Thread:Gilgameshkun/@comment-16581186-20151129161318/@comment-995426-20151201112828

(I'm awake now. Continued from before.)  And though kids were already in the audience, it appealed to me as an adult in sophisticated ways the previous TMNT TV shows had never appealed to me before. See, even before Slash mutated, Raph tripped gaydar heavily throughout season 1, mostly through tertiary social characteristics we could relate to. But he was still a compelling dramatic character who wasn't any kind of unflattering stereotype. Season 2 took what season 1 made and ran with it gloriously, which is part of why Raph and Slash easily earned so many shippers (and again, not T-cest). Season 3...made Raph unbelievably bland, and as the episodes rolled on, this blandness was just as starkly noticeable as his gaydar-tripping in season 1 had been. What they've done with him since has been incredibly wrong.

I had already heard of the 1987 TV series having its Raphael and its Mona Lisa having a romantic relationship, but I also knew that that Raphael was a very different character with a very different personality. I didn't want to believe that the show could be so careless or callous as to sloppily shoehorn that same kind of plot with this version of Raphael. I wanted Raph and the new Mona Lisa to have some kind of meaningful bond, but I wanted it to mesh well with the character he had already been developed to be in the first two seasons.

You see, Raph and April had tomboyish banter and even the rare girltalk.



And Raph and Karai had a fantastically catty antagonism.



Raph and Mona Lisa could have bonded like Amazon warrior sisters, sort of like what Raph and Karai could have been had they been on good terms instead of constantly clashing. Cheap mass-marketed boy-meets-girl stories are already a dime a dozen, and this Raph was no one's prince valiant&mdash;he was the alpha bitch tomboy princess in a guy's body, and we loved him for that. "The Moons of Thalos 3" did nothing less than ruin some of the best things about his character. He has no credibility on the TV show anymore. He retains at least a shred of his credibility in separate continuities where that was never going to happen.

See Fan Yay at All The Tropes for the amplified peripheral appeal a story can naturally have on gay audiences. And see Wall Banger (also at All The Tropes) for why these kinds of extreme derailments can be so alienating to fans.