combination-allan-death

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I’m sorry but Mia deserves better than Diego-

Round 1-

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I will say this. I agreed with your earlier post about Amy and her flawed and stuff. But this…isn’t this kinda putting Amy in a box? Something that you criticized before? People are allowed to like and dislike parts of a character. And Amy having crazy love for Sonic shouldn’t just be her core thing about her. She’s stubborn and has a thing for the supernatural. She’s kind but goes by her own thoughts and feelings.

As long as people are aware of Amy’s flaws and strengths and aren’t ignoring them, I can consider them a fan.

>I never liked the extreme way she showed her love for Sonic.

Then you didn't like Amy lol. That's like saying you like Batman, but you never liked how he refuses to kill criminals. There are OTHER THINGS to like about him, sure. But that's definitely a core primary defining attribute. If Batman killed criminals, he would be a fundamentally different character. If you don't like that Batman doesn't kill criminals, then you don't like Batman.

Same thing with Amy being crazy for Sonic.

For some reason people think "I enjoy this characters aesthetic design" and "I like this character" are the same thing.

But. They're not.

You can like LOOKING at Amy because of her character design and DISLIKE her characterization. That's ALLOWED.

You don't have to PRETEND to be a fan of the CHARACTER just because you like their character design. Especially when it's clear you actually completely despise everything about the way that character is written and would rather prefer they were a completely different character instead.

If you want to rip a characters skin off and dress up a different character in that skin, then you don't like the character. You just like the design.

If you "like" Eggman but don't want him to be evil, then you don't like Eggman. If you "like" Fang but want him to be a hero, then you don't like Fang. If you "like" Amy but don't want her to be violently in love with Sonic, then you don't like Amy.

And that's fine. Just. Be honest about it.

[red-balloon12]

Another thing is Amy is persistent to an annoying degree. It’s practically why she’s friends with Sonic in the first place.

I feel empathy for the people who kinda glaze Amy. Because for a while all people talked about in terms of Amy was her flaws and they did it in such a derogatory way. People were called weird and were bullied for liking Amy so I can’t blame people for trying to present her in a more positive light. But what people (who either hate Amy or glaze on her) don’t seem to realize is that the whole Sonic cast is very flawed. It’s not just Amy. Sonic, for instance, is often portrayed as a noble leader. But bro isn’t supposed to be a leader at all. He goes by the heart of his own drum (just like Amy) and that could be seen as being negligent. And Sonic often is negligent because he rarely slows down for others including his friends. He’s also not that smart either and is kind of a bitch at times. But he’s still kind and does want to do good by others.

Shadow, the one people glaze hell and back over, is a violent edgelord. For a good while he was terrible at communicating with others (kinda still is) he’s a “fight now, talk later” person and he’s not all that nice to people. He is also negligent to other’s feelings. Bro almost aided in destroying the world (and would have if it wasn’t for our girl Amy). But over time he realized the value of kindness and friendship and is better because of his growth.

People who like Amy Rose are right that Amy is so much more than just her crush on Sonic. But they always kind of fall into this trap where they ONLY ever talk about her virtues. The positive attributes of her character. They glaze her up. They say "Amy Rose is a great character because she's a Good Person" and that kind of thing.

And that's a trap and it's what allows people to mischaracterize Amy and butcher her portrayals in shit like Sonic Boom and IDW Sonic. Because Amy is actually a crazy stupid bitch. And THAT is what makes her a great character. If you want to explain what makes Amy so great as a character, you need to talk about her flaws in addition to her virtues. Because her flaws being sandpapered away and disregarded because they're "sexist" or "problematic" are the REASON her character keeps getting fucked up and then that fucked up characterization gets held up as an "improvement" by people who never liked Amy.

Amy FROM HER VERY FIRST APPEARANCE in Sonic CD was an annoying clinger. LITERALLY. She would jump onto Sonic and cling onto him, making it impossible for him to move. When she meets Sonic at the ending of Palm Tree Panic she is literally an obstacle that you as the player need to avoid, and jump to shake her off when she grabs hold of you. And after the Metal Sonic fight, the act will not conclude until Amy grabs hold of Sonic. Stopping him from running off screen to the right, the way he does at the end of every other boss act. And the score screen showing the end of the act will ALWAYS last just long enough for Sonic's idle animation of frustrated impatience to start. From her very first appearance, Amy is an annoying bitch. This is a FOUNDATIONAL attribute of her character.

