every time a tumblr post mlb rewrite mentions the fact that they're taking out marinette's 'obsessive stalker' characteristics an angel gets run over by a steamroller and fucking dies
clarification on the sideblog: this is not me saying i personally think the show adequately addressed what they had set up in terms of her stalking behavior. this is not me saying she didn't theoretically violate people's boundaries. this is me saying I want marinette to be a villain protagonist. stop writing it out guys. MAKE IT WORSE
Alya: I was right earlier, wasn't I? Gabriel was Monarch.
Marinette: I never lied to you.
Alya: Technically, you didn't. You just kept the truth from me and manipulated me so you wouldn't have to answer my questions. Wow, thanks Marinette. So this is what being BFFs is like?
The show saved me the trouble of needing to argue that Marinette was manipulative in Nemesis by outright saying that she manipulated Alya to avoid answering her questions. Nice!
This means that I can skip the tedious part of making my case that Marinette isn't a perfect innocent angel and go straight to the fun part of breaking down exactly how she tried to manipulate Alya and why those tactics work.
Just to get this out of the way: no, I'm not accusing Marinette of being some heartless manipulative mastermind. Most manipulation is learned intuitively, by people noticing what works and what doesn't work in order to get them what they want.
Marinette knows those things can make Alya stop asking questions that she doesn't want to answer, so she does them. How much she actually understands what it is she's doing is debatable. She may be thinking "I can't let Alya know no matter what" and so is willing to resort to tactics she knows are manipulative, or she may be running purely on instinct without thinking too much about why those tactics work.
So lets get into it:
Alya: I know you have a secret, I know it's about Adrien and I know you don't want to tell me about it.
(...)
*Alya shows Marinette the mirage of Monarch detransforming into Gabriel Agreste*
Marinette: Why would I have done that? Why keep it a secret that Gabriel Agreste was Monarch?
Marinette's first reaction to being confronted with the accusation of lying is to double down and defend the lie by trying to poke holes in Alya's story.
This, by itself, isn't manipulation. However, it does show us where Marinette's head is at. She doesn't want Alya knowing about the lie, so she keeps trying to cover it up even after she got caught. She knows Alya isn't certain yet, that the guess she's making may be educated, but it's still a guess.
So she tries to exploit that uncertainty, sow even more doubt that this story is right. If Alya can't give a motivation or gives a wrong motivation, that would allow Marinette to point out how the story doesn't make sense and spin the entire thing as being wrong and illogical.
I would classify this as more of a debate tactic than a manipulation tactic. She's attacking the idea itself and trying to debunk it.
Unfortunately for Marinette, it doesn't work because Alya gets the motivation right.
Alya: To protect Adrien.
So Marinette switches to another tactic.
Marinette: You really think I could lie to my boyfriend like that? And to my BFF? And to the whole world?
She sounds and looks angry when she says that, which is an expression she didn't have when asking why she would've lied about Monarch. Obviously YMMV on the exact nuances of the tone (I would classify it as a mix of offended and indignant), but it's undeniably the tone of someone unjustly accused of something horrible.
And she is accused of something horrible. Alya's accusations are serious. Marinette is aware that lying about Gabriel being Monarch to Adrien, Alya and the entire world is a bad thing. So for Alya to imply such a thing about her best friend? To even consider that Marinette is such a horrible person who would be willing to do any of it?
Try to imagine for a moment accusing someone you're really close and love of being a pedophile. Not a fun experience, right? Leaving aside how half this site is so conflict avoidant that even telling someone a valid criticism to their face is something they can't do, accusing someone you love of something bad isn't easy for the accuser.
For one, there's the entire aspect of trying to reconcile the the person you love doing something horrible, which is complex and a big reason (although far from the only one) why it's unfortunately common for loved ones of abusers (who aren't being abused) to not believe victims.
But more importantly in our case, what if you're wrong? What does it say about you that you thought so lowly about the person that you were willing to consider that they could do something so horrible? Those are not the kind of things you're supposed to think about the people you care about. Many would consider it justified to reconsider whether you should actually be friends with someone who accuses you of something like that.
