#ml guiltrip

although some use sympathy and empathy interchangeably, the two words connote entirely different ways to experience human connection. sympathy is about sharing others' feelings and experiencing them as if they're your own, but you're limited to only understanding these feelings through your own experience. empathy needs you to put yourself in the other person's shoes, granting an understanding beyond your personal perspective, but without necessarily sharing those feelings.

marinette and adrien are both people pleasers. they value kindness and enjoy helping others. other people's happiness is a source of joy, even at their own expense. the differences, however, lie in how they understand other people, which in turn influences how their kindness towards others manifests.

marinette is sympathetic. the flaw that keeps manifesting in her relationships is that she struggles with understanding other's feelings deeply, because she finds it hard to put herself in other people's place. it's not that marinette is cold, unemotional or selfish; we've seen plenty of times that when someone close to her experiences feelings of sadness or sorrow, marinette immediately gets saddened, too. but a lot of her solutions to relationship conflicts are thought of through a one-size-fits-all lens. there's also the fact that marinette is a proactive character and takes the initiative to console, cheer up, do something special for, save someone and so on, and when she doesn't have the full information, she can come off as silly ('mr. pigeon 72') or even be harmful (the bizarre scene in 'style queen pt. 2' when she makes chloé and her emotionally abusive mother bond over how awful they are?).

marinette loves to show her affection through gifts, so everyone special to her gets to receive something she made with love and care. marinette likes being around others when she's feeling down, so she assumes that everyone likes to be comforted by a group of people when they're sad. marinette has never lost a parent and doesn't know what to say to someone who has, so she confesses her feelings for adrien on the anniversary of his mother's death (to be fair, that was tikki's idea). marinette believes in honesty, so she struggles to understand why someone wouldn't share the same value.

a prime example is 'mr. pigeon 72', where she learns that adrien and kagami have broken up, and immediately assumes that kagami is devastated, but also must rekindle her love for adrien. over the course of the episode, marinette hilariously projects her love for adrien on kagami, along with her own fears and insecurities. she ignores the disappointment that kagami expresses about their failed relationship, and claims that maybe the next course of action - looking into his eyes, seeing him model for the commercial, et cetera - will make kagami fall in love again, in the way marinette is in love with him - wobbly knees, blushes and stammering.

adrien is empathetic. he refrains from making definite judgement about others until he's able to understand where they come from; until then, it's all maybes. he's also less likely to express his support through grand gestures; his approach is rather quiet in comparison to marinette's. adrien's ability to understand other people's perspectives comes with the drawback of how it interacts with other parts of his personality, like his naivety, which mingled with his optimism and hopefulness, can create the prime circumstance for being taken advantage of. he is interested in who people are deep inside, and he also believes there is goodness in everyone. "no one is useless, not even chloé".

adrien's empathy, combined with his circumstances and the way he was raised, results in him being nearly willfully blind and delusional. he is able to come up with excuses for the way his father is treating him - he's grieving emilie (as if adrien isn't also grieving!), he's busy, he's overprotective. when plagg informs him (if a little harshly) that felix has been scooping around his cousin's room and rummaging through his personal belongings, adrien explains that felix recently lost his father and that must be why he's behaving so weirdly.

adrien's people pleasing ways manifest in putting on personas to make everyone happy. who is adrien agreste? whoever you need him to be. he's the golden child his father demands. he's ladybug's silly and loyal companion, because she needs his jokes and trust. he's nino's best bro. he's the polite teenager that will behave perfectly in the classroom. adrien tailors his approach to be what others want him to be, while marinette goes overboard with showing her love and care, always doing something for someone. being versus doing.

i loved 'guiltrip' for exploring this difference in their characters. marinette runs after an upset juleka and crashes into adrien. she believes that she has said something wrong to upset juleka so much, but adrien reassures her that she doesn't have it in her to say cruel things. when they hear juleka crying, adrien immediately takes charge and asks marinette to stay behind. he slowly approaches juleka and asks her if she's okay. juleka tells him that she'd rather be alone ("you want to be alone? i understand."), but marinette has already sent texts about juleka's hiding place to their classmates, despite juleka's desire to cry in peace. in the end, adrien tells her that she "hung on to that secret as long as [she] could, but it was just too heavy to bear alone", and marinette chimes in with "that's what friends are for". adrien has shifted his approach for the situation, but marinette hasn't.

the class clearly cares a lot about juleka and don't want to betray her trust. but they also care about rose and are afraid that she can get ill again. adrien is the only one who abides by rose's wish to not give her any special treatment. marinette, as the assertive class representive, scrambles to organize the class when rose sneezes and they panic; you can hear adrien asking marinette to calm down. both of them care about rose, but they showed that care differently due to the way they perceive information about others' feelings.

unsurprisingly, this affects their superhero personas and the ladynoir dynamic. marinette's sympathy is why she's able to connect with the masses as ladybug, representing the perfect, serious and reliable superhero, giving grand speeches on top of the eiffel tower, affecting everyone who is watching her. adrien would rather stay behind and connect one-on-one with civilians, leaving ladybug to deal with the press for the most part. there's also the lucky charm that requires marinette to choose the correct path that will solve the riddle and release the akuma. her difficulty with brainstorming many scenarios instead of just one is now her advantage.

there's something poetic about how marinette's anxiety is, for the most part, caused by her feelings for adrien, but adrien is the only person able to calm her down (as chat noir, of course). he validates her feelings of insecurity, and then is able to shift her mindset by introducing a different perspective, something that has come up in all season finales so far.