- "It's just me, myself, and science"
- ―Lunella Lafayette
Lunella Latifa Lafayette, known by her superhero alias Moon Girl, is the protagonist of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. A gifted young girl, Lunella protects New York City's Lower East Side community as a gadget-wielding superhero known as Moon Girl with her partner, Devil Dinosaur.[7]
Biography
Lunella Lafayette is a 13-year-old black girl, who is the daughter of Adria Lafayette and James Lafayette Jr, as well as the granddaughter of Mimi Lafayette and Pops Lafayette. She lives in the Lower East Side of New York City, and is a gifted young girl who is smart at school subjects (especially in Science and Technology). She also won a Spelling Bee in first grade.
During the events of the series, Lunella attends middle school at Intermediate School 833. It is never stated what grade she's in, but since she's 13, that means she's most likely in seventh grade, or less likely eighth grade.
Appearance
Physical Appearance
Lunella is a short and thin, adorable, young African-American teenage girl with black eyes and large bushy, dark brown hair with golden-brown accents, kept in two large afro-puff pom-pom pigtails with gray-colored hair ties. When posing as Moon Girl, she keeps her hair in a single puff.
Clothing
Lunella's attire consists of a pair of round, periwinkle-blue framed glasses, a long-sleeved grayish-white shirt under a light pink-collared, black short-sleeved T-shirt with red accents, a grayish-purple belt with a rounded light pink buckle, a short pink skirt over baggy blue pants with a round cyan patch sewn on the right knee, and chunky black tennis shoes with red, pink, and grayish-white accents.
In Season 1, her Moon Girl costume consists of a large pair of cyan goggles with hot-pink and black lenses that form certain symbols and expressions, depending on how she feels. She wore a yellow skate helmet with a large cyan stripe on the front, and a full-length black spandex undersuit with blue accents over a vest and shorts that matchers her helmet, with her vest including cyan accents, short lavender sleeves and collar, and her logo on the chest, and her shorts having lavender stripes on the sides. She also wore a red utility belt and gloves, blue elbow and knee-pads, and large black, knee-high skating boots with blue accents, three yellow X-shaped cutouts, and dark turquoise soles. In addition, she carries a cyan backpack that can transform into a jetpack. she also get a sweatshirt with double sided sequences to help her become invisible.
By the second season, Lunella upgraded her Moon Girl suit with some help from Mimi and her friends, featuring new gadgets and weapons.
In Season 2, Lunella gained a new, upgraded version of her costume following the destruction of her original one. Her new attire now consists of a yellow and lavender skate helmet, a matching purple, yellow, and black suit with her logo on the front, black and blue elbow pads, and purple and blue knee pads. While her knee-high skating boots are still black with blue accents, they now have yellow zippers and lavender soles. While retaining her goggles and gloves, her red gloves now have rings to deploy multiple tools. In addition, her suit now has more features, including Eclipse Mode, and if ripped, a Healing Mode.
Personality
Lunella is a friendly and energetic girl, being described as one of the most intelligent people in the universe. She loves her Lower East Side community, protecting it in her Moon Girl alter-ego from whatever danger lurks.
She has called Casey "her best friend" but she refers to Devil with similar terms of endearment like "my number one" and "the best" indicating they both are very important people in her life.
She is highly competitive in several areas, such as playing board games, which has caused her several problems. In "The Borough Bully", she becomes obsessed with besting an online troll named SYPHØN8TR. At first, she tries to counter the negative comments with facts, but after he twists them into new attacks on her, she decides to confront him in person and discovers he is an actual troll living under a bridge. As Moon Girl, she fights him, watching him get physically stronger until she realizes the way to defeat him is to starve him by not letting his comments affect her any longer.
In "Check Yourself", she challenged Devil to a skate race, where he raced with titanium-reinforced taxis strapped to his feet, and she celebrated triumphantly. Later that night, she hears through a monitor displaying the family's living quarters that they are about to start a party. When she hurries up to join them, she discovers they were planning on having a family game night and didn't tell her because she is obsessed with winning and this prevents her from just having fun playing. After demanding evidence, she is confronted with her competitiveness while playing Contortion (Twister), Word! (Scrabble) and Spades, where she breaks the table slamming down the ace of spades.
This obsession continued when the East Coast Science Institute brings their chess-champion supercomputer LOS-307 to demonstrate its capabilities. Lunella immediately volunteers, despite Casey's misgivings due to Lunella grousing to her just moments before about the family game night. Following some light verbal sparring, Lunella states she will checkmate the computer in ten moves, but after many hours, it remains a stalemate as she calculates what her tenth move will be. Principal Nelson carries Lunella out the door so they can both go home, leaving LOS-307 to wonder who she is as it recharges overnight.
Lunella spends the night in her lab, neglecting playtime with Devil in favor of running chess simulations until 12:38 a.m., where she starts hallucinating that her fingers and hands turn into chess pieces. She then heads to the school, prepared to break in, when the door suddenly unlocks itself. LOS-307 is waiting for her, happy that she came back and quickly disappointed that Lunella only wants to play another chess game.
Despite multiple warnings from LOS-307 that running the chess simulation too long while they are charging will result in them overheating, Lunella is still obsessed with winning and won't quit. LOS-307 does overheat and threatens to expose her as Moon Girl, which they had discovered while searching the internet during the recharge cycle. The confrontation turns physical as LOS-307 uses their connection with networked electronic devices to attack her. The battle ends when Lunella uses the school's sprinkler system to disable the computer and both come to realize that they took things too far. They reconcile and LOS-307 is saved by using rice to absorb the moisture inside its case. Later, LOS-307 is given the vacant guidance counselor position after downloading the entirety of Harvard's Developmental Psychology coursework and offering to work for free.
