🐝With Her, Evil Becomes Fun~🐝

🐝An ML Sideblog where I ramble about any/all the gay ships🐝 ❄️She/Her/25/Lesbian❄️ 🐝More on the critical/fanon side🐝 ❄️Icon from ML La Terreur AU❄️

[miraculous-lesbians]

🐝Pollen, Buzz On!🐝

I decided to make a ML sideblog so I can rant and obsess more about the show than I need to

This’ll mainly be dedicated to talking about LGBT+ ships/pairings in the show, and leaning toward F/F pairings. It’ll be mostly talking about headcanons, character dynamics, and fanfic ideas if I ever get that far!

My preferred/fav ships are Alyanette, Chlogami, and Julerose!

This blog may lean towards the critical side, so if you’re not into that feel free to leave! That is all for now!

[trainsinanime]

Marinette's emotional state as of Secret Protocol and Nemesis is so fascinating. I don't think the question "is she doing the right thing with Adrien?" is super interesting; she's not, she's in the wrong, and she canonically knows this and feels bad about it. No, what's really worth watching is why she's stuck in that hole and why she fails to dig herself out of it.

First there's the lying, something Marinette hates that she's also really good at. She's been lying about being Ladybug all her life the entire last school year and she's gotten excellent at it. Making up fibs on the spot, keeping huge parts of her life secret from everyone she knows and loves, this is a skill that must be learned and that she learned well. At this point it's her default mode of being, with thousands of secret protocols to keep the lie going. Lying to Adrien and Alya about one more thing associated with red and black dots seems like just another one on the pile.

And emotionally, she has a long history of training herself to think it's necessary and good to do so. Lying protects Paris, her friends, her parents, Adrien, everyone. Telling the truth is risky; controlling the narrative is not just morally okay, it's her solemn duty. Secret Protocol proved that, as did the complex and almost successful plan in Nemesis.

The lie about Gabriel is different, and she knows it, feels it in her soul, but it still fits neatly into this scheme she developed and spent a lot of time perfecting.

And then on the other side, Marinette has very little to no experience telling the truth. A few people figured out she's Ladybug on their own; a few people she told essentially under duress, with zero plan, when everything else got too much. How do you tell people that you've been lying to them for months? That would be mortifying for all of us but she in particular has no idea.

Lying is her safe space. The default. The thing you do without thinking, the choice that is always correct, because the truth may have consequences. And it's not working here, she knows it's not, but how does she get out? Isn't it scary? She's going to hurt him, herself, everyone, and crucially she can't control any of it once the truth is out.

And of course there's her whole anxiety. It took her forever to admit her crush on Adrien, tell him she loves him, kiss him, because she's an anxious little bean who gets herself worked up to hell and back both over valid things and over absolutely nothing. The same thing that makes her a great superhero keeps ruining her life.

This season more than any before has made sure to point that out, with references to "Marinette moments", Max pointing out that Marinette has a particular way of thinking and so on. Where her behaviour was just cartoonish in season 1, these days it's gently pointed out that those seem to be issues that hurt her. I still genuinely think there's a good chance that we will see an episode end with Marinette in the therapist's office, and when the therapist asks Marinette why she's there, Marinette responds with, "Tikki, spots on".

Anyway, it's so fascinating and heartbreaking to see her here, trapped by her own choices, her own preconceived notions and her own mind.

[flightfoot]

Only note I really have for this is that she's got a habit of lying about a lot more than just Ladybug-related stuff, and has since the early seasons. So I don't think her drive to lie is entirely due to habit from protecting her secret identity, though that is probably exacerbating it.

[miraculous-lesbians]

[miraculous-lesbians]

Remember when Lila was just a mean girl who lied. Remember that. Remember when the writers didn’t think about her for a whole season after she debuted. Remember that. I remember

[miraculous-lesbians]

Some writer on ML: WHO MIXED UP THE SUGAR WITH THE SALT. WE’VE BEEN BAKING WITH SALT THIS WHOLE SEASON

[miraculous-lesbians]

I will always stress my bad feelings over this season of ML is strictly focused on the writers, and not Marinette as a character! They wrote her like that for some reason and I can’t figure out why

[miraculous-lesbians]

To anon: it’s probably not in best practice to send a hate ask about a mutual of mine-

[miraculous-lesbians]

Lila’s greatest act of villainy was passing her debilitating incurable chronic lying disease onto Marinette

