#This level of drama is wildly unsuited to the intended age group

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

"Adrien isn't emotionally stable enough to know the truth, but he's totally cool to keep being Chat Noir!" is my 'favorite' variant of that take. Like, you cannot have this both ways. If he's incapable of facing personal hardship (which really doesn't fit the character, btw), then he's not fit to be a hero.

I still can't get over that the 'lesson' of Chat Blanc and Ephemeral is apparently "Adrien is a delicate flower who can't know things" and not "Adrien is incapable of facing the full truth of his messed up family during the final battle, so he needs to learn beforehand so he can process things. Also, Gabriel needs to remain in the dark or be the one to find out during the final battle". Like how much more satisfying would that have been if Adrien was revealed and the shock made Gabriel lose? Tables turned old man!

Also, like I said on the scarf post, Marinette keeping this secret is not in line with her other secrets. It's a wildly different flavor of secret that actively hurts Adrien with Marinette being the only one to benefit. Just terrible writing all around. These characters deserved so much better! Miraculous sucks at handling both the power of love and the power of friendship.

Okay, I'm done. I'm gonna fucking say it. This is my take that's hot enough to scorch the earth.

Marinette is not a 14-year-old girl

"Marinette" is a fictional character, therefore she is a construct made by a group of grownass adults, who should fucking know better. When Marinette does such an abhorrent thing that it has people renoucing her writing while the writers make excuses for her, that's not Marinette "making a mistake", that's the writers resolving the plot the way they intended to.

The writers literally think she's in the right to lie to Adrien. They've said so, the fucking show bible says Adrien will never learn the truth so Marinette will keep lying to him. Do you honestly think the writers would actually make their protagonist that much a parallel to her boyfriend's abusive father on purpose? They literally had no idea what they were doing when they wrote the finale with Marinette gaslighting her abuse victim boyfriend about his father's abuse. We're meant to only see Marinette protecting poor, fragile Adrien from things that would hurt him, even though that is how Gabriel saw his actions as well.

As far as the writers are concerned, Marinette has to make those decisions for Adrien, because she knows best. Because she's the protagonist. She's literally the center of the fictional universe of Miraculous, and, as of the retooling in season 4, the show is being written accordingly. Marinette only makes mistakes when she doesn't know something, meaning the mistake wasn't really her fault even when she feels guilty. She's never allowed to be morally wrong about anything, because the writers have changed the way this show works. It's Protagonist Centered Morality all the way down, now, the protagonist is literally just a mouthpiece for how the writers think things should work, and that is that Adrien's trauma isn't allowed to inconvenience Marinette in the slightest.

The people defending this writing choice are even worse, though. They actively voice the general idea that abuse victims shouldn't let their trauma ever inconvenience anyone, or they don't deserve relationships, if they're not outright denying a person's right to be traumatized at all. "Adrien isn't emotionally stable enough to know the truth," they say with complete sincerity, not realizing how ableist they sound. "Adrien should forgive Marinette for acting like his abusive father because Marinette had good intentions," they claim every time they try to justify Marinette's behavior, valuing the mistreating party's feelings over those of the party that is being mistreated. And let us not forget that even Marinette's good intentions just mimic Adrien's abuser.

Like, I know it's because these fans care more about Marinette as a character than they do about Adrien. They're both fictional constructs and not real people, so people will side with their favorite. But, once again, the people justifying the bullshit this show does with Adrien sound so much like abuse apologists that we really have to start calling things by their actual names.