Lunella is a fun, yet down-to-earth teenager with a knack for inventing and building things. While she is highly intelligent, usually ranked as being the smartest person in the Marvel Universe, she does not let this get to her head as she wisely uses her brains to fix other people's problems ahead of her own. Her most important thing are her family and friends. She loves her parents and grandparents unconditionally and deeply cares for her best friends Casey and Devil Dinosaur.
While she does not have a large ego, Lunella is shown to be slightly self-conscious of her appearance and will take drastic measures usually to justify or fix an issue. She also enjoys getting a lot of attention as her superhero persona that she will sometimes fail to notice certain things. She is very reliant on those around her and is not afraid to ask a question, under the guise of a regular problem, from her family.
Powers and abilities
Powers
Unlike Inhumans, mutants, or mutates, Lunella does not possess any superpowers as she is simply an ordinary human being. However, her genius intellect enables her to create inventions she uses to fight crime.
Abilities:
- Super-intelligence: Lunella has a genius intellect, which has led her to build and design anything she sets her mind to, being described as one of the "smartest people in the Marvel Universe."
- Resourcefulness: Going hand to hand with her brain, Lunella has shown to be able to improvise her inventions with pre-existing, unconventional materials, such as a makeshift jetpack and a laser gun in "The Great Beyond-er!" or a failsafe switch to cut off the portal's generation in "O.M.G Issue #2" with its own cables.
- Hand-to-hand Combat: Throughout the show, she has shown to be a relatively skilled combatant when fighting diverse enemies with different skillsets, especially when devil isn't there to aid her.
- Clarity and focus: Even when the situation around her gets too chaotic or noisy, she is able to tune out external input to focus on technical problems to find a solution.
- Expert roller skater: She is a very skilled roller skater and is able to hop, jump and dance in her skates with the same precision as she has wearing shoes, often utilizing it in her fight style.
Equipment:
- Bubble Blaster: a commonly used device that shoots bubbles of varying sizes that either bounds or disarm whoever is getting shot by it.
- Multispectrum Moon Scanner:
- Rollerblades: allows for easy and quick transport.
- Boxing glove: used only for when she needs to perform any physical combat. These gloves were later upgraded with multiple tools that deploy from the fingers.
- Jetpack: allows her to fly when necessary.
- Inflatabutt: Her second Moon Girl suit features an airbag that deploys from her butt.
- Electro magnetic hover skates: Zero gravity rollerblades that replace her usual rollerblades.
- Self-healing textile: A fabric that is self-healing, fireproof, and shockproof. Whatever damage it takes, it instantly heals itself.
Quotes
- "Although, I am the smartest 13-year-old I know."
Sightings
- Intro: "Moon Girl Magic"
Season 1
- Every episode of Season 1
Season 2
- Every episode of Season 2
Trivia
- In the comics, Lunella Lafayette is an Inhuman and the smartest person in the Earth, often called "The Smartest There Is". After Devil Dinosaur is transported through Kree technology to the modern era, she took him in and later saved him from captivity under the pseudonym Moon Girl, a moniker her bullies originally namecalled her, which she later embraced as her superhero name as part of a duo with Devil. Shortly after, Moon Girl was exposed to the Terrigenesis Cloud that was spreading through Earth, resulting in her Inhuman genes activating and giving her the ability to telepathically switch minds with Devil.
- Moon Girl is the first black female lead character in a Marvel superhero show.
- In Lunella's room is a sign on her door and her pillowcase that have three rectangles with numbers and two-letter abbreviations that approximately spell out her name: Lutetium (LU, 71), Neon (NE, 10), Lanthanum (LA, 57). These are from the Periodic Table of the Elements. Lutetium and Lanthanum are metals, while Neon is a gas.
- In "Dancing With Myself", Lunella is shown considering both boys and girls as potential prom dates. While not confirmed, it may hint towards Lunella being either bisexual or pansexual, while it is unlikely that she is LGBTQ, it is possible that she was just being open-minded, or at most bicurious.
- Her middle name is revealed to be Latifa in "Moon Girl, Grounded".
- Lunella is Diamond White's first protagonist role in a Disney series.
- Despite being called Moon Girl, Lunella admits that the moon is in her top five celestial bodies, implying that it is not her absolute favorite.
- Lunella was envisioned as being similar to Inspector Gadget, due to her constant use of machines she invents.
- Lunella is aged up from the comics, going from a 9-year-old to a 13-year-old, most likely to give the character wider appeal.
- The explanation for Moon Girl is different from both the series and comic. In the comic, Lunella is nicknamed Moon Girl by her peers because of her tendency to space out, while in the series, it is a nickname that she gave to a mysterious scientist whom she admired and takes for herself.
References
- ↑ Disney Television Animation [@disneytva] "Cast announcement". (Tweet) Twitter.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Halima Lucas (writer); Trey Buongiorno (director) (February 11, 2023). "The Borough Bully". Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. Season 1. Episode 2. Disney Channel.
- ↑ by Rat King
- ↑ Jeffrey M. Howard, Kate Kondell (writers); Trey Buongiorno, Christine Liu (directors) (February 10, 2023). "Moon Girl Landing". Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. Season 1. Episode 1. Disney Channel.
- ↑ "Marvel’s ‘Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur’ Cartoon Headed to Disney Channel". The Hollywood Reporter. (August 24, 2019).
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 "Diamond White Leads Cast of Disney Channel's Highly Anticipated Animated Series 'Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur'". Disney General Entertainment Press. (February 10, 2021).
- ↑ Holub, Christian (February 7, 2022). "Take a first look at the cast of Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur cartoon". Entertainment Weekly.
