I feel guilty sometimes for disliking shows. There’s something admirable in it, or other parents tell me how much they like them, or things along those lines, but for whatever reason, something about the show just really grates on me. Even worse, when I feel that way about a show, it makes it hard for me to write about it, because I then feel as though I’m justifying my thoughts instead of just explaining them.

Yeah. Anyway. Miraculous: The Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir is about a girl named Marinette Dupain-Cheng. Her parents own a bakery. She’s studying fashion design at Collège Françoise-Dupont. Her crush is Adrien Agreste, himself a model. When she is around him, she is even more awkward than usual, which is really saying something. However, she is also the bearer of the Ladybug Miraculous, which transforms her into a superhero. Though she is unaware of it, Adrien bears the Black Cat Miraculous and is the superhero with whom she works. Together, they fight a series of people infected with an akuma, a butterfly given dark powers by the villain Hawk Moth.

I could really do without the clumsy thing. It is always clumsiness with these girls, isn’t it? Never mind that, as Ladybug, she is agile and acrobatic, flinging herself about to defeat the various villains-of-the-week. Sure, okay, that’s the power of the Miraculous. But that doesn’t mean that the girl should be as clumsy as she is when she’s being herself. It’s as though screenwriters don’t know any other way of giving a girl a thing to keep her from being a Mary Sue.

I also don’t know why Marinette can’t tell her best friend, Alya Césaire, who she is. Alya runs the Ladyblog, the unofficial site dedicated to Ladybug. She’s also Marinette’s best friend. These two things suggest to me that Alya will never give Marinette’s secret away, and it would be awfully convenient to have someone who can cover for her, but no. Never mind not telling Adrien, a trope I find tedious enough, this one is worse to me.

And then there’s the mayor’s daughter, Chloé Bourgeois. She’s the sort of obnoxious blonde who always crops up in this sort of show. She’s rich and obnoxious and obsessed with her appearance. She has a crush on Adrien that she just assumes is requited because how could it not be? She’s got essentially a servant, Sabrina Raincomprix. She’s got an actual servant in one episode who tries to make her be a better person and then is infected with an akuma for reasons.

You see, every person with an akuma is caught in a moment of anger. They are being pushed in some way, and Hawk Moth, who is spying on the world, it seems, catches them at it and decides this is their true nature and they will be okay with villainy. Over and over and over again. And of course these are also people who are in some way relevant to the lives of Marinette and Adrien, and that’s not in any way suspicious, of course.

Marinette’s not a bad character, but I just can’t get into the show much. I feel as though this is just shallow and repetitive. Of course, shallow and repetitive appeals to small children. It’s just that it’s not something I’d like to watch.

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