The Sensory Deprivation Chamber Is Still Crazy Btw. Adrien Is Actually Meant To Be In A Victorian Novel

Tell me, is there anything about Miraculous Ladybug that you wish had gone differently?

everything

felt the urge to watch ml s6 while doing HW in a similar way i felt the urge to watch ml during ceramics. I will resist. I will resist. I will resi

If I may throw my hat into the ring here, I think the source of a lot of problems in the writing of Miraculous can be boiled down to its confusion over its target demographic.

There are two very clear audiences the show is trying to cater to:

Grade school girls around 5-10

Teens/young adults around 15-20

And this results in some. unique conflicts in the show's internal logic.

Because it's a superhero show for little kids, it's full of fun, bright colors, wacky villain-of-the-week designs, and the characters are all very straightforward with exaggerated personality traits. The cheerful, clumsy, scatterbrained girl protagonist, her utterly charming and goofy (but slightly clueless) love interest, her cool best friend, her mean bully, etc.

This extends to the romance; the show is so comedic that Marinette's nervous crush and Cat Noir's flirting are played up for laughs. Their more "problematic" behaviors read as cartoon shenanigans first and foremost, which I do think was the intention - they're both shown as being more than a little ridiculous for acting this way, so they're not exactly trying to encourage people to emulate them. They're allowed to be genuinely wholesome, too, because it's nice to give the kids something to go "aww!" at, but it's not meant to be more complicated or deep than that.

And of course, it's gotta follow a sweet and simple episodic formula! A conflict in Marinette's civilian life, an inciting incident to get a side character upset enough for Hawk Moth to turn into a villain, Ladybug and Cat Noir show up, there's fun banter, Ladybug uses her Lucky Charm to figure out a wacky solution to the problem, and boom! The day is saved, Marinette and/or someone else learns a moral, and we get a cute little end screen showing all the key players of the episode.

The one aspect of the show's setup that's a little more serious is the fact that Adrien has a super controlling and distant father, but even this is something that doesn't necessarily break the kid-friendly tone for the first season or two. Superhero shows in particular like to put in some stuff that's a little more emotionally challenging for the viewers, even when they're mostly comedic, so it's not totally out of place here.

For example, while they tend to have more grounded tones overall, Spider-Man cartoons are aimed at kids and regularly keep the conflict between Harry Osborn and his father, Norman, intact; often including the plot point of Norman being the Green Goblin, a notorious villain. It's a similar deal with Adrien, and his dad secretly being Hawk Moth.

You can easily anticipate drama coming from this, but the show primes you to expect it to work out fine in the end because every other conflict so far has been wrapped up in a nice little bow once the episode's over. Though I will say, the choice to have Hawk Moth be Gabriel instead of his own, separate character is perhaps the first sign of the tone shift to come.

And, uh. it sure is a shift.

See, Miraculous does not start out with what you'd call a... plot. It vaguely alludes to there being more going on behind the scenes, but the only thing it really tries to get you invested in is the Love Square dynamic. Marinette and Adrien dancing around each other while fighting crime IS the plot, and it's clearly going to end with a cool final confrontation with Hawk Moth.

You expect it to end like... well, like the movie. Identities are revealed, Gabriel realizes the error of his ways when he finds out he's been fighting his son this whole time, and they may or may not make up but he almost definitely gets arrested. Marinette and Adrien kiss, roll credits.

This is not what happens, because the plot the writers actually had in mind is complex in a way that I would argue is meant for the same audience as YA novels. And with that plot comes a lot of darker, weightier traits to these otherwise silly characters.

Marinette isn't just scatterbrained and nervous, she has debilitating anxiety and an increasing need to be in control of everything due to the stress she's under. She has panic attacks on-screen. She's not just great at strategizing, she also knows how to manipulate people, and does so with increasing frequency - and to Cat Noir at times, no less. Her positive traits haven't gone anywhere, she's still loving and creative and sweet and doing her best to help everyone she can, she just. has all of that other stuff going on, now.

Adrien isn't just a charming, goofy, clueless love interest with a gazillion skills and a controlling father, he's like. actively being abused, and in some cases straight-up mind controlled. His tendency to heroically sacrifice himself so that Ladybug can do her Cool Protagonist Thing is gradually but unmistakably reframed as being a sign of suicidal inclinations. He has identity issues out the wazoo and he doesn't even know he's an artificially created human yet, because everyone in his life is keeping secrets from him and/or lying to his face about crucial information.

Information like, uh. how his dad died???

Yeah, so we're at a point in the story now where there was no satisfying conclusion to the Gabriel plot, no team-up, no moment where he realizes he's been fighting his son, none of that. He still has something akin to a change of heart, but he also still kind of gets what he wants - the Miraculous of the Ladybug and Black Cat, which he uses to rewrite the universe with a wish. It's just that instead of reviving his wife, he trades his life for Natalie's. Of course, he was already dying anyway, which was his own fault but he did force Cat Noir's Cataclysm onto himself, so, that's another thing poor Adrien is going to have to deal with at some point.

