Sweet story...

[MTL]

I actually don't understand why "proper" French people make such a big deal of them. I think they're unnecessary, except in distinguishing important syntax or meaning, like the difference between a and à.

I can understand making a big deal out of such things.  Without the proper accents, it is wrong.  Imagine if someone typed words in English, but did not use English letters all of the time, but sometimes used letters that only somewhat resembled the correct letters.  Like imagine the letter "n" without the first vertical stroke.  It would not look right, and it would likely annoy most native English speakers, even though it would not thereby look like some other letter leading to confusion.

but look at how we bastardize english. 
Night .. Nite
Drive-Through .... Drive-Thru
Even the American spellings of certain words, like "honor" is less British than the Canadian "honour", etc
and nowadays, we replace whole sentences with a few letters, as in text messaging,
and it has become positively trendy to replace certain letters with numbers, like in the movie,
"Se7en"
or "5ive"
and consider the trademark backwards "N" in the Nine Inch Nails logo:






...not to mention how drastically I hear english changed in modern American TV, movies and music:
" Where you at? "
" He disrespected me " etc
and most North Americans are completely oblivious to the fact that we are, as a continent, almost entirely pronouncing "aluminium" incorrectly.  Listen again to Evie's Accent Tag video if you don't believe me, and listen to how an Englishman pronounces it.
We don't even SPELL it correctly, here.  We leave out an "i"
AluminIum
Aluminum