Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151024145123/@comment-995426-20151029194351

Facile plot. Shoehorned romance fed to the audience on a silver platter.

This show seems to have abandoned the older trend of long developing relationships characters had to really work for, and replaced them with a plot-lazy form of speed dating that magically results in an instant perfect romance with appallingly few question marks.

If you're going to write a shallow love interest, at least show that there are consequences for rushing in fast. Easy love with strangers is always initially infatuation. It can become more, but that takes time as well as characters really getting to know each other's flaws and rough edges. It's one of those kinds of plot elements that, even in a fantasy setting, works best when it is actually believable.

It would be one thing if this show had made things easy for the audience from day one. But this show used to make the audience sit through multiple episodes of plot development to earn character milestones. There were times it actually made a decent chick flick or guy cry story. You had to see characters' feelings genuinely go through the wringer.

Leo and Karai never quite reached that point. Donnie and April have made some achievements, but they still have a way to go. (Casey is just plain annoying and doesn't make it easy for you to sympathize with him or feel him truly suffering.) Raph and Slash had one of the hardest roads, and then, for the most part, plot crickets as the writers seemed to forget what they went through. Mikey and Leatherhead wonderfully demonstrated how absence makes the heart grow fonder.

By contrast, Mikey and Renet did nothing to earn their instant, easy romance plot. And if Raph and Mona Lisa turn out to be no deeper, it will insult the legacy of what was formerly one of the best developed characters in the series.

However it happens, characters need to go through a crucible that affirms their relationships. Something we can believe and relate to. It's the same reason we like challenging video games, because incredibly easy games can feel insulting to play.

Nick, stop babying your audience with cheap writing. You're looking plain incompetent compared to what IDW has done with the comic reboot and New Animated Adventures and Amazing Adventures, and New Animated Adventures still managed to have some really good writing even while Nick at the time had forbidden IDW from running any stories that risked contradicting the TV show's canon.