Sentiadrien means the True Selfers has more of a point than the show wants them to have

[type_wild]

Here’s one for the designer baby joke I didn’t make because I didn’t want to go into sentiadrien on that post I made about Marinette and Gabriel both being professional creators of identity while Adrien’s story arc is to shape an identity independent of them both.

Full disclosure: To any extent this is meant as a criticism of the writers, it is that they’re being shallow and depending on the audience being so, too. I personally do approach this show as exactly as shallow as I think the writers want me to, but I know that a lot of other people don’t and I guess this one's for you!

Because "identity" is what this story is built on, and forcing a main character into grappling with potentially never having had any in the first place makes this all the more immediate than any quantum masking could. But it also makes it seem like the story doesn't see that there is a vital difference between "not defining yourself by your past and your peers and your parents", and "actually your entire life has been lived with people who have had the ability to mold your mind just by wishing for it".



First: Duusu is the kwami of “emotions” whose power is to make sentient beings whose agency ultimately lies not within themselves, but within a physical object that anyone can use to control them. I don’t think the writing team meant for Duusu to be the kwami of blind slavery, but that is what they put on screen.

Second: This Is A Problem For Adrien. It is in fact something that has repeately been used to make him do things going against his very nature. So Adrien has to be free. This has been evident since years before his de facto enslavement was revealed, and become increasingly clear as the story has progressed. Never mind that his father is a supervillain fighting Adrien four times weekly, mind that he’s making Adrien’s life miserable for purely non-supervillaining purposes too. Until this point, Adrien has defended his father on the logic that he’s just handling his grief poorly and the assumption that he’ll be better once he just gets over it. This is tragic, but you can live with it. But once it is revealed that daddy never dealt with his grief because he’s been terrorising the city so that he won’t have to mourn mum? The break is inevitable, and when it is revealed that daddy has a remote control to Adrien’s brain and he’s willing to use it? Yeah, the break is vital for Adrien's survival as an individual.

Third: The show has repeatedly sunk the True Selves Theory. “Oblivio”, “Glaciator 2″ and “Kuro Neko” didn’t air for us to still be arguing that actually Cat Noir is Adrien’s real self.

And this is where things get potentially iffy if we’re pursuing the question of What Makes Identity. Because who is Adrien Agreste? He was made by his parents, as most of us were, though his genetic relation to them might be debated. It certainly seems likely that he was created with an intentional likeness to Felix, though if that was because they’re both sentimonsters made to be a matching set or Felix is a real boy and Adrien a sentimonster copy of him is yet unknown.

So far so good, but things become chilling once you take into consideration that natural conception is a lottery, whereas Adrien wasn’t merely designed to be exactly the son his parents wanted (”Isn’t he perfect?”). By the very nature of his existence, they have the tool to mold him into anything they’d want if he somehow turned out wrong while on auto mode, and until it is made unequestionably clear that they never used the amok to control him prior to “Felix”, then everything that is Adrien is cast into question. The show is clear on the fact that he is fully capable of having thoughts and opinions independent of whoever has the amok, but what isn't clear is to what extent they can be changed, or if it's merely his body that can be forced into action against his will. Regardless of that, Adrien is clearly so used to obedience that he doesn't seem to question whether the source of that is his own seeing the reason in his parents' thinking, or just resignation to never having it in him to protest. And when we're at this point, the question rises: What were Adrien’s “real” desires and opinions, and which ones were forced upon him by his parents? What was his genuine acceptance of their worldview, and what was the amok? There is no way to know.

A big part of parenthood is certainly to raise your children into what you believe to be good people, and a big part of growing up is to realise that your parents are no less fallible than anyone else. Real parents will have to justify their words and opinions, or resort to force to coerce their children (and the children will, most likely, at some point recognise that this is wrong). If Gabriel and Emilie ever were faced with open resistance from Adrien, persuasion or justification wouldn't be necessary; merely wanting him to obey would suffice for him to at least on the surface think that he agrees. So even though we know that Adrien isn’t blindly following his father, that still leaves a nasty question of how much of anything he thinks about the world was his own mind, and how much of it was his parents overriding the AI, so to speak.

Again, to be clear: I’m very certain the show eventually will frame Adrien’s creation as a positive force, because the way Astruc talks about sentimonsters on twitter doesn't seem to consider the "can be controlled by anyone holding the keychain" to be a fundamentally fucked up premise, merely a problem in the specific case of Adrien not having his own amok. I’m very sure we’re not meant to question Adrien’s ability to think for himself, nor any aspect of his individuality. But as of Nathalie commanding "Adrien" in "Risk", that is exactly what we have to do - because if merely holding the amok and wishing for an action is enough to command a sentimonster, then Adrien will inevitably have to question every thing he has ever done in the company of his parents. And we know, for a fact, that very little of what he did prior to "Origins" was done in the company of anyone but his parents. (when he and Felix having allegedly switched places for a weekend becomes a source of hope...)

And this is where it gets fun (/s): This fandom has a long and venerated tradition of explaining that Adrien Agreste is a lie, actually: it’s the persona his father wants him to be, and only as Cat Noir does the boy he truly is inside come out.

And as of sentiadrien being canon, the True Selves theory was suddenly handed... not canon backing, but certainly a moral weight that never was there before. Because when “Adrien Agreste” is an entity whose very core is cast into question, it is certainly the case that Cat Noir’s cannot be: Because Gabriel doesn’t know that he can control Cat Noir, so he’s never tried. So when both Adrien and the audience might question how much his own person Adrien Agreste ever was, we know for sure that Cat Noir was fully him, from the very beginning.

Even if the show has repeatedly made clear that Cat Noir is a role play, is a performance, isn't who he is when he's alone in his room. But at least it was a performance that was fully Adrien’s own, and not directed by his parents. However artificial he is, he is at least a self that unlike Adrien himself, was for sure created to be what Adrien wants, and not "whatever [his] parents wanted [him] to be". In a twist of massive irony, Cat Noir then becomes the evidence of Adrien Agreste's existence as something more than a custom-made doll: we know for certain that that is something his parents never wanted him to be, and his having come up with that is the proof of his personal agency.

It has always been a point that Adrien needs to construct a life independent of his father, but at the point canon is at now, "life" would mean disturbingly much more than what it did before the sentimonster backstory entered the picture. Where we are at present, Adrien's childhood prior to becoming Cat Noir has become a slush where it is impossible for anyone to know what was Adrien's genuine personality and what was his parents' will being imposed on him without his knowing.

Personality is made by nature and nurture, and Finding Out Who You Really Are is an age-old quest in both stories and our lived lives. The dichotomy between Adrien Agreste™ and Cat Noir has been setting this one up for a long time, and the sentimonster backstory just dials it up to eleven. And in theory, this is clever.

But thanks to the lore they've established around it, the in-story results are... messy. The quest for Self inevitably involves facing your past and the events that changed you, and acknowledging that there are parts of who you are today that happened because of chance and luck and misfortune, and how prepared you were and weren't for meeting them. In Adrien's case, none of that might at all matter, because for all anyone knows, his parents might have gone in and fixed any unintended consequences. Adrien Agreste is a person whose personhood was literally created by his parents, and done out of love thought it might have been, it also means that he never stood a chance. Forget "finding yourself"; for Adrien to have a genuine personhood, he would have to reject everything he ever was and make it all anew.

I belong to the minority of people who like Adrien better when he's Adrien than when he's Cat Noir, but at this point, the True Self Theory would be bitterly comforting.