Given the characters all take very interesting moral stances over the course of the story, the cast was bound to get a few.
Marinette
- Did Marinette become a colder and less sympathetic person as the story went on, or just a more assertive person? If she did, is that a good or bad thing?
- Is Marinette wrong when she refuses to help Adrien and the others in their efforts to expose Lila after the fact? As noted under Alternate Aesop Interpretation and Strawman Has a Point, Marinette's actions bank uncomfortably close to letting evil win because she chooses to do nothing, and her reasons for not acting against Lila when she could are ostensibly not abusing her power, but are worded as if it stems from personal dislike of the victims.
- On the other hand, far beyond Lila, Marinette's inability to set boundaries was depicted as being her Fatal Flaw. While the poor choices of her classmates were never her responsibility, she had unintentionally enabled them to exploit her giving nature. Rather than being morally wrong, cutting the class off may have been the morally better choice for her own sake, and helped earn her Karmic Jackpot, seeing as everyone else who earns their happy ending does so by overcoming their personal flaws and the only part of Lila's grand scheme that fails is the trap for Marinette, directly because Lila was expecting Marinette to ensnare herself by overreaching to help Adrien.
- Alternatively, is the choice moral at all, or is it simply a case of pragmatism and believing the situation to be a lost cause — not just the matter of trying to help people who have taken her completely for granted, but in trying to convince the police of Lila's guilt when they've already decided that Adrien and his classmates' testimony is suspicious? Does Marinette even believe adding her voice to theirs would have the sway they think it would?
- For even more subjectivity fuel, it's worth noting that Marinette's bitterness towards the class may have affected the tone with which she stated her position regardless of her actual reasons, making the decision sound more personal than it was.
Adrien
- It's very unclear how much of Adrien's behavior is genuine obliviousness and how much is simply pure selfishness. On one hand, it seems clear that he is Innocently Insensitive to some degree; however, it's also obvious that he's willfully ignoring warnings or evidence of the harm his actions have caused.
- Adrien also becomes worse over the course of the story; however, it's ambiguous if this is because he's letting his Secretly Selfish personality shine through, or if he's struggling to cope with things not going his way because he honestly can't comprehend that the world doesn't work the way he thinks it does.
- Is Adrien purely looking out for his own self-interests when he tries to subvert karma, or does he genuinely believe that nothing he, Lila, Chloé or Gabriel has done deserves any kind of consequences? After all, he has grown up witnessing how both his family and the Bourgeoises flouting any serious punishment for their bad behavior, which may have skewed his sense of how wrongdoing should be handled and how high the threshold before having to face consequences. Even if a part of him acknowledges the severity of Lila's scam, he may genuinely believe such crimes don't deserve severe punishment. Of course, his desire for retribution after Lila scams him does complicate this interpretation.
- Adrien repeatedly insists that he was right all along, even when admitting he was wrong would have cost him nothing. In fact, this stubbornness proves to be the Fatal Flaw Lila uses against him: she convinces him to help her out by claiming his methods have helped her realize her mistakes.
- Adrien's insistence on his lack of culpability brings a related part of his character into question. Despite Marinette telling him point blank that she's in pain in Chapter One, his internal monologue in Chapter Four reveals that he still doesn't think he needs to apologize, as he maintains that he hasn't done anything that hurt anyone. Throughout the story he also insists that seriously doing something about Chloé's and Lila's behavior would have hurt them and resulted in an akuma. Is he just actually that oblivious to the consequences of his actions owing to being a steadfast optimist afraid of conflict as well as extremely sheltered? Is he only concerned with avoiding the trouble of their resulting akumas in particular? Does he just have such a small amount of emotional intelligence and empathy that he's unable to read others' negative emotions when they don't result in an obvious, tangible response like akumatization, and is unwilling to put in the effort to try? Did he turn to Selective Obliviousness as a defense mechanism only after the consequences hit, or was he willfully blind the entire time out of pure selfishness?
- When Adrien decides to press for some money for his service as Chat Noir, it's not clear if he's driven primarily by selfishness or desperation because he effectively has no accessible finances after Lila cons him. While he does show a supreme apathy about the damage done by his father because of the Miraculous Cure and Plagg points out the contradiction of expecting to be rewarded when he continually professes that any harm done doesn't matter, Adrien is also in a bad situation and having to cope with genuinely upsetting revelations without the support he wants and may not be thinking clearly. He's certainly letting his entitlement enter into things, but it's unclear if that's the primary source of this particular plan.
- Is this version of Adrien truly a deconstruction of his character in the show, or is he a deconstruction of Thomas Astruc's implied perspective of him? Astruc, the creator behind the show, famously insists that Adrien is ''perfect'' and that it's not Adrien that's flawed, it's the world he lives in
. In the same statement, Astruc also says that "Marinette has poor control of her emotions." With this in mind, this story's version of Adrien can possibly be read as what Adrien would actually be like if he lived by an interpretation of Astruc's statements that he is perfect and that the problem is everyone and everything else, especially Marinette and her out of control emotions, showing what can actually happen to people who think this way. This is supported by the fact that it's not just Adrien who echoes Astruc's statements, but Tikki in the first chapter, before she ultimately concludes that the "Marinette needs to control her emotions better" position is unhealthy and unhelpful and that what Marinette actually needs is reliable support.
