Episode 9 - Dakukani

The main thing driving Dakukani as an Akuma was pure rage and Constant Motion by Dream Theater really gets that across for me. As someone who’s had anger issues in her youth (being undiagnosed and struggling with masking will do that to some people) the refrain of “Spinning round and round we go, I can’t let up, I can’t let go” really resonates with the frustration of failing no matter what you try, which is how I tied it to Dakukani in my mind.

Combat Episode

Like Firesaur and Big Monkey: Part 1 & 2 this double episode really had a split between setting up the events in Miracon and then throwing the fight together in Dakukani. I worry that sometimes this will get tedious, so in this episode I’ve tried to keep the pace up by having regular swaps to different points of view, as well as the little spacing moments looking in on Sabrina, Zoé, and Maria’s developing conversation.

Kagami and Chloé

I’ve always had these two paired up for this episode – although I scrubbed most of Animaestro from the Contingency timeline (because of the massive plothole, where the victim says he’s been working on the Ladybug movie for two years, when Marinette’s only supposed to have had the Earrings for a matter of months), the interaction between Chloé and Kagami really stuck with me. Chloé was genuinely intimidated by Kagami’s confidence and her ability to see straight through Chloé’s nonsense.

Therefore, in this timeline, where Chloé’s been trying really hard to do better, I felt like she’d still feel intimidated, because Kagami sort-of represents what Chloé thinks she can be – an influential, wealthy teen but one who is accepted as a friend by other people. For Kagami’s part, she’s witnessed Chloé’s improvement as a superhero, and she’ll have heard from Adrien and Marinette about how Chloé’s trying to get better (mostly from her attempt to stop people talking about Max’s sexuality).

Putting the two together just made sense to me, and Kagami’s no-nonsense advice flowed on from that. Originally Kagami said Chloé would be better if she learned a martial art, I’d forgotten just how good a fighter Queen Bee was. I actually got a reminder just as I’d started uploaded Season 2, just in time for me to hurriedly make a quick edit.

In the first draft, Papillon’s attack on them wasn’t quite as serious as it was in the final version. The Miraculous Ladybugs can fix what happened, but Papillon gave Chloé a pretty severe concussion (which would have been much worse if she hadn’t started moving) and broke Kagami’s rib. This isn’t explicitly mentioned in the text, because in general I try to stay at an equivalent age rating with the show, but the fact that he’s injured two teenage girls was intended to show just how far Papillon has fallen from his lofty goals.

It also allowed us to see the struggle Marinette will have now that she is in a relationship with someone in the firing line of her conflict with Papillon. I feel bad doing that to Kagami (and to Chloé) but sometimes an author doesn’t have complete control over what her characters are going to do.

Dakukani

The name was meant to be a google-translate Japanese for ‘dark crab,’ which one of my cousins worked out for me, but it doesn’t really work. We’ve seen an Akumatised Miraculous in the show before, with Queen Wasp, Rena Rage, and Shellshock getting stronger and using modified versions of their normal powers.

The Crab Miraculous’ power was unsubtly based on the Black Panther suit from the Marvel films. In an odd twist of fate, I finished writing the first draft of this episode the day that we learned Chadwick Boseman had died. I have trouble re-reading this episode without having a bittersweet memory of that link between the two events.

So, Aodh/Heikegana. I hadn’t originally planned to have someone else join the roster at this point, but it made sense for Papillon to start branching out. The idea of using someone tangentially linked to the Rogues already was originally something that Lila shared with Papillon, but that didn’t make sense, hence her helping him find a suitable target, but keeping secret about her reasons.

Aodh really pushed the story at a point when the momentum was starting to drop, plus it adds another uncontrollable variable to the perpetual back and forth. In the first draft I really tripped up and had everyone forget who Heikegana was under the mask, despite his quite public reveal. I fixed that in the second draft, as we’ll learn in Season 3, but at the moment, he’s successfully convinced both sides that the other side reclaimed the Miraculous of the Crab.

We’ll get to know more about Aodh (pronounced “A”) and Caarcon (pronounced car-sohn, to rhyme with “on”) in Season 3, but for now they are safely out of the country, allowing us to return to our regularly scheduled programming.