Episode 1 - The Retailer

Although this is the first episode in the story, it’s not the first one I wrote. Initially, I only intended to write three or four episodes, with no real thought about an ongoing narrative. But, as I got further through them, a longer story started to grow in my mind. Therefore, I needed a starting point.

Bunnyx

One of the things I really wanted was to make Miraculous: Contingency feel like it could be part of the show. That’s why I created the idea of Bunnyx Prime making a contingency timeline before she went to speak with Ladybug in Chat Blanc. The show currently depicts Bunnyx as never making a mistake, because she’s advised by her older selves. I’ve had to adjust that slightly; in my narrative Bunnyx made this choice just before she turned 25, found out what she’d done wrong, and learned from it. However, she chose not to warn younger Alix about the problems, because the contingency timeline was growing out of her control and trying to stop it from existing might do more harm than good.

With any time-travel sub-plot, you run into a mess of paradoxes and confusion. I’ve had to use that to justify some of the changes I’ve made. The big explanation won’t be here until Season 3 of the story, but I’ve tried to establish some things first.

The Retailer

This is a pretty generic Akuma, I’m not especially fond of her. I just needed an Akuma that the older Alix could conceivably trigger by treating her badly. In the original draft, Fluff feels bad about helping Alix upset Abelone, but there wasn’t space in the newer versions. It never really comes up, but Older Alix definitely based her customer behaviour on Chloé from the Prime timeline.

Music

For a later phase of the story, I used songs to help me structure the narrative, picking songs from all over and using them to prompt a narrative for an episode. Once I’d done that, I went back and assigned songs to the episodes I’d already written, because I liked the idea. For this episode, the song is Echo Beach by Martha and the Muffins. The line “from nine to five I have to spend my time at work” was the link. I love eighties music.