In Sonic Adventure Amy's story opens with her complaining about how bored she is, and how she misses the excitement of going on adventures with Sonic. Then when Birdie crashes into her she takes it upon herself to help this lost animal who is being targeted by killer robots. She is throwing herself in harms way risking her personal safety on behalf of a creature that is weaker than her.... PARTIALLY because she was bored and thinks this will be exciting. SelfISH motivations for selfLESS actions. And it pays off when she runs into Sonic and uses the whole situation of the Birdie needing protection as an excuse to get to spend time around Sonic by imposing the need for a bodyguard onto him without giving any thoughts to what Sonic might be up to.

THEN WHEN THE KILLER ROBOT COMES BARING DOWN ON THEM, AMY GETS CAUGHT UP IN THE IDEA OF A ROMANTIC DATE THROUGH TWINKLE PARK WITH SONIC AND RUNS OFF IN A FLIGHT OF FANCY WHICH COMPLETELY DISTRACTS HIM FROM FIGHTING SAID ROBOT.

Amy is immature, selfish, does NOT have her priorities straight, and is kind of dumb. These flaws and shortcomings being ignored and disregarded is why Amy gets turned into the sensible mature voice of reason with a good head on her shoulders - which is the EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHO SHE IS SUPPOSED TO BE. These are character flaws that have NOTHING to do with her obsession with Sonic. But because her feelings towards Sonic are all anyone ever talks about, and because people who like Amy always want to present her in the most positive framing, these elements of her character getting sanitized are ignored.

Amy being sort of a super fucking annoying dumbass is WHY she gets treated like a punchline in games like Sonic Adventure 2. She gets caught up in her own little world, and because of that she gets left behind when everyone else is focused on more pressing issues right in front of their nose. All of her interactions with other characters in Sonic Battle are about how she's caught up in her little delusions about Emerl being her and Sonic's baby, and she lashes out violently at anyone who challenges that. You cannot have Amy without her being kind of crazy and kind of dumb.

Because these flaws are the REASON she's capable of her virtues. If Amy wasn't always getting swept up in her own little ideas, she wouldn't be there to find Shadow on the ARK and get him to remember Maria's wish and convince him to save the day. If Amy wasn't always charging off on her own flights of fancy, she wouldn't be the spunky little ball of energy and inspiration that helped Cream and Big rescue Chocola and Froggy. If Amy wasn't obsessively in love with Sonic, she wouldn't have gotten Blaze softened up to the idea of not needing to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders.

I've not put much focus on Amy's virtues in this post because I wanted to emphasize her flaws and shortcomings, BECAUSE I feel those are important parts of her character that always get ignored. And ignoring those parts of her character make them easy to get swept under the rug. And that more than anything else is what results in Amy being mutilated in spin offs like the comics and cartoons.

Amy is more than JUST her crush on Sonic. She is more than just her hobbies. She is more than just her virtues! She is ALL of those things. And she is also REALLY fucking dumb. And REALLY fucking crazy. And those things should be celebrated as part of the whole of Amy Rose JUST as much as her love for Sonic, just as much as her enjoyment of fortune card reading and shopping and boxcersizing, just as much as her being a spunky inspirational leader who reaches out and touches the hearts of others and risks it all to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

Love Amy Rose warts and all, or lose her.

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A (pretty late) birthday gift for the boi

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This was actually a good essay that made me understand why people liked Scarlet Lady.

Unfortunately, it’s still not for me and while this essay has given me a fresh take on it, I just don’t have any interest in Chloe being a stagnant character in re-writes. I think her character potential has grown beyond that stagnation and I appreciate stories that actually shows that potential rather than just hint to it at the very end. It seems almost cowardly to me.

Since you've mentioned Scarlet Lady in one of your posts, what's your opinion on it?

I've mentioned before that I'm a big Scarlet Lady fan, which is the only reason that I'm comfortable answering asks like this one. I don't publicly criticize the content of hobby creators. That's wildly inappropriate! Punch up, not down.

