Why don’t we start the list of Posthuman texts outside of my comfort zone? Usually, I prefer to philosophize on universal themes or ideas that I can at least talk extensively on, if not personally relate to. Hence, “comfort zone.” But that sort of thinking puts up limits and boundaries in human intellectual connection, keeping my realm of expertise cradled in a tightly-wound basket. It limits my audience, in other words, and that’s no good as a creator. Since we’re about rewriting posthumanism through loss here, I’m going to lose my inhibitions; we’re going to talk about sexuality in a children’s show.
Yeah. I didn’t say this would be within your comfort zone, either.
Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir is a CGI animated superhero show produced by three different studios from three different countries: Zagtoon in France, Toei Animation in Japan, and SAMG Animation in Korea. It’s the story, as these superhero wish-fulfillment shows tend to be, about a teenager with magical superpowers who fights evildoers while also keeping her identity secret. Basic stuff, not too nuanced. What you wouldn’t know from that synopsis, though, is that the main draw of the show is not in the superhero-ing, or the villains, or the lore of the magical mystery items that provide the main character with powers. All of that is as inherently interesting as our superhero-obsessed culture can find it, but the main draw of the show lies in the second genre Miraculous falls under: romantic comedy.
The protagonist, possessor of the Miraculous that enables her to become Paris’ lucky-charm superhero, is Marinette Dupain-Cheng. Marinette is your average girl, except she is above-average when being clumsy and awkward around her idyllic crush, Adrien Agreste. Little does she know that Adrien is actually the secret identity of her partner in fighting crime, another Miraculous-wielder who goes by the name “Cat Noir.” When they fight together, the roles are reversed; he is flirtatiously in love with Ladybug, while she playfully blows him off at every turn. It’s a purely innocent and sweet relationship for kids to watch, except when parents read a little too much into Marinette’s obsession.
But why is my complicated plot synopsis essential for understanding sexuality in Miraculous? This ironic love rhombus, paired with the fact that the “villain of the week” is always someone turned evil against their will after they have had their feelings hurt or dreams crushed, helps the romantic-comedy genre rise above the superhero genre. Though sporting some of the best 3D choreographed scenes I’ve ever seen on TV, the fights and villain plots are outdone by the relationship plots. In other words, this is a humanist show, one about love, friends, and human connections in general. There isn’t really anything Posthuman about Miraculous, as it’s primarily a children’s show and meant to entertain above all else.
But then the 2nd season came around, and the writers upped their game to appease their growing teenage and young-adult audience. This meant less episodic storylines, focusing on progress in Marinette and Adrien’s (and likewise Ladybug and Cat Noir’s) relationship, even crossing between the two so that Ladybug could have development with Adrien and Cat Noir could spend time with Marinette. But complex storytelling also calls for complex themes; iven France’s cultural tilt and the older audience’s fads, we are treated to a few moments of progressive push.
Normally, that would annoy me. But not here. Miraculous does it right.
Meet Marc. Marc is a character who didn’t exist until Season 2, Episode 21. I thought Marc was a girl at first glance; his face and voice are rather feminine. He has a far brighter shade of coloring in his lips compared to all the other character models in the show, even among some of the girls. He wears a boy’s hoodie but a girl’s t-shirt. He wears a choker and fingerless gloves, painting his nails black. And, if that’s not enough, his last name, Anciel, is actually wordplay on the French word for rainbow: “Arc en ciel.” He is, on the surface and down to his very core, a plug for the LGBT community. In a kid’s show. Not such a rare or confrontational concept anymore, if I’m being honest.
Nevertheless, I would have issues with depictions of sexuality in any show directed at children, period. The main protagonists get away with it, as they so often do, because eight-year-olds do not associate a crush with sexual feelings until much later in life, but associate male and female pairings directly with the very understanding of love (though social media is chipping away with a jackahammer at this innocence). Heck, I still don’t associate the two together; there’s a difference between pining for sex and pining for affection. But the creators of Miraculous seem to have the same feeling, as Marc’s sexuality is never even brought up. Until I did research and discovered that the show’s primary writer, Thomas Astruc, apparently said in a comic-con interview that there would be more diverse characters, including those of sexual persuasions, I actually couldn’t tell if that’s what Marc here was supposed to represent.
But his story makes it pretty obvious.
Marc is our villain of the week. By virtue of the shows formula, we know this right from the get-go. It all happens because of a misunderstanding: Marc is too shy to approach a classmate he respects very very much, Nathaniel, and angers Nathaniel through his poor attempts at connecting with him to so some intimate work. Nathaniel then erupts at Marc for the wrong reasons, and Marc, heart broken, is “akumatized” by the show’s chief villain, Hawk Moth.
