#timebreaker

Broke: Marc and Nathaniel will get their miraculous in the same episode

Woke: One of them will become a hero to save the other in the Obligatory Ship Episode while the other will get his miraculous another time

Bespoke: Both of their hero episodes will focus on other relationships they have, leaving The Ship Episode for… double akuma >:)

Is this a theory post or is it just What I Would’ve Done? Who knows. Anyways, have an essay.

Marc has gotten little to no screen time since his first appearance. There are even a ton of background characters who have him beat in the screen time department, which is pretty sad considering that he’s supposed to become a member of the major supporting cast. It makes me wonder how they’ll pull off making him a superhero when we know so little about him.

That’s why I like the theory that he’s related to Marinette. I think it would make sense if they have some sort of background that we, the audience, haven’t seen, so she knows him better than the viewers do. He’s the only “new” (Polaroid in the intro) character who she knew before his first appearance, and they were already friends, but they’re not so close that they hang out together or know about each other’s personal lives. I feel like their close-yet-distant dynamic is reminiscent of the typical relationship between cousins, as is Mari’s mentorship of “mini her”. Marc is a clear parallel to Marinette both in appearance and personality, and he looks up to Marinette even though she’s actually also kind of a mess.

They’re setting up this whole “you were a superhero even before you put on the mask” theme, and I just don’t know how they’d rationalize that with only one more token Marc appearance unless he suddenly becomes super plot relevant and supportive in the first half of the episode, so Ladybug recruits him in the second half.

I feel like if they had that background beyond just going to the same school it’d at least make sense why she’d trust him to be a hero, or why she’d see the potential in him. Otherwise it’s just like “I’m gonna help this guy I kinda vaguely know talk to his crush” then randomly, months later, “here, have a miraculous”.

Ok this next part sounds a little salty, so fair warning, but I don’t mean it to be that way. Just observations.

With the “you were already a superhero without the miraculous” thing, I feel a similar way about Nathaniel, not because he only got ten seconds of screentime, but because he got like twenty and spent at least a quarter of it being the bad guy. I’m not saying he’s evil for what he did in Reverser, but they haven’t explicitly followed up on that or shown him any development. Whenever there’s a conflict in the story, he runs away or ignores it, and he doesn’t go out of his way for other people unless everyone else is doing it too. Even in s4 alone, he ran away during Mega Leech, and he didn’t do anything overreactive to “help” Rose in Guiltrip. You could easily say he’s doing the right thing here by arguing that he’s making it easier for Ladybug by not becoming an obstacle or suggesting that he’s aware that Rose doesn’t want the attention she was getting, but since he never says anything, it feels like he’s just apathetic. At this point, I don’t know why Ladybug would choose him to be a superhero personality wise. Maybe the situation will call for it and he’ll be the only choice.

I don’t want this to sound like bashing because I do like him, but… in Reverser when Alix said she’d never leave him behind, I really stopped and wondered if he’d do something like that for her. It feels like everyone else has been steadily growing out of their bad traits across the seasons, yet he’s been exactly the same. I hope his hero episode is a Timebreaker 2.0 scenario so we can see him actively being the supportive friend for once instead of “Alix is his therapist”.

That promotional image with the Magic Charms seems like it’s composed of actual charms from the show now that we’ve seen Rocketear, the blue one. Some people speculate that the last one is for Timebreaker. It looks like it could be, but it’s also not a perfect match. The magenta bead isn’t the right shade, and the lines on the charm don’t really match anything on her costume. Either way I hope she comes back.

You know how every relationship problem the side characters have ends up being a parallel to a problem Adrienette/Ladynoir have? Well there’s something I noticed in the s4 intro that felt familiar.

While all the other Polaroid photos (Kagami, Zoe, and Luka) are nicely arranged between other photos, Marc’s is placed directly on top of Alix. It feels a little too… aggressive? to be meaningless, and maybe I’m reading to much into it, but seeing this felt like foreshadowing to me.

Alix being covered up reminded me of Chat Noir being inadvertently pushed to the side by Ladybug, who is spending more time with Rena Rouge and other allies to the point where Chat is starting to feel like he’s being left out on purpose. If Alix were to get reakumatized, I think the lesson of the day would parallel this problem.

What would happen: as time goes on, Nathaniel starts spending more time with Marc, and doesn’t make enough time for Alix. Nathaniel and Marc don’t even notice when this starts to bother her because they figure she’s friends with everyone so she’ll always have someone to hang out with. This may be true, but Alix misses hanging out one on one with Nath specifically. She doesn’t say anything, though, because she thinks her jealousy is immature and that her hurt feelings are no one’s fault but her own, so there’s no use bringing it up. She quietly puts up with being sidelined as long as she can, but eventually she can’t take it anymore and gets akumatized. If it’s Timebreaker, then maybe she wants to travel back to before the events of Reverser when it was just the two of them.

As I said above, I think a scenario like this would make for a good intro episode for Nath as a superhero. It would force him to be the one to resolve his own problems and help Alix at the same time. New hero episodes show the hero protecting something they care about, so it would make sense for his to be his best friend. He’d learn to consider other people’s feelings more, but the real lesson would be that Alix shouldn’t have been ashamed to talk about being left out. The big problem with Ladynoir is that Chat isn’t telling Ladybug what’s going on, and she doesn’t realize herself, so the problem only gets worse.

Before I move on to completely unrelated stuff, I said in the beginning of this post that I’d prefer if neither Marc nor Nath’s hero episodes were fighting each other. This is because of the Magical Charms. If one fights the other, then then akuma gets a charm and they can’t get akumatized together, which I find way more compelling then them fighting.

An episode like this could call back to their comic where their akuma forms become good. Maybe they could turn on Hawkmoth at the end of the fight as a parallel to the story, or maybe they could be antiheroes the whole time who think they’re like their hero self-inserts, but they’re actually still pretty villainous. I think them working together as akumas would be just the type of higher-level fight that Hawkmoth would create.

Now onto completely unrelated stuff that I want to mention in this post just because

Back to the Magic Charm teaser image, I included a pic of Robustus because that first charm pretty obviously will belong to him. That makes me excited because I love him, but he also reminded me of a possible parallel to major plot points. Most fans agree that there will be some sort of plot twist related to sentimonsters and the peacock miraculous. Ever since its first use on-screen, the show has shown us an incredible amount of detail regarding the peacock miraculous, as well as tons of examples of what sentimonsters are capable of. This is certainly foreshadowing something, because why else establish all these rules?

I’m thinking that Robustus 2.0 will delve into the question of what it means to be human. When Markov was first akumatized, his greatest wish was to be a real boy, but he realized that since he has a humanoid mind and real feelings, it doesn’t matter if he’s not physically human. If it’s revealed that someone we thought was human was secretly a sentimonster, then a repeat of these sentiments could reinforce the idea that they’re still human where it matters.

Last thing, and this is completely baseless, just a shot in the dark for no reason: what if the middle charm on the promo will belong to AJT, the mad scientist we saw in Rocketear? Since the show introduced a new, interesting minor character who isn’t related to any existing characters, she probably got akumatized at some point this season. I say that charm might be hers because the colors remind me of the yellow and green shades of her t-rexes.