Episode 3 - Anachrosaur

Songs about dinosaurs are surprisingly hard to find so, in the end, I went with Jurassic Park by ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.

Rewrites

When I’d finished the first draft of Miraculous: Contingency, I managed to wrangle a friend of mine into reading and helping me edit it. Lee had never seen an episode of the show, so his insight helped me adjust things to make them more accessible. When he got to the first draft of Anachrosaur he gave me the most brutal, but necessary, feedback.

“I’m sorry, Bobbi, but this is unreadable.”

It sounds harsh, but it really helped. Based on that, instead of only editing what I already had, I set out to completely re-write the episode, using the original draft as a basic template. I paused the editing process, sat down with far too many spreadsheets, and worked out the exact timeline of Miraculous: Contingency, as well as scouring a map of Paris to work out exactly where everything is taking place.

The new draft is much better, but there is always a part of me that will consider this episode the black sheep. Even though there are moments of the episode I love, I think it will always be my least favourite episode in all of Miraculous: Contingency.

I could never have written Miraculous: Contingency as well as I have without Lee’s help and editing. It improved my writing, my storytelling, and my confidence. I am incredibly grateful to him for taking a chance on a childish project a friend threw at him.

Anachrosaur

Pierre is, honestly, a boy version of me as a child. I adored dinosaurs and hated it when things weren’t right. It’s frankly bizarre that it took more than 30 years to get an ADHD and possible Autism diagnosis. It probably won’t surprise anyone who read the episode that Pachycephalosaurus was my favourite, growing up. I even threw in Ladybug doing an Akira-Slide while riding Pachycephalosaur-back, despite not really being an anime fan.

For all my issues with the episode as a whole, I really enjoyed Pierre and Anachrosaur, plus I got a chance to show Marc and Nathaniel actually being a couple, which made me happy.

Gabriel and Nathalie

This is the first episode in Miraculous: Contingency which has Nathalie in, and it was a very deliberate choice. While Gabriel is distracting Ladybug and Chat Noir with a new Akuma, Nathalie is busy setting up an ongoing plot that is going to absorb most of the rest of the story for Season 1. I wanted this to be visible to the readers, because we can see what Ladybug and her friends can’t. I’ve tried to put more in place throughout the season, but this was the first real sign that Gabriel and Nathalie have a plan beyond a monster-of-the-week.