This is what Marinette is banking on. If Marinette was innocent, then Alya's accusations are an insulting. Alya knows Marinette, she's her best friend. Hell, she knows Marinette is a superhero! She should know better than to think that Marinette is capable of such a thing.
(If you doubt that this is the train of thought which is expected in such a situation, I recommend you go and check the reactions to Heartfixer. Quite a few people were pissed at Adrien for believing his girlfriend was cheating on him when he saw it with his own eyes. Most of their arguments boiled down to "Adrien knows Marinette and how much she loves him, he should've known better than to suspect she would be capable of such a thing.")
By acting indignant and offended, Marinette is implicitly making Alya to be the bad guy in this situation. Alya is the one doing something wrong here by thinking about Marinette so badly. She's shifting the blame, so that now Alya has to defend her actions (accusing Marinette) rather than Marinette having to defend her actions (gaslighting her boyfriend and lying to everyone).
And once Alya has to defend her action, she's implicitly accepting the premise that she's doing something wrong that needs defending in the first place. That would allow Marinette to keep pressing Alya about her being the bad guy for accusing Marinette, which would serve two purposes: 1) It derails the discussion away from Marinette's misdeed 2) If Alya is the bad guy for accusing Marinette, they could "resolve" the conflict by coming to a compromise where Marinette graciously forgives Alya for accusing her so long as Alya doesn't do it again.
This is a full-on manipulation tactic. Marinette isn't attacking the idea itself, she's exploiting human feelings and tendencies (such as the desire to not feel like the bad guy) in order to get Alya to drop the topic without Marinette ever needing to admit to anything. She's unfairly placing blame on Alya when all Alya did was try to hold her accountable. She isn't trying to defend herself, she's trying to make Alya feel bad enough that she stops asking questions.
This tactic ends up not working because instead of turning defensive, Alya is fully willing to own up to her opinion of Marinette.
Alya: Do I think Marinette Dupain-Cheng would do anything in order to protect other people even if it means ruining her own life?
Alya: Yes.
I'm going to ignore how even in this Alya is framing Marinette as someone selfless and heroic, because that has to do more with with the show's bonkers moral framing of the big lie (which is its own can of worms) rather than the actual dynamic of the conversation.
But despite the dubious way the writers went about it, this is still Alya justifying her opinion and owning up to it. She rejects Marinette's framing of Alya accusing her being a deplorable liar and instead gives her own framing which is more accurate to who Marinette is as a person but still supports Alya's accusations.
(Ignore that Marinette is a massive liar and that Alya's interpretation is far more charitable than many would agree with. As said, this is the show's weird morality at play. As far as the narrative is concerned, Marinette is a long suffering noble hero who's willing to do anything for the people she loves, even if it means getting her hands dirty. So Alya's framing is very in line with who the narrative claims Marinette is.)
We also get a zoom in on Alya's face and a sound cue to indicate to us that what Alya is saying is not trivial. This is a serious thing to admit. Yet Alya says this calmly and with conviction. There's nothing about this that Marinette can attack.
So once again she switches tactics.
Marinette: Don't you think my life is enough of a disaster as it is?
Alya: Why would you say that?
Marinette: Because clearly *starting to speak in more panicked/stressed tone, sounding on the verge of tears* everything is falling apart! I couldn't defeat Hawkmoth and get his miraculous back, so now there's this holder of the butterfly miraculous. A new Hawkmoth, who's more dangerous than ever! They even attacked me and my family!
Marinette: *starting to cry* I've never seen my parents so afraid. I'm scared too, Alya! We have to stop them, before I can't go on anymore. But we have nothing on them, we know nothing about this new butterfly miraculous holder! Whether they're a man, or a woman, or what their name is, or what they really want!
Those stresses Marinette is crying over are all very valid.
They're also utterly irrelevant to the conversation.
Like, just to put this in perspective, this is Alya asking Marinette "did you lie to me and gaslight your boyfriend?" and Marinette responding "my life is such a disaster" and starts crying.
None of the things Marinette speaks about have anything to do with the big lie. If the thing she was crying to Alya about was how hard making the decision to lie to Adrien was, or how stressful keeping it a secret had been or anything at all that's related to the big lie, I would be willing to read it as a genuine reaction that's only accidentally manipulative. That she burst under the pressure of Alya's questioning because of how stressed she is, and her tears are more an expression of her emotional turmoil rather than an attempt to fish for sympathy.
