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Alya was frustrated.
She’d been staring at her screen for what felt like hours, and her eyes felt like they were burning.
Don’t get her wrong, she loves being Rena Furtive, and is overjoyed that Marinette trusted her enough to tell her her secret, but…
She just wished it didn’t come at the expense of her blog.
Logically, she knows that there are other types of content she can put out. She can do more compilations, more theory-type videos, etc. But her old videos were where she really thrived and enjoyed herself, and the switch caused her to scramble for ideas, causing fewer uploads.
Why isn’t she uploading?
Is it just me, or have these videos been dropping in quality?
I came for the akuma fight videos, not for yet another Ladybug compilation.
This isn’t the first time she got less than pleasant comments, nor does she expect it to be the last, yet she is still floundering.
She seems to be floundering a lot lately, she thinks. Regarding Nino, regarding her blog, she was even floundering a bit during her brief stint as Scarabella.
How Marinette managed to stay afloat so long, she had no idea.
Not for the first time, Alya felt a rush of respect towards her best friend. And no small amount of awe. She still hadn’t got over the fact that Marinette was freaking LADYBUG and still had the time and energy to design her own clothes, be class representative, be an amazing friend, make gifts for everyone…
She was exhausted just thinking about all of it. Sure, Marinette may be all over the place and a klutz, especially when it came to Adrien, but still.
And that was why she was in her current predicament to begin with, wasn’t it? All her recent problems, from the backlash she faced from deleting all her photos of Ladybug and Chat Noir together in situations that could be interpreted as not-strictly-platonic, to the whole debacle with Rocketear, all of it could, in some way, be traced back to Marinette. Could be traced back to her decision to help her. Because Marinette, after all she did for everyone, deserved it. Because she was her friend.
She deserved to be happy.
And if there was something in the way of that, Alya was ready to fight HawkMoth, sorry, ShadowMoth himself with her bare hands.
Of course, none of this helped her with her current problem of finding ideas for her blog, so she closed her laptop in frustration. Maybe she should call Nino, he might give her some ideas, maybe even completely by accident. (One of her theory videos was inadvertently inspired by him, and it was still one of her most popular videos to date)
At the very least, he might play Super Penguino with her or something.
Maybe she should call him.
*****
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