That’s the plot. Sounds very “homosexual kid gets ridiculed for coming out of the closet,” doesn’t it? But sexuality has nothing to do with it. Nor does finding one’s identity, struggling with romantic feelings, or even a single display of affection beyond respect and friendship. Marc’s chief goal, you see, is to work as a writer with Nathaniel, a proficient comic book artist, on a comic tribute to Ladybug. Nathaniel, misinterpreting Marc’s sheepish and roundabout advances as ridicule directed at his love for Ladybug (and the fact that he had already been akumatized in an earlier episode), blows up in Marc’s face. Therefore, sexuality is not a problem, because it is never addressed as being important to Marc or even in his character’s head.
And yet, somehow, we are aware that he is representative of the closet homosexual. His struggle is one we’ve seen time and time again, with more direct reference, in other mediums. Even his Akumatized form, Reverser, is almost synonymous with conversion therapy, in which he can reverse the natural state of anyone he hits with his origami airplanes. Miraculous approaches core issues with a symbolic lens, meaning that the life lessons are encouraged without actually touching upon the subject. But, me-oh-my, how can subtlety be expected to help the LGBT community in Popular Culture? That answer can be analyzed through a little competition between ontology and epistemology, and their representations on the screen.
Take a look at these photos from a Disney Channel Show, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, in its episode “Love Sentence”:
Yes, we’ve got what are considered our first homosexual smooches in a children’s animated cartoon. It’s in the background, so it’s not very prominent, but the show received both heat and praise for what it did, the brave steps it took.
I respectfully do not agree.
There is a difference between Miraculous and Star vs. the Forces of Evil. That difference is in their presentation of love. For Marinette and Adrien, neither really know how to process the feeling, or even understand it is the right feeling at all. Love is depicted as a bond, a connection, that two people share when they feel like being more than friends, but in a different way than best friends. It’s almost closer to admiration, actually, or idolization.
Star vs. the Forces of Evil stars Star and Marco, who also have to deal with feelings they don’t understand. However, it is much more complex and prominent here, and a kiss, while a big thing, is not a rare thing, and not always with the necessary scenario set-up of loving interaction. In other words, the kiss becomes a social construct that is the result of animalistic impulse, and disassociated with the feeling or mindset of love. Or, at least, with what a child’s conception of the feeling/mindset of love is.
Perhaps I read too far into this show. But where Star vs. the Forces of Evil takes a less avoidable misstep in presentation (though the fact that the theme of the boy band in the episode is prison related, which is a rather embarrassing coincidence), there is another show that is even worse.
Nickelodeon’s Loud House is that show:
Loud House features a gay, bi-racial couple; two diverse birds with one progressive stone, basically. The interaction between the married characters at first glance doesn’t seem to be problematic. But, as we were saying earlier, the war is between epistemology and ontology; the study of knowing (represented by humanism) and the study of being (represented by posthumanism). It is the little animated touches, the vocal inflections, the fact that the main character opens the door with the line “Time to make history!” is the big indicator to children that these two characters are in the same position as your mother and father. And what do children think at seeing that?
Or, considering “Maturana’s work on reflexivity in sensory processing and Varela’s on the dynamics of autonomous biological systems” and how “the two authors expanded the reflexive turm into a fully articulated epistemology that sees the world as a set of informationally closed systems” where “Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self-organization” and “their one and only goal is continually to produce and reproduce the organization that defines them as systems,” how do you think they’ll react (Hayles 10)?
“That’s weird.”
Yes, most likely, children are going to find it weird, and almost averse. You thought I was going to get on to the shows for depicting homosexuality? That is a problem, as I have stated, but the bottom line is that this hurts the LGBT community above all others. What you have is children being told to know something: that two same-sex spouses or same-sex kisses are normal. But, chances are, those are not normal to children. And this will not make it normal to them, by any stretch, because their immediate reality does not depict it as such. So, what to do? Instruct kids in school just how normal it is? No, because then you isolate the parents, who fire back for control of their children’s minds. The humanistic epistemological approach is a failure.
And so one must lose sexuality from the whole depiction of the LGBT individual. The Popular Culture ought to focus on their ontology, their state of being apart from their sexuality, and how that transfers into media. The reason Marc works is because we do not explicitly know his sexuality; children, therefore, look at him as a character operating on his own agency. Yes, there are stereotypes, as I listed at the beginning, but stereotypes exist because they are true in some form or fashion. By focusing on the simple state of being of the character (all that really young children can process, anyway), not knowing everything about them, they become part of the show’s world, and consequently the child’s reality.
Marc’s example is an example of how the ontological approach, and the loss of knowledge, is a posthuman step forward for the LGBT community in media depictions. Sure, it waters down identity, but children aren’t at that point yet of caring beyond their immediate experience. Instead, if they see someone who acts like Marc, shows similarities in some form or fashion, no prior knowledge is questioned. They accept them as part of their reality, just as Marc is accepted as part of Miraculous’ reality.
In other words, as far as the nature of being homosexual is concerned outside of the sexuality itself, the characteristics of those prescribing to it are now normalized. And, you know, sometimes small steps like these are all you can ask of kids if you want something done right. Especially when the adults are looking over their shoulders.
You can check out Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir on Netflix.
Works Cited: Hayles, N. Katherine. “Prologue” and “Toward Embodied Virtuality.” How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1999. xi-24
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