The Actual Reason I Consume Mediocre Media Is Because I Have Bad Taste. The Deeper Secret Pretentious

s5+ adrien agreste is like. what if the fridged wife was actually a zany teenage boy who we held at gunpoint until he forfeited all agency and plot relevance. but he stayed silly.

gabriel and Adrien: obvious. don't need to say this. cold and distant, gabriels thrown himself entirely into his grief. when he's not working he's trying to find the miraculous, thinking to himself anything he fucks up he can fix with the wish. adrien might be neglected now but he won't remember anything but happiness when gabriel succeeds. if gabriel spends more time with adrien, it just prolongs their suffering

chat noir and hawkmoth: i hate this bitch give me your miraculous

the potential of a hawkmoth and adrien dynamic:

adriens POV "that's the villain I need to defeat by any cost but right now i have no powers and he could akumatize me, hurt me, hurt my friends - my best option is to fawn or flee --> this is an advantage to learn more about who im fighting without him trying to steal my miraculous"

gabriels "this is my son who is very well behaved usually and who I do care for yet I have forgotten entirely about in my grief. its strange, viewing him with this miraculous, seeing his emotions - im learning more about him now than in my own house. am i making a mistake? i can't be (sunken cost fallacy)"

potential chat noir and gabriel dynamic:

chat noir: adrien gets the freedom to ask his father questions that would seem disrespectful and get him in trouble in his own house. after all, chat noir has all the power and gabriel is the civilian. gabriel cannot harm him in any way--the power dynamic has been reversed, and it allows adrien to ask his father questions and interact with him in a more expressive way without consequence. of course, this is his father; adrien loves him, and he doesn't want to hurt him, plus it would seem out of character or even villainous for chat noir to hate a civilian randomly. but it gives adrien more of an outlet to express negative emotions with his father.

gabriel: "i need this boys miraculous but i can't transform right now, he has no reason to suspect me. this is a child--one that shouldn't be capable of bossing me around, yet holds the power of destruction so he can. --> this is an opportunity to learn more about chat noir, anything about his identity. if i seem nice enough, perhaps he'll let something slip. for some reason the hero seems to eat up any compliment i give him."

okay i will say one of the least utilized parts of ml is that the lovesquare isn't the only characters that can have multiple dynamics at once. and in fact one of my things i wanna do in a rewrite is have gabriel/hawkmoth have different dynamics with the main characters depending on persona.

for example; what is an interaction between hawkmoth and adrien agreste actually like? in a scenario where potentially hawkmoth finds out about ladybug being attached to a civilian AND having the excuse of knowing it because it's a popular model so it wouldn't out his identity, would he choose to endanger his son? or maybe would he do it himself instead of trusting an akuma, knowing he won't actually follow through with a threat to adriens life while an akuma would?

what's a dynamic between chat noir and gabriel? that's a superhero gabriel wants the miraculous from, but he can't be blatant about it, and more than that, he has no power over a superhero and no reason to dislike him. it's fascinating.

one of my fav fucked up things is the concept of adrien talking more to hawkmoth than his own father because gabriel learns that adrien is one of the most effective ways to bait ladybug. hawkmoth can read emotions, and one day he reads ladybugs enough when Adrien is in the vicinity- and woah, her emotions are so strong about him it's readable through the magical cloaking, even! he even justifies it morally because it's not like adrien is ever hurt. is it kidnapping if it's your own son? is it really hurting him if all your doing is playing chess with him on top of the eiffel tower, an unspoken threat of super powered violence enough to keep him from doing anything reckless? gabriel is spending time with his son /and/ getting the miraculous. and at the end of the day... when gabriel gets the wish, he can fix it all - so it'll be okay! :)

i can't log into anywhere anymore. go onto Twitter "breaking my silence i think Chloe being redeemed would've been bad because it would teach kids they have to forgive their bullies. the show was good for keeping her evil" i watched a finale where a domestic terrorist is considered for even 5 seconds a good dad. girl he found out his son was a superhero in one ep and hit him with a cane and i still got the show telling me he's misunderstood. "redeeming Chloe would've been bad messaging" do we HEAR ourselves. right now.

@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 💖

our spiritually elevated rejection of canon vs their intellectually dishonest refusal to engage with the text

Most Hated Magical Girl Character - Round 3

Funniest fandoms are where the fans are like, "I'm obsessed with this. I don't recommend it even slightly."

If we lived in the good timeline Nino would have canon parents and Adrien would have become an honorary lahiffe but instead he’s gonna keep on being marinette’s pet boyfriend

Man, Adrien learning about the lies really IS the new Adrien learning about Chat Blanc for the fandom, isn't it? I have seen so much fan content around it... Watch canon do the same fix where no one ever tells him and yet he's unable to fight in the final right because he just magically knows.

i really do need miraculous to timeskip 20 years in the future idgaf about adrienette rn but i do care about their toxic marriage so badly. but i don't want to write it myself. i think it'd be like a psychological horror on both ends. like marinette loving adrien but over the course of years and years isn't sure where the love ends and the guilt begins. it's too late to come clean now. etc. is she with him because she truly cares about him or is it because she can't bring herself to harm him in anyway? is there a difference? on the other end if adrien ever found out he was a senti and marinette knew and didn't inform him for years, there's some insane psychological horror of knowing ur s/o was fully capable of giving you orders in some way without you knowing and there's no way to prove she did or did not. nothing but trust which has immediately been broken because she lied for 20 yrs or whatever. (stares off into the distance) they should be the main characters in a victorian short story they make freshman read and annotate in English class . and instead it's ml