Story Trivia: Destiny's Dance

CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Destiny's Dance was the very first Miraculous fanfiction idea that I ever came up with.

The storyline was inspired when I noticed that Marinette's eye colour matched none of her parents', which caused me to joke that maybe she was secretly adopted. The idea then began to spiral from there.

The nightmare Marinette experiences where she follows a trail of blood was inspired by a level from the video game, Max Payne, which traumatized me as a child after my dad played it in front of me.

The dancing lessons from the chapter 'Two Left Feet' were inspired by the dance lessons that I was forced to take in high school. I share Marinette's clumsiness, so I was a notoriously bad dancer.

At the time of planning and writing, Master Fu's 'grave error' had yet to be revealed. I had always interpreted it to mean that he had once made a mistake in choosing a miraculous holder (which I suspected to be the peacock, so I was half right), and this is also what led to the development of Nina. Of course it was later revealed that Master Fu's mistake was cheating during one of his challenges and unleashing a sentimonster that destroyed the temple.

Coming up with the powers of the peacock miraculous was difficult. Its powers had yet to be revealed in the show, and while researching, I found that the symbolism was often similar to that of the butterfly, so I figured that its powers would work in a similar way to that of the butterfly miraculous. The eyes of the peacock feathers then also helped inspire the idea that maybe it was some sort of hypnotizing power.

Gabriel possessing the peacock miraculous was something that had been suspected in the fandom for a while, and this was a fact I was incredibly convinced of after seeing a peacock shaped brooch in his safe. This is what made me incorporate this aspect into the story, though at the time, there was no hint that the miraculous was broken.

I also incorporated the fan theory that Emilie was once a holder of a miraculous. Though I added my own twist by having it be the butterfly miraculous rather than the peacock one like everybody was suspecting.

At the beginning of writing and publishing chapters, for some reason my computer kept autocorrecting the word 'kwami' to 'qwami' which I would then have to go back and correct a million times. It was really annoying.

The complex storyline of Marinette's family was something I created due to the fact that we have hardly had much background information on Marinette's family in the show - especially at the time of writing. Most of the mysteries of the plot seemed to be centred around Adrien, and I wanted Marinette to have a turn so to speak.

I hate the way I have written the character Leon. I wish that I'd developed his character a bit more and I feel like his role in the story is very forced.

Originally I had planned for Master Fu to be killed, but ultimately changed my mind.

An idea for a sequel was in the works, and the outline of the story was all planned out, however, I decided to abandon the idea in favour of other projects. I felt like a sequel maybe would have been a bit too much, especially given that the storyline would have been very similar. In my opinion, a sequel should be a continuation of the story, not a repeat.

I would often plan, write and make notes on this story when I was bored during my lectures at university.

Destiny's Dance was the first fanfiction that I had written in years after 'retiring' back in 2016. Needless to say, I was very rusty. I was just finally coming out my long period of depression and was finally showing an interest in my hobbies again, and becoming obsessed with books, anime and TV shows just like I used to.

Like with most of my fics that involve Chat Noir, my boyfriend, Jowy Avilon, helped me come up with most of the puns in the story.

The story is still technically in the process of being edited, it's just taken a backseat compared to a lot of the other projects that I'm working on at the moment. But I do hope to finish some point this year (2021) and have all of the chapters also uploaded onto AO3.

I was still fairly new to the fandom when I published Destiny's Dance. I remember enjoying the first season after my boyfriend suggested we watch it after seeing screenshots and posts everywhere about how good it was. It wasn't until season 2 began that I became completely obsessed and became inspired to write fanfiction about the show.

Writing this story is what finally helped me fully come out of my period of deep depression - it gave me a sense of purpose again and something to focus on.

The story was originally going to be called 'Kismet', but I decided that was too cliché. Plus, way too many other fanfictions out there also had that name.

As well as being inspired by many people I have met in real life, the personality and story of Nina was loosely inspired by the character, The Dark Queen, in the movie Mirrormask.