Miraculous Ladybug: The Children’s TV Show You Must Watch Next
Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir, also known shorthand as Miraculous Ladybug or just Miraculous, is a French cartoon CGI show about two high schoolers who transform into their superhero personas (the animal-inspired Ladybug and Cat Noir) and use magical powers to fight crime. It’s also if you haven’t deduced already, a show targeted towards children, first airing on Nickelodeon and then Disney. Yet, at this time of writing, the hashtags #miraculous and #miraculousladybug have respectively 22.4 billion and 13.8 billion views on TikTok. So just why is it that this children’s cartoon has proven so popular amongst teenagers and young adults today?
My 16-year-old sister first suggested Miraculous Ladybug to me when I was drifting through pandemic-originated ennui and I, for lack of a better option, hesitatingly decided to give it a watch. I liked season one enough to get through it, season two really started to suck me in, and by the end of season three, I’d become a die-hard fan. In my opinion, even though Miraculous is aimed towards children, the overarching plot, romance and character dynamics are excellently written and the major draw for older fans.
Most of the episodes on the show are anthological in nature, showcasing a more villain-of-the-day type vibe with a plot that is resolved in the same episode, similar to other children’s shows such as Totally Spies (which Miraculous creator Thomas Astruc also worked on) and Scooby-Doo. The main characters are two Parisian teenagers—half-French and half-Chinese Marinette Dupain-Cheng, the clumsy but likable daughter of two bakery owners who one day aspires to become a fashion designer, and Adrien Agreste, a teenage idol and supermodel, perfect and beloved by all, who is the son of the famous fashion designer Gabriel Agreste. Before season one begins, they are both unknowingly selected, based on their good deeds, to wield magical jewels named Miraculouses which transform them into superheroes and give them their powers. Once transformed, they must work together as a team to fight crime in Paris against their biggest nemesis, Hawk Moth, who has the power to villainize (called “akumatize” in the show) any person he chooses. There is one catch—for their personal safety, neither superhero can know the real identity of the other, which is the basis for arguably the biggest tension point on the show.
Miraculous Ladybug is pretty formulaic in the first season—an ordinary Parisian is slighted in some measure, such as rejected by a romantic interest, and while upset, are akumatized and controlled by Hawk Moth, whose overarching goal is to use these villains to steal Ladybug and Cat Noir’s Miraculouses and, subsequently, their powers. Beyond these one-dimensional episodes, season one serves to establish the character backstories of the show.
However, if you can get through the structural predictability and repetitiveness of season one, you’ll find that season two takes things up a notch. By this point, Astruc and Jeremy Zag—the other developer of Miraculous—had noticed that their show was gaining popularity in an older demographic and started to ramp up the storyline and the stakes more. In seasons two and three, many developments are revealed, particularly about the main villain, Hawk Moth, and his motives, as well as the origins behind the mysterious jewels, which we’ll get into later.
At the core of the show lies the tension of the relationship between the two main characters, Marinette and Adrien, who are friends and classmates at the same high school. Outside of school, they don their superhero personas as Ladybug and Cat Noir, with neither knowing the identity of the other behind the mask. In real life, Marinette or Ladybug loves Adrien, and she obsesses over him on the show to the point of tracking him down just so she can fake-stumble into him. Adrien, as both himself and Cat Noir, loves Ladybug, his superhero teammate whose identity he tries but fails to uncover during the show. Cat Noir tries to make the moves on Ladybug several times during their missions, only to be rejected wholeheartedly, while Marinette is similarly friendzoned by Adrien. This relationship, known as the Love Square, is the main heart of the show and behind many plot tangles, with many fans predicting that in season four, it will completely flip, with Adrien/Cat Noir loving Marinette and Marinette/Ladybug loving Cat Noir. The show has teased a relationship between the two many times, most notably in the episodes Oblivio, where Marinette and Adrien, who have had their memories erased, realize they are deeply in love with each other right before having their memories wiped again, and Cat Blanc, which deals with an alternate reality in which Marinette and Adrien, having been allowed to find out each other’s secret identity and to fall in love, unintentionally destroy the world. For now, though, at the end of season three, Marinette and Adrien are currently with their respective other semi-love interests, a musician named Luka and a competitive fencer named Kagami.