The linked post was a general discussion of the adaptation process and how @zoe-oneesama did a fantastic job, so for this one, I'm just going to do some general gushing because I do actually like praising and enjoying things!

Scarlet Lady's chosen format (comic) allows it to have this wonderful conversation with canon where it can rely on the framework of canon to tell it's own story while also using canon for jokes and meta commentary. This means that Scarlet Lady is about as close as fan content can get to a direct reboot because it's able to have moments like this one from the comic's first post:

[Image description: Adrien standing in his room after transforming into Chat Noir for the first time. He is beaming and his eyes are shining with excitement as he exclaims, "This is gonna be awesome!"]

A single picture that communicates everything we need to know about Adrien getting his miraculous. When I've done this same thing in fanfic, I had to write out the full scene because that's how novels work. You have to give the full picture. With a comic, you can just quickly acknowledge this thing that we all already know and then move on to the new stuff. A picture really is worth a thousand words! (Or, in my case, more like two thousand...)

This allows Zoe to keep the same akumas that we get in canon without her story feeling like a boring rehash because she can focus on what's different in her version. A novelization of the same content would have to show both the stuff that stays the same and the stuff that changes for it to be coherent. That's a lot less fun to read and write. It's why I basically never revisit canon akumas in my own stuff. It's just too derivative for the written word.

This is one of the big reasons that I loved Scarlet Lady. Because it was able to have that more directly conversation with canon, it was able to take canon and say, "hey, why don't we embrace the tone that you established in season one and retell the story with that vibe?" That's something that I desperately wanted to see, but that is totally unsuited to my chosen artistic form. It couldn't be a novel. It had to be a comic.

If you want to know what a true formula show version of Miraculous would look like, Scarlet Lady is it. It does everything that Miraculous should have done:

Sticks to a lighthearted tone where nothing is ever super serious

Keeps Gabriel entirely unsympathetic

Has slow character development and background hints at a bigger plot as the only serial elements, allowing the individual episodes to be their own story while never feeling incomplete or rushed

Allows characters other than Marinette to shine while keeping Marinette as the clear main character

Makes Adrien narratively important

MAKES THE LOVE SQUARE CUTE SO I CAN ACTUALLY SHIP IT

Understands that Lila and Chloe can't coexist as antagonists

Reverses the love square, which is the best way to tell their story. Yes, I will die on my "love diamond" hill. It's a good hill. Come join me. I'll bring cookies.

I could keep going, but you hopefully get my point. While Scarlet Lady is certainly not the only way to do a formula version of canon, it's proof that a formula version does work! You don't have to go the serious route for Miraculous to be successful.

I want to take some time to gush about the ending, but I don't want to spoil it, so I'll put that gushing under a "read more" in case anyone hasn't seen it. I'll finish out this less spoilerish section with this:

I feel like some people are surprised when they learn that I love Scarlet Lady because - as some of you have probably picked up - it is quite different from my ideal version of canon. I'm not sure why that would stop me from enjoying a thing, though. It's important to remember that our personal ideals are not the only way to tell a good story. There are lots of ways to take what canon gave us and make something wonderful! It's part of the reason that I enjoy being in a fandom.

If I only wanted to see my ideal take on canon, then I'd stick to writing/imagining my own stories. But I don't want that! I like seeing alternate takes, too. Scarlet Lady is one of my personal favorites. It's completely different from anything that I'd ever think to write and that's why I'm so glad that it exists! I like being entertained just as much as I like creating my own entertainment and I don't want to only read stories that look like something I'd write. That's boring!

Spoilers below:

I've mentioned before that there are many, many ways to properly handle Chloe's character and Zoe did such a good job with her take on that! Chloe isn't absolved of all the things she did wrong, but she's also treated as a young woman with the ability to change.

While the comic bares the name of Chloe's alter ego, she was the never the main character. She never went on a journey. The story kept her to her shallow season-one self: a petty brat who just wanted attention. It did this because that's who Chloe was in canon and who Chloe needed to be for the comic to work.

The first time we see any complexity from Chloe is in the comic's final few episodes, which was absolutely the right call for Zoe to make! In a recent post, I talked about how the end of a formula show is the only time when you can break the formula in catastrophic ways and that's what Zoe did. She kept Chloe static until it was time to end the story and that's when the formula breaks. That's when Chloe gets depth because, once she has depth, the formula doesn't work.