But that's not what happened.
Instead, the things she cried about was how much of a failure she is as Ladybug and how scary it was for the butterfly holder to target her personally.
Again, all things that she's genuinely very stressed about. But they're not things that the conversation reminded her of. Nor are they things that she was so preoccupied and bothered by that she was already on the verge of spilling them to anyone.
We saw her in the scene right before this conversation. The things she was preoccupied by and anxious about were the big lie and feeling like she's lying to everyone. She didn't bring up these topic even when she interacted with her parents (who were reassuring her of how supportive they were), where it would be the perfect opportunity to talk about it. If nothing else, her parents fully understand feeling scared because the new butterfly holder attacked them personally.
Marinette is choosing to bring those things up.
There are two possible reads here.
Either Marinette is just so stressed by the sheer act of Alya pressing her for answers about whether she lied or not, that she places it as equivalent to all those things she ranted about that make her life a total disaster. And so she starts crying because Alya is supposed to be her friend but here she is, adding even more stress to Marinette's life and helping ruin it.
Or she's bringing it all up with the intention of distracting Alya from pressing her about the big lie.
We don't actually have to wonder which read is correct because the show outright tells us.
Marinette: I never lied to you.
Alya: Technically, you didn't. You just kept the truth from me and manipulated me so you wouldn't have to answer my questions.
Alya is framed in this scene to be the one cutting through Marinette's bullshit and saying the truth as it is. We're supposed to see her words and actions as giving Marinette a reality check. Therefore, we're supposed to take her assessment here as a correct read of Marinette's motivations in the scene. This is further supported by how Marinette doesn't even try to deny this.
The manipulation Marinette pulls here is two fold. She hijacks the conversation with something very emotional, stuff that Alya can't simply brush aside and return to the original conversation without feeling like a jerk.
And she tries to get Alya on her side by fishing for sympathy. Can't Alya see how much her best friend is dealing with? How her life is a complete and utter disaster so she needs to be coddled and reassured to let her know she's not alone? How can Alya keep on criticizing Marinette and adding to her burdens when Marinette is already suffering so much, doesn't she have a heart?
This time, the manipulation works.
Alya may be angry at Marinette, but that's still her best friend. She cares for her. She can't stay unmoved when she sees how bad Marinette is feeling.
*Alya's expression turns sympathetic and she approaches Marinette, dispelling the mirage in the process, and lays a hand on Marinette's shoulder.*
Marinette: I've had this idea but it's very dangerous and I don't know if you'd wanna hear about it.
That's a very manipulative line. Marinette is implying that Alya wouldn't want to hear about Marinette's idea to stop the butterfly holder because Alya is angry at Marinette.
She's creating this false association where "being angry at Marinette" = "putting Paris in danger", and "helping save Paris" = "being on Marinette's side and not questioning her about the big lie".
If Alya continues pushing now, she would be doing it at the expanse of catching the butterfly holder.
Alya: If it can help save Paris, of course I wanna know.
But Marinette knows Alya would never do that. She's a hero, so she would pick helping Paris over questioning Marinette. That's the exact thing Marinette is counting on.
The entire thing is textbook DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), which is a classic manipulation technique that often comes out in response to being held accountable.
Marinette started out by trying to deny this was possible. Then she attacked Alya by implicitly placing her as the bad guy for accusing Marinette of horrible things. Finally she hijacked the conversation by painting herself as the real victim in all of this because her life is just such a disaster, you see.
And it worked. She did manage to get Alya to drop the topic and instead go and comfort Marinette. She got exactly what she wanted out of all of this.
For the short term, at least. But Marinette tends to only think about solving the immediate problem in front of her without ever thinking about the consequences beyond that. See: Her being upset that the boyfriend she gaslighted the entire season to think positively about Gabriel now thinks positively about Gabriel.
This wasn't just predictable, this was the outcome she was actively working towards. Marinette just never stopped to consider what achieving this outcome would actually be like.
And she didn't stop to consider that just because she got Alya to drop the topic now doesn't mean she was going to drop it forever.
