YMMV / The Karma of Lies

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • The Plot Parallel between how Miss Rossi was punished for exposing her cohort's corruption and how Marinette suffered for trying to warn everyone about Lila could be read as a Hard Truth Aesop that simply challenging evil is not enough without support. Marinette only manages to change the status quo by defeating Hawkmoth with the aid of trustworthy allies like Luka and Kagami, while Adrien refused to take his duties as Chat Noir seriously, dismissing the impact of Hawkmoth's terrorism exactly the same way he did the effect of Lila's lies.
  • Marinette's refusal to help Adrien and her classmates belatedly expose Lila could be seen as breaking the lesson about how "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing"... or it could be read as acknowledgement that it's too late at that point, and actually be a lesson in knowing when to recognize a lost cause. All of Marinette's efforts to help them up to that point had gone completely ignored and dismissed and now the damage is done; Adrien and the others are just refusing to accept reality and banking on the delusion that everything will be magically fixed if they can just get Marinette back onside working for their benefit. Evil has already triumphed because Adrien refused to act, and the only reason he's motivated now is because he doesn't want to deal with the consequences of his inaction. And even if she did help and somehow succeed in turning the tide, it's made clear most of the class intend to continue taking her for granted.
• Broken Aesop: Potentially.
  • The story revolves around the concept that evil wins when good people do nothing — Lila did incredible damage thanks to Adrien's refusal to act against her. However, part of Marinette's Karmic Jackpot stems from her opting to cut ties with him and the rest of her ungrateful classmates, which includes no longer going out of her way to oppose Lila. While probably good for her mental health, this could also be interpreted as "Oppose evil, but not when evil heaps consequences upon the complicit."
  • The class losing their dreams and valuables to Lila is framed as Laser-Guided Karma for how they constantly took advantage of Marinette, sending the message that taking people for granted and exploiting them doesn't pay in the long run. However, the fact that they have no hope of gaining restitution, even for work they did honestly before Lila stole it from them (not to mention Adrien losing the Agreste emergency fund solely due to terribly poor judgement on his part), could be interpreted as saying that people who are victimized by scammers and con artists deserve to be taken advantage of for being stupid/greedy enough to fall for their lies.
• Broken Base: Does Adrien's misfortune read as a logical demonstration of the consequences his poor choices could bring, given his circumstances, or does it read as him being cruelly over-punished by a spiteful narrative? This differing interpretation among readers has been a hot topic of debate since the story's completion.
• Cry for the Devil: While Marinette's old classmates are undeniably selfish and entitled in their relationship with Marinette, it's hard not to feel a little bad for them in Chapter 10 when they all recount just how much worse off they all are for their acquaintance with Lila. As a direct result of Lila's actions, all of them except Kim, Ivan, and Rose (who only lost a couple of valuables to her) and Juleka (who turns out to be the Only Sane Man) are going to be feeling the consequences of losing their intellectual property to her for years down the line. In particular, Sabrina had several wealthy people's phone numbers sold to advertising agencies under her name, pissing off influential college donors across the country and quite possibly costing Sabrina her entire post-high school education, while Alix is told she's benched permanently, and that Bunnyx was a sentimonster Marinette made to simulate what she described Bunnyx as, meaning she never actually got to properly use her canon Miraculous, and even the hope that Bunnyx was an Alix who learned her lesson and was trying to help her past self is dashed. It only gets worse when they all find out Adrien knew what Lila was doing and did nothing.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Or Harsher in Hindsight, depending on perspective. Adrien's fate in this story (losing all his wealth, power, and prestige, being cut off from all of his old acquaintances who now all hate his guts, being placed under the thumb of an abusive parent, and being reduced to a crying wreck) has astonishing parallels to Chloé's fate in the canon show.
• Jerkass Woobie: Adrien. On the jerkass end, he's selfish, entitled, delusional, and completely unable to accept responsibility for his own genuine mistakes. On the woobie end, his father is outed as a terrorist, his father's staff and the new staff at school wash their hands of him at the first opportunity, he is put under the thumb of an aunt who has just as little regard for his emotional well-being as his father did and generally comes off as doing the bare minimum to support him and keep up her reputation until she too can wash her hands of him, he is backstabbed six ways to Sunday by Lila and Nathalie, and he ends the story under effective solitary house arrest and largely believed by Paris to be an accomplice to terrorism, with his life completely and quite possibly irreversibly ruined before he's old enough to drive.
• Karmic Overkill: Whether or not Adrien ultimately suffered from this is the crux of various debates about the story. To elaborate, his crimes can be summed up under the umbrellas of allowing Lila to get away with her cons unimpeded (which mostly hit her classmates) and dereliction of duty as Chat Noir. While having his friends cut him out of their lives and losing the ring do come off as warranted given his actions, a very significant amount of his misfortunes (losing his house and his company, being thrown out of school, put to the mercies of a loveless guardian and the extremely heavy implication he will end up homeless among other misfortunes) come off as him being punished for being Hawkmoth's son despite genuinely not being party to his actions, and the narrative explaining his fate as karmic punishment through Plagg can read as victim-blaming. It doesn't help that his final fate, being confined to his new house with a bare minimum of human contact, is basically the same scenario that cultivated his character flaws in the first place.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Whenever this story is brought up, expect it to be related to one of two things: the wringer that Adrien/Chat Noir gets placed through across the entire story, or the idea that Adrien got harshly struck by karma while Lila, the main source of conflict, got to walk away scot-free from everything.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Chat Noir argues that Hawkmoth's murders shouldn't count against him because they were undone by Miraculous Ladybug. While from an ethical standpoint he's got no real ground to stand on here, from a legal perspective there actually is an argument that since courts have defined death as the irreversible cessation of all brain activity and Miraculous Ladybug quite obviously reversed it, he's "only" guilty of eight godzillion counts of attempted murder, plus all of the other charges, which isn't exactly better, but his point still stands.
  • Marinette's decision not to get involved with the police investigation is portrayed as rejecting Adrien and her former friends' selfish demands that she once again fix their problems for them, with Adrien specifically wanting her to abuse her influence as Ladybug. However, it could be argued that Adrien has a point, even if his demands come from an extremely self-centered position:
    • Marinette is a direct eyewitness to several of Lila's crimes; thus she arguably has a civic duty to come forward with what she saw. This would be true regardless of her identity. Coming forward would not be 'interfering' with the investigation, so long as she left the police work to the professionals and didn't try pushing them in any particular direction.
    • Her honest testimony would likely be taken as far more credible than Adrien or the rest of the class, particularly as she would be unlikely to hold back her criticism of Adrien. This could help the police reconcile Adrien's shifty behavior and strange-sounding claims.
    • Marinette explicitly states that she would act if they were still friends, making her decision not to come forward seem personal rather than trying to avoid abusing her influence. One could thusly argue that she's using her position as Ladybug as an excuse to avoid testifying about witnessing a crime due to her anger at the victims.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Adrien's life is systematically destroyed until he effectively has nothing left by the climax. While the story insists that he's dug his own grave, some find it hard to buy that he actually deserves his fate. Part of the issue is that he's explicitly suffering from Lila's karma alongside his own, meaning she gets to remain a Karma Houdini despite taking her cruelty even further than your typical Salt Fic.

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