Character BasicsCharacter name: Chloé Bourgeois
Character Journal:
vaniteuseCanon: Miraculous Ladybug
Canon Point: Post-season 1
Age: About 14/15ish
Icon:
HereCanon Character InformationAppearance: A French teenage girl who takes great pride in her appearance. Chloé never goes anywhere without making sure that her hair is impeccable, that her makeup is on pooint and brings out her baby-blue eyes, and that her manicure is fabulous, and if anything happens to compromise that, she'll drop everything to get it fixed. She wears her wavy blonde hair in a high ponytail and keeps her makeup and nail polish with her so she can always reapply if need be.
History:
Wiki article, which unfortunately is a little lacking. I'll summarize a few key things here:
• As far as we know, Chloé's mother isn't in the picture and hasn't been for a while. Her father, the mayor of Paris, dotes on her - possibly to make up for her mother not being there, possibly because he's just the doting type. We don't really have enough information to say either way.
• While her father is seen to spend time with her when he can, his job as the mayor leaves him rather busy; she was probably looked after mostly by employees of Le Grand Paris. One of the butlers in particular is seen to indulge her in playing the villain to her Ladybug and Sabrina's Chat Noir when they dress up; the same butler tries to urge her to do the right thing when she and Sabrina are fighting. He's probably been looking after her since she was a child.
• Chloé's father has been the mayor of Paris for longer than she's been alive, as the election in Darkblade marked the end of his third consecutive term, meaning he had been mayor for eighteen years at that point. Never having known any other sort of life than being the pampered mayor's daughter has likely contributed to Chloé's selfishness and vanity.
• She's known Adrien longer than anyone else at school has; Adrien has stated that in the past, she was his only friend, and that they've known each other since they were little kids. Exactly how they met hasn't been defined yet, but given that Adrien's father is a famous designer and her father is the mayor, they're both part of the "high society" of Paris, so it's pretty normal that they'd have met each other.
• The canon school year is the fourth year in a row that she's been in the same class as Marinette. Neither of them is really happy about that.
• The canon school year is
also the first year she wasn't elected as class representative.
• In the Origins episodes, she knew that Adrien was going to attempting to go to their school that year, and she called herself his best friend (while he called her his only friend). When he didn't show on the first day of class because he got caught by Nathalie and the Gorilla, she was visibly disappointed, and when he made it on the second day she was ecstatic.
• Many of her classmates, including Sabrina, have been akumatized because she made them feel bad about themselves. She has also had a hand in the akumatization of some adults, such as Sabrina's father (after escalating the situation with her missing bracelet, resulting in her father firing him) and Marinette's relative (sabotaging his dish because she doesn't like soup and causing him to lose a cooking competition). This is her contribution to most of the episodes she appears in during the first season. Good going, Chloé.
• Chloé herself was akumatized because Ladybug, who she looks up to, wouldn't listen to her and called her a liar.
Personality: Let's just address the elephant in the room here: Chloé is a very unpleasant person to be around.
She's self-centered, rude, and impossibly vain, and by most accounts, she always has been. While some might say this is a natural consequence of being a rich kid whose father buys her whatever she asks for, she takes it to extremes and leaves little room for doubt that it's both nature and nurture that have left her this way. There are some people who are just so up themselves that nothing really accounts for it other than that just being the way they are, and Chloé is one of them.
It wouldn't be inaccurate to describe her as a bully. Most, if not all, of her classmates expect this out of her and anyone who is close to her; a simple "You're one of
Chloé's friends, aren't you?" paints Adrien in an incredibly bad light on his first day of school. When Adrien is understandably horrified to catch her putting gum on Marinette's seat, she justifies it to him as needing to teach Marinette to "respect" her and to "put her back in her place". Chloé, who isn't used to being told no and can't fathom why anyone
would, cannot deal with it when people stand up to her. It challenges her worldview that everyone adores her and that she can do no wrong, so when it happens, she writes it off as people just being jealous, or below her, or not worth her time.
She doesn't see anything wrong with her own behavior. The way she sees it, she tells it like it is, and if people can't deal with her being honest, how is that
her problem? Unless she's trying to get something out of someone, she doesn't bother with sugarcoating - as we see in the Origins episodes, where she goads Ivan into getting upset and running off, then says "Good, we're much safer without you!" Was it true? Yes, because he still
could have transformed back into Stoneheart at that time and could have hurt his classmates. Was it cruel? Absolutely. There was no need at all for her to treat him like that, and in the end her needling contributed to his second transformation. But she doesn't hold with coddling, and she's of the opinion that if the truth hurts someone, then they need to just man up and learn to deal with it. The truth being painful doesn't change the fact that it's the truth.
Predictably, though, she only holds to that when it comes to other people. Chloé is in many ways a massive hypocrite. While she won't make use of little white lies to make things easier for anyone else, she'll straight-up lie if she thinks she can get something out of it for herself. She lies to her father, she lies to her teachers, and most of all, she lies to herself. She has no problem picking at other people's faults and insecurities, but she won't even acknowledge that she has her own. She is cruel to other people, but she can't fathom why so many of the people who get akumatized try to use their powers to get back at her in retaliation, and she describes it as
unfair when she gets targeted despite the fact that she targets so many other people herself. There's a definite double standard at play but she won't admit that it even exists.