And because there's all these astronomically messed up things in Adrien's life, and Marinette's the one who got to learn about all of it before him, she decides that maybe it would be better if he just. didn't know about it. Which is understandable, if I was 14 and had all this information about my boyfriend's life that he didn't, I wouldn't know how to begin telling him about it, either.

But. can you see how we've maybe lost the plot, here?

Here's the thing: starting with a simple framework and gradually getting more complex and subverting the audience's expectations for how the main villain is going to be dealt with is not a bad thing. The fact that it gets darker over time is not an issue. I actually think that all these developments are, themselves, pretty cool! I'm a sucker for angst and complex character dynamics and the show is absolutely giving me those things.

The problem is that it didn't just start with a simple framework, it started with the framework for a different demographic entirely, and perhaps just as importantly, it never actually... stopped.

For as much complexity and intensity they're injecting this story with, they're still working under the logic of it being "for young kids." We still get goofy villain-of-the-week designs with equally goofy motivations, and the supporting cast is stuck remaining two-dimensional no matter their circumstances. Chloe is the most blatant example of this - she was made to be a simple bully first, so no matter what else they do with her, she has to remain straightforwardly evil.

This, I think, is the reason that Gabriel is a more nuanced and "sympathetic" antagonist than her, and why so much care goes into Adrien's character as a victim of abuse while Chloe is just a Problem Child despite suffering similar neglect; she wasn't made to be interesting, and so the show is resistant to changing that. Gabriel and Adrien, however, were already made with nuance in mind, and so they're allowed to develop as characters. And at the same time, it's a kid's show! We need to teach the kids what kind of behavior is acceptable, and Chloe's home life isn't an excuse to treat people badly, so--!

...Oh crap we're supposed to be teaching kids about acceptable behavior. Uh. Um. Quick, bring back the ice cream akuma who cares way too much about his ships so that Cat Noir can learn about consent! Uhh, but don't change his character too much afterwards, he's only marketable because of his silly flirting, and we can't lose that.

Yeah, remember when I said that the romance having problematic elements to it used to work well enough because it was clearly just exaggerated cartooniness? It wasn't free from criticism or anything, but you could see how it was intended to be endearing and silly, right? You were supposed to point and laugh at Marinette's convoluted plans to spend time with Adrien, at Cat Noir's dramatic flirting attempts that Ladybug herself fondly rolled her eyes at.

The tonal shift into deep character exploration kinda paints the previous stuff in a worse light, and to an extent, I think the writers know that. It's hard to laugh at Cat Noir being flirty all the time when he's also supposed to be taken completely seriously, and the more Ladybug rejects him, the more it turns into harassment, and it. kinda just stops being funny, even with the comedic framing.

It's also hard to laugh at Marinette's crush being so all-consuming when they try to tell us (in what I can only assume was an attempt to get people to stop complaining) that she's like this because it's fueled by an event in her past, one that made her so scared of loving the wrong person that she now needs to know Everything about them before asking them out. Her cartoon antics aren't funny under that light, it's just concerning, but they're dedicated to keeping it up anyway.

The show runs on straightforward cartoon logic where you're not supposed to think about it too hard just as much as it runs on grounded, closer-to-real-life logic where people are messy and complicated and actions have consequences. It's so divided that you can hand-pick parts of the story that are influenced by one or the other pretty easily, and depending on the episode you can find instances of both in the same 20-minute time span. Maybe even multiple times!

Neither thing they're trying to go for is bad, and neither is a better approach than the other, but forcing them into the same show makes both sides suffer.

It's not just hard to laugh at the parts I mentioned earlier, it's hard to take Gabriel seriously as a villain whenever you rewatch an episode and remember that he has a once-per-episode pun-based speech that he says so self-seriously that you can't help but laugh at. It's hard to take him seriously when you remember that he repeatedly akumatized a Literal Baby and practically threw a tantrum every time it didn't work, or when he randomly steals (and enthusiastically performs) his nephew's musical dance number, or something similar that you would only do for a cartoon villain aimed at five-year-olds.

And I can only imagine this whole show is a marketing nightmare, too. Hey, little girls, here's your cool role model! She's cute and smart and talented and powerful and can fix anything by shouting the title of the show! Hope you're having fun watching her tell her boyfriend that his newly-deceased father (who used deepfakes of him to sell merchandise that's built to enslave the population and then locked him in a solitary confinement chamber in another country) was actually a hero who sacrificed himself to stop the main villain instead of, y'know, being the main villain! Aren't you excited to watch her wrestle with the guilt of this lie for the next season or so? Doesn't it just make you want to buy her merchandise??

