien dating her.

I love the irony, but the writers didn't keep that character bit.

I still haven't watched season 5, but it seemed to me Gabriel was not always consistent in how he treated Adrien and his relationship with his classmates, ranging from "overprotective parent with communication issues" to "supervillain having to remember he has a son". Mind you, the Senti-Adrien theory (has it actually been confirmed in the show?) could shed a new light on their relationship.

Yes, it's been confirmed.

Gabriel doesn't seem to have anything personal towards Marinette, I think he would probably respect or even like her if he wasn't dating his son.

@C105 considering that Gay Paree here is one of the largest and most iconic cities in the world, there is a level of absurdity to that statement

Not sure which statement you are referring to, but in any case the difference between Miraculous Paris and real world Paris never cease to amuse me. For starters, Paris in the Miraculous universe seems to count only 1000 inhabitants instead of 2 millions, and there seems to be very few people having the same job.

I generally got the impression that Gabriel would've disapproved of anyone Adrien chose to date that wasn't specifically someone he picked for Adrien (control freak and all), so he started coming up with rationales for why Marinette was supposedly unfit for him to justify it.

You know, the whole "dad is fine with child's friend until the two start dating, and then the friend becomes the scum of the Earth" thing.

the one claiming that the Ducheng's are seemingly the only bakery in Paris

Miraculous Paris is basically French Gotham. It has fewer crazy people and gothic architecture but they are both ridiculously corrupt, regularly menaced by supervillains, has a lot of millionaires involved in shady stuff and the rest of the country never intervenes and might as well not matter.

Gotham at lease has the advantage of not being a capital city IRL. You'd have to assume the government moved to somewhere like Orleans of smt with how irrelevant politics and legislature are in this setting and how no one bothers to gun for anything higher than the mayor

It's true the President of France is, I think, never mentioned once in the series. And the only other cities seem to be other capitals (or close to, in the case of New. York). The Miraculous world is really small.

I had read a negative review of the movie in a French newspaper that commented that Paris in this movie looked like an ad for American tourists. It's a bit mean, but there is some truth to it.

But seriously, everyone in this show is living in vast apartments inside Paris, which is the most expensive city to live in in France. There is no way a zoo keeper or a policeman could afford those, and a baker would probably have to supply half the city to be able to afford the Dupains' apartment.

And what amuses me the most is that Parisians have the (not entirely undeserved, though often exaggerated IMO) reputation of being constantly stressed and extremely rude. Hawkmoth would be instantly overwhelmed in real world Paris.

Edited by C105 on Jan 16th 2024 at 7:30:48 PM

Feels like the dude just sticks to like a few blocks from his house, honestly. Or does something around his son's vicinity.

Edited by Blueace on Jan 16th 2024 at 4:36:47 PM

Where are the creators based? I mean, France, obviously, but I mean are they actually from Paris? I feel like it would make more sense if the creators were from some small French city and just took some tours of Paris.

Astruc is from Paris.

But that happens. How many tv shows written by New Yorkers depict New York as a city composed entirely of Midtown and Downtown and nothing else, in which hip young protagonists can life in lavish apartments despite not appearing to have jobs?

Honestly it's really rare to see small apartments in a visual medium unless it is explicitly small. I know for live action it's partly due to the reality of a camera crew needing to set up in the space or on set, and I assume it's also for visual clutter reasons in an animated show.

That same review claimed that Zag lives in New York (I have no idea if that is true or not). Then again it was obvious whoever wrote it were not familiar with the show, or else they would not have commented on the characters' Paper-Thin Disguise.

Anyway, I understand why the show would want to use a simplified version of Paris, and on the whole it works well. But that also means we shouldn't expect a lot of other things to be realistic either.

Miraculous Ladybug isn't realistic and isn't really trying to be. It's not a Marvel/DC style Like Reality, Unless Noted, it's pretty different from our world in a number of ways and that includes some stuff that doesn't really make sense and I'm happy to not think about. The way Paris is depicted is one of those things.

I mean, for starter ladybug isnt a western superhero but a western magical girl, which probably should tip off people.

I will said for a while the show did seen very superheroic kinda "aside of supervillian, everything is as reallity" until season 2 and 3 were thing start to get wacky as hell, I will said the AI companion is probably the first sign that they will show weird stuff. By merica special, all bet were off.

As for Paris, some stuff clearly are because limitation(no way they cant show how crowded paris can get) other is probably to make it simple. Granted I feel for a french series, it can feel quite generic in how it show paris.

Well the various landmarks are rather faithfully reproduced (even if their relative locations are off) and not limited to the Eiffel Tower. On the other hand... the heroes are the daughter of a baker and the son of a fashion designer. I guess they refrained from using a wine seller because of the target audience.

Jeremy Zag posted a story with a teaser for a second movie on his Instagram:

Source: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyzag?igsh=MThjd3ZtZWI5a3Bybg==