tvtropes.org

Miraculous Ladybug - TV Tropes

  • ️Tue Jan 28 2020

While characters were still given this treatment beforehand, "Chameleon" seemed to open the floodgates in regards to characters getting the Ron the Death Eater treatment, so much so that "Salt Fics" that portray heroic characters as warped exaggerations of their worst canonical traits and Idiot Ball moments are their own genre.

  • Adrien/Cat Noir: Yes, canonically Adrien is somewhat insensitive, socially stunted, and an Extreme Doormat with moments of being an Entitled Bastard — all pretty typical for a somewhat naïve, heavily sheltered teenage boy trying to fit in with his friends while also dealing with being a hero. But he is not, as most "Salt Fics" will have you believe, a selfish asshole who bullies Marinette into accepting Chloé and Lila's treatment of her, and he doesn't think he's destined to get with Ladybug (he's more or less The Tease and has shown interest in other girls before), throw fits when she so much as glances at another guy, or completely disregard her feelings. He also doesn't disregard civilians during Akuma attacks.
  • Alya:
    • Canonically, Alya is Marinette's best friend and confidant, but her glaring oversights regarding Lila's Blatant Lies (made worse by her once saying "a good journalist always checks her sources," but failing to do the most basic of research regarding Lila's statements) has led many fan writers to turn her into Lila's Beta Bitch who happily follows her every falsehood, with the only nod to Alya and Marinette's canonical friendship is Alya being deluded into thinking she retains it after siding with Lila over everything. If she's lucky, she'll get a Heel Realization when Lila finally overreaches... and if she's really lucky, she'll have it before she's completely burned all her bridges and trashed her reputation by listening to Lila. If she's unlucky, she'll leap off the slippery slope with such eagerness that even Lila herself will be shocked, and readers will wonder how Marinette ever became friends with such a manipulative, self-righteous, toxic sociopath in the first place.
    • Alternatively, Alya's desire to help Marinette hook up with her crush is transformed into her becoming a Shipper on Deck who doesn't care one whit about Marinette's agency. It doesn't help that canon has given her moments of ignoring Marinette wanting to take things slower and focus on befriending Adrien first, even physically restraining her. This gets exaggerated into Alya being an outright Control Freak who only wants to see her ships sail.
  • Nino: He's much less likely to be demonized than the girls, but he does the occasional time as Alya's unquestioning follower and another member of the Lila pack.
  • Miss Bustier: Canonically a Cool Teacher who tries to support all her students (sometimes to the point of being overly forgiving), her own interactions with Chloé and Lila (her being lenient around the former can be chalked up to Chloé's Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! routine, and the latter to the influence of the Idiot Ball passed around liberally in the Lila episodes) have given her as a reputation for being a Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher who coddles and excuses bullies in her class while disregarding their victims' (mainly Marinette) well-beings.
  • Marinette:
    • Much like Adrien, while Marinette has had some questionable moments in canon, she is not (as most "Salt Fics" targeting her would say) a hypocritical Control Freak dictator who only cares about her friends if they do what she wants, nor is she a potentially homophobic and/or transphobic Yandere towards Adrien (again, she has shown interest in other guys before).
    • There's also an unintentional version of this that tends to pop up in "Salt Fics" targeting Adrien, Alya, and/or the rest of Bustier's class; writers of these tend to turn her into their mouthpiece for expressing their hatred of other characters, in the process dropping all of her Nice Girl qualities and turning her into a spiteful witch who instantly dumps her friends the moment they offend her.
  • Lila is an odd case, in that she's most often the cause of this in others. Many otherwise totally reasonable characters will hang on to her every word, and take even the most unbelievable lies at face value. Usually, this leads to them doing something horrible to Marinette that they'd never canonically do (i.e. Tom and Sabine grounding Marinette because Lila accused her of being a bully, or Marinette's friends hurting her and damaging her things in revenge for things she supposedly did to Lila, with tearing up her notebook being a popular one). There are also fans who exaggerate her own cruel behavior, though that falls more under Adaptational Villainy than this trope. Still, she's a teenage Smug Snake bully and aspiring comic book-style supervillain in the Hawk Moth mold, not a serial killer or promiscuous Femme Fatale.
  • While Gabriel is emotionally abusive to Adrien, he does care about his safety to some extent, and has never raised a hand against him. Some fanfics leave out the "cares deep down but is bad at showing it" part and pile on the Abusive Parent part.
