Talk:Miracle Queen (The Battle of the Miraculous - Part 2)/@comment-43872912-20191019105728/@comment-2037317-20191019213437

Except your concern witl Lila's non-appearance (again, I would had loved her to be the one that helped to push Chloe into the edge of embracing evil once more, I'm against your complaints for the most part:

Chloe was being used, yes... but she was doing something. Since Miraculer she proved she was heroine material, but Ladybug kept playing pull away from her. And that's something that had been kind of building on the entire season (In Animaestro, she complains about the movie not having Queen Bee, after Miraculer, she kept expecting for Ladybug to give her a Miraculous again). She was trying to hog the fame, but she really, really has a case of blindness in her actions (I wouldn't blame her, as EVERYONE IN PARIS SUFFERS THE SAME DEAL). And given that HM was planning the entire season to have Chloe side with her (hell, she was his go-to girl to get akumatizations to the point he sent an Akuma to her party pre-emptively as she knew she would akumatize someone... and he was right!)

Hawkmoth could had fought the heroes, but Mayura certainly NOT. The longer she keeps transformed with the still damaged Miraculous, the more she goes the Emilie way. Yes, the episode Feast confirmed that Nathalie's condition was suffered by Emilie before her. Hell, she almost fails to create the Sentimonster in the middle of the battle. Also, once Fu did the thing, both Ladybug and Cat Noir had a chance to escape, as they had depowered Queen Bee's akumatization twice, so Hawkmoth couldn't use her again.

Ladybug insecurities in the middle of the battle.... where did I hear that before? Origins? Volpina? Mayura, maybe? Yeah, it seems to be her thing to get completely lost when something out of the blue comes and this entire plan was one such thing. Basically, Marinette's own confidence is in the rock bottom, the only thing stopping her from runnign away is what happened in Origins: the moment she left, it was almost an Armageddon. Marinette is used to rely on her powers, as seen on her nightmare in Sandboy, her worst fear is being left powerless and unable to save the day. And given how weirdly limited her powers are already, that's a serious issue. So when she sees the villain already neutralizing the things she relies on, she turns into Panic Doom Mode Marinette®. Thank god that Adrien is already awesome, so as less flirty Cat noir can reliably help. Hell, LB and CN felt more like their civilian identities in this episode, like a mash of both.

The giving of the box was in the odd side... but given the result, that was probably plot convenience, as, right now, the box with all the Miraculous not attached to the two main heroes and two main villains is the best chance the heroes have as HM and Mayura have a severe advantage now. Not only the Peacock is repaired, but also thewy know several hero identities, they can pretty much tell where Ladybug hangs around to get more heroes (specifically, the same school and grade his son goes to) and they have the decrypted tome of Miraculous with all the spells they can use (which is how they could fix 6the Peacock Miraculous, actually). He will get more powers thanks to those and I'm not sure if Fu left a copy of the book for LB to find before his tablet was stolen, so that's a plus that the heroes don't have as of now. Believe me: HM won big time and he didn't need to win more in this season. It was a Near Villain Victory, the only thing stopping him was Fu's last minute action.

The reason for that part of the plot? Adrinette, as of 2016 (it's oficial that's the year the series is taking place on), is too toxic to be allowed to go on. Marinette needs to grow from her obsession, just as Adrien apparently got over his own obsession with Ladybug (I'm betting something happened in the missing episodes about that, which is weird because Ladybug is supposed to have happened right before this two-parter and nothing seemed changed there except that Adrien was somehow able to threaten Lila with some calm anger heat, or as fandom mentioned it, "Adrien, your Gabriel is showing"... man, I really can't wait to see those episodes). The idea is Adrinette, of course, it will happen... but it should not happen with current Marinette on the lead. She needs to grow up A LOT. And yes, I'm willing to say the idea of this episode is the creators thinking "Man, we're severely screwing up our main character. Scriptwriters, wring out some development drama for Marinette Dupain-Cheng ASAP!" Marinette got now a lot of stuff thrown in, like if trying to fill a checklist of "Stuff to try and mature Marinette". They'll probably take this season to address the entire hubris she has around, like Lila still out, her own happiness, the Guardian deal... I'm hoping they mature her up a good lot before the end of Season 4. So no, they couldn't do it in a better way, they had to actually address Marinette's character. After all, when an episode that is meant to deal with Marinette facing having the world turned against her like Lila promised and even a fake Ladybug to face against turns out to be an increasingly ill Nathalie trying to prove her worth and Lila's menace being disabled literally in the last 5 minutes by Adrien's frozen shoulder (because that was WAY more than a cold shoulder, I mean GEEEEEEE was Adrien royally pissed with Lila), then something is not working with the development of a character. And before you ask, no, the small moments where Marinette is meant to learn a lesson on not skipping responsabilities, not lying and so forth is meant crap in a series that took 52 episdoes to try and have a coherent continuity. And it still fails at that.

So, while it was lackluster and could had been done better... the only way to do it better was to turn the episode into two episodes and having a three-episode finale instead, because the idea of the episode, just as Ladybug's idea was NOT to advance Marinette's character, was to actually close a chapter in Marinette's life rather than in the series as a whole.