[moemyers]

[miraculous-lesbians]

Alright guys now that Season 6 is over what was the most pointless episode*

*That’s NOT Queen of the Dreadzone

[wisteriasymphony]

I think across the board, I'm seeing a lot of people agree with the take that Season 6 is mishandled. (Whether these people would self-identify as agreeing with each other is less certain, and I think that's largely down to the differing tones everybody takes when discussing things and the fact that we all vary in how well we can articulate ourselves, but I digress.) It's come up again and even stronger than ever before with Nemesis, so I might as well try to synthesize best I can:

The 'Lie Plot' of Season 6 and beyond centers itself on Marinette's inner turmoil to its own detriment.

We are supposed to understand Marinette is in the wrong for lying to Adrien about his father, but the way this is evidenced to us is through her own guilt or getting hurt by those who confront her. Furthermore, the framing of these confrontations and outside Word of God implies that we are meant to think of Marinette's actions as her making a difficult sacrifice, not actively doing something wrong. She is put through emotional turmoil as consequence for a necessary evil, and the necessity of this evil is meant to compound on the existing tragedy of the situation.

Of course, this rings hollow for many people given the lengths she's gone to preserve the status quo she's set up for herself (ex: Lady Chaos, Nemesis); Especially when the inner turmoil of characters such as Adrien are so quickly brushed over, as the relevance of their emotional is only in terms of how it impacts Marinette and said status quo (ex: Lady Chaos). He's not an active player in this, but merely a potential obstacle to be navigated around, even if the plot pretends to be working for his sake.

(The above explains Marinette's "switch-up" in Nemesis when Adrien discusses turning the Agreste manor into a Gabriel museum. He cannot meaningfully influence the status quo in either direction, pro- or anti-Gabriel, because the lie Marinette has constructed is for the sake of reining Adrien in.)

This isn't to say that some other characters aren't active players in this. Alya is by far the character whose reactions and emotions regarding the lie have been shown the most besides Marinette, now that she has both Revelator and Nemesis under her belt. Still, her reactions are incredibly mature and subdued for 14-15. Marinette is given considerable grace under the reasoning that she's a child making poor decisions when this poor decision making could just as easily apply to characters like Alya. It would be incredibly plausible for Alya to permanently break up her friendship with Marinette! It would be plausible for her to lash out! Despite this, she lets Marinette off easy and both episodes end with their friendship being strained at best. Why? Alya cannot meaningfully impact the status quo or plot progression either. Her utility in figuring out the lie is to serve as someone who repeatedly confronts Marinette with the gravity of her decisions, and thus generate angst.

(edit: The repetition seen in previous episodes regarding the lie and its effects on Marinette would be a lot less egregious if we got to see the way other characters implicated in the lie handle it, such as Felix/Kagami/Tomoe/Nathalie, but I feel like we haven't seen much of them for very similar reasons. As refreshing as it would be to see their perspectives, it opens them up to affecting the status quo and I guess we just can't have that.)

Breaking up Adrienette as part of the Season 6 finale is very "too little too late" in terms of addressing the impact of the Lie Plot. It is yet more angst. We're at a point where Adrien is, as many people are putting it, lobotomized and brainwashed into believing this new status quo of his father as a hero, and it's such an insulting representation of victims of child abuse.

[im-mender]

It's important to note that Chekhov's Gun was not originally about foreshadowing, but a piece of advice to playwrights about how every element in a play should have narrative relevance. The corollary to Chekhov's Gun is that if a gun mounted on the wall in act 1 is never used at all in the entirety of the play, then it should be omitted from the play entirely.

[miraculous-lesbians]

On the one hand (if/when I start another project), I really want to work on The Happiest Woman In Paris because I think talking about ML’s insistence of toxic positivity, feeling the “correct emotions,” and accidentally putting people into binaries is something VERY MUCH worth writing if this season is an indication

….but on the other hand. I really want to write Female!Adrien Agreste because. Well. We aren’t gonna get Adrien’s perspective in canon for a long time, so-

[miraculous-lesbians]

I hope the writers let Marinette kill someone in S7 so it gives us more to argue about

[miraculous-lesbians]

Depending on how the S6 Finale shakes out, I might either push the Memory Wiped!Marinette AU or the Female!Adrien Agreste Rewrite up on my To Do List

[miraculous-lesbians]

[kosmogrl]

[magneatio]

[magneatio]