That depth is not used to redeem Chloe, but to show us that there's hope for Chloe. That this petty brat who we've been dealing with has some serious issues and needs help. Help that she's going to get far away from the people that she's hurt because her issues aren't an excuse for what she's done. They don't erase the harm that she caused. At the same time, understanding her issues makes us hope that she can be better now and Scarlet Lady took a moment to give us that hope. To show us the START of Chloe's true story.

That is the kind of ending that I have wanted to see in so many properties!!! It was so wonderful to finally get one that did this right. A story that understood that full redemption to the team and damnation to death/suffering are extremes on a scale of possibilities. You don't have to go to extremes! You can fall in the middle and the middle is a perfect, natural place for Chloe to land in this kind of story. Fully redeeming or even fully damning Chloe simply doesn't work in lighthearted formula content. It's too big a lift as canon has already demonstrated.

I also loved Zoe's take on Emilie. I've mentioned that I don't like evil Emilie in part because it makes her revival feel like the start of a new story. She's back and she'd bad, so we have to take her down now! But I don't want that. I want the story to end when Gabriel is stopped. Zoe does this by giving us an Emilie that is another perfect middle ground. She matches canon's uncomfortable implications without feeling like a true villain who is a threat to society.

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today is the only day you can reblog this

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(Copying and pasting from a comment I made on YT)

By textbook definition Marinette hasn’t reached levels of being an actual stalker. By definition, a stalker harasses or persecutes someone with obsessive or unwanted attention. And to persecute someone is to torture or bully them.

Marinette has obsessed over Adrien but has never tortured or bullied him….at least not as Marinette and hasn’t out right harassed him….unless you count the museum. But at the time Marinette was under the impression Adrien was a statue.

So yes Marinette has stalker like tendencies but she hasn’t crossed the threshold of being an actual stalker…yet.

However I’m not going to sit here and say her actions weren’t problematic because they were-

I just gotten into an argument with someone on twitter, that was trying to argue that Marinette wasn’t a stalker and when I pointed out all the stuff she did, they said it didn’t make her a stalker at all. They said Adrien didn’t feel any danger around her and when I argued that he either didn’t know that she was stalking him or being creepy or just thought it was something else entirely different, they still try to argue that she wasn’t a stalker since he found her behavior funny, silly, and strange like that but if it was then why did derision made it out to be serious? Like that doesn’t make any sense to me!

A better excuse could've been it's just a gag bro, it's not that serious. This is a show that makes light of mental health problems and it's symptoms by calling it "quirky"... But yeah, with that one episode that makes everything worse in retrospect... I just gotta ask why??? Why write a defense for this? It's funny how Derision made it hard to defend by taking it seriously.

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I think the closest we got to Marinette comforting someone is that one scene in Maladiktator and even then she somehow found a way to make it about only herself and not Chloe.

Why do you think they don't show Marinette comforting other characters? It's always been a weird writing decision to me, and I sometimes wondered if I was legit just erasing all the times it happened out of my memory or smth. Like the first character trait established for her is she struggles to say no to people, she is a people-pleaser. And there isn't a better way to make ur mc lovable than showing how they effect the people around them. AND it would make her breakdowns genuinely heartbreaking, because she keeps giving and giving and it's a genuine flaw. Like, she rushed off to comfort Ivan in Origins, right? We should have had more of that. I'm reminded of that one Lady Wifi (i think?) scene where Ladybug is smiling at her adoring fans and the camera while Chat Noir is in the background actually comforting a child lmao. It just feels so weird, because I think Marinette IS actually supposed to be someone who does that, who provides that comfort to her loved ones all the time (even at the cost of her own mental health, boom, an actual thing she can work towards). But we just keep getting the reverse instead. She just kinda feels like a shit friend? Showing that emotional labor would also make her exhaustion work because like, what does the guardian even DO? Tell not show, but they ain't telling shit.

