#ml: 3x22

[wield-the-mighty-pen]

To clarify, this does not mean your favorite episode, but rather, your favorite episode of this ship. Because this had to be whittled down so much to fit into the amount of spaces available for a poll, this doesn't include every Adrinette episode, so feel free to click other and put your episode in the tags!

This is for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity of ship trends in ml, so please share for a larger sample size!

Ladynoir Poll

[aaronwarner]

Every Ladrien interaction ever. (44/?)

[trash-squatch]

Everyone in Kwami Buster except Adrien

[for-lovely-things]

*cries*

[iridescentoracle]

okay so i know i disagree with the Entire Rest Of The Fandom Except Nyquildriver, Apparently, on a lot of stuff, but this does still feel a bit like sacrilege to say, but i’ve been thinking it for over a year now:

i do love the concept and a lot of the individual bits are great, but honestly i didn’t think chat blanc was like, super well-written—the concept is great but the execution was lacking—but not for the reasons i’ve seen anyone else argue. the problems i’ve seen other people have with chat blanc were all down to characterization (of marinette and/or of her parents, mostly) and that all worked totally fine for me.

the problem i have with chat blanc is the way the time travel/flashbacks are handled—having bunnyx frantically flipping back and forth between the chat blanc/ladybug conflict & the how-we-got-here just feels contrived, like if the solution here is having ladybug deakumatize chat blanc then why does it matter what happened, why are you so desperate to find the answers, and if it does matter that much and bunnyx does need to know, then… why doesn’t she do anything with the information

but then there’s also all this focus on “oh she has to find the akuma so she can fix everything!!!!” but surprise that didn’t fix everything and actually now you have to go back in time and avert this whole timeline so actually you could’ve dipped on the fight ten minutes ago and gone back to erase the name as soon as you found out he knows who you are and everything that’s happened since was totally pointless

and while i think that could have been done well—you thought everything was fixed but SURPRISE OH NO—it actually just felt anticlimactic? and the “actually this whole fight was pointless bc she’s erasing this bit of the timeline” could’ve been really poignant—she knows she should just leave and fix things before the timestream breaks down but she can’t bear to leave chat noir like this even in a future she wants to prevent from happening in the first place—but again, as it stood it just felt pointless

like, the problem with how marinette is written in this episode isn’t about characterization, it’s about agency. between dropping off the hat and erasing her name, nothing she does actually matters or drives the plot, and basically ditto bunnyx; she’s great in theory but doesn’t actually do anything that like, a random time portal marinette accidentally trips through couldn’t have done.

and i feel like i’m making it sound like i don’t like the episode, and that’s not even true!! i cannot possibly overstate how much i love the idea of it, i’m all about time travel and alternate timelines if they’re handled well, and i have happily eaten up every temporary identity reveal the show has given us and hoped for more! to borrow a description from nyquildriver,

it honestly does feel like all its impact on the story is to give marinette some PTSD "gotcha, can't fall in love with chat noir, okay"

and i am just fine with the actual plot impact going forward being "marinette has PTSD around the idea of falling in love with chat noir now," [kicks a non-trivial amount of my ao3 history under the bed], so at the end of the day i’m still really grateful that chat blanc is an episode that exists, but i’ve never been able to watch it without thinking the whole time that they had all the pieces of a top-tier episode and put them together clunkily enough it’s actually just kind of okay.

which is WILD because holy shit what a concept. like even from years in the future when we’re a couple episodes from the end of season five i still can’t believe that’s actually a real episode they gave us. i wish it were more than the sum of its parts but what parts

[wield-the-mighty-pen]

To clarify, this does not mean your favorite episode, but rather, your favorite episode of this ship. Because this had to be whittled down so much to fit into the amount of spaces available for a poll, this doesn't include every Marichat episode, so feel free to click other and put your episode in the tags!

This is for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity of ship trends in ml, so please share for a larger sample size!

Ladynoir poll

Adrinette poll

Ladrien poll

[wield-the-mighty-pen]

After seeing a lot of people upset with some missing favorite episodes, I decided to do a part 2 with the top choices from last part with some requested episodes that weren't included last time. I did this for both Adrinette and Ladynoir since they were the two sides that really had a bunch of episodes missing, obviously I can't include everything, but I felt like this would be a good way of seeing what the favorited episodes actually are.

Once again, to clarify, this does not mean your favorite episode, but rather, your favorite episode of this ship. Because this had to be whittled down so much to fit into the amount of spaces available for a poll, this doesn't include every Adrinette episode, so feel free to click other and put your episode in the tags!

This is for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity of ship trends in ml, so please share for a larger sample size!

Ladynoir poll

[aaronwarner]

[aaronwarner]

I’m not Chat Noir anymore. I’m Chat Blanc.