#ml s3

Because of that, her actions are reinterpreted as not being purely egotistical entitlement, but also a coping mechanism for their greater insecurities. Queen Bee is probably the biggest smoking gun regarding that. Thomas and Co wanted us to believe Chloe viewed it purely as an ego stroking thing, but we were primed to see it as deeper than that considering how she was given the bee originally.

They really had to make her talk about lacking purpose in the same convo where she becomes Queen Bee again. That’s a generational fumble. If she also sees being Queen Bee as her serving a purpose then her insistence on her NEEDING it becomes, still selfish, but interesting. Putting those two subject together made viewers link them together, reasonably so.

We get to Miracle Queen and we still have that link of purpose in our heads. Suddenly our perception of her being manipulated rings of a different tone than intended. It’s not just taking advantage of her ego, but also her abandonment issues, desire for approval, want of a purpose, and care for her parents on some level. Queen’s battle made us consider how her surroundings affects her behavior (Her parents being akumatized and being directly confronted by hawkmoth), while Maledictator made us aware the insecurities (her purpose/usefulness, and Ladybug not conscripting her) that influence her just as much.

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.

THIS GIVES ME AN IDEA

It feels like whenever the writers make a joke it lands 50% of the time and sucks the other 50%.

But everything else that happens ends up unintentionally being the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

That scene at the end of season 3 where Luka finally figured out Marinette’s ‘song’ and he played it and it was the theme song of the show made me laugh harder than pretty much all of the jokes that were made on purpose.