Episode 3 - Renégadaire

Under Ice by Kate Bush is a much more metaphorical song choice for this episode. From now on The Gorilla is going to become a much more important character in the narrative, because of how trapped he feels between his obligations to Adrien and the pressure of knowing Gabriel and Nathalie’s secret.

Renégadaire

When I first came up with this name, it was by mashing together two French words. One was the word for ‘renegade’ renégate, but I can’t remember what the second was. I’ve always imagined him looking like a combination of characters from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – there was Dampé the gravedigger, for how he moved, the Poe Collector for the hooded appearance, and the absolutely terrifying Dead Hand miniboss: when it attacked it looked like it was being pulled along by its head.

Renégadaire punishes everyone who imagines that they’ve broken confidence. As it says in the narrative, the Akuma can’t read people’s minds, it can just sense when they feel guilty. Technically, I think Lila is completely safe from this Akuma as she doesn’t feel like she’s done anything wrong in pursuit of her goals.

Luka and Danyll

This was first introduced in The Maelstrom: Part 2, and Dany (as Korvid) was flirting with Luka/Viperion from the day they met, but here is where their relationship actually starts. Originally, they didn’t have any appearance in this episode; like Chloé and Maria in the previous episode, in earlier drafts the two of them were already a couple. Now we’ve had several months for them to actually start dating, so I needed to show it appearing. Originally, I had a bunch of cameos from characters who I hadn’t introduced to Miraculous: Contingency before, and it didn’t flow very well, so replacing those cameos with an actual side-plot development was a much better choice.

The Gorilla

Technically, we only learned the Gorilla’s real name is Placide I.T. from the Miraculous Secrets trading card game. That’s why, in this episode (and his first appearance in Miraculous: Contingency) I’ve established that he actually quite likes Adrien’s nickname for him.

This is another case where I made a spur of the moment decision while writing the first draft of the episode, which then changed the entire direction of the rest of the story. I came up with the idea of the Gorilla learning about Papillon and Nathalie on the fly, and as a result he started becoming a stronger ally for Adrien. Over the following three seasons of Miraculous: Contingency the Gorilla’s protection helps keep Adrien safer, and also massively reduces the number of Akumas being drawn from Adrien’s friends.

I chose to let him speak, despite his permanent silence in the show, because Adrien deserves a supportive father figure. He doesn’t speak very often, but when he does, it’s important.

Nathalie’s new situation

I mean, in the show Nathalie was suffering enough, dying because she tried to protect Papillon. Now this version of Nathalie has something far more insidious happening to her. In the first draft, I was very vague on what was actually happening, to the point that it may as well not have happened in the first place. When I got to the re-write of this episode, I decided to make it much clearer what is happening.

Nathalie doesn’t have dissociative identity disorder, that’s not what’s happening here. The personalities of the Akumas have been cloned and blended with Nathalie’s own personality, but they are separate entities which parasitise off of Nathalie, rather than being a part of Nathalie’s mind. The additional knowledge of the parasite personalities can help Nathalie out, but it’s not necessarily safe. For example, in this episode when Anansi-Nathalie makes her first appearance, she pushes Nathalie’s body to get up and chase the Gorilla, despite the fact that Nathalie’s body was injured and needed to rest.

In total, Nathalie now has nine hitch-hiking parasites. We’ll get introduced to some of them as the story goes on. As a secret hint; Anansi-Nathalie is only the first parasite that Gabriel has noticed, there was one very brief appearance before that.