Thread:Sonicisawesome2448/@comment-995426-20160128044156/@comment-995426-20160130004531

Well, it wasn't so much that the characteristics went away. After all, I kept watching season 3, even as Raph got dull. I was disappointed by him acting like a cold fish to Slash (after such immediate tenderness as recently as Clash of the Mutanimals), but I kept watching. But Dinosaur Seen in Sewers! proved to be his single worst plot in season 3, making him look like a manipulative jerk. Zog's lecture of how much the turtles sucked was largely spot-on, and I couldn't sympathize with what Raph had done anymore. But in season 4 with yet another fast, easy, shallow romance with Mona Lisa, Raph went from unsympathetic to offensive, as it appeared to not only finally erase what had been the most interesting things about him and make him a one-dimensional character, but to some of us it felt like straightwashing.

You see, Raph had once been written as a realistic, believable, deep, developed gay character with lots of potential at around the same time other cartoons were actually doing some of the same things (Legend of Korra, Steven Universe). It made gay audiences feel a little more respected and less invisible in a G-rated fashion, which is a big deal when they're used to always feeling invisible when children are present. But it's far worse to feel visible and then to be made to feel brutally invisible again, than it is to have felt invisible all along. It was...a genuinely painful experience.

That's why I stopped watching. The only way they can salvage this now, is if a major reality shift happens, like: I've been a TMNT fan for decades, and I mostly like good, well-written story, plot and character development, including drama. I always mainly liked the Mirage comics, etc., and not the old cartoons&mdash;I don't like the 1987 TV series at all, really. The 2012 TV series once offered enough of this kind of dramatic appeal to me with its heavy emphasis on character development and detail. But now, you can only drastically retool characters so many times before that detail-oriented audience feels too whiplashed to want to keep up. After all, for audiences like me, TMNT was always a saga for the ages, and not a cheap comedy just for children or adults nostalgic of old cartoons they watched as children. It just became less frustrating for me to stop watching. I still have plenty of TMNT stuff I like&mdash;the 2012 show's first two seasons, as well as the Mirage TMNT comics, the IDW TMNT comics and especially MNT Gaiden, and those comics have never been for children. :) There's also Amazing Adventures, which branched into a separate continuity from the 2012 TV series when season 3 was still airing, and now carries separate story and characters of its own.
 * Someone wakes up, and it was all a dream, or...
 * These turtles turned out to be alternate reality versions all along, and maybe they'll all die saving the Earth's timeline from the Heart of Darkness, allowing the "normal" turtles to live on as if their voyage in the Ulixes had never happened.