So There's A Strange "defense" Of Miraculous I've Seen Crop Up On Occasion. The Idea That Everything

being a miraculous hater when you like both marinette and adrien as characters and the lovesquare is worse than being in the army. liking lila on top of that is worse than freezing in the lake at the bottom of hell. "character flaws are good" i cry. "it makes characters more interesting and nuanced!" i wail. "the problem is that miraculous is bad at incorporating the character flaws in a meaningful way, not that the characters have them!" i weep. they stone me like a 2025 Jesus.

i want this with marinette and gabriel too but it's much harder than with adrien because the show doesn't give much to work with. alas i try to build something in a rewrite bc the protagonist and antagonist should have fun dynamics or it kills me.

marinette and gabriel: a girl and her hero. what she strives to be. a man who made his own fashion house and is a household name. she loves his work, wants to be him. gabriel sees a lot of himself in this girl his son brings around-his childhood, before he was successful. with superpowers that give access to emotions, it's hard Not to feel empathy, and there's a reason gabriel stays mostly in his house. but... shes talented. when he's not hawkmoth, all he does is necessary work, but it wouldn't hurt to let her shadow him doing things he already has to do anyways.

ladybug and hawkmoth: i hate you give me your miraculous (starting out with hawkmoth seeing her as a child who simply can be manipulated into doing what he wants. and marinette, who is used to kind adults who have her best interests in mind, is vehemently betrayed by the notion of an adult so horrible - despises him. the manipulation doesn't work, it becomes more and more vitriolic. theyre so similar, and they hate that about one another. it doesn't matter she's a child anymore; she's a brat with a weapon too powerful for her to understand, etc.)

marinette and hawkmoth: marinette despises him as always, but the power imbalance makes her incapable of doing anything. marinettes less of a fawner though. less conversation, more her considering ways to escape. meanwhile hawkmoth still has a soft spot for the fashion girl his son likes - so he isn't as horrid as he Could be.

ladybug and gabriel: gabriel is marinettes hero and ladybug is gabriels fucking worst nightmare and both of them have to tamper it down. ladybug can't hero worship, she's the hero! gabriel can't openly show any disdain -- who the fuck hates ladybug! similar to chat noir and gabriel, it's a power reversal where ladybug technically has more power over gabriel, but gabriel has the potential to use her seeking adult validation and approval to try and learn more about her. especially since marinette looks up to him. becomes more sour as marinette becomes more disillusioned with his parenting style; she would ask questions as ladybug she would never dare as marinette.

okay i will say one of the least utilized parts of ml is that the lovesquare isn't the only characters that can have multiple dynamics at once. and in fact one of my things i wanna do in a rewrite is have gabriel/hawkmoth have different dynamics with the main characters depending on persona.

for example; what is an interaction between hawkmoth and adrien agreste actually like? in a scenario where potentially hawkmoth finds out about ladybug being attached to a civilian AND having the excuse of knowing it because it's a popular model so it wouldn't out his identity, would he choose to endanger his son? or maybe would he do it himself instead of trusting an akuma, knowing he won't actually follow through with a threat to adriens life while an akuma would?

what's a dynamic between chat noir and gabriel? that's a superhero gabriel wants the miraculous from, but he can't be blatant about it, and more than that, he has no power over a superhero and no reason to dislike him. it's fascinating.

one of my fav fucked up things is the concept of adrien talking more to hawkmoth than his own father because gabriel learns that adrien is one of the most effective ways to bait ladybug. hawkmoth can read emotions, and one day he reads ladybugs enough when Adrien is in the vicinity- and woah, her emotions are so strong about him it's readable through the magical cloaking, even! he even justifies it morally because it's not like adrien is ever hurt. is it kidnapping if it's your own son? is it really hurting him if all your doing is playing chess with him on top of the eiffel tower, an unspoken threat of super powered violence enough to keep him from doing anything reckless? gabriel is spending time with his son /and/ getting the miraculous. and at the end of the day... when gabriel gets the wish, he can fix it all - so it'll be okay! :)

sooo. divorce arc when

i need to join a ml discord server because right now i force my friends to listen to me rant and they dont even like miraculous ladybug at all. but also i know im such a hater that i cant join any in fear of me being a total grinch and ruining peoples fun. but i also cant join hater servers because if i see any character bashing ill be the one with a bunch of grinches ruining MY fun. you see my dilemma.

im still thinking about the miraculous finale. i understand marinette not wanting to tell adrien his father was a terrorist because the mans dead, and honestly who wants to open all that baggage when you cant even confront the guy... yikes! like i promote honesty but i understand the perspective here. but someone has got to tell adrien hes a senti. it feels like keeping adriens medical history a secret. between marinette, felix, and kagami, someones got to break it to him. i know its a kids show and im overthinking this too hard, and also ive heard it said that sentis are actually just the same as humans, but that makes no sense to me... hes made of magic. like hes a little boy made of emotions and a dream. what if something comes up. what if adrien needs to know hes a senti because when he goes to the doctor, and he has some senti symptom going on like not having to blink or breathe or some other weird shit , the doc is like "sir you are the most abnormal human alive can we put you in a medical journal? can we study you?" what if adrien went in for surgery and he just had no organs or something i dont know... i just think he needs to know to be able to make informed decisions about this. also so he knows not to flush the rings that grant him free will and autonomy down the toilet but i mean thats secondary to me compared to the medical history stuff obviously.

don't ever remind me of miraculous ladybug it's that serious to me. I treat the writing of ml like being in the damn navy.

the actual reason I consume mediocre media is because I have bad taste. the deeper secret pretentious reason is because I think there’s something very revealing about bad media that you don’t get with good media. when you watch a poorly executed plot point unfold, you see the machinery behind it. you see the gap between what’s actually on screen and the true goal the author is striving for. if it’s particularly awful, you can even measure just how poorly mismatched the author’s skills are with the story they’re trying to tell you. watching a poorly executed narrative play out feels like you’re discovering something, because you see all the wiring and guts underneath that better authors hide from you, in the same way that movies hide boom mics and books make you forget you’re turning the pages. if a story is good and executed well you just see the story. but I want to see the guts and wires!

the thing is that i actually love moral grayness. and i actually don't personally believe lying is always wrong. sometimes lying is necessary in the society we live in. sometimes people that want to hurt us want to use information we have against us, and there's no reason to tell the truth to those people. it's just self defense. so mls secret identity rules have never been a problem to me ever. in fact i think the superhero genre is a perfect avenue for exploring the topic of what is and isn't okay to lie about. but there are some things that are just so fucking crazy to me to keep secret and ml has reached the point where it's like Jesus fucking Christ.

like there's just so much going on in miraculous ladybug like it's a baby kids show that has akumas every week and is funny and has cute romance which is what i expected and i assume most people wanted. and then it also has insane themes from things such as having a miraculous that has a power of creating designer babies forced to do whatever you want; which is not inherently bad i actually think it's a fascinating topic to explore but maybe in a horror movie. not the baby kids show that is mainly a feel good romance? i suppose the idea is to make it more similar to avatar and other family focused shows where it is both fun but has adult themes that cater to parents watching, but in this case they could handle their more adult themes with like a smidgen more care than they do. instead they introduce shit like sentimonsters and waffle on the morality of doing stuff like: killing them. GIRL‼️ this is a baby kids show we're teaching children MORALS‼️ murder is bad guys. unless the heroes do it 💖