Episode 3 - Chamela 2

It’s sometimes hard to pick songs for Lila episodes, but this one dropped into my head just because of the title. Devoid of Caring by Insomnium. Insomnium are an awesome death metal band from Finland. Earlier this year, they were the first death metal band I ever saw live, which was an eye-opening experience for me.

Timeskips

The timeframe for Miraculous: Contingency has been difficult. The first draft was incredibly vague and seemed to require most of Season 2 happening in the space of a week. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve really tried to hone in on the time when I did the second draft. What that means is that Season 1 takes place over six months, Season 2 over nine, and Season 3 is over a year-and-a-quarter. Most of that is just by skipping between different episodes. There’s a four month jump from Grendel to Chamela 2.

After School Thoughts

The scene in the school library with everyone looking at options for once they leave school was in the first draft, but Lila was a lot less subtle in it. One major change was that in the first draft, Alya hadn’t had her eyes opened to Lila’s darker side. I liked how this new version of the sequence establishes that Marinette, Adrien, and Kagami are now more relaxed about people knowing, with the rest of the class running interference to support them.

Because of how Miraculous: Contingency has always been planned meant that I didn’t need to know for sure what the characters would be doing after school, but it was something that I wanted to have an idea about, because it would affect their journeys. One thing I decided quite early was that Marinette was getting disillusioned with doing fashion as a career. I still want her to pursue it as a hobby, but there are other options available for her. I can really relate to the indecision Marinette goes through in this episode. When I was at school, the idea of what I wanted to do for the rest of my life was completely unfathomable to me.

The change I made in Grendel, revealing the truth on screen, made this scene a little easier, because I’ve firmly established that all four of Marinette, Adrien, Alya, & Nino know each other.

Lila/Chamela

Lila is making some mistakes at the moment, in that she’s relying on out-of-date information to pressure Ladybug and Chat Noir. In the original draft, that was a massive plot hole, so I’ve tried to cover it in the re-write. Up until this point, she was confident that Marinette and Adrien were both suffering without anyone knowing their secrets, and that Marinette was still unrequited for Adrien. She would definitely have corrected that knowledge after this episode if it wasn’t for one thing she learned here.

After Dakukani, Aodh persuaded Lila that Rena Rouge had already taken Caarcon back from him (I covered a bit of this in the short episode Heikegana’s Escape). When it’s clear that Ladybug thinks that Aodh gave Caarcon back to Chamela after that episode, it reveals to Lila not only that Aodh still has a Miraculous, but that he also knows about her secret identity. One of Lila’s defining characteristics is confidence so strong that it borders on arrogance. Once she learned about Heikegana, she chose to rely on her previous research on Marinette and Adrien, assuming that they aren’t smart enough to have got better since she stopped watching.

To be honest, I really like how manipulative and cunning I’ve made Chamela in this episode. Ignoring the mistake she’s made, she’s actually operating perfectly with the information she has. If Marinette and Adrien (& Kagami) weren’t together, if she didn’t have other people to talk to about being a Miraculous, this effort to deceive Ladybug about Chamela’s true intentions would definitely have worked.

I also like how she briefly loses control and nearly wrecks her whole plan by revealing Chat Noir’s identity. An important feature of Lila is that she learns from her mistakes (like an evil Tony Stark) and, now that she’s lost her temper once, she’ll keep her emotions under much better control from now on. This sequence (at least to me) shows how she is still a human, just an efficient and immoral one.

Lila is my editor’s favourite character, which is frankly alarming to me (mostly kidding, Lee). He’s said that she feels like the most nuanced character in the story and that I don’t let my dislike for the character affect how she appears in the story. It’s worth noting that most of the sections following Lila are going from her point of view, so obviously her self-regard shows through in those, but I actually nearly convinced Marinette and Adrien that she was trying to turn over a new leaf as well, so those sequences are a little kinder as well. That all said – I really don’t like Lila. She’s definitely scarier as a villain than Papillon is – Chrysalis in the show is becoming genuinely terrifying.

When Lila declared war on Monarch at the end of Season 5 of the show, it was another moment of wondering if they were somehow in my head. Lila finding out Papillon’s identity was necessary in both stories, it was just odd how we independently landed on it. Here, Lila is convinced she can manipulate Gabriel until she’s ready to make her move. As we’ll learn in Chlophidian, Lila has miscalculated but, in her defence, that’s because she didn’t know just how much Gabriel is losing his mind now.

Gabriel/Papillon

Gabriel’s descent into a haggard mess in this episode was new in the second draft. Originally, he just saw the news, got angry, and transformed. I really wanted to get across firstly, that time has passed and, secondly, that without Nathalie, his world is crumbling. I’m sure with time he’d be able to put himself back on track, but It would take time. The simple solution would, of course, be to stop being a supervillain and get some counselling for the loss of his wife, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen.

The moment when Ladybug pins Papillon and immediately reaches for his Miraculous was added in direct response to a moment I really disliked in Season 5 of the show – where Ladybug and Chat Noir have Monarch pinned with all the Miraculous on him and the sly old dog got them monologuing. I get that they are fourteen years old and everyone makes mistakes when they’re fourteen, but seriously. Chat Noir got right up in Monarch’s grill and couldn’t at least snatch Kaalki’s Glasses from him?

The way Papillon got out of that moment in this episode is one of the fundamental issues with superheroes in any medium. We all know Ladybug can repair everything after the fact, and what’s one helicopter vs. finally bringing down Papillon once and for all. But heroes set themselves up with a code, which any villain worth their salt can exploit. Without trying to toot my own horn too much, I am kinda trying to evoke a few moments from Discworld – where people often point out the issue with being a hero, saving one person at the cost of thousands, although with much more nuance – and the dichotomy between Avatar: the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. There was a Tumblr post I saw once which said that Avatar is about a human being learning to be the Avatar, and LoK is about the Avatar learning to be a human being.

At this point, Ladybug and Chat Noir are still in the ‘learning to be the Avatar’ stage, even though they’ve been doing this for a while. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever have the guts to make them really have to make the hard choice, but there’s a later phase of the story which it might come up in.