what would you have me do?

we're running out of scenarios I fear

some person on tiktok just trying to vent: im an adult who has never been pursued romantically or even hit on or complimented. this makes me insecure because society places such a strong emphasis on romantic and sexual relationships so i feel like i am missing out on a fundamental aspect of life. it also makes me feel singled out and unattractive because most people i know get complimented on their appearance and i have never experienced that before.

somebody with no ability to read the room who also very much cannot relate: ummm just try loving yourself maybe? relationships aren’t even a big deal you’re not missing out on anything 🙄 i get called hot like seven times a day but it honestly doesn’t even improve my self esteem that much. true confidence comes from within #girlboss

A lot of people out there have the boldness to say that FM romances are all formulaic, boring and based on common stereotypes and then turn around and base their whole personality on MM books featuring two skinny guys whose faces you can find on any pinterest moodboard and whose main conflict is that they belong to two different volleyball squads and where there’s like one cardboard cut woman who exists only for being an antagonist or for getting an equally cardboard cut girlfriend

i just think that if you’re telling any kind of story in which there’s a designated love interest, and you REALLY want the audience to be invested in that love story instead of going “hm, but i think they have more chemistry with the villain/sidekick/best friend/etc.,” the emotional intensity of that relationship has to outweigh every other relationship either character has. your protagonist has to have stronger feelings about their love interest than they do about anyone else. so often the emotional stakes inherent to the main love story (or friendship! or familial relationship!) are informed attributes - the author tells us that they have chemistry, that they’re best friends, that this dude would do anything for his family - but those emotional relationships aren’t central motivating factors that drive the story forward. if the protagonist spends more time thinking about their nemesis than their love interest, or if the conflict is driven by two people hating each other and that emotion is what drives their actions, your audience is gonna pick up on that! it’s the most interesting and emotionally intense relationship you’re giving us! it’s basic “show don’t tell” - people won’t just get invested in the dynamic between two characters because you say so. it’s on you, the creator, to make that relationship the most compelling one on the page/screen.

this is why the first three years of Supernatural fandom were either gen or Wincest, approximately nothing else, and this is a big part of why Destiel took off like a rocket the moment Castiel joined the party

this is why zero people believe Naruto and Sasuke are straight

and this is why the juggernaut Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir ship is the title characters

bro shutup im making up scenarios in my head that will never happen

is this about anxiety or romance

both my guy

Thesis: the rise of fanwank and anti culture correlates directly with diminished understanding of what “romantic”, in a literary sense, actually means.

It doesn’t mean “this is ideal or healthy or even realistic”. It means “this is beautiful, this is tragic, this is grotesque, this stirs emotion”, even if it’s not, as @starryroom puts it, something you would be comfortable seeing play out in front of you at Taco Bell. It’s about grandiosity and mythology and heroism writ large. It’s about playing with the id, as beautiful and terrible as it can be. 

LET LOVE AND LUST BE MONSTROUS.

i feel like Guillermo del Toro ghostwrote that

“I didn’t say I liked it. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”

- Oscar Wilde 

so many ml fans don’t touch the shoujo romance/romance drama genres and it shows

people say adrien is written more like/better suited to being the protag of the show because he’s the one who actually ties in to the plot etc., while Marinette’s only connection to the plot is Adrien, so she’s written more like a love interest. Except if you’d ever watched a kdrama or shoujo romance you’d know that it’s the opposite - protag is always “normal girl with a normal life*” (*sometimes with an added quirk) and the love interest is often the one with the angst, the dark secrets, the manipulative rich parent(s) who try to keep the heroine away from her boy using money/influence/threats, etc. Hell, the Chat Blanc scene where Gabriel threatens Marinette in to breaking up with Adrien, followed by her telling him she doesn’t love him anymore while crying in the pouring rain, looked like it was pulled straight out of like three kdramas. You’re supposed to love the love interest more (sorry Astruc - even he forgets how his own genre works sometimes), because often the protag serves as the point through which viewers are supposed to learn more about and fall in love with the love interest. The plot usually revolves around protag struggling (against a love rival, the Evil Rich Parent™, circumstances, the love interest’s own angst, etc) to be with her boy. The emotional investment comes from wanting her to succeed against the Evil Rich Parent™/etc and Be With Him. ML just took these classic east asian romance drama tropes and threw in super powers. That’s even how they described the show - a romcom with superpowers.

