YMMV / Raise Your Voice Against Liars

• Catharsis Factor: People who don’t approve of the Phantom Thieves’ treatment of Adrien finally gets this in Chapter 118 when he calls them out on their behaviour towards him, as he rightfully points out that they were willing to leave him in the ‘care’ of his father (who is not only a terrorist but also a murderer at this point) and push him out as Chat Noir because their refusal to trust him due to his past mistakes regarding Marinette and Lila. At that, the Thieves realize that their petty behaviour had gone too far and apologize.
• Funny Moments: In Chapter 86, Chat Noir makes the hilariously crude suggestion that Mayura should bugger off to go suck Hawk Moth's dick.
• Moral Event Horizon: As usual of the Phantom Thieves' major targets, this is the norm.
  • While Lila's bad enough in canon, here she reveals she's crossed it much earlier when she's revealed to caused prior victims of her bullying to kill themselves. Even Hawk Moth is appalled to find out that a kid as young as Lila is capable of indirect murder.
  • Ms. Bustier walked out on her marriage to Nathaniel's father, feeling ashamed of herself for the relationship and for having the kid at all in spite of the fact she didn't want to have children. Of course, there's also her years of apathy to her earlier students, letting bullies like Chloé and Lila get away with bullying and harassing students like her "good example" Marinette until their warranty expired in a way not even SHE could sweep under the rug, and her Control Freak status forcing her students to follow paths she chose for them so she could ride the coattails of their success to get back with M. Kurtzberg, but the first one is a little harder to ignore.
  • Not even getting into Bob Roth's Palace, he not only abuses his son XY into being a submissive patsy for his schemes, he tried to have Juleka kidnapped for what is assumed by the Phantom Thieves to involve a human trafficking ring. It says something when Anarka Couffaine, who doesn't like the police, almost actually called them and locked her houseboat down out of concern for her daughter! And if that isn't enough, XY eventually reveals Bob had kidnapped and impregnated XY's mother, who was a university student intern of his at the time, 20 years younger than him!
  • You know Hawk Moth has crossed the line when his murder of Audrey Bourgeois makes Ladybug drop an F-Bomb while raging at his retreating form.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Chat Noir DOES have a point that the Phantom Thieves are technically a danger: in a city like Paris that is constantly plagued by a magical emotion-manipulating terrorist like Hawk Moth, the Phantom Thieves causing changes of heart the way they do creates the potential of incredibly powerful Akumas. Considering the Phantom Thieves acted twice KNOWING they were bringing about major Akuma attacks, at his school no less, he's not wrong about worrying they were helping Hawk Moth (who is now looking into them, seeing them as an Outside-Context Problem). Also, considering how the Bad Ending of Persona 5 features Joker making a deal with Yaldabaoth to rule the new world, Chat is right that they ought to be worried about them. And recently, the fact that the Thieves ended up falling prey to their own selfish beliefs, resulting in them trying to bully him off the team and leaving him at Gabriel’s mercy shows that in the end, they ARE capable of doing serious harm and falling to their worst urges.
  • He also has a point about the class potentially not believing him and turning against him if he had spoke up about Lila: He saw how quickly they had turned against Marinette after everything she had done for them, and knew that they would turn on him even more quickly since he wasn’t as close to them as she was. Despite that though, it is made clear that this does NOT give him an excuse to abandon Marinette, especially after he promised to have her back.
• The Woobie:
  • Marinette at the start of the story: She’s bullied by Lila and her class, her only friends left are Kagami and Luka due to Adrien abandoning her, and Ms. Bustier does nothing to help her, telling her to be a ‘good example.’ Even worse, in Lila’s Palace, it’s revealed that Lila wants Marinette dead simply because she refused to grovel at Lila’s feet, and in Ms. Bustier’s Palace, it’s revealed that Bustier allowed Marinette to be bullied by Chloe because she couldn’t be bothered to step in. Thankfully, it becomes a Subverted Trope when she meets the Phantom Thieves, and they help her rebuild her self-worth and confidence, encouraging her to stand up for herself. She is also able to help deal with Lila and Bustier and has started to reconnect with the students that ended up joining the Thieves.
  • Adrien can be considered one as well: He truly does care for the people around him, wishes to have friends and to help others as Chat Noir, and wants to believe in the best in everyone. Unfortunately, his upbringing has left him very naive to the world around him, resulting in him making some very bad decisions which make him look like an Extreme Doormat to a lot of the people around him (who either look down on him or take advantage of him), and he ends up losing multiple friends (Chloé ^note : Who was transferred before the story started , Marinette and Nino) while he’s already extremely lonely. He also has a hard time dealing with his emotions, having to hide them as Adrien, and can only really show them as Chat Noir... which also backfires on him as he doesn’t know how to deal with his feelings properly, which results in him often lashing out at Ladybug when he feels like she doesn’t respect him, affecting their partnership. It says a lot that unlike everyone else, joining the Phantom Thieves doesn't really improve his situation. Before awakening his Persona he accidentally ends up in the Metaverse, has the Phantom Thieves (who he would later find out are his "friends" and members of the Miraculous Heroes) threaten him at gunpoint, detransform and then immediately finds out his father is Hawkmoth. Even after awakening his Persona he finds out his friends knew about his father's identity and couldn't be bothered to tell him, causing the poor kid to pass out from a panic attack. After this the others finally stop seeing him as a doormat...but at this point he doesn't even want to associate with them after changing his father's heart
  • Juleka becomes one in the Bob Roth arc, as not only does she try to deal with what she had done to Marinette, She ends up nearly kidnapped by Bob Roth’s men just to put her in a human trafficking ring.
• Unexpected Character: Ms. Bustier as a Palace Ruler is surprisingly shocking to those who were expecting Damocles.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Adrien. Granted, we are supposed to sympathize with him, but we are still supposed to (at least initially) see the way the Phantom Thieves treat him as the consequences of his actions (mainly his insistence in knowing Ladybug's identity and his lack of actions in regards to the Lila situation). However, the way the Thieves go on about treating him feels like such a Karmic Overkill that when the story finally starts deconstructing the way they acted towards him, it feels too little, too late.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Phantom Thieves. While the story eventually deconstructs how they treated Adrien/Chat, it is still insisted that they had some reasons to act the way they did. However, their treatment of Chat for wanting to know Ladybug's identity (which isn't even unreasonable due to everyone else knowing and him not getting an explanation for why he alone had to stay in the dark.) is plain bullying, to the point that Joker reminded Chat of his father. It doesn't help that even when they realize they are wrong they still insist that Chat left the team instead of being bullied out. Combined with their treatment of Adrien being far worse than anything he did, they come off as hypocritical bullies instead of the reasonable people who misjudged Adrien they were supposed to be. It all comes to a head when they essentially refuse to do anything for him when it came to Gabriel, resulting in him inadvertently following them to his father’s Palace, getting held at gun point by them even though he was about to change back, and then nearly dying at the hands of his father’s Shadow. And even though the Thieves ultimately realize how low they had stooped with their dislike of Adrien afterwards, the damage was already done.