One of the things that drew me to Miraculous is the fact that the show tends to write the characters in non-standard gender roles, so I actually like the fact that Marinette tends to be more of a fixer than a comforter. She drives people to action and wants to solve problems and is very good at taking the weight of the world on her shoulders, but she kind of sucks at emotional vulnerability and comforting people. It's genuinely a good flaw for her character and a lovely thing to see in a show aimed at girls. No, we don't all need to be stereotypically maternal figures. Women can be just as bad as men stereotypically are when it comes to emotions!

The problem is that the show is obsessed with Marinette holding every important role in the story, meaning that we don't get a more emotionally aware character or characters to balance her out. Nor do we get to see her learn that this is a flaw of hers and either improve or just own that she's bad at this and learn to trust someone else with these types of issues. (This is one of the many things I think Adrien should have been allowed to do, btw. Ladybug is the brains, Chat Noir should be the heart.) We also don't get a true sense of Marinette's struggles because the show's formulaic nature rarely allows for those types of problems.

The Lila thing is a good example. Lila says that she's going to destroy Marinette's friendships, but she literally can't do that because that would mean changing the way the characters relate on a massive scale and formula shows can't do that. So instead of seeing Marinette struggle as Lila lies and manipulates everyone into hating Marinette, we get extremely annoying episodes where Lila lies and everyone believes her, but no one gets all that upset at Marinette's constant accusations. They just treat it as a minor quibble which is actually more aggravating than Lila changing the status quo in my opinion.

There's also the issue that you brought up: we don't see Marinette truly struggling to be the guardian, so her new role doesn't feel like a big deal. Not much changes for her save for the kwamis being around now. We don't even know what her relationship with Master Fu was really like because he was barely ever on screen so we really don't feel her loss.

All of this is just another problem to lay at the feat of our ever-present issue: Miraculous does not have the right conflicts and characters for a formula show. Formula shows thrive off of things being lighthearted and the heroes lacking major flaws. Miraculous chose to make things somewhat serious and give everyone flaws that are just begging to be address, but that can't be because this is the wrong format for that type of thing.

In a team show where character arcs were a thing or even just one where character dynamics were a thing and Marinette was allowed to share the screen in a more balanced manner, then everything about her would work fine. She's set up perfectly for that kind of show. She is not set up for a formula show where she's basically the only character that matters outside of the villains. If that's what they wanted to write, then Marinette needed to be limited to minor flaws that never last more than an episode or at least limited to flaws that are purely situational such as being stubborn or the classic sudo-flaw of being clumsy that the show already embraces.

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I think the time wasting aspect of this whole debacle isn’t talked about enough. If we’re going off of the narrative that everything that happened in Miraculous in regards to Chloe was planned by Astruc and his writing team, than them spending time to give Chloe nuance and depth was a waste of time on every aspect.

It didn’t amount to anything because all of the nuance and depth for Chloe was either denied or deconstructed to the point of irrelevancy, it took away time that could have been spent exploring kwami/miraculous lore, other characters or even the love square and there was a petty reason why it happened. It was an exaggerated and extended “gotcha” moment to flip off any person that remotely had faith in Chloe or related to her. The worst part in this is that the other characters didn’t grow from this. Sabrina’s “redemption” was so out of left field and so rushed, Zoe’s issues were solved from the get go so this was just for her to look nice and “more ideal” in comparison and Marinette just treated Chloe like an insignificance rather than an actual threat (like she has been though out the whole show)

Even when she was going through her “damnation” arc, the writers were wasting time with her. They tried to have their cake and eat it too with Chloe, trying to make her both a threat and a laughing stock with no real sway over the show and she ended up being a waste on all fronts. I used to think people who say “she should have been written off” were being too harsh but now I really don’t blame those people who held that sentiment.

(I wanted to post this in the form of a video with GamingMagic13’s style of editing, but I don’t have the energy for that.)*

People say Chloé’s redeeming qualities only started to show through during Seasons 2 and 3 because Thomas had no involvement in the production of those two seasons as if he wasn’t on the writing team on every episode for those two seasons.

The consensus shouldn’t be, ��Thomas went away so the other writers started a redemption arc which Thomas ruined when he came back”. It should be, “Thomas and the other writers spent two seasons tricking people into feeling bad for Chloé by revealing that she was more than just a one-dimensional mean girl, and then yanked the rug out from under them just for the sake of yanking the rug out from under people”.

