What are your thoughts on that scene in the episode "Lies" where Kagami is trying to paint Adrien but can't seem to capture his true self?
Congrats, anon, you just activated my trap card.
In all seriousness, that scene is part of a really long trend of characters talking over Adrien and telling him how he's supposed to feel, and the fandom taking their uninformed, unsolicited BS takes at face value. It was also written entirely to counter the idea that Cat Noir is Adrien's true self, because both the writers and large parts of the fandom try too hard to sound smart at the expense of the show actually making sense.
First of all, the whole premise the scene is built on is patently insane, and I'm surprised no one else pointed this out yet. "Drawings never lie"? Girl, you're thinking of photography, and even then, optical illusions and Photoshop exist. Don't show Kagami r/confusingperspective, it might actually break her brain. Also, "The poses people make are always a reflection of their personality". For pretty much everyone, posing for pictures or photos is about being aesthetically pleasing more than anything, and (I can't emphasize this enough) Adrien is a model. Of course he's going to do model poses when he's told to pose, Kagami, he's been doing this on a constant basis for what seems to be years at this point. What do you expect him to do, a handstand? It's another one of the show's attempts to be profound while in reality making no fucking sense. It reminds me of that bit in Wishmaker where Luka is asked why the hell he bothers making an instrument when an app can do the same thing, and he responds with some weird esoteric BS about how "the instrument fills the space and the space fills the instrument", instead of, y'know, that the way an instrument is physically constructed affects the way it sounds, and you just can't get that from anything digital. Luka and Kagami really are made for each other; both of them have no clue what they're talking about.
Second of all, Adrien has nothing to gain from acting silly. In fact, it's actually lowkey kind of dangerous, because the particular pose he makes could be a clue to his secret identity. It's this scene among others that led to the idea that Adrien is "overcompensating" as Cat Noir for everything he isn't allowed to do and that he's trying to hide his vulnerability, but like. Cat Noir is way more open than Adrien is. He wears his heart on his sleeve and is never quiet about the things that bother him unless he literally has to. Sure, he doesn't talk about his home life all that much, but that's more because it would risk revealing his identity, something he knows Ladybug is adamantly against. I've said it before, but just because something isn't said in the rain with soft piano music in the background while making sad kitten eyes doesn't make it less vulnerable.
Third and lastly, this scene also gave rise to the idea that Adrien is constantly performing or compartmentalizing some shit, and that Kagami knows him so well and figured out he's just a confused boy who doesn't know what to do. But this episode doesn't exist in a vacuum, and this take flies in the face of how Adrien has actually been characterized. Adrien scenes always, always follow a regular pattern of him expressing himself, getting invalidated or shut down, and then trying to give the other person what he thinks they want. It's never the other way around. Performing isn't something Adrien does naturally because he tries to be what other people want, it's always a response to someone else going "No, not like that." With that for context, this is a scene that says way more about Kagami and how she views Adrien than it does about Adrien himself.
