Hi! Are you still mad about the ML finale? ‘Cause I very much am, but I feel a little silly about it. I know the show isn’t high art, but I am just so disappointed that they never do anything with the potential that it does have
Sorry about the late response, tumblr isn't showing when I get asks apparently.
But to answer your question, no, I'm not mad.
It has nothing to do with it not being high art, it's about the writing blatantly doing everything it can, including contradicting itself, dumbing down characters, etc., just to sabotage one character.
Thomas says it himself, that the way the show is supposed to go, is that Marinette has to learn a lesson every episode. So basically what he's saying is that Marinette, no matter how much it doesn't make sense, is always wrong. Always. When she does the right thing, she's wrong. When she gets bullied, she's wrong. When everyone turns against her because of a liar, she's wrong. When she breathes, she's wrong.
But when Adrien Agreste is the one that's wrong, which happens more often than not, he's never wrong. He barely if ever faces consequences because in Thomas's words, "he's perfect." It's always that world that is wrong and not Adrien. But that's just the thing though, isn't it. The world isn't blamed for being wrong, it's Marinette that is. The blatant misogyny, comedic, and dismissive take on a female POC suffering, and the glorification of this white boy (even if he's actually a sentimonster he still has that privilege) as the one who is morally right when it's false, is absolutely vile.
Marinette has full on panic attacks and yet most of the miraculous fandom doesn't give a single damn about her being crushed under the pressure of all of her responsibilities.
But the moment Adrien Agreste looks sad, everyone is ready to go to war. It's disgusting how people find him more sympathetic just because his father is controlling. They dismiss his problematic behavior, and while some could say the same about Marinette fans, it's not actually the same. It's far different.
For one thing, when people complain about Marinette's obsessive behavior regarding Adrien, they always disregard her efforts to get over him. ALWAYS. They also disregard how she was often forced into interacting with him by her friends and even Tikki. They call her a stalker, but you see plenty of times that Alya is the one who approaches her about Adrien's location and will even physically push Marinette into going along with a plot.
I'm not gonna disregard the times Marinette was out of line, but a lot of the time her friends were the ones who encouraged her into interacting with him when she was too scared to, and there's plenty of instances of that in the show. Marinette even says NO plenty of times but is often either ignored or just outright dismissed when she says she's trying to get over him.
For all that the fandom tries to call her a stalker, the writing, inconsistent as it is, proves that she isn't. In fact that's one of the things it has been consistent on. By definition, isn't a stalker, and by the show itself proving time after time that her friends involvement, whether she likes it or not, is usually the catalyst to her and Adrien interacting. In fact she'd been changing for the better in that regard and even found romance with someone else before it was taken away from her.
Adrien on the other hand was told to stop going after Ladybug by Plagg and by Ladybug herself. And yet he kept going. He kept pushing. There is no episode where anyone is forcing him to interact with Ladybug when he doesn't want to, that's purely only happening to Marinette. And unlike Marinette, Adrien actually fits the definition for sexual harassment. His advances are unwanted, and he knows that they are unwanted, he's been told numerous times. And yet somehow the fandom blames Ladybug for his shortcomings because like Thomas said, Marinette has to learn a lesson every episode. She's always wrong even if she's right. And that means that Adrien is right, even when he's wrong.
I can honestly say that while everyone claims he hates Chloe, I say he hates Marinette the most. Because by his own words, if Marinette is always wrong and needs to learn a lesson, then that means in some way Chloe is more right than she is, even if she's a bully. Because Chloe doesn't learn a lesson every episode. Neither does any of the other villains. Even when Hawk Moth is defeated there's no real consequence for him. He loses the fight, but he gets the opportunity to try again. It's a minor setback, whereas for Marinette it's constant criticism that she doesn't need or deserve.
And now because of the season 4 finale, Adrien gets framed once again as being in the right, as if he was right all along and he wasn't. Not once. While Marinette gets all of the blame as if she was a total failure instead of using her brain to make the only logical decision that was available to her. Felix barely caught any heat for what he did, nope, it was Marinette. She was blamed for "pushing Chat Noir away' and other things that she never did. She didn't push him away, she was doing her job, like he should have been.
It's not and has never been her job to coddle him. She's the Guardian now and she has better things to do. And even then she always tried to reassure Chat that he was irreplaceable to her. And when she asked if there was anything wrong he said nothing. Instead he quit like a child. And then Plagg turned on her out of nowhere as if he hadn't been telling Adrien for the entire 4 seasons that he should stop pursuing Ladybug. There was literally no evidence that he'd had any problems with how she ran things until that moment. And when Ladybug correctly thought that Chat being in love with her was the problem, she sought to fix it by finding another Cat that wasn't.
People claim that she was falling in love with Cat Walker and that he wasn't different because he fought the same. But the thing is, he didn't fight the same because he didn't act the same. In my opinion, I think she was just happy that she wasn't being flirted with, but in the end needed Chat Noir back because she was so used to his behavior that her plans were often based on it. So she took the devil she knew. And lets get one thing straight, banter is NOT the same as flirting. She was not flirting back with Chat Noir, EVER.
Thomas may have created a truly awful show that craps all over a female POC, but it's the fans that really make this awful. Because any of Thomas's shitty writing can be dismissed by the amazing talents of fanfiction writers. But its the fans who ignore blatant evidence just to spread misinformation about characters that gets me. Adrien stans especially fit this and unfortunately, they are the larger part of the fandom.
I will take solace however in the fact that the ones who actually have the braincell are the Marinette Stans. At the very LEAST, it's the Marinette stans who actually do the research and prove their points of view. Miraculous Content here on tumblr is proof of that and I encourage anyone who wants to see actual research done to prove how this show treats Marinette vs Adrien to watch some of their videos.
But yeah, I'm still upset about this. I can at least say that unlike the majority of this fandom who can barely type legibly on the internet, (and I'm not saying that to be mean, I've actually seen it) that there are some out there who actually knows how to check their facts and back them up with evidence.