If you take the character of Marinette Dupain-Cheng as the show actually portrays her, rather than the character she’s intended to be, you actually end up with a character who’s surprisingly consistent.
At her core, Marinette is a girl who operates on the strong underlying belief that people are emotionally fragile. It’s a belief that was instilled in her by her parents (mostly Tom) being overprotective and making a big deal (even panicking) from even small things that inconvenienced her (as seen in weredad). Marinette ended up learning that even a small amount of discomfort is something akin to harm.
The overprotective parenting also meant that Marinette never had to learn to cope with disappointments, failure or rejections, which means she failed to develop emotional resilience in handling those things. This then further reinforced her underlying belief that discomfort is harm because she had such a strong emotional reaction to those things so her brain learned to associate them as something Very Bad.
This leads to a few obvious traits. She can’t handle stress well. She’s anxious and catastrophizes at the smallest obstacle. Her self esteem is very dependent on external validation (as she never developed the tools to manage it herself) and even small missteps can send her into a spiral that ends with her considering herself The Worst EverTM. On the flipside, she’s very quick to bounce back once she has that external validation and during those times her self esteem is pretty high.
During those periods of high self esteem, she doesn’t consider herself to have any flaws or done something wrong (as being confronted with a mistake or a wrong she did would send her spiraling into low self esteem). At times there also seems to be an underlying belief that she’s better than others (like in the episode copycat) and being shown up by others in something that’s important to her will be perceived as a threat, either to her self esteem (see her reaction to Chat Noir showing an unexpected talent) or as a concrete threat (see her reaction to Sublime, Kagami and initial reaction to Lila before she learned she’s a liar).
The belief that discomfort is harm also manifests in several less obvious ways. First and foremost is her avoidance by any means of discomfort, which is at the core of many of her more morally dubious actions (there are many times where she lies to avoid discomfort, either of her own or the other person, she steals Adrien’s phone in copycat to delete the voice message, she lies to Adrien about his father at the end of s5).
However, it also leads towards an underlying distrust in others. Marinette grew up in a happy and loving family, so she perceives people as being fundamentally good and trustworthy. She’s also pretty anxious about upsetting others because she believes that they’re easily hurt. So despite thinking people are fundamentally good, she acts like people close to her will turn on her if she makes any missteps (see her behaviour after she accidentally deleted the Ladybug video from Alya’s phone, some of her catastrophizing about Adrien breaking up with her also fall into this category).
Those last two traits lead to many of her control freak tendencies. If people are easily hurt, and small mistakes can result in catastrophes, then the way to prevent that from happening is by controlling as many variables as possible so she could get the desired outcome. This is a big trait for her and results in many of her common behaviours as well as many of her worse actions.
Her overconvoluted schemes tend to be this way because of that, especially as far as Adrien is concerned. She can’t just ask him out on a date because then he could say no. Her plans are all aimed at minimizing her chances of rejection, as she doesn’t try to figure out how to confess her feelings to Adrien, but rather how to make him fall in love with her so that by the time she confesses her feelings he says yes. Knowing his schedule and her instances of stalking are generally because of this trait, as well as bullying any girl that gets near Adrien and seems to be a potential romantic threat.
It’s also the cause of her manipulating Chat Noir in Ephemeral as otherwise she runs the risk of him saying no to her plan, something which she explicitly stated as her motivation for the manipulation.
The other main core trait that informs Marinette’s personality is how she didn’t yet reach that stage in development where you internalize that other people aren’t NPCs but have their own rich inner lives that are different to your own.
As a result she has low empathy and struggles to put herself in another’s shoes or even imagine that it’s possible that someone’s experience differed from her own. The most notable place this shows up is her attitude towards child abuse. Namely, that she doesn’t seem to realize it’s a thing or that there are situations where children are better off without their parent. That’s why she reconnected Chloe with Audrey even after she saw how Audrey treated Chloe, and it’s why she thinks letting Adrien remember Gabriel in a positive light is something good.
