#i may clown on TOH but it doesn't hold a candle to ML in terms of writing choices

[theprinceandthewitch]

I honestly wish I had an image to convey my horror and disbelief when I saw Felix for the first time. I knew right then and there Adrien was never EVER going to get an arc.

They really wanted Adrien to be a damsel in distress - a princess who needed to be saved by his knight. There really is no combination of words I can find to express how confused I was to see this writing choice be veiled as progressive for the first time.

Because here is the thing: In these stories, princesses still have more agency than Adrien. They will make choices that will guarantee a victory over the villain. Adrien's actions in ML do not matter and this was intentional.

If this wasn't intentional, then Felix would have never been introduced in the show. With his introduction, Felix usurps Adrien's agency from his own narrative. Like, it is so incredibly weird to see Felix have this level of influence in the story, because it's not like Adrien and Felix are the same character. From the audiences perspective, we know Felix is an older design of Adrien - BUT IN THE ACTUAL STORY Felix and Adrien are not treated as one in the same.

Felix zapping Adrien of his agency wasn't used as set-up to an eventual reveal of Adrien and Felix being two halves of the same whole. Felix is in this story JUST to make sure Marinettes and Adriens relationship doesn't become "toxic". Adrien can't be "mean" to Marinette - A.K.A he can't actually have any meaningful conflict with her. Which would naturally come about when you bring up the themes of agency with sentimonsters.

So, to keep any "toxicity" away from our main leads, Felix is given the agency Adrien should have had from day one.

I really don't have the words to describe how I feel when I see FELIX [who looks identical to Adrien] telling Marinette the sentikids backstory when this show could have just been written in a way where Adrien figures this out on his own and tells Marinette before they fight Gabriel. Adding Felix - who is literally an older design of Adrien - to this story just because they see ADRIEN exerting power over his own story as a detriment to his romantic development with Marinette is so odd to me.