Like. what is even happening right now. what am I watching. how did we get here and why did we start where we did if this was what the story was going to be about

miraculous season 500 comes out in 2050 and I, 47 years old, tune in to watch marinette and adriens custody battle over their three children. louis agreste-dupain-cheng gets so upset he gets akumatized by the 30th butterfly holder (they still don't have it) and becomes pacifier (because he has a pacifier) and forces his parents to get along. ladybug and chat noir unakumatize him. chat noir gets advice from ladybug (they still dont know each others identities) and then adrien is convinced hes been mistaken this whole time and he actually wants to stay with marinette who lied to him about his father for 20 years. they make out in the courtroom. the end.

s6 making lila the main antagonist (probably) is so sad like the excessive fake identities and such... it's not the same as it is s1-s4 its just not the same flavor. I need her petty 14 yo beef to stay petty 14 yo beef. can s6 at least have adrien and lila fight with nails behind the lycee. or have marinette teach adrien how to drive her scooter and adrien runs over lila mako-asami style like "oops sorry ^_^" i need their beef to be astronomical but also on a civilian level. like lila should be a normal 14 yo girl who just so happens to push people down staircases Not a supervillain. In my opinion.

@cloudbends i'm sorry to tell you this...

okay so i also haven't totally caught up with season 6. i really did think maybe they were saving marinette telling adrien for later but the crazy thing is that felix knows. kagami knows. nathalie knows. and you're telling me NO ONE has snitched. everyone is totally fine with not telling adrien anything. i hope everyone goes to hell im so serious

making marinette similar to the main antagonist is interesting for sure you know i thought it was on purpose in the sense of the protagonist and antagonist being foils. a way to connect marinette and gabriel beyond just through adrien. kind of the point of doing that though is to define to the audience how though they're so similar, the protagonist has made different choices or has a character trait that changed their path from what the villain has done. but in this case marinette and gabriel are both control freaks who dole out power and take it away. knowing the persons identity but not vice versa, they're fashion designers who just want to "protect xyz" or whatever. both of them are lying to adrien for the "greater good." y'all what the Fuck is going on. im so serious. it's not marinettes fault this happened because shes literally such a good character when the writing room isn't obsessed with bending the universe to make gabriel win. can someone on that team get over that their kids left them and accept they're a bad father already it's getting serious

pet peeve is when a fellow hater conducts their haterism such that they leave the hater community vulnerable to attack. “i think characterizing Character A in x way is boring and annoying” = beautiful, flawless, unimpeachable haterism. no one can tell u that u aren’t allowed to find a certain characterization boring. “it is morally/objectively wrong to characterize Character A in x way” = sloppy, reactionary, overcommitting. you have left our eastern flank open to attack girl what the hell….now my dedicated hater troops are taking fire from YOUR enemies fuckkkkk

@wavebiders sorry to screenshot your tags but i agree with all of this so much + the examples. the messaging has always irked me about ml. for a kids show with an akuma of the day it's a pretty perfect set up to have those kids show episode formulas of learning a moral every episode but the morals ml teaches is, quite frankly, insane. which would be fine if it was for a little bit of an older audience but it's NOT. i dont know for some reason ive always seen miraculous as quite honestly pretty mean spirited in its storytelling...

like there's just so much going on in miraculous ladybug like it's a baby kids show that has akumas every week and is funny and has cute romance which is what i expected and i assume most people wanted. and then it also has insane themes from things such as having a miraculous that has a power of creating designer babies forced to do whatever you want; which is not inherently bad i actually think it's a fascinating topic to explore but maybe in a horror movie. not the baby kids show that is mainly a feel good romance? i suppose the idea is to make it more similar to avatar and other family focused shows where it is both fun but has adult themes that cater to parents watching, but in this case they could handle their more adult themes with like a smidgen more care than they do. instead they introduce shit like sentimonsters and waffle on the morality of doing stuff like: killing them. GIRL‼️ this is a baby kids show we're teaching children MORALS‼️ murder is bad guys. unless the heroes do it 💖

i do think the sentimonsters thing is absolutely intriguing but it doesn't seem planned at all and the fact that so many characters are sentimonsters makes it feel more contrived to me. also the fact there's no difference between people and sentimonsters. it would have been way more interesting if it had been hinted at since the beginning and became more of a hint over time to gabriels identity. like for example how fascinating would it be if chat noir had the typical "symptoms" of a sentimonster - whatever that may be - that he doesn't notice because he's lived with it forever but ladybug does through pattern recognition - and she has to figure out if this chat noir is HERS and always been a sentimonster or been replaced. and if he's always been a sentimonster, his identity itself is the clue to who hawkmoth is. it would also be a fascinating way to do a "chat noir villain arc" where gabriel finds out adrien is chat noir and instead of being a fucking dumbass and akumatizing him, he uses the ring to make chat noir a double agent and get the earrings from ladybug. ANYTHING but what they're doing. ANYTHING AT ALL!