Episode 5 - Mayura 2

This song for this episode, Wings of a Butterfly by H.I.M., is very on the nose, but when I first picked it I was actually thinking about using it to make a fan-video cut of Nathalie in Season 5 of the show, as she slowly turns on Gabriel.

Anniversary trip

I don’t like glossing over the fact that the core throuple of Miraculous: Contingency just had a three-week vacation, visiting three distant cities, but it wouldn’t be particularly thrilling reading. The trouble with writing a superhero story is that it’s hard to get away with a whole episode just being sweet following the love story. I’ve done it a bit, but there’s always something to balance it out.

One thing I like about the Marinette-telling-Alya narrative is that I get to canonise Fei from Miraculous: Shanghai, which was my favourite of the four specials at time of typing. I might come back to meet her with the Prodigious at a later point, but for now we’ll just have to accept that she’s been taken on as an apprentice at Marinette’s uncle’s restaurant.

We also get the first confirmation to the Core team that language learning is being boosted by Miraculous ownership now. This will be significant later on.

Félix and Amelie

As we’ve covered before, Félix never appeared in the original draft of Miraculous: Contingency and bringing him in had some complications. But the brief appearance in this episode teases the truth about him, and his fear of a repaired Peafowl Miraculous. I wanted to make it clear that there’s a part of him which regrets not making a deal with Gabriel, the way he did in the show.

Félix is an interesting character. Despite his hero turn in the show, he’s still right on the cusp of becoming a villain. We see a touch of that here, when he lies to Adrien and Plagg about being alone, while Amelie is listening at the door, and of course he could just tell Chat Noir he knows who Papillon really is. On the other hand, you can see a touch of goodness, with how defensive he is about Adrien – given what happened to him as a child, he wants to make sure that Adrien and Kagami never feel less than human. His promise that, even if Mayura is back, he would risk coming back to Paris if Adrien found out the truth is the heart of him here.

Marinette and Kagami

This sequence was interesting. I wanted there to be a little tension between them for once – I am aware that I’ve pretty much set their relationship up and had it go smoothly ever since, but that is the long-term goal anyway. Still, having this brief awkwardness shows that it’s not perfect. Kagami needs some time to rest and have her ice-cream, Marinette is tired and has to go deal with both Max and Mayura on the little sleep she’s had. No wonder there was a little tension.

Max

This part is where we finally get a bit of an answer about how the secrecy magic is working. Kaalki and Tikki have more or less worked it out, because being Miraculous is much more integrated it’s easier to identify them. The protection still works a little, you have to be able to logically work out the truth and if something distracts you, you’ll lose all your progress. Intention also plays a part – back in Renégadaire Alya worked out the truth, but remembered that she’d promised to stop, which blocked her from fully realising it. It wasn’t until she got that final bit of proof in Chamela that she couldn’t resist the answer anymore.

The simple truth here is that Max could easily have worked out every single member of the Miraculous team by now, if he’d decided to. Being Pegasus and being aware of the requirement for secrecy meant that he chose not to think about it too closely until now. We also get another glimpse of his friendship with Chloé, a joke I couldn’t resist about Gojira films, and the beginning of a big moment, when Kaalki permanently stays with Max.

The last bit here is the stretching of the age limit thing. This kinda leans into the way Toxinelle and Griffe Noire (Shadybug and Claw Noir) could use their powers multiple times, but without the damage to their human bodies – in the show we’ve only seen the Miraculous get through the age limit by “growing up” in a dramatic fashion. As that hasn’t happened for anyone (except Chloé, after New York, but no-one’s noticed that, not even her) in Miraculous: Contingency, I figured I’d explore a slightly different way of handling this shift. After all, magical effects don’t have to be perfectly synchronised with arbitrary markers of maturity.

For reference; Max has just turned 17 around now (I’ve worked out specific birthdays for all the major characters in Miraculous: Contingency with the explanation that the split in the timeline is what caused a few birthdays to get bounced around) so he’s only got approximately a year to go before he’s fully free to Voyage without waiting.

Mayura

One of the biggest changes I’ve had to make to the powers of the Miraculous was this. By repairing Duusu’s Brooch, and transforming, the repair has effectively applied itself to Nathalie as well. In theory this would work on Émilie as well, but she’d need to be conscious enough to transform, which they can’t guarantee at this point.

With the parasitic personalities constantly pressuring Nathalie, Mayura is very different now. She’s slightly more aggressive, and more gleeful in her attacks. She nearly gets Chat Noir’s Ring at this point, and it took Pegasus pushing himself to the limit to prevent that. But what you can see from how she behaves once Papillon is in danger, her primary focus is still Gabriel’s safety and eventual victory.

Gabriel, Nathalie, and Adrien

Adrien deserves better than these two parent figures but, for the moment, they’re all he’s got. I don’t blame him for being happy that Nathalie has returned. She’s been a part of his life as long as he can remember and, before Papillon, she was a good stepmother figure. Gabriel has no excuse and, unlike the show’s version, he’s not even putting a token effort in.