“Marinette took down all her pictures of Adrien when she realized what a weirdo she was being and started acting like a Normal Person and-” cool I already stopped reading
the ferality is what makes her her!!!!
So I feel like what’s happening to Marinette in the Ladybug fandom is the same thing that happened to Usagi in the Sailor Moon fandom in the early 00s.
Both are heroines with relatable, human flaws. Marinette is a basketcase of anxiety with a healthy dose of Overthinking and Cringe, and Usagi is a crybaby ditz who falls over her own feet and is Really Great at eating and sleeping. Both are WONDERFUL heroines. They get shit done, they’re badass, and above all else, they do not have to be perfect for it. They’re a giant fuck you middle finger in the face of sexism and productivity culture, saying that no, you do not have to check every box and it is OK who you are, you’re extraordinary the way you are. That femininity overall is great and that being an embarrassingly crushing teenage girl is great, too. These characters stand for embracing the fact that people aren’t machines and they aren’t obligated to play the role that society desperately wants them to.
And yet there are pockets of fandom for both - in this example with Marinette, in the 00s with Usagi, of largely young female writers who get Very Angry at both these characters and write these rigid gender expectations and perfectionist hegemonic role expectations they themselves suffer under onto these characters: Marinette gets her “shit together” and banishes her relatable and adorable crushing on Adrien and all that entails and becomes Responsible Perfection ™, and Usagi cuts her silly hair, gets a tutor and aces all her classes and also never falls on her butt or cries again and becomes Responsible Perfection, too. All in the name of “growing up” or “being more mature” as if that means you leave your personality at the door of a magic threshold someday and what remains of you is a cardboard ad of adulthood that displays only obligation, productivity, conformity and societal norms. In this process of “getting their shit together”, both characters lose everything that make them more human (including their relatability and everything about the character that is so, so healthy as a role model), and instead they become a stencil of external expectations.
And that’s sad. Because that means these harmful scripts are so deeply internalized that they are seen as obligations not only for the writer, but also for the character. So deeply ingrained that apparently there are young authors out there that get ANGRY at these characters when they don’t perform these rigid shackles of expectations they themselves suffer from.
(Good news, as the Sailor Moon fandom aged, Usagi was eventually largely embraced for exactly who she was, and it’s now a rare egg to see her getting changed in fics, as her quirks are finally largely loved and appreciated. Here’s to hoping the same will happen in the Ladybug fandom as the fandom base ages, too.)