ML is written exactly the way it’s supposed to be in this regard, y'all just don’t know what genre you’re watching

i very strongly feel that this is written because of my posts today. apologies if i am being presumptuous.

i don’t understand what’s the problem with viewing ml through a self-contained lens, especially since the show seems to be a hodgepodge from all sorts of different genres, as we’ve even had horror (kind of) episodes. i haven’t seen any kdramas/shoujo shows (i’ve seen plenty of romcom films though, and given how the romance gets pushed aside for more and more action, ml doesn’t follow that genre properly either), i assume the 7-year olds watching ml haven’t either, and i don’t think the show should follow somebody else’s set formula, especially as i haven’t seen anyone on the team state their intentions for ml as anything different from ‘make a superhero show for girls with a female lead’. in the beginning i used to think that the superhero identities are just an excuse to have the love square happen, but given that this aspect of the show wasn’t there for years (before it got made) and how seriously the team takes the superhero plot, we obviously have some sort of a mix going on that is uniquely ml. if i had to guess, western fairytales seem to be a consistent inspiration. however, if the show indeed follows some sort of a clear formula, then that would be upsetting to me, especially since normal girl with a normal life/angsty boy has become such a cliche, and that’s why they got rid of pv felix.

i also really dislike the idea that ml is supposed to be the same thing to all viewers? like, you have your references to korean shows, i make my unhinged blibical agreste posts, obviously we don’t have the same touchstones and that’s cool! more interpretations and views, the more fun it is, in my opinion. i don’t think anyone has to see the show the same way.

i hope you don’t misunderstand me - i’m not hostile or dismissive in any way of your view, just adding my 0.02 cents.

Tbh I’ve had some of these thoughts in my notes ever since I saw Hack San and Glaciator 2.0 bring about Adrien stans salting that everything “always comes back to his feelings for Ladybug,” as well as all the Marinette stans I’ve seen on twitter and tumblr alike similarly salting that everything “always revolves around her feelings for Adrien,” as well as the random video essays youtube will recommend me talking about “why Adrien should’ve been the protagonist” and similar comments from Adrien stans on Tumblr etc.

The very problem here is that fans don’t actually see ML for what it is. It’s not a girl power cartoon with a romance on the side, it’s a cartoon about the power of love. It’s not “Marinette’s adventures in the fashion industry!!1!” (@ the Marinette stans who salted on the New York special not being about Marinette in a fashion capital), it’s not some American superhero series where the protag is the focus of everything and the love interest is just their Mary Jane, it’s about the love between Adrien and Marinette. It’s not “bad writing” to have everything tie back to each other and their romance in a show that is literally made to be about love and is upfront about that fact.

Shoujo romance anime does the same thing with fun genre episodes, but they’re still romcoms at the end of the day. ML is a romcom.

ML was intentionally made to be like a shoujo anime. That’s not how I interpret it or relate to it, that’s literally what it is. Shoujo anime literally means “girl’s anime”, and two of the popular subgenres under that umbrella are Middle/High School Romance and Magical Girl - ML is both of them. It’s French sailor moon, complete with magical girl transformation sequences and ~the power of love~ and a superhero squad of classmates and small talking magic fairy creatures and a 14 year old protag with twintails.

