Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir S4 ★★★★☆
This show has really wormed its way into me to the point where I’m second guessing whether I should have rated the previous series higher and I was too embarrassed to. But also it has vastly improved over time. It has gotten more complex since the purely monster of the week structure of the first series as well as funnier, more self-aware and much more queer, though the queerness remains strictly subtextual.
I love Gabriel Agreste and Chloe Bourgeois, they are such messy bitches. Chloe has ridiculous (utterly ridiculous) shōnen anime protagonist levels of willpower to break through any barrier and uses it only for drama. She was the first person to shrug off akumatisation and now that she has relapsed into a brat she openly invites Shadow Moth to give her superpowers when she wants them and then just breaks her own akumatised totem when she feels like it. It honestly reminded me of Vegeta and Babidi of all things. She is the one using Shadow Moth now.
The shows disposition to tease shipping and forward plot progress and and then undermine itself is still annoying, though. The forth series wastes no time in immediately breaking up the protagonists from Kagami and Luka and we get another episode dedicated to showing an alternative timeline to Marinette and Adrien learning their secret identities which immediately results in him getting evilised and the world ending.
Any rules or limits on how powers work seem to be completely thrown out the window at this point, too. The transformation time limits stopped mattering to the plot a long time ago but now we just have, playground-like, Ladybug making up the power to make anti-evil shields and Shadow Moth saying that well I can make super-hyper-mega butterflies that can break shields and also that multiple people can be akumatised at once and people don’t actually have to be near the thing that gets akumatised at all (one wonders why he ever does it objects people are carrying at all), and, with the power of the peacock miraculous, he can just make up a guy to get mad at something so he can evilise them! But he is also so, so endearingly bad at being a villain that his most successful plan does not exploit any of this but just relies trying is luck with Ladybug making a really bad mistake, which she dutifully does. Good for him. He needed a win.
Also Simpleman was so fucking funny.