I want to add that I think Marinette bringing up how stressed and scared she is to try to get Alya to stop pressing is a learned response. It's worked before. Specifically, at the end of season 4. There, Chat learned that Ladybug had secretly recruited Rena Furtive and had had her helping out with battles without his knowledge, while deliberately keeping it secret from him. Which he wasn't happy about, but he set aside for the most part to deal with the akuma. And then Monarch stole all the Miraculous, Ladybug freaked out and broke down (understandably, that wasn't a manipulation tactic like it is during the Nemesis conversation), and he just comforted her, without ever getting mad at her, or even bringing up the fact that she kept an entire teammate secret from him. Like. Ever.
Of course Marinette would, consciously or subconsciously, try to repeat the same tactic. It worked perfectly last time.
Unfortunately for her, Alya is far less downtrodden than Adrien.
I would even go further and say this is something she learned far earlier than the finale of s4. Or at least that she learned the mindset earlier.
Marinette:(gasps) Me, me, me! I can totally help you out with that. (drops plates in excitement)
Tom:(catches plates) You mean, as a server?
Marinette: Yes. I'll hand the macarons out to Adrien. I mean... (drops plates and knocks over fruit bowl before managing to balance the bowl on top of the plates with a banana and two oranges.) ...to everybody, of course. Not just Adrien 'cause Adrien's not the only one who likes macarons.
Sabine:(teasingly) And the fact that Adrien is going to be there has nothing with it, of course.
Marinette: Not a thing. Like, not in the slightest. I just want to help out my wonderful sweet parents who I love so much.(drops the balanced bowl and the fruit)
(Tom and Sabine look at each other warily)
Marinette:(dejectedly) You guys don't trust me. Then again, I'm such a klutz. Even I wouldn't trust me. (picks up oranges)
Tom: Of course you're not a klutz, my darling. You're hired. We'll just—
Marinette: (hugs Tom) Oh, thank you! You're the best parents in the world! (dances out of the room while singing, and crashes into something)
Sabine: We'll just make twice the number of macarons. Just in case.
This is a conversation Marinette had with her parents in Animaestro (so beginning of s3). In it, Marinette sees that her parents are considering telling her no and so pulls out the guilt trip to convince them to say yes to what they know is a bad idea. In response, her parents fold like a wet paper towel.
Since this is the post for explaining the manipulation tactics she uses, let's break it down:
In this conversation, both Marinette and her parents are aware that 1) Marinette has ulterior motives for asking to be a server 2) she's objectively bad for the role and could cause some actual damage. Two things that make a pretty obvious "no" here.
But Marinette really wants that "no" to be a "yes", so she does something to convince her parents to change their minds.
Marinette:(dejectedly) You guys don't trust me. Then again, I'm such a klutz. Even I wouldn't trust me. (picks up oranges)
This conversation was never about trusting Marinette or not. While strictly speaking, it is a matter of trusting her as a server here, Marinette is speaking in far broader terms. She's claiming her parents don't trust her in general.
Good parents, loving parents, trust their children. But Marinette here is claiming that they don't trust her, which implicitly makes them the bad guys for thinking so badly about Marinette.
If this sounds familiar it's because should. The underlying mechanism of the manipulation here is the same as the manipulation she pulled on Alya, even if the execution is different.
Tom: Of course you're not a klutz, my darling. You're hired. We'll just—
Tom and Sabine very much want to be good parents, and they hate to see their daughter hurt or upset. Especially as a result of their own actions.
Where Alya would've managed to avoid this manipulation by going "do I not trust Marinette to be able to keep stable a large plate of macaroons while she's distracted by Adrien? No, I don't", Tom and Sabine fall right into the trap. They rush to soothe Marinette by "making up" for their sin of thinking so lowly of her by reassuring her that of course they trust her. Thereby giving Marinette exactly what she wants despite their better judgement.
Marinette: (hugs Tom) Oh, thank you! You're the best parents in the world!
Marinette then rewards her parents for giving her what she wants by forgiving them of their transgression and stating that they really are good parents. Not just good, but the best in the world!
Something which both soothes over any lingering discomfort from the guilt trip (so they come out of the interaction with a positive feeling about Marinette rather than a negative one) and incentivizes Tom and Sabine to act this way again.
