Work Text:
In stores now. He can be yours.
FUTUREMRSAGRESTE Thu 13 Feb 2007 14:06:32 No.21004122018
So I noticed something while looking through my latest copy of the Radiant Carefree Dreamy poster, 5th print.
Her fingers fly over the keys as she begins her thread, her latest diatribe of many on the forums. It’s her birthright, really, to be the one who whistleblows, as she’s the one who notices. What hasn’t she noticed? Nothing can slip past her fingers, her camera, those sly, quick fingers as they make out like a bandit through every press release and promotional. She extends a single hand to grab her drink of choice (strawberry bubble tea, cold, half sweet), the other picking up the slack with fluid ease.
I don't know who from Maison Gabriel would sign off on such a blatant error in printing. I could barely believe it myself!! (҂ `з´ ) But no, I cross-referenced it with prints #4, #1, and #3 (still hunting for #2 mweheh) and there are countless issues with this print. I don't know who they were thinking to dupe, but we're Adrien's fans. His success comes from our hard work supporting him, so the least they could do is compensate us with decent product.
The lines for the 5th print had been obnoxious. The poster of Adrien—that sweet, immaculate preservation of his image—had barely survived mint condition, no doubt due to her own experience faring the crowds. All five poster prints were released in waves, select images from the advertisements stretching over construction sites and building walls airbrushed further and fit to something made for bedrooms and the inside of closet doors.
Free as a bird, Adrien has been shot in front of a false sky, his hand stretching out to the camera as he seemingly plummets, back-first and shirt open, to his doom. White angelic wings spread out behind him, and his golden hair is static mid-toss in the breeze. He is not a true Icarus, not a young boy doomed by his own hubris—the bend in his knee and the curve of his shoulders looks not like he flew up, but was pushed down. Still, his misfortune and the death that awaits him is belied by that innocent, trademark smile of his. It’s a smile Marinette finds…safe, in how perfect it is. Impossible to dirty and unthinkable to try. In two dimensions, his kind green eyes and dimpled smile are reassuring, kind and blithe.
In Print 5—her favorite, most cherished print—it’s reproduced with a touching remorse for something he didn’t even do. He apologizes for being pushed to his death as he reaches out to the camera, to Marinette.
Which is what makes the errors so aggravating.
17cm from the right margin and 40 cm from the bottom margin is a clear coloring error. While the chromatic aberration is slight throughout the entire print (already a sign of poor quality! I spent €169 on this!), there is a clear color correction error that leads to the chromatic aberration bleeding into the wings! This is the most egregious printing error I've ever seen on a poster, and I know my posters!!!!1!
Every piece of Adrien Agreste that she can hold onto forever is a comfort. The real him, as she knows him, is not a rejection of the posters in service for the smile she sees in class every day but a synthesis of the two. If his smile varied even a muscle twitch from the advertisements, to call it a synthesis would be untrue, but it’s not. Every motion of the hand and every chipper conversation is only a reminder that nothing changes on and off camera. Marinette knows him and all there is to know of him.
It’s leagues better than the other whores on the forum, who don’t even share a school with Adrien. Try as they might, they could never compare. They would never understand how it is to see him walk right out of a poster and just...live.
ADRIDADDYLOVESYOU Thu 13 Feb 2007 14:15:23 No.21004122023
and r u sure this isnt just an error with only ur poster? lol i got mine th first day n its fine
Marinette blinks for a moment, bewildered.
FUTUREMRSAGRESTE Thu 13 Feb 2007 14:20:19 No.21004122027
Are *you* sure you’re checking it diligently enough? (￣︿￣)
ADRIDADDYLOVESYOU Thu 13 Feb 2007 14:23:00 No.21004122030
image.png yeah
The photo Marinette opens on her desktop was taken on a Motorola Razr, blurry and tinted warm. Marinette zooms in with her computer mouse, eye twitching as she pours over the photo and its slight grain. Adridaddylovesyou’s Print #5 is immaculate—not just devoid of the color bleed, but devoid of any possible flaw altogether.
She pushes her chair away from her desk, eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights. She gets up from her desk, silently and without emotion, looking over to where she has her Print #5 resting on her chaise. Soon, her feet follow her eyes.
Marinette takes the poster in her hands, a shiver working its way through her arms. It’s the only way she has him in her grasp—his posters, auctioned love letters, the bottles of perfume on her dresser and signed memorabilia. The notion that any item in Adrien’s image falls short of him and his perfect self means she cannot have Adrien as himself, only an ersatz. If, with every piece of him, Marinette grows closer to the reassuring inevitability that she owns him, and that she earned him… What water does it hold if the pieces are flawed?
But she has earned him. She has to have earned him. Hundreds have been spent on that maxim, meticulously upkept and crafted to fit her design. Marinette knows what Adrien has for breakfast each morning, how long it takes for him to get to school, and the number of steps he takes to walk up the stairs to Françoise Dupont based on the stride of his legs. Marinette knows his weight and his height, the circumference of his ribcage and the pulse that beats within it. Nothing evades her, and her throne is built on that sole immutable fact.
Marinette loosens her grasp on the poster. Creasing its paper is a single, near-invisible dent from her fingernail on its margin. Bile rises in her throat as she stares at the flaw, horrified.
It's ruined.
Everything is torn down. Posters, cardboard cutouts, photos pasted to the wall. None of it means anything anymore, a thousand lifeless green eyes like needles in her back, and so she rips and pulls and massacres, leaving shreds of printed-on blond hair and fair skin in her wake. The scream that escapes her is long and fraught and furious, propelling her faster than she can think. Print #1 is torn by its waist from the pins trapping it to the wall, mangled and crushed before it falls apart into strips in her hands—Print #2 is slashed until it hangs like strips of offal from her wall, its white back catching the soft rosy light of her room like the thinnest sheen of viscera. In her suffocating room of cherry-pinks and creams, the merchandise that had once piled up like gore at the far corners of the room is thrown to the ground, spilling out its guts. Adrien, as Marinette knows him, is torn limb from limb from limb, over and over and yet none of it can satisfy. Nothing can cry out for help underneath her grasp. Nothing can thrash and yowl and beg for mercy and plead that really, truly, she does deserve him, regardless of what the words of an internet stranger or a nail-mark in a poster imply.
Voiceless and immobile, the collected paper remains of Adrien can’t sob for forgiveness. All of them lie vitiated, victims of Marinette’s wrath.
In a manger of torn paper lies Radiant Carefree Dreamy, the blue liquid dulled to gray. The bottle is 50 milliliters, and transparent square glass. Marinette picks it up and slams it back down against her floor, her palm raw from amassing multiple paper cuts. The bottle refuses to break. It is thrown and tossed and launched at the corner of her desk and slammed and thrown and slammed and slammed, and the more it refuses the crack, the angrier Marinette can only get.
Winding up her arm, she hurls it at the wall.
The bottle shatters.
The sound of glass fragmenting is the snap that finally wakes Marinette up. Silently, she falls to her knees. Her gaze is far-off, and even as her chest rises and falls she does not feel herself to be breathing. It is only an imitation of breathing, lips parted and nothing moving inwards or out.