Submitted post:
About Bleach vs ML round 3:
Hi. Just here to remind you of the round 3 of Bleach vs ML: comparaison between Masaki kurosaki and Emilie Agreste.
Although to be honest it cannot really be called a "comparaison", because like, there's none of that lol.
Masaki had only few appearances in Bleach, but with just that, we found out she was kind and loving, so impactful was her presence that her presence helped alleviate any of Ichigo's sadness during his childhood, she cared deeply for her family, and her death deeply impacted Ichigo's family along with his friends as well. She didn't just die for the sake of giving Ichigo and his father Manpain (unlike another show that uses females for the sake of manpain).
Her presence (soul?) returns once more at the beginning of the series to give Ichigo much needed advice when he was a beginner in the whole shinigami bussines and help alleviate his burden and guilt about her death.
Even more so later in the series, she would get more characterisation.
Meanwhile Emilie has... something about making a movie that only the Agrestes(?) had heard of?? Whtever she did with the peacock??
She has no personality whatsoever. I guess she was nice to Adrien?? Or that is just Adrien wearing rose-tinted lenses when about her.
Her presence has no impact aside than *maybe* giving Gabriel a reason to go full terrorist, though at this point I am not sure about that either.
Any other appearance and she is literally fridged in a cryochamber, and four seasons in, and we still don't know more about her than when the first season came.
Why is Gabriel loving her to this extent, we still don't know.
What had she done to Adrien in his childhood, how did she impact his personality, attitude, growth, we still don't know.
How she interacted with Duusuu, and what the heck she wanted to do that justified to her the risk of getting put into coma.
The fact that people can make headcanons and write about whatever idea they had about her (evil and controlling, or loving and naive to a fault, and anything in between) and that she won't be OOC says a lot.
The ML writers might as well swap her with a lootbox and the plot won't really change. Emilie is just that non-entity in her show, even though she is apparently the main reason Gabriel kickstarted the whole plot.
You can't do that with Masaki, because even though she only appeared in few episodes, she has a solid character and personality, and her presence keeps following the watchers in the form of Ichigo's own growth and his friends.
Masaki is what the ML writers think Emilie is supposed to be, and they utterly fail at that.
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Thank you anon, thank you very much, because not only did you remind me I needed to make this post, you literally made the post for me! Because Masaki Kurosaki is an actual character, while Emilie Agreste is a generic, barely-existant concept.
Emilie Agreste exists literally as. A name. A woman in a fridge. She exists purely to give Adrien and Gabriel a tragic backstory that only motivates Gabriel, while Adrien doesn't give a flying fuck about his mom and literally everyone was convinced Emilie had vanished when he was like, 5.
But no, Emilie had been missing for... Less than a year.
And Adrien doesn't give a single fuck about her other than to be weirdly nostalgic over her, as if he can't really remember her and only knows about her from pictures and that singular movie that existed for a single scene and means nothing because! Because!
Because... the writers decided to come in years after the show first aired to say it's been less than a year since Emilie vanished.
Not even died, not even went missing... She just straight up vanished, and Adrien's not the only one that doesn't give a fuck about Emilie's nonexistance-- no one in Paris questions where she is, no one talks about going to a funeral or having to accept that she's gone, no one even talks about *how* she vanished, her own TWIN SISTER doesn't give a rat's ass about her identical twin possibly being murdered by her billionaire husband or being so unhappy she ran away from her marriage OR possibly being kidnapped and murdered or died in a tragic accident or. Literally anything that could possibly explain her falling off the face of the earth while married to a billionaire and with a teenage son.
Literally no one gives a single shit about Emilie as a person, even when she's being used for Gabriel and Adrien's manpain, she's literally just a tool, a concept, to give Adrien and Gabriel cheap sympathy points which fails horribly because Adrien clearly doesn't care that she's possibly dead in a ditch somewhere or ran off because she didn't love them enough to stay or anything else an actual teenager would rightfully catesteophize about their mom going missing, and Gabriel's Manpain doesn't mean much when he's a pathetically incompetent villain who's writing flipflops between irredeemable terrorist who will do anything to save his wife to sadboy candy who we're supposed to ship with his personal assistant for some god fucking awful reason because the writers are gross 45 year old white men.
Then, there's Masaki Kurosaki.
Ishinn took her last name when they got married, so Ichigo, Karin and Yuzu all have Masaki's family name of Kurosaki as part of their inheritance.
Unlike Adrien's Less-Than-A-Year-Ago Emilie that Adrien doesn't care about...
Ichigo lost his mother when he was very young, and Masaki's death was a deeply defining part of Ichigo's life; dealing with his grief, literal depression, and learning to heal from the loss is one of the major plot arcs for the first season of Bleach, and the arc could very well stand up as its own standalone storyline for anyone that isn't interested in the fighting genre that Bleach swaps to at the end of the first main arc. (Wink wink nudge nudge go watch the Bleach Live action movie if you're curious about Bleach but don't want to get into the chore of skipping past a million filler episodes)
But Masaki's role in the story doesn't end there!
Ichigo gets closure, and is able to start moving on with his life, finally able to accept that he was not responsible for his mother's death...
But the family name Kurosaki and red hair is not the only thing Ichigo inhereted from his mother--
Because Ichigo is mixed race in more than just inhereting his mother's red hair that warrants him being racially targeted through his entire life-- Masaki was also a Quincy, foreshadowed from the very beginning in every scene we see of her, and she had led an entire life before she met Ishinn and had a family, she has family history, and personality, and even when all we know is that she is gone... We know what she was like, we know she loved her family and would do anything for them, that she would gladly give her life to save her child-- and that she did.
We even know exactly how much Ishinn loved and respected her, and loved her all the more for protecting their child with her very life--
While Emilie, as you said, is literally just... A blank slate that no one can agree on-- was she just a horrifying a parent as Gabriel? Was she worse? Was she one of Gabriel's victims? Did she genuinely love Gabriel and Adrien and care for them? Was she a good person? A good parent? Was she doting? Was she controlling? Was she kind? Was she cold?
Was she using the Peacock Miraculous to save someone out of selflessness? To get rich? To hurt someone because she was selfish? Was it out of a desperate desire to have a child that she couldn't have biologically?
Or to create the perfect walking talking mannequin to be the perfect cash grab to sell to a new market?
We just don't know! Because the writers dont even know, nor do they care! Adrien being a Sentimonster is literally the biggest, half-assed retcon in the world, because the writers only care about what sells, not what's actually good storytelling.