#i am very disinterested in the critics' rewritten version of ML where the romance is a side dish lol

[chatonnoir]

while i agree generally with your takes on miraculous, i don't think it's in completely bad faith to criticize aspects of marinette's character that were clearly created by a male writer. marinette is still a character written by a male perspective, not a real person. her story toes the line of what is assumed to be stereotypical behaviour of teen girls and prioritizes her romantic relations and her connection to the main boy over most things. i don't criticising that aspect of the show is bad faith or salty.

I don't know where this ask is coming from because I haven't said anything remotely related to anything you're saying here today?? But ok, I guess we’re having this conversation now

I HAVE criticized the way the writing falls in to men's stereotypes of women plenty. I've made it no secret how much I hate the fact that all of the girls who like Adrien were shown to be catty and jealous with each other while the boys who liked Marinette/Ladybug were for the most part able to be nice to each other (though I have more thoughts on this I won’t get in to here). I can ALSO criticize the way the majority of fandoms see the realistic failings and flaws of a female protagonist, especially when a fan favorite male character is involved, and point out how the criticism would be far more lax if she was a male character and how insane it is of the fandom to attribute things to the writers having a personal bias against the male character. That has nothing to do with forgetting Marinette is a fictional character written by a man, and everything to do with fandom biases and perception, because I've been in fandoms long enough to see the patterns.

Then there's the opposite end of the spectrum where people want Marinette to be less "boy crazy" because that's a teenage girl stereotype, want more focus on her fashion design career, want the show to be primarily about her #girlpower with the romance as a side dish, like Mary Jane to Spider-Man, etc. As usual those people are completely missing the point.

Marinette is written to be a very fleshed out and human teenage girl character, “stereotypical” traits included. Sorry to say that even though it doesn’t fit some people’s #girlpower ideal, having her focus so much on her crush is pretty realistic to the teenage experience, since romantic love is such a new and big and exciting and overwhelming feeling when you’re young. Maybe your experiences were different, but Marinette’s antics definitely remind me of how most of my friends were at 14. It’s also not only one way, so while it might be a “teenage girl stereotype,” the teenage boy is shown exhibiting the same traits. She's shown sighing dreamily out of windows over her crush, and her crush is shown sighing dreamily out of windows over her the same way. She has a stash of pictures of him, and he has a stash of pictures of her. His story prioritizes his romantic feelings for her just as much as her story prioritizes her romantic feelings for him --- enough that plenty of Adrien fans also complain about everything “always being about his feelings for Ladybug,” as if it doesn’t go both ways. If that weren’t the case, you might’ve had a point here.

And sorry but I do think criticizing the fact that the show prioritizes her romance with the male lead is idiotic. The argument that "a male writer writing a show prioritizing the female protag's romance with the male lead is bad" sounds true enough by itself, and might mean something if you applied it to a completely different show, but it's complete nonsense when you apply it to Miraculous. As I've said before, ML is first and foremost a ROMCOM whose plot revolves around the love story and the power of love itself.  If I hit play on a romcom/romance, I want it to prioritize the romance.

If someone walks in to a romcom and then complains about it focusing too much on the romance because it’s unfeminist .......... there’s no helping them. They either missed the memo on what they're watching or they just want a different show. Idk how to make this any clearer for y’all. ML is a romcom. It was intentionally written to be a romcom and focus on the love story. That is literally the point.