Even the pink “bubble vision” as some people call it is actually a shoujo romance staple - “shoujo sparkles”

The “normal” teenage girl getting thrust in to a new, unfamiliar, fantastical situation with a conflict that is tied to her love interest is a genre staple. ML reverses the secret identity romance situation that happens in SM, wherein the heroine falls for the male hero’s dramatic, rose-brandishing, masked alter ego, but finds his civilian persona annoying. They got rid of PV Félix because, yes, he was cliché and they didn’t want their love interest to be an asshole. Jerkface Rich Boy is certainly another love interest archetype that exists in these genres. But Adrien is still literally an archetypal shoujo anime love interest - rich, “princely,” chivalrous , piano-playing sweetheart with stellar grades (the aspect abt him that Really shows his character’s shoujo influences, bc western romcoms never care as much abt the boy being at the top of his class the way eastern ones do) who has some kind of hidden sadboy angst that tugs at our heartstrings + a controlling parent who stands in the way of the romance. Astruc even said Adrien learned how to act through watching movies and anime, referring to his ridiculous flirting as Chat Noir, which is a play on some more over the top “princely” male characters in shoujo, like Tuxedo Mask or even Tamaki Suoh, the French-Japanese, piano-playing, rich blonde boy with stellar grades who is the “prince” of his school and was written to be a caricature of the “prince charming” shoujo archetype. The people who salt on Chat Noir’s flirting are usually westerners who are unfamiliar with this whole roses-and-hand-kisses trope.

Just because Adrien and Marinette fit in to these genre tropes doesn’t take away from their individual characters or their unique relationship. Tropes =/= Bad. People love these tropes and cliches, see: all the tropey fanfic premises people adore, or the huge box office success of Crazy Rich Asians, which had the same tropey premise of a “normal” girl in a struggle against her secretly rich fiancé’s rich parent who doesn’t approve of her and tries to split them up. ML takes every trope and spins it in a way that is entirely fresh and unique to ML. It even pokes fun at its own love of shoujo romance tropes, like when Kagami gives Marinette advice straight out of her own shoujo romance manga in Glaciator 2.0 and warns her that the person she practices on could fall for her, because that’s how the trope always goes.

The show Was Conceptualized As A Shoujo Anime. They chose to make it CG and tailored to a younger audience to make it more marketable in the west, bc westerners are still stuck in the mindset that animation = for children and because toy sales are where the money is. And even with all the creative decisions made to stay in the western audiences’ comfort zone and please execs who want to sell merchandise, the anime influences, as well as the fact that it was originally inspired by a genre geared towards ~13 year old girls who like to read stories about navigating school life + gaining self-confidence + larger-than-life romance, are at the very core of the show and reflected in every episode.

All that said, you don’t have to have watched a lick of shoujo anime to understand that ML is a romcom whose focus is the superhero love story and the power of love. Kids enjoy watching Ladybug and their other fav heroes be cool and kick ass. Teens enjoy the romance. It’s only in these online fandom spaces that the older, western audience starts trying to make the show into something it never set out to be

It’s tiresome and annoying when salt on the show comes from the fact that people clearly just want a completely different show. It’s a romcom. With magical elements. It’s a French Shoujo Anime. Western audiences in fandom spaces miss the point and then blame the writers for it, claim they can “do better,” and rewrite the show as something it never intended to be in the first place. It’s great to have your own tastes, it’s great to make your own ideas out of what’s given to you by the source material, but this attitude of salting on the show/blaming the writers for writing the show exactly how it was meant to be because the fans missed the memo on what genre they were watching is tiresome.

on the one hand I understand the importance of giving platonic male/female friendships in fiction the same weight and visibility as romance is usually given, as to dispel that heteronormative notion that men and women are always bound to feel attracted to each other. on the other hand it’s so rare to find m/f romances that are developed upon actual comradery, mutual respect, and affinity – instead of, you know, empty sexual tension like 99% of the time –, that whenever I see a guy and a girl in who trust each other with their lives blindly, know each other better than anyone else ever could, and move in unspoken synchrony through battles and similar dangerous endeavours I… just… feel… weak…