The thing about the London special not outright accepting or condemning Marinette's actions itself, to me, feels like giving her more sympathy and grace than she deserves for her actions. There is no moral ambiguity here. Marinette is 100% in the wrong. And the London special goes out of its way to try and frame this as some "no right answer" type of situation and takes away every opportunity it can to have someone meaningfully confront Marinette about the impact her actions could have on Adrien.
They deny her the chance to even consider it beyond "is lying wrong?" She's almost gaslighting her boyfriend into thinking his abuser was a good person, and now she doesn't even have the excuse of not knowing how bad it was. The whole special focused on how awful Marinette felt for doing something so despicable. And I apologize for my harsh words, but that's really just how bad it is. There's no way around it, and it's honestly quite disheartening to see all the posts about Marinette being under a lot of stress and being 14 or whatever. Like sure, but I don't see nearly the same number of posts sympathizing with Adrien, who is by all means Marinette's own victim now. And anytime someone points out the very reasonable critique that Marinette is doing an incredibly bad thing, they get swamped with these excuses.
Hm... okay. So I agree that Marinette's actions in the London Special were wrong, and that she should have told Adrien the truth, even if it hurt, instead of lying to him. I disagree about there being no moral ambiguity, since "wanting Adrien not to be hurt worse than he already is and wanting to honor the last wish of a dead man, even if he was awful" are reasonable things to value, they just don't override Adrien's right to know about things that concern him, and the way she's done it is likely just as, if not more upsetting than just telling Adrien the truth.
So with the focus on Marinette during the special (and in a bunch of the fanfics that were made based off of the special, though there haven't been all that many) being mostly around Marinette's feelings about the lie, being sympathetic towards her... yeah I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think showing her perspective is valuable to understand why she did what she did, and to show that she was conflicted about it and honestly believed that she was doing the right thing, or trying to do the right thing at least.
On the other hand, it did sometimes feel like the London Special went beyond "these are the reasons Marinette did this, and this is the effect this decision has had on her, please empathize with her reasoning even if you disagree with her choices (even she isn't sure her choices were correct)" to "Poor Marinette, struggling under the burden of the choices she made, but she will bravely shoulder them for Adrien's happiness." I thought it mostly did okay with balancing it except for the last part, with Ladybug and Chat Noir talking about secrets and them both hugging each other over the burden of what they can't tell their partner. Because Ladybug COULD tell Chat Noir, and the person she's hiding all this stuff from IS him, so it felt icky to me to have him help in comforting her for it, when he didn't even understand what he was comforting her over.
I have the same problem with most of the fanfics about the London Special which have cropped up. I'm okay with there being some sympathy towards Marinette in the narrative for being conflicted and feeling like she should lie to Adrien "for his own good", given that she has good intentions, but a lot of it traipses into "poor Marinette is struggling heroically with having to sacrifice her commitment to the truth for the sake of Adrien's happiness." I especially don't like when Adrien feels guilty about Marinette feeling bad over that. While that's not totally out of character for him, I feel like his feelings over his own horrific situation should be centered more, rather than Marinette's guilt over feeling like she should lie to him in an effort to make his situation seem better.
Marinette IS only 14 and I can see why she honestly thinks that lying to Adrien about his father being a better person than he is would be better for him, she hasn't exactly had a lot of classes on the effects of child abuse and the different forms it could take. But there is the angle that Adrien is ALSO 14 and doesn't even have the luxury of any amount of control over the horrible situation he's in with his father.
The main sympathy I've seen given to Marinette is that well, what would YOU do if you were thrown into the situation of having to tell your crush that his father was a supervillain, he was gonna die anyway, and decided to do the one good thing of sacrificing what remained of his life to save your substitute mom? Which... yeah I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable having that conversation, but I wouldn't lie to Adrien either, I'd foist it off on Nathalie. (I do agree with the criticism that Nathalie ought to have been responsible for telling Adrien all these uncomfortable truths, given how deeply she was involved in both Gabriel's supervillainy and in Adrien's creation, but the show has decided to give Marinette all the power and all the responsibility of deciding what to tell Adrien, so here we are).
I would like there to be more attention paid to how Adrien must be feeling after all of this, with finding out his father died and being led to believe that he was actually trying to protect him the whole time, and dealing with that knowledge, than just sympathy for Marinette's position. Marinette had a choice in what to do. Adrien did not.
