#In spite of the show runner's claim that he doesn't want religion in his show France's Catholic routes are absolutely showing

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

The writers are really, really, really big on extreme virtue ethics where Marinette's actions are only good if her motivations are virtuous and, therefore, morally pure. The fact that Marinette wanted to take part in the competition to get close to Adrien is an impure motivation and therefore bad (this ignores the fact that Max's motivation wasn't exactly selfless. He wanted to be in the competition for selfish reasons, too, but Max isn't the main character so his motivations don't matter, I guess.)

Another example of this is Volpina where outing a liar is bad because Marinette is doing it for selfish reasons, ignoring the fact that Lila is very clearly causing harm through her lies. It's all quite bizarre and actually a great example of a common criticism of virtue ethics: it is possible to perform a right action without being virtuous and a virtuous person can occasionally perform the wrong action without that calling her virtue into question.

You can give a good lesson about the concept of selfish motivation blinding you to the nuances of a situation, but that's not what either of these are. Marinette is allowed to use her leet gaming skills to show off to the boy she likes even if it means that she dared to fairly beat another boy and Ladybug is allowed to confront a person using her name to manipulate people. In fact, I'd say that Ladybug's confrontation of Lila was straight up tame since it was mostly private while Lila's claim to BFF status was done on the Ladyblog. Ladybug would have been perfectly within her rights to have Alya post a follow-up video denouncing Lila.

Max literally had a HUD display for move inputs and still lost to Marinette who just knew her character better. Skill issue.

Also the fact that Adrien also beat Max far and square but the ire and “blame” was directed entirely at Marinette shows a very clear narrative bias lmao