Thomas, your target audience is literal children. I don’t think subverting their expectations is that much of an achievement to brag about.

Also, does anyone else think that, if people weren’t so antagonistically vocal about Miracle Queen and didn’t harass Thomas over it and the “We thought she was redeemable” tweet, then Chloé wouldn’t have gotten worse and worse as Seasons 4 and 5 went on?

Considering the fact that, after Season 3 ended in Fall 2019, the show went on a hiatus that was forced to be even longer due to the COVID pandemic with only the New York special to keep us company in September before finally returning in Spring 2021, the crew had plenty of time to rework the scripts to worsen Chloé.

I would say this applies to Lila, too, but it’s not like feeling bad for her was ever a common fandom talking point and the only thing about her that could have qualified as a redeeming quality that could have gone somewhere (that she lies for attention that she can’t get at home because her mom is out working for most of the day, which only briefly comes back at the beginning of Oni-Chan) is now irrelevant (now that she has multiple moms and identities) because this show has proven how much it loves its retcons and has done nothing to convince me it’s not misogynistic, not even the half-a**ed attempts at redeeming Nathalie and Sabrina after four seasons of them making Bayonetta faces. I know I’m of the “better late than never” opinion, but that mindset can only go so far until “too little, too late” kicks in.

*When talking about the GM13’s editing style, I’m referring to the one he’s been using since the Top 20 Worst Movies video, as in, the topic he is currently talking about will contain clips from the franchise the current topic is discussing.

Talking about Toy Story? Clips from the Toy Story saga.

Talking about The Incredibles? Clips from the Incredibles duology.

Talking about Cars? Clips from the Cars trilogy.

Talking about The Owl House? Clips from The Owl House.

Practice with this.

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What gets me about the “Chloe is so dumb lol” narrative is that there are several instances where she’s proven to be more competent than S4 and 5 (especially 5) gives her credit for. This is the same character that called out the lacking dynamic in LB and CN in S1 while still akumatized. This is the same character that nearly took down Mayura in S3 on her own. This is the same character that was the very first character to resist an Akuma in the turning process and made the very idea that people can fight Akuma’s happen (something S4 and S5 tries to discredit by having everyone and their mother do to the point where it’s not ground breaking anymore). And sure you can argue that most of these examples aren’t necessarily Chloe being smart, but they do demonstrate Chloe being strong willed and determined.

THIS is the same character Astruc wants to argue is the dumbest character and has the lowest IQ and is so incompetent she can’t spell “democracy”.

Clover Rants Miraculously: Unearned Defeat

Maybe it's the bitter Chloe Stan in me, but I genuinely do hate how her (And Lila's, frankly) "Downfall" in S5 was never actually about her bullying victims coming together as a community/group to finally stand up for themselves, but about the writers taking every opportunity possible to mock her (and her fans indirectly) because they were that desperate to get the audience onboard with her constant on-screen ridicule. Marinette wasn't allowed to actually stand up for herself against her, to get others to stand up for themselves, to get the class and their teachers to put their feet down in face of her cruelty and commands and finally say "No. I don't care if you're going to call your dad down to have me fired/expelled/exiled. I'm noting doing what you asked. I refuse to buckle under your threats anymore. The answer is no."

