#sentitheory salt

I'm a firm believer that senti Adrien is a big bullshit because if Gabriel has that power to control Adrien 24/7 then he would do it without hesitation, he won't need to wait until Adrien show a sign of rebelling to use it. He would do it every fucking single time! This is Gabriel, the same person who mock Ladybug and Cat Noir for getting sentimental over a sentimonster after all.

If I have a power that could control my son-puppet emotion, feeling and action, I wouldn't bother to manipulate-gaslight him. It's a waste of time and energy. He doesn't like the pancake I made? Twist the amok and he would eat it without protest. No effort needed. Unless this is the whole Even Evil Has Standard but I doubt it is.

This is another case of the Senti Stans being completely unaware of the implications of the things they’re saying. Like, they do not mean to imply the things they imply, you’ll see this in how genuinely angry and defensive they get every time someone points out said implications. This doesn’t change the fact that almost every single time a new defense of SentiAdrien shows up, it does indeed imply some stuff that really grinds people’s gears.

Because, here’s the thing; chalking up Adrien’s trauma responses as being a result of him being a Sentimonster is literally saying that he acts the way he does because he is not human. This idea that his Sentimonster programming informs his behavior is the same thing as saying that these actions make more sense if he’s not human. Said actions being trauma responses creates the implication that people who act like they’ve been traumatized act in unreasonable, weird or inhuman ways. It’s literally othering trauma victims as something other than a “normal” human.

This is why people who are against the SentiAdrien concept say that the concept makes light of Adrien’s story being an abuse story. The Stans can claim until they’re blue in the face that they still view Adrien’s abuse as abuse, but everything else they say creates implications that ring as the opposite, especially when they say that him being a Sentimonster would “explain” his or Gabriel’s behavior, when nothing about their situation is different from a real life abusive relationship.

If something already happens in the real world, unless the fictional universe is changing its mechanics, it requires no fantastical explanation. In the world of Equestria, seasons don't pass naturally, so the ponies need to pull off a Winter Wrap-up to change winter to spring. The only reason Gabriel's abuse and Adrien's responses to it would need to be explained is if neither existed naturally in the world of Miraculous. And, since Miraculous seems to be functioning similarly to our world when it comes to family stuff, that would be like the show was denying the actual existence of abusive families, especially if all the rich/abused kids are Sentimonsters, which is the popular current take on the concept.

In a fandom where people still vilify Adrien for his trauma responses, let’s not give the hatedom even more reasons to demonize him by saying him being a Sentimonster explains jack shit. It just gives people who don’t sympathize or empathize with trauma victims a free pass.

Here’s the thing about Gabriel’s characterization in a SentiAdrien situation: it doesn’t work no matter how you spin it. No matter what he’ll come out of it with inconsistent characterization and his behavior not making sense.

Option one is that Gabriel doesn’t care about Adrien and doesn’t care about Sentimonsters. That means that he would be using the Amok constantly to get out of dealing with Adrien wanting different things than he does, but he doesn’t do that so it’s inconsistent.

Option two is that Gabriel loves Adrien and therefore doesn’t want to control him. Then why is he okay with other people keeping hold of his son’s essence when he couldn’t trust them to begin with (Félix) or is learning he can’t trust them anymore (Nathalie)? It still doesn't make sense.

Thanks! Yeah, a lot of us who like Adrien a bit too much are dropping the show after we saw how season four treated him. Frankly, I was actually briefly worried that season five might end up being good, because then I'd have to watch season four to catch up. So season five being even worse is technically a good thing since now I don't have to watch "Kuro Neko". Frankly, with how different the show ended up feeling from what got me into it, I consider the start of season four a retooling of the series and seasons 1-3 the original Miraculous.

Apparently the new take on what real life family situation SentiAdrien parallels is artificial semination/fertility treatments, to try to deflect from the accusation that the concept demonizes unconventional family structures. However, that just means they're now demonizing fertility treatments. There are sects who fully believe that getting fertility treatments is going against some higher power that has decided that you'd be an unfit parent (many fundamentalist christian groups naturally believe this). Having the couples who resorted to magical fertility treatments always include at least one person who by all rights shouldn't have kids (Tomoe, Mr. Fathom according to Félix and supposedly Gabriel) is very much in line with this kind of thinking.

There's a reason I've been saying "the Sentimonsters better not be a metaphor for anything". The thing is that the very concept of "sentipeople" is so misguided that it will end up demonizing whatever group it's trying to drum up sympathy for. In addition, the instant you start to think about what being a Sentimonster would mean to a person, it becomes horrific. I can't see there being a satisfying conclusion because I don't care if the Amok or Peacock are in the hands of someone trustworthy: it's inherently wrong for anyone to have that power over another person. And Félix isn't even trustworthy.

If characters who are not themselves Sentimonsters are the ones deciding which Sentimonsters get human rights, even against the opinions of a confirmed human-level Sentimonster, a “Sentiperson” (assuming Félix is one), then we literally have a situation where a specific, small group of non-Sentimonster people is going to prioritize Sentimonsters that look, act and feel human to them, with the rest getting erased and not grieved. They get to decide which ones get to live and which ones can die unmourned, and the only Sentimonsters they’ll allow to live will be the ones they have personal relationships with. Even if said human characters are people who try to be empathetic and kind like Marinette, and the Sentimonsters getting erased aren't ones the audience is attached to, it's still a horrifying concept.

“This Sentimonster causes property damage so we have to get rid of them.”

“I’ve personally seen this Sentimonster act human enough for me so they get to stay.”

The Sentimonsters have their human rights depend on pleasing a person who arbitrarily has control over them. That’s really oppressive, isn’t it? Add to that the fact that Sentimonsters are designed to be slaves, so they’ll always have to be controlled, and it just gets really bad in terms of what this children’s show is saying about its characters. In cases where the knowledge of being a Sentimonster is being kept from said characters, that's saying that they need a "real" human making decisions in their stead over what they should know, in a conservatorship, if you will.

Even if we get lore that establishes that only Sentimonsters that are indistinguishable from humans count as basically humans because they’re fundamentally different from all the rest, it still doesn’t look good with the “all the rich kids are Sentimonsters” concept. And that’s because it frames a group of people with very specific othering traits as inhuman and it makes their continuing treatment in the show as lesser hold some really unsavory implications.

This route avoids destroying established characters by retroactively diminishing their humanity and smothering their self-determination prospects.

Technically sentitheory isn’t 100% official until it’s stated…

But there are always AU’s