But the really insidious part is this line:
Sabine: We'll just make twice the number of macarons. Just in case.
Tom and Sabine don't just fall for the guilt trip, they actively work to shield Marinette from the consequences of her actions.
Not only does she get what she wants despite it being a bad idea, she never gets to learn why it's a bad idea. There's a good reason why Tom and Sabine wanted to tell her no. What should happen is that she pushes to get what she wants and then gets a reality check that just because she wants something really badly doesn't mean that it's a good idea for her to get it. Someone can tell her no and be right to do so.
But that's not a lesson she learns, because her parents don't want her to experience the discomfort of her actions having consequences. So instead what she learns is that she can get whatever she wants with no downsides whatsoever. If someone thinks about telling her no, she can just guilt trip them to get them to change their minds.
#what i find interesting is that the time in animaestro is (i would argue) developmentally appropriate for a 14 year old#young teenagers do things like that all the time to get what they want#(think the stereotypical 'asking the parent who always says yes when they know the answer would be no if the parents were together' way of#getting what they want)#yes maribug manipulated her parents in animaestro but the stakes are much lower and#that episode is all about her stooping to low levels to get what she wants (such as teaming with chloe to bully kagami)#i would go as far as to say that scene was to parallel her to chloe who also always gets what she wants from her father#however the behavior goes unchecked as opposed to acting as a narrative device#in a living breathing teenager that manipulation tactic would not work at a certain point with their parents#and they would have to learn to accept a no at some point#i truly dont think a 14 year old trying to manipulate her parents is that worrying developmentally#as a narrative device comparing her to chloe it works even better as the whole episode shows her being underhanded and even#cruel due to her crush. the lesson she is supposed to learn is that anyone can become a bully if they justify the reasoning to themselves#through this framing the behavior should have stopped after this episode. she ends animaestro feeling bad about#teaming up with chloe to bully kagami. that guilt should have extended to manipulating her parents to let her see her crush @thetrashthatsmilesback
Agreed. Teenagers are quite self-centered and short-sighted. Them being little sociopaths sometimes doesn't necessarily means they'll remain that way or that there's something (too much) wrong with them.
Middle adolescence is also the time period where they try to establish an identity independent from their parents and more in line with their peers. Pushing boundaries and seeing what they can get away with is a normal part of that experience.
However, the key part in the boundary pushing that leads to a healthy development is the teenagers finding the limits of how much they can get away with. Sure, it's not fun because most of the process is basically "fuck around and find out", but that's a necessary part of growth. That's how people learn to function in a society. If the teenagers finds healthy boundaries that tells them what they can and can't do, they would learn to have healthy boundaries themselves.
That's why I find Tom and Sabine's part a lot more insidious and worrying than Marinette's. Because they don't give Marinette those healthy boundaries. They teach her that she can get away with whatever she wants so long as she's willing to play a little dirty. But it's all good if no one ever catches her or gets mad at her! So long as she's getting what she wants and not experiencing consequences, that's an acceptable state of affairs.
Which is a major and consistent pattern we see with Marinette from season 1. She always tries to get away with stuff in secret and only fesses up if she has to (the time she broke Alya's phone comes to mind). Back then it wasn't as worrying because it was all small stakes stuff and could still be put down to Marinette simply being a dumb teenager.
But over the seasons the stuff Marinette tried to get away with grew more serious and the means she was willing to use grew worse and more extreme. Her current actions are far beyond anything that resembles typical development for her age.
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.
Absolutely agreed on everything but the last.
They didnt break up Adrienette as part of the season finale. They only had marinette restate her previous (Sadnansi) resolution to break up with adrien so she doesnt have to "Lie to her boyfriend".
Because y'see, The problem isnt that she's lying to people, but that those people are close to her. If adrien were a random parisian who she didnt know? It wouldnt be wrong because she wouldnt owe him anything. If she was merely an anonymous superhero covering up a terrorist who tried to start World War Three? Marinette wouldnt have a problem with that, because strangers are like Senti's and Fae-Catboys...
In that they arent people.
