Great!
Any tips on being more agressive / less passive?
I guess will address this and the rest of your previous post to the best of my understanding.
Most of Marth's moveset is pretty punishable or lacks the ability to generate strong situations. Hitting someone with Ftilt at like 50% can still often times get you punished. Using Aerials is often times fairly punishable as well. When you short hop, you commit very heavily. Where ever you end up moving to in your short hop people will know exactly where you will end up landing. If its a character like Sheik, Fox, Falco, or Falcon they can keep a very tight spacing around you to avoid any aerial you might throw out and still be quick enough to punish your ending lag. If you 2nd jump away this is still bad because you completely give up all stage control as the void where you were on the ground is now gone. It can be filled up with the other character.
So, the point is that you can reduce your ability of getting put into bad situations by picking options which will not leave you vulnerable. Some of the best moves in Marth's arsenal are literally grab and Dtilt. Grab avoids any pitfalls such as not enough knockback at low percent, risk of crouch canceling, and hitting shield. It would be pretty good to use Grab to start all of Marth's punishes with because you can tech chase a person or hit them in the air or punish landing lag of wherever they land.
The question next to ask is how do you set this up? How can you try to get situations where you get grabs. Dash Dancing, holding some amount of stage, your opponents position, and using Dtilt. The essence of DD'ing as far as I know is to be able to mask what you will do next. Its hard to react too. On any dash forward you might grab or you might dash back and avoid the attack targeted at you. However, this loses any power when you lose stage to use the dash back or fail to act out of dash forwards on many attempts.
Thus, to avoid being in a bad spot you should avoid losing ground and press forward to gain more ground. Dtilt is a very good move to attempt to regain some amount of ground. Its an area where your opponent cannot come here during the time period the move is out. If successful to land punishing even when CC'd at tipper range is difficult for most anyone depending upon what you do after Dtilt. At the very least, it establishes for a brief period this space belongs to Marth. Thus, you gain some stage. You might lose it still depending upon what happens afterwards, but that is effectively what Dtilt does.
In combination with the threat of DD back, dash forward grab, or dash forward Dtilt you can pretty much choose to beat out any option a person takes and attempt to take space from said person. The closer a person gets the ledge the less they have to work with. Yet, you have all this stage to retreat too to cover their break forward. If a person is being really safe they often times retreat. During a retreat you can take back space they gave up. This set-ups up for the next interaction. Eventually, something happens which breaks this neutral game. They go into shield, they attempt to attack forward (or inplace), go to the platform. At which point, the game shifts gears and that is a different topic.
There are more nuances to other topics such as projectiles and different characters, but this is what I believe to be the way Marth wants to approach neutral in general. Some characters like Peach give you more reason and sometimes more options to do certain things.
To address the idea of being more aggressive and less passive more directly you simply try to take any space they give up the moment it happens. This is done by the actions of putting an attack out there (space/time your Dtilt/Grab well when you do swing). Or, you simply capitalizing on any actions such as say a full hop they make or their own retreating backwards and simply move into the space they gave up if they dash away.
When you are in a bad spot. You simply have to accept you might not be able to do anything about it. If you are on the ledge that is a bad spot. The best you can do is try to minimize worst actions and work with the few plausible options you can. If you run out of stage you want to get it back. Trying at attack someone directly, rushing past them, get into the stage and roll inwards. These are all attempts to take some more stage back that while they can fail you might wiggle out of your situation.