Her moral compass is more than a little out of whack. Chloé sees nothing wrong with bribing and blackmailing people like Sabrina into remaining friends with her, and she sees nothing wrong with taking credit for other people's actions. We see this manifest itself in a few different ways. For one, she has no qualms about stealing Marinette's design for a hat contest. For another, even though contestants are supposed to be making their entries themselves, she has no problem with hiring somebody else to do the actual labor. She
also won't even give Sabrina even a little bit of the credit for pulling off the theft of the design, even though Sabrina was the one who got close enough to snap a picture of Marinette's sketchbook. The way Chloé sees it, stealing the design was her idea, so she ought to get the credit for it. And although the hat design was
Marinette's idea, if she couldn't keep her design safe, then it's her own fault if someone more opportunistic got their hands on it and made it first. She sees it not as stealing but as taking advantage of all the resources at her disposal. Outside of the hat contest, she has Sabrina do her homework for her (often enough that she's totally at a loss for how to do it on her own when Sabrina
won't), and tries to get Chat Noir to do it for her instead.
She also doesn't see anything wrong with trashing other people to make herself look better by comparison. This, she definitely learned from her father: she says it herself to Sabrina when she's discussing her campaign for class representative. The key to winning isn't to have the better approach to the issues, but to do as her father did to win the position of mayor so many times and absolutely
wreck your opponent's reputation so they can't stand up to you anymore. This is something she's taken to heart, and when one keeps it in mind, it's easy to predict how she'll react. People who
don't threaten her are mostly left alone unless they do something to wind up on her radar; people who stand up to her or wrong her in some way are the ones she goes after, which is likely why she's so antagonistic to Alya and Marinette in particular.
For all her flaws, though, Chloé
is human, and even she has some redeeming qualities.
She looks out for number one, and number two and below can just deal with their own problems, but she has two people who are tied for 1.5 that just barely make it past her cutoff: Adrien and Ladybug. Adrien is her oldest friend (and for awhile she was his
only friend), and while it's an undeniable fact that she likes him a lot more than he likes her... it's also an undeniable fact that cares about him, in her own way. Her own way is possessive and sometimes even manipulative and cruel - she doesn't seem to give much thought to his boundaries, doesn't seem to care that associating with him could cause other people to steer clear of him - but at her heart, she cares. Having known him from childhood, she isn't so ready to just let him go. She tries to get as close to him as she can as often as she can, tries to urge people away from them if she doesn't think they're good enough for him. In some ways, the stifling, possessive way she interacts with him is very much like the way Adrien's father does: they both care about him, in their own way, but they never stop to check with him to see if what they think he needs is really what he wants. She doesn't take it to quite as many extremes as Gabriel does. While she certainly doesn't approve of his association with Marinette or Alya, since she doesn't like them, she never ties to stop him from being friends with Nino, and she was fully behind his decision to come to school against his father's wishes - though it was somewhat self-serving in that it would give her more chances to see him, too. She knows that Adrien needs more than what's behind the walls of his family home, and she knows that he needs to have other friends - she just can't stand to see any other girl be closer to him than she is.
And then there's Ladybug. Ladybug is strong, brave, and adored by most everyone in Paris - all the things that Chloé wants to be and insists that she
is, even though she almost always falls short of that. If the circumstances were just a little different, she would probably be massively jealous of her. As it is, though, Ladybug has been rescuing her since the very beginning, and Chloé looks up to her and respects her in a way that she really doesn't for anyone else. She's definitely a fangirl, going so far as to have an entire Ladybug costume created for her so that she can dress up and play "Ladybug and Chat Noir" with Sabrina. While she's not above getting a little snarky with Ladybug if she feels like she's messed up (
"What took you so long?!" and
"Ladybug and Chat Noir TOTALLY wrecked my room and made everything worse!"), nine times out of ten she's overjoyed to see her when she shows up. Similarly to how she disregards Adrien's personal space, she throws her arms around Ladybug and tries to get her to take selfies with her, anything so that she can have proof that she's
totally the superhero's BFF. Deep down, she knows she isn't the kind of person who's cut out to be a hero the way Ladybug is, but she'd like to be the kind of person that Ladybug could be proud to call a friend.
It's worth noting that being called out for her behavior by her classmates, being chided by her father the rare time that it happens, feuding with Marinette and Alya, being embarrassed in front of her entire class at the elections, and even being called out by
Adrien isn't enough to akumatize Chloé. She can take it just as well as she can dish it out. What she can't stand - what
was enough of a blow to finally akumatize her - was Ladybug calling her a liar. She values Ladybug's opinion and cares about her enough that thinking her idol thought the worst of her was what sent her over the edge, and after she had been turned back, she actually took Ladybug's advice and patched things up with Sabrina. This is significant - even the urging of someone she has most likely known since childhood, who indulges her in playing games and who looks out for her even though that's not actually in his job description, wasn't enough to do that, but at Ladybug's urging, she did.
She has a strange, possessive way of showing that she cares about people, but she does care. And she's young enough that perhaps she can learn to outgrow her bad habits, but it will take a lot of work. There is good in Chloé, but it's buried very,
very deep down.
Powers/Abilities/Talents:
• Chloé is your bog-standard human girl, with no magical powers of her own (unless you count her extraordinary ability to be rude to people).
• She is pretty good at
bossing people around delegating, and she did serve as class representative every year in school until Marinette beat her in the elections, so she possesses decent enough organizational ability to do that job.
• Ditto with makeup and fashion. While she's no designer, you have to admit the girl has good fashion sense.
• When she was akumatized into Antibug, she had the same powers as Ladybug, but they were given to her because of Papillon and Nooroo's power and she did not retain them once her akuma had been captured and purified. It's worth noting, though, that the people who are transformed tend to develop powers based on their civilian lives, so while Papillon provided the actual power source by akumatizing her, it manifested into those specific abilities because of Chloé.
AU/CR AU Addendum: N/A
What 4 items would you like your character to have with them on the island during their stay? Her cell phone, a makeup kit, nail polish, and her Ladybug cosplay. #priorities
Finally, out of the 4 words, pick one: Chimes, lake, gravel, or sun? Chimes