If Alya stops being friends with Marinette, then my faith will be restored. If Adrien breaks up with her, my faith will be restored.
Let her have consequences!!!! I want to see the fall out of the situation so badly, I want to see how everyone takes the information 😔
Marinette has been on a tear of 'mistakes have no consequences for me personally' for multiple seasons now. Her mistakes have consequences for other people, but plot keeps allowing her to dodge them. It makes sense in a way she has progressed this way.
So yes, she needs some consequence she can't undo in the medium term at least. She needs that wake up call, for personal growth. She needs it to undo the damage that having a personal fixit button and a rewind-time minion on speed dial has done to her perceptions of the impact her actions have.
She needs to face a level of consequences solid enough to narratively be a wake up call but not one that strays into 'punishment'. Punishment will just feed into her persecution issues and inhibit growth and healing.
And very importantly, while the consequences should linger for longer than an episode or two(perhaps a season?) They shouldn't be unfixable. We don't want to teach kids anything is hopeless. (Especially the kids themselves)
I do think the main issue comes from the first season's "target audience" story structure.
When Miraculous was stated, it felt its main target audience was kids, and I mean little kids. The show was just a monster-of-the-week with a moral message, where the status quo had to be restored by the end of the episode.
Season 1's lack of serialization does support that strategy. It was a superhero show where not much ever happened.
The problem is that as the seasons progressed, the story started to add serialization, and by season 4, the whole target audience moved up to Teens. You can see that the focus is on the mysteries and the overarching story that happened in the background of the "monster of the week" plot.
The thing is. Marinette and many of the characters never left the "return to status quo" mentality. Marinette always has her friends, and conflicts that might disrupt her friend group always get resolved by the end of the episode (Unless is a 2-part story). The antagonists always get foiled before the end of the episode, but only receive a slap on the wrist (Chloe and Lila) unless it's the end of the season.
I feel that Marinette suffers from being a "Kid's Show Protagonist" in a show that has moved to a Teen Target audience.
She is friends with everyone in class. But they get easily tricked by Lila into believing her lies about Marinette
Adults are incompetent and are blind to what happens in the kids' social circle
Marinette's "quirks" are played for laughs, but any traumatic backstory of hers is to be taken seriously.
What I am trying to say is that, premise-wise, the show has a lot of "potential" and nuggets of good plot. But due to the limitations of the type of show this started as, it keeps hitting walls to fulfill the tropes it tied itself with.
I get where you are coming from, and have been in these discussions for a few years now. I definitely agree there is a dissonance in the writing, but I think it is focused slightly differently. Allow me to share my take on it(sorry I don't know how to do cool formating):
I absolutely agree it started as an episodic show aimed at 6-10yr olds.
It IS *still* aimed at 6-10 year olds. That's by their own media materials. It also just makes sense. You've got merch deals. You've got networks who want a show they can play reruns of in the same timeslot. Or in terms of streaming they want to be able to run the entire show as a single entry without having to put new age bracket warnings halfway through. Yes fans get older, but in terms of the business most age out to new things. You don't *court* those who remain, that's an ever shrinking population. Us folks on Tumblr are a vanishingly small group of outliers in the grand scheme of things.
The original pitch for Miraculous was for a much older target audience than the one we got. Look up the Mini-Menace art if you haven't seen it before. Thomas had a very different ideas for the show originally. It was workshopped and altered over many years and iterations until they got to something that networks and producers would back financially.
It is my belief from the scraps of lore we have, Thomas's general behavior, and some of the writer commentary on the S5 finale, that Thomas has never gotten over having to alter his original idea to secure funding. You can see with each renewal the series received(securing itself a future) how the overall direction has been pushed that way. For Example: Bugganoire is an idea from the original mini-menace, a Ladybug who it should be noted, did NOT have a partner. Thomas threw it into S5 to get it on screen before the end of the series(written before the renewal for S 6-18, which has ballooned to 10 now)
And here is the rub. The episodic structure is not well suited to the kind of stories he wants to tell, I agree. You hit upon many of the points as so how it ends up creating friction and dissonance.
To my mind though, the failure in this case rests squarely on Thomas' shoulders. The restrictions are nothing new. The restrictions were a part of the pitch. The guidelines were what the producers bought. Choosing to ignore that and make a worse version of both an episodic show AND the original show you wanted to make is where the problem lay.
To put it another way if I order a cake from you, and you try to make a stir fry with the ingredients. You can't say 'It's the ingredients I had!' The end result s the same though. We've got a show twisting itself into shapes it was not meant to be in. The Big Lie is not something tat can really be sustained, but it HAS to be sustained because you can't resolve something in the middle of a season because 'status quo'.
-Aside sometimes the status quo thing doesn't work even now. One of the restrictions Thomas claims is the 'you can watch in any order'. However if you do that for Queen of the Dreadzone and Daddycop you could get Sabrina hanging out with the gang and deciding she has room in her heart *before* she is allowed to hang out with them and has decided she needs to stop loving Chloé. 🤣 Marinette, being the character always on screen, suffers the most from this push-pull-lack of care. We have her making deep dramatic motional mistakes, that are then patched up with a pep talk or just completely ignored if addressing them would be too complex. Eventually, this does lead to two things.
Bad messages start to accumulate. People string things together into a narrative(Even 6-10yr olds!) Even if the show is written goldfish memory style, people do not forget. You therefor need to either think up new ideas relentlessly, or stick with relatively light issues. Otherwise the weight of continuity will start to send messages other than the ones you want. There are examples I could provide but this post is already too long!
People start blaming and salting the character for the way the narrative utilizes and twists around them. This is self evident. It's sort of a subset of #1 there but it's important because it's NOT a thing for a healthy fandom.
That's probably enough from me for now. 🤣