Another interesting facet of the show deals with Hawk Moth, the main supervillain who Marinette and Adrien have faced in all three seasons (and tv specials) thus far. While it’s unusual that the show has kept the same supervillain during its entirety, they’ve created enough backstory, motivations, and development to keep the character of Hawk Moth interesting. At the beginning of season two, Hawk Moth is revealed to be (spoiler alert!) Gabriel Agreste, Adrien’s reclusive and renowned fashion designer father. Obviously, Hawk Moth’s personal relationship and proximity to one of the main characters is a huge point of intrigue (and neither father nor son has any idea of the other’s alter ego). It’s also revealed that Emilie, Adrien’s famous actress mother, once had a Miraculous and superpowers of her own and isn’t actually dead, as Adrien and everybody else believes, but secretly kept beneath her husband’s mansion in a coma, for reasons we are yet to discover. Gabriel’s—Hawk Moth’s—entire reasoning behind wanting to steal the Miraculouses of Ladybug and Cat Noir are so that he can wield enough power to make his deepest wish come true, to waken his wife from her coma.
Complicated, no? Gabriel also has a stony assistant, Natalie, who is madly in love with him, and willing to risk herself to help him in his mission to save his wife. She allows Gabriel to akumatize her repeatedly and even dons Emilie’s damaged Miraculous—which deteriorates her health each time—in order to help him capture the Miraculouses of Ladybug and Cat Noir.
The show also delves into the mysterious origins behind the Miraculouses, lending an extra dimension of fantasy and mysticism to the plot. Each Miraculous has a kwami living in it, a tiny, magical, animated being which gives the jewel its powers and also acts as a friend or sidekick to the Miraculous wearer. Marinette’s kwami is named Tikki, an adorable ladybug creature with a sweet tooth, while Adrien’s kwami is a little black cat named Plagg, who has a penchant for mischief and camembert cheese. The magical Miraculouses also have guardians, who’ve protected them since they were created at the beginning of time. At the start of the show, Master Fu, an ancient, wise, Chinese man, is the last known surviving Miraculous guardian and also the one to choose Marinette and Adrien based on their kind actions. It’s later revealed that in his youth, Master Fu inadvertently created the great catastrophe that would cause the disappearance of the other Guardians and other Miraculouses.
Finally, Miraculous Ladybug makes excellent use of the side characters, with each of the other classmates’ distinct personalities being allowed to shine. Many interesting characters are introduced, such as Gabriel Agreste’s mysterious and love blind assistant Natalie, the love-to-hate-them characters of Luka and Kagami, the semi-boyfriend and girlfriend of Marinette and Adrien respectively, and Lila, a truly heinous and compulsive liar classmate of the main characters. Lila forms an alliance with Gabriel Agreste at the detriment of Ladybug and Cat Noir purely for her own selfish motivations and chooses to become willingly akumatized by Hawk Moth to get revenge on the other characters. Adrien and Marinette’s friends—Alya, Nino, Kagami, Luka, Alyx, Max, Chloé and Kim, among others—also become temporary heroes and Miraculous wearers when more help is needed.
One of the most interesting and biggest redemption arcs surrounds resident mean girl Chloé Bourgeois, who is introduced as a selfish, bossy and arrogant character who always gets what she wants through any means possible (although, compared to Lila’s evilness, Chloé is child’s play). In season one, Chloé contributed to many of the villains becoming akumatized through upsetting their feelings. In season two, however, more development is given to Chloé, and she begins to grow as a character, even admitting fault for the first time and asking for forgiveness. The basis of her selfishness and inferiority complex is revealed in the form of her degrading, demanding mother, who neglects Chloé and abandoned her at an early age to focus on her career as a famous fashion editor. In her latest attempt to seek her mother’s approval, Chloé very publicly becomes the superhero Queen Bee after stealing a Miraculous from Marinette. However, Hawk Moth is able to use Chloé’s identity as Queen Bee against her, forcing Marinette to stop including Chloé in all future missions. Chloé’s growing resentment towards Ladybug at being left out (and her fear of being neglected) leads eventually to her working together with Hawk Moth as a villain in the season 3 finale. Despite her damnation arc, I have high hopes for this character, and really wish for Astruc and Zag to find a way to somehow redeem her once again.
Despite being originally billed as a children’s tv show, Miraculous Ladybug has some of the most clever and well-written storylines, character arcs, and romance, leading to a surprising gain in an older fanbase. I’ll be eagerly awaiting season four of this show to drop on Disney+ any day now, but in the meantime, you can find the first three seasons and Christmas special on Netflix, and the two most recent tv specials on Disney+ here and here.
