Being The Topic Du Jour And All

being the topic du jour and all

The problem with the Adrien-is-a-sentimonster thing isn’t the no-man-of-woman-born whatever, since they’ve bent over backwards to insist that a sentihuman is completely 100% physically for all intents and purposes a human being like anyone else. Yeah, someone on this show is a sentimonster or at the very least there’s going to be a plotline about someone thinking that they are one.

The problem is that in the case of Adrien specifically, “posessing his own amok” could never be anything else than a tangible allegory for breaking free of his father’s abuse. And the problem with that is that they’ve already discarded the option through the very framework of how sentimonsters work. ~Controlling the amok~ has long since been tested and proven false. 

In “Feast”, Nathalie blackmails the sentimonster with a threat of removing the amok, and Feast clearly, physically reacts to her powers. In “Ladybug”, Marinette gives Sentibug the amok and Nathalie promptly wipes her out of existence. 

Posessing the amok will never be enough. 

In order for any sentimonster on this show to be truly emancipated, it needs to posess not only the amok, but the peacock miraculous. And with that, the amount of provisions for the allegory has sunk any elegance to it, turning it from an apt narrative device to a matter of plot mechanics. If Adrien has to carry two pieces of jewelry in order to be a free man, then the show has also set up a clear precedent of miraculouses and other magical jewelry falling into the hands of relatives with sticky fingers. 

That’s why I’m still not convinced - because this setup would amount to some MASSIVELY CLUMSY STORYTELLING. If Adrien is a sentimonster, then the only tidy way out of it is if The Wish ends up being used to turn him into a Real Boy or something to equal effect, and then what was the point except just adding another item to the list of Adrien Agreste’s life is despair. 

(again: Those Rings clearly have some kind of magical abilities beyond any possible amoks, because this entire Felix-Gabriel feud can not be over a family heirloom. If that’s truly all they are, then Gabe’s redemption is going to be his using The Wish to set Adrien free once Felix completes the set and I’ll probably sit here pulling my hair) 

Non-Human’s aren’t worth much

Today, I’m gonna talk to you guys about a narrative device / story trope called “What Measure Is a Non-Human?” This device refers to the choice a creator might make to question the distinction between human and non-human. In terms of censorship, it refers to how, especially in children’s media, you can inflict worse fates on explicitly non-human characters than human ones without the people funding your project trying to axe your story. It’s basically an excuse to rack up a body count without there actually being a body count because the things being “killed” are not human and are, therefore, not really being killed. You can’t kill something that’s a thing.

Thomas Astruc has worked with children’s action/adventure shows for years. He knows about this story device, he has even taken advantage of it. Aeon and Sentibug were killed on-screen and Miraculous Ladybug is still rated TV-Y7 or the equivalent in most countries. In contrast, Batman: Mask of Phantasm, an animated kids’ superhero movie, where human characters die nonviolently on-screen, is rated PG.

Even in the case of the Special, Aeon’s death was undone almost instantly after. This story trope is often called a Disney Death, where a character can die and it won’t affect the rating as long as it gets undone quickly enough through a fakeout or resurrection. Even so, Aeon was in her robot form when it happened, to make sure her non-humanness was explicit. In contrast, Sentibug’s death doesn’t get undone, meaning a Sentimonster’s life is worth even less than a robot’s in the eyes of the arbiters of the Miraculous Ladybug universe.

In other words, Sentimonsters are considered explicitly enough “non-human” that they can be killed irreversibly on-screen without it affecting the rating. They cannot be killed. They do not have lives that can be taken away. They are not human.

This means that, if the writers then turned around and revealed one of their main characters to be a Sentimonster, an explicitly non-human creature that can be killed with no out-of-universe repercussions (aka, a rating bump) because they are not really alive, then he isn’t human in a metatextual sense. If Adrien is meant to preserve his worth as a human being or as close to human being as possible while being a Sentimonster, every single other Sentimonster needs to be treated as fully human and their deaths have to be undone.

Plagg really snapped

timetagger: tHe FuTuRe Is NoT sEt In StOnE

chat blanc: if the adrinetteladynoir ship sails the future is doomed, it cannot be fixed, fuck you

what would have happened if they didn’t nerf tf outta sasuke