Instead, it's 27 episodes (and two specials) of "Isn't Chloe so stupid and dumb? Look at how stupid and dumb she is! She's too dumb to tell Felix and Adrien apart despite being their friend for years. She's too dumb to hide the fact that she hasn't been doing her own homework since Primary. She's too dumb to know Gabriel's tricking her into taking over Paris. She can't even spell 'Democracy' or scheme without Lila needing to hold her hand! What a moron, am I right?". Her friendship with Adrien gets ended over a randomly inserted event from a year ago rather than her steadily growing toxicity that's clearly changed her from the girl he befriended years before, just so Chloe can rant and rave about how evil (and stupid) she is, too much so to even apologize. Sabrina gets downgraded from friend/lackey to punchingbag/slave with nearly zero explanation on how the transition happened, before suddenly being inserted with morals during a scheme (when the upset's clearly more about her being upstaged by Lila) when she barely showed any remorse/reluctance before now and throwing Chloe under the bus to save herself under the excuse of "redeeming herself" to prove further that Chloe is too dumb and stupid to appreciate her friends. Her father, who constantly indulged her whims and turned the whole city upsidedown in her name even when unasked, calls her "Selfish and heartless" to a close friend, and barely reflects on how he might of had a hand in how that came to be, before tossing her to her neglectful mother as a "they deserve each other" punishment for her stupidity and evil. An entirely new character is introduced specifically to talk about how evil and stupid Chloe is and blaming her for her expulsion before getting casually tossed aside. An evil version of Marinette's existence is all but directly blamed on Chloe's bullying rather than the post-apocalyptic villainous dictatorship she lives under that forbids helping people, and even then, nothing comes of the mention as it just exist to remind the audience that Chloe is evil and stupid - even in alternate universes. We dedicated a section of the London special on how Chloe's too evil and stupid to change just to have it there (instead of actual being in London so the episode name would make some sense). Her defeat doesn't come from a clever plan, or the power of cooperation, or even love in the face of difficulty - instead, it comes from spyware and the heroes deciding "Nuhuh" as their transformation timers run out and the narrative shrugging before giving them a freebie by claiming they've "Grown up" without explaining how.

Even when Marinette is finally given the chance to shut Chloe down, it just...rings hollow, because it more about making Chloe look foolish and letting us laugh at her tears than making Marinette seem strong for finally standing up to the girl who's apparently tormented her since they were in diapers and yet somehow she's been beating the blonde down for the past 2-4 seasons with minimum effort. And even, it feels unearned because not only has Marinette not been allowed to build up to her defeat of Chloe to this point, she isn't the one who took her down anyways - convenience did the job for her and she just showed up at the right time to reap the benefits.

Marinette and all the people Chloe hurt should have been given this chance to grow and finally get back their agency from her, to finally defeat Chloe on their own - but instead, they're made passive players and props to the writers personal hit pieces against the loud fan minority on twitter, because a group of adults decided their personal hateboner against the fictional child antagonist they created was far more important than the story they were supposed to tell

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THANK GOD-

what if ragatha is an npc? she and kinger are the only characters who's names are puns on what they are. but, kinger's lines and actions in episode 3 make me believe he's human.

it's ragatha all along!

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Hot Take:

We can argue about Chloe’s “scrapped” redemption forever. But I think Thomas and his thoughts towards Chloe about parental abuse should be talked about MUCH more.

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OH NO HE’S HOT-

Page 3 !! Ignore what's behind Pomni, you're looking spiffy Caine <3

( Page 4 )

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Ragatha my beloved! They can never make me hate you!

tbh there is not a story arc on earth that would make me dislike ragatha im ride or die for her

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If I see anyone trying to defend Gabriel or Andre or Audrey (and etc etc), I will move into your walls and SEVERELY JUDGE YOU-

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I’d honestly stop watching and walking out of the fandom if Ragatha turns out to be evil.

my goofy ass after episode 5 where it's inevitably revealed that one of my all time biggest comfort characters (Ragatha) is actually a mean girl bitch with no empathy who just plays nice to get high off peoples' admiration and affection

[red-balloon12]

Hear me out…Ragatha is a barbarian. But she’s one of those barbarians that are really nice and doesn’t like to fight or cause violence unless she really has to. (Jax is really frustrated about it cuz he wants to see her mess shit up)

And then she finally snaps and ragged and she goes HAM on her enemies because they hurt her friends (or they pissed her off to the point if breaking)

unrelated to the AU I was talking about earlier but

the troupe if they had DND classes (might expand on this idea later):

Pomni - Wizard (because I think it would be nice to reflect her smarter side. or maybe a Bard. not entirely sure but definitely some kind of spellcaster)

Ragatha - Cleric (I don’t have to explain this)

Jax - Rogue (what the hell ELSE would he be)

Gangle - Fighter (“Huh. And I thought pirating all that anime was useless.” Also we need to have more than just one martial class, also this would be so funny guys)

Kinger - Also Cleric (Because the only other thing that fits him is Paladin, and this fits more. I know Ragatha is also a Cleric but they can be two different subclasses.)

Zooble - Druid (I don’t have to explain this either)