YMMV / Miraculous Ladybug S04E18 "Wishmaker"

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Luka's forlorn expression when he finds out that Adrien is Cat Noir. Is he troubled because this means that Marinette's "hopeless" crush on Adrien is in fact reciprocated, meaning that there's no chance he and Marinette will ever get back together again? Is he sad for Adrien, whose childhood was so crappy that his greatest wish was to become whatever his parents wanted him to be? Is it both? Neither?
  • Shadow Moth's This Cannot Be! when he finds out that Adrien is Cat Noir. Is he upset that one of his enemies, whom he's tried to kill multiple times, is his son? Or did he realize how terrible a parent he is when he heard Adrien's greatest childhood wish? This contrasts with "Cat Blanc", where his moment of realization was immediately replaced by scheming to use his son against Ladybug. In this episode, seeing Adrien's childhood dream to be nothing (compared to everyone else's fantasies) seems to trigger a realization from Gabriel into just how mentally screwed up Adrien is and how it is all his fault for his Control Freak tendencies, which we don't get to see more of because Viperion resets everything.
• Epileptic Trees: Adrien's flashback when struck by Wishmaker showed him looking at his parents as a baby, which raises quite a few questions. First, they have blatantly different eye colors than they do in the present. The fandom went absolutely nuts wondering what was up with that, from the mundane (animation error, it's an old memory so it's distorted) to the bizarre (Gabriel and Emilie switched bodies at some point, the Agreste family already made a wish that somehow caused this). Thomas Astruc has stated that the eye color switch isn't important to the plot, though given his history of lying to conceal spoilers, not everyone buys it. It's also odd that Adrien would flash back so far, given everyone else remembered dreams they had when they were in the 6-10 range. An old apparent Dub-Induced Plot Hole back in "Simon Says" has also been brought back up in relation to this theory — in English only, Adrien said that Ladybug has the same eyes as his mother, despite the fact that Ladybug's eyes are blue, the same as Emilie in this flashback but not in the "reality" of the show, and the consistency between these two oddities has fueled the flames even further.
  man are we all having normal feelings about this!

  —Tumblr user peachcitt
• Harsher in Hindsight: Following the reveal in "Representation", it makes Adrien's wish of being what his parents want him to be all the more heart-breaking.
• I Knew It!: After the first trailer for this episode was released, a vast majority of people predicted because of Viperion's involvement, that he would discover at least one of Ladybug or Cat Noir's identities. As it turns out, he discovered both of them, but reset the clock afterward to prevent any further leakage of the information.
• One-Scene Wonder: Marinette as the "Knitting Fairy" has spawned tons of fanart of her throughout different social media platforms.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Gabriel and Emilie's Control Freak parenting means that Adrien has never had any agency over his life. He laments that everything has been chosen for him, and that if he doesn't make a stand now then he's going to spend the rest of his life like this. It's eventually revealed in "Representation" that Adrien is a Sentimonster whose creation was the cause of Emilie's coma while raised by Gabriel, using Adrien's amok to covertly keep the boy in line while grooming him to be the perfect obedient son. Having a Miraculous gave Adrien, unaware of his true nature, a way to be partially free, and Plagg is the only one who unconditionally supports him and his choices, whatever they may be.

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