...
of course there is the posibility that scene was genuinely meant to be a breakup... which im only considering for because Reginerazione played her grandpa's death just this ambiguously off-screen.
so lets engage that thought: If this was meant to be them actually "Breaking up" then why didnt we get to see her tell Adrien that. Why does Adrien not get to be in the scene where he's broken up with if that was genuinely what that scene was meant to be? Do adriens feelings matter so little he cannot even be allowed to be a part of his own breakup?
Cause i am tired of giving them the benefit of overwhelming doubt about this. That could very well be how little the writers care about their second title character.
As far as I can rationalize it, Nemesis is might to segue right into a two-parter at the start of Season 7, and I think there's a solid chance that they are breaking up for real in said two-parter.
Of course, the reason I say this has nothing to do with the actual plot (and I think your point is valid, on-screen it was just Marinette reaffirming her intentions, nothing more) and everything to do with how the show markets itself. This was the big cliffhanger meant to drag people into watching the Season 7 debut episodes because so much of the show is now marketed on promises and hypebaiting.
Conversely, it could turn out that Season 7 has a whole arc of Marinette trying to figure out how to tell Adrien she's totally breaking up with him. Maybe the can is kicked all the way down the road to the s7 finale. Who knows at this point.
One of my general courses is about magic in the ancient near east. The miraculous having been made by a wizard, and subsequently the kwamis being giving a form mortals can interact with, is making me think about how that would affect things for other practitioners (I know it's the wrong culture but humor me).
Even if some people in mlb's world have actual magic (like the wizard) then I can still see the same kind of magical practices developing in their world as our world had. Those practices were basically people's attempts to control a world they didn't understand in order to ward off harm like diseases, failed harvests, the evil eye and all that. So even if real magic exists for some people, the vast majority of the common folk would be relying on these practices for their everyday life and probably won't even encounter a real wizard.
One of the things those practitioners did whenever they wrote amulets for their clients (it was a respectable profession!) was invoke magic names that were often said to be names of gods. Considering the kwamis are supposedly gods, I can see their names getting used in amulets and magical spells like that.
They wouldn't stay as simply "Tikki" or "Plagg". For one, the words are going to get corrupted quick as word spreads of those magical names (especially whenever the spells get translated). For another, they would pick up different name and/or epithets by which they can be invoked. (Also, they would probably get merged with other deities as well.)
It's fun to try and imagine the kwamis being worshipped as actual gods, especially in the context of who would be invoked when. Tikki would obviously be invoked the most often considering everyone wants good luck, healing and bountiful harvests. Plagg would probably be regarded as an evil deity or be the ruler of demons, since he would be the one bringing calamities upon people.
It's the other kwamis where there's a lot more variety in how they would be regarded. Or even how people would see them and which would be worshipped (something that would be decided mostly by how useful those domains would be to the everyday of people). Wayzz would be very popular as a protector of all manners. Stompp could be seen as a protector against demons and witchcraft specifically. Barkk ig could be prayed to when trying to find something lost?
Idk, the domains of the kwamis in the show are so trash and don't really lend themselves to actually treating the kwamis as gods rather than mascots. But hey, that's where we get to have fun with worldbuilding! (and it's also a great excuse to infodump about stuff I learned lol).
So how do you think the kwamis would be worshipped if they were treated as a pantheon of gods?
You are dead on the money in terms of the Chinese Miracle Box being rubbish as a proper Pantheon of its own. I think the only way to really make kwamis as gods work is to incorporate all the boxes&kwamis into a broad polytheistic religion.
You could have humans set up some complex celestial mythology for them ala Hinduism, which is probably not accurate but the storytellers get carried away. Another path is a more Chinese style using the kwamis as an aray of nature spirits that are prayed to more generally in the moment and at little shrines. The particulars of each individual kwami/god/spirit and the worship thereof would vary heavily from region to region and even family to family in this case.
Oooh the Chinese style sounds fun. And it works great with the stuff I learned.
Spells and magic were treated as an almost scientific endeavor back then. In the sense that there were specific steps and if you followed them right the spell should work, regardless of who you are. A lot of the spells and amulets we have today have something like "good spell" written on them, meaning that it was tested and found to be effective. (How well it was actually tested is another topic as it was obviously all pseudo-science at best, but the attitude to it is really interesting).