It also seems to show up a lot in her attitude towards Chat Noir where she doesn’t quite seem to internalize the idea that Chat is a boy that exists outside the mask most of the time and that he has a life of his own as a civilian. (Kuro Neko is the most blatant culprit where he misses a few fights and she assumes he’s just taking a break based on absolutely nothing).
It also leads to her being quite self centered in the way she views things and reacts to them, as it’s always how it’ll affect her and how she feels that is being considered. (In Mister Agreste she’s concerned with how guilty she feels for lying, not with how the lie would harm Adrien. In Guilttrip she’s concerned with her feelings about Rose’s illness and her attempts to cope with such feelings rather than what Rose wants.)
That being said, she’s not the most self aware person either. There are a lot of times where she’s unaware of her true motives (see most of her rationalizations for bullying the girls she’s jealous of). She also rarely stops and reflects, and when she does it’s only about specific actions rather than any personality traits of hers or general patterns of behaviour. That’s why she keeps making the same mistakes over and over again despite learning a lesson at the end of the episode.
It doesn’t help that she has a lot of big emotions she often acts upon and has trouble regulating because she never needed to learn how to do that by herself. As a result, she often ends up outsourcing her emotional regulation by making other people manage her moods. (The many pep talks she gets and arguably fishes for, the time she physically Chat Noir in the trash).
She seems to struggle with complexity and nuance in general as her thinking tends to run pretty black and white (she’s either the best or the worst, people are either good or evil, she’s either going to have a fairytale romance with Adrien or he’ll dump her and hate her forever).
She generally sees the world in a pretty simplified way that seems to be modeled according to popular narratives that are common in culture. Her understanding of romance is in line with how movies present it rather than about having a real relationship. She tends to think of herself as a knightly figure and Adrien as a damsel figure in a way that aligns with fairytales.
Her thinking of herself as a knightly figure is also what leads to a lot of her more heroic traits.
She’s very driven by her sense of justice. Now, whether said sense of justice actually manages to correctly clock injustices in a morally sound manner is another thing. But if she feels like something is wrong or unjust she’ll move to try and correct it, sometimes by calling out the person responsible and a lot of time by trying to fix the issue.
She’s very much a problem solver who strives to “fix” a problem however she can. She struggles handling a situation where there’s still an open problem that she can’t make better. (That seems to be at least partially her motivation for the big lie, as she talks in the London special about the only thing she can fix is how Adrien remembers his father.)
However, due to many of the traits mentioned above, her fixes tend to create as many problems as they solve. (Her reconnecting Chloe and Audrey, her treatment of Rose in Guilttrip, Sublimation, about half the episodes where she’s the inciting incident for the plot).
It’s a similar story with her sympathy. When she sees someone distressed it’ll make her feel distressed as well and attempt to fix it. She’ll manage to do it if the advice she needs to give aligns with her experiences or is a general, simplified, socially acceptable advice (like to Ivan in ETDP), but once the situation is out of her comfort zone she won’t do well and will struggle to listen to what the person is really saying (Juleka in Guilttrip, Adrien in Mister Agreste).
In general, she has a tendency to jump to conclusions and run away with the first assumption she makes. This applies in most situations, whether it’s about her judgement of a person (like Zoe in Sole Crusher), her fantasy daydreams or her catastrophizing.
It also means that she has trouble seeing any consequences to her actions other than those she intended and in general struggles to think through the long term consequences or implications for things. This trait also comes from her being a teenager, who aren’t exactly known for their ability to think about long term consequences.
This is already getting way longer than I intended, so here are some rapid fire traits she has that I didn’t get a chance to mention beforehand.
She’s charismatic and obviously very creative. Other than fashion designing, she also seems to have some impressive mechanical skill considering some of the contraptions she built (the diary trap in darkblade, the code locked sewing box for the miraculous in s4).
She has a lot of trust and respect for authority, which makes sense given her history and background.
She’s someone who’s very image conscious and cares a lot about how she comes across, especially in the context of whether she’s liked or not. She has a hard time handling someone disliking her unless she dislikes them first. And she cares about being seen as good, not just as nice.
Honestly, Marinette can be a very compelling character when you actually engage with how she’s written in the show. You just need to acknowledge all of her character, including the flaws.
