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Song choice for this episode was Army of Me by Björk. It feels like this one is self-explanatory, considering Legion literally has an army of his own clones.
Legion
I quite like this Akuma version of M. d’Argentcourt. It’s similar to his first appearance as Darkblade but cloning himself instead of converting citizens. The idea of forcing Ladybug and her team to work together seemed just like an Akuma Papillon would make, without thinking about how this was just going to make his enemies better at resisting him.
Chloé
It’s no secret that Chloé is one of my favourite characters in Miraculous. I really didn’t like the way she threw everything aside in Heart Hunter, so I concocted this way of letting her pursue her redemption a little further. In the earlier drafts, Ladybug was too quick to decide to let Chloé back: it had been a while since I’d watched Miraculer, and I’d forgotten how final that decision was meant to be. By the final draft, that you’ve hopefully read by now, I had to make several things bludgeon Marinette to change her mind: between the Lucky Charm, Alya and Nino being out of town, and Master Fu suggesting returning Queen Bee to the fold.
Even so, I don’t want her to change too much, too quickly. Hence her iconic final line to Ladybug in this episode.
Tangle and Korvid
Ah, these two. It’s a rule of fanfiction that you have to have your own original characters in the story somewhere, but I really didn’t want them to become the focus. Maria, Danyll, Riggly, & Calla feature in three episodes of Season 1, but they’re going to be more noticeable as the story goes on. I decided very early on that I was only going to use the core Miraculous who had been revealed at the point the timelines split, so having a couple more options allows the story to expand in different ways.
The concept of the Minor Miracle Chest is one of the biggest changes I’ve made – although there are other Miracle Chests shown in the show, the Minor Chest has ten Kwamis inside who opposed the creation of the Miraculous. Any hero fusing with one of them is automatically a bit out of Ladybug’s control, and I liked that as a foil to Ladybug’s decision making. Revealing information about the situation is another slow-burn, drip-feed that’s taking a long time.
Rewrites
This episode had the most drafts of any episode I wrote in all of Miraculous: Contingency. It was the first one I wrote, and the first draft would be barely recognisable today. I’d edited it several times and then, once I’d finished the official second draft of the whole story, I went back and completely re-wrote this one. I think before I felt quite precious about it, because it was the first one, but that just meant it needed a lot of work. There are going to be forty-two chapters across Miraculous: Contingency, so I got a lot of practice between this one and the end. Therefore, Legion is both the first and the last episode I wrote. The Alpha and the Omega.
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