The most fascinating aspect of this is that practitioners thought of magical names as having inherent power to them. If invoking Helios' name works, then it's going to work for everyone regardless of if they're greek or pagan or christian or jewish. So we see spells that invoke just a whole bunch of different names from multiple origins.
Although there are scribes who adjusted which names and epithets they used based on who the client is. There are magic bowls that were written with the same spell from the same scribe that have christian names and epithets in them vs others that have jewish names and verses in them. Based on the names of the clients it seemed like the scribe matched it to their religion and culture.
It could be really interesting if there was something similar for the kwamis. Practitioners would invoke their names regardless because if the magic name works then it works, but they could be adjusting which names and epithets they use in their spells based on the specific practices of the clients.
And then of course there would be the hacks that just give a generic spell to everyone regardless of their own personal practices. Smh, some people just want to make quick money.
"dni if you engage with irredeemable media! dni to kill a mockingbird stans" ok well CLEARLY you have never read to kill a mockingbird if you think it's irredeemable media and also having a book that was published in 1960 on your dni stan list is kinda ridiculous actually
dna is often explained as if it was computer code, but its important to remember its literally a bunch of physical strings. just as important as the sequence itself is how these physical strings are packaged and where proteins attach to them, because this determines which parts can even be read
It's not ALL DNA, I don't recall the specifics right now, but yes, it does turn into this stringy thing when you purify it for DNA extraction. I was amazed when I saw it for the first time, it really looks like what you would imagine it to be.
One of the problems with Miraculous Ladybug is that its characters don't seem to develop (this applies to both the protagonists and the villains, and the new characters from the sixth season aren't spared either). Far from seeing an arc of heroism, redemption, or villainy, the characters remain stuck in their arcs, which makes them annoying and boring (literally, far from hating the villains for their evil, people hate them because some of them seem to have come out of nowhere, as we were never given any clues or coherent evidence of their existence (which makes them seem forced), and because their villainous arcs don't progress but are repeated without any development to make them interesting, which makes the villains annoying because of how boring they are, and the same applies to the protagonists).
This is one of the endless issues with Miraculous being an episodic formula show where every episode stands alone. Those kinds of shows require the characters to be stagnant so they thrive on conflicts that don't require meaningful growth. In spite of this, Miraculous keeps introducing plot threads, conflicts, and character beats that beg for some level of serialization. This results in a mess of a show that will never satisfy you because it can never deliver on the things it sets up. I've ranted about that several times so I'll just link to one of those posts and call it a day on this one.
My immediate reaction whenever I hear that Miraculous is introducing what should be a shocking twist that changes the series forever:
[gif description: Hela from Thor Ragnarok pushing over the infinity gauntlet in the vaults of Asgard while announcing "Fake" because it's just a cheap replica and Thanos has the real one]
I've just stopped believing anything the series tries to sell me. Miraculous' twists are almost always fake outs that either get undone within an episode or have their obvious consequences ignored so it's impossible for me to care about them. I'm genuinely more shocked when a change/reveal/whatever matters than when it doesn't.
Even when the twists stick around and actually effect the plot, they are played in the least interesting way possible. Like Gabriel getting all the miraculous didn't really matter outside of the season finale and even then the way he used them there made no sense. We went from him sharing a single power to his entire army somehow getting whatever powers he needed. With how broken the butterfly is, I'm not even sure why he needed all the miraculous. They functionally just replaced the peacock since I think every akuma got a single bonus power which could have just come from a sentimonster.
Roman: So do we just, fucking, bash it's head in, or?
Shiv: It isn't our problem, right? We just leave it. Hands clean.
Kendall: Very, uh, maternal, Shiv. Leave the baby.
Connor: There are a lot of uses for an evil baby. I'm not saying that's what we should do, but....
Kendall: Roman's right. We kill it, or we get someone to kill it.
Shiv: So what, you just get to be the hero who saves the world from an evil baby?
Greg: I'm worried, uh, if we find a guy to kill the baby? He must be a pretty evil guy. So he might use the baby for evil. But I'm not saying I should kill the baby? Because I don't really want those images like, in my head whenever I see another baby?