  • Luka: He's generally pretty hard to salt on, being a Mellow Fellow who genuinely cares about Marinette's happiness, and if he's present in a salt fic, he's usually the Only Sane Man, and Marinette's endgame love interest if Adrien is getting salted. But this doesn't stop some fanfics from potraying him as a bully and even a sexual abuser, despite the utter lack of canonical evidence (he tends not to appear in a lot of the more badly-written episodes, so you can't even exaggerate Idiot Ball moments like you do for the rest of the cast) for any of this.
  • Kagami: While she did have a bit of a cold and hostile attitude in her earlier appearances, it was still clear she was meant to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold at worst. Some fans like to remove the "heart of gold" part and focus solely on the "jerk" part, with the more extreme ones essentially turning her into Chloé 2.0 (aka an Alpha Bitch who's possessive towards Adrien). While a combination of her later Character Development and canon actions taken by Marinette and Adrien that have affected her (several of which have gotten them hit with the RTDE treatment, as mentioned elsewhere on this page) have caused some fans to turn around and sympathize with her instead, there's still fans who refuse to look past her first appearances and keep writing her like this.
  • Not even Master Fu is safe. When the authors dump salt on him, the usual focus is on how much he treats Adrien as The Unfavorite of the Miraculous holders and/or how much he is a (mostly) Obsolete Mentor and/or he turns the "Comes Great Responsibility" part of being the Ladybug Miraculous holder/Guardian into "you must not have any life outside of this role at all and I don't care this is stressing you out" for poor Marinette (best-case scenario with the latter is that he just being massively Innocently Insensitive and will make amends once it's revealed to him). There's also the fact he never tells her certain much-needed details for said role until it's too late to take them back like the fact that if she ever decides to quit being a Guardian for whatever reason, the magic will erase her memories.
  • André Glacier's worst traits in canon are his Love Freak tendencies and the fact that he's just as out of the loop regarding Marinette and Adrien's Two-Person Love Triangle antics as everyone else is. Fanfics that pair Marinette and Adrien with people other than each other, that have them both as part of a polyamorous relationship, or that exclusively ship MariChat (as he prefers Adrienette and LadyNoir) tend to ramp up these traits to the point that he'll freak out and refuse to serve anyone if they deviate outside of his preferred pairings. He also usually ends up depicted as either confused about or outright bigoted against same-sex pairings, aromantic people, or polyamorous relationships, even though there's no evidence for this in canon.
  • Alix's status as one of Bustier's class' resident jocks means that she's one of the characters most likely to be depicted physically bullying Marinette (e.g. tripping her or beating her up) in salt fics even though she shows no such inclinations in canon. Additionally, multiple salt fic writers like to depict her future self Bunnyx taking her job to Set Right What Once Went Wrong as an excuse to deliberately enforce Status Quo Is God on the timeline — no matter how toxic it is — for her own selfish reasons.
  • Kim also gets hit with this, especially in the Lila fics. While he can be rough around the edges and cocky in canon, the salt fics amp up those negative traits and make him a full blown bully to Marinette, even beating her up on occasion.
  • We don't know a lot about Adrien's mother Emilie, but canon has repeatedly indicated that she was a loving mother to him, or at the bare minimum a much better parent than his father. A number of fanfic writers, however, like to make her just as neglectful and controlling of Adrien as Gabriel is at best or an aspiring supervillainess in her own right at worst. Part of this can be chalked up to the implication in the show that Emilie was just as complicit with keeping Adrien from the outside world as Gabriel was, since her disappearance was relatively recent and Adrien's been homeschooled for years.
  • In canon, Tikki — while not perfect — is nothing but kind and loving to Marinette, always trying to give her good advice. However, plenty of fic writers like to turn her into something of a Control Freak, trying to mold Marinette (or whoever her current wielder is) into a "perfect" Ladybug by blaming her for "losing control of her emotions" (AKA feeling justifiably upset whenever someone hurts her), criticizing her mistakes while not really praising her successes, and otherwise not caring about her outside of her status as the Ladybug wielder. Some fics at least have her realize how bad this mentality is and apologize, while others don't.
  • Tom and Sabine Dupain-Cheng, while not perfect, are generally loving parents to Marinette who try to support her decisions no matter what. However, there's a number of salt fics out there where they inexplicably become Abusive Parents, usually thanks to getting a skewed take on what's happening in their daughter's class from either Lila or Miss Bustier. This can range from them simply choosing to ignore her to outright kicking her out of the house for her supposed delinquency.