Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151111163045/@comment-995426-20160229060623

My main #1 gripe is shallow love interest plots passed off as epic romances. There are few plot elements with more potential for growth than a love interest, but mishandling such storylines insults people's emotional maturity. It's the same reason why Twilight has the hatedom it does. I mean, it's not so bad for a character to be written to have an infatuation on another character. But the results should be more realistic. For instance, April didn't really return Donnie's affections the way he liked, and Leo keeps pining over Karai who may or may not have ever had feelings for him. But Mikey and Renet fell mutually in love within seconds, with the added implication by the time scepter that they were always meant to be together&mdash;that was...just lazy writing for a pair with no chemistry or depth. But Raph, arguably the most subtle and complicated characters in the series (or at least he used to be), being radically rescripted so that some 1987 fanwank fantasy of a shallow romantic plot tumor can instantly come true? That was so many different layers of wrong, like some spectacularly bad fanfiction. It destroyed everything I had left of a suspension of disbelief for the series, and I couldn't keep watching after that.

So yeah, the characters have lost a lot of their depth, and that's bad. But now the characters are taken in bizarre new directions that make them seem really phony, and that's worse. It's hard to keep caring about characters when the writers don't seem to respect them very much. So, "Splinter probably shouldn't come back" is really in the same vein as "the series should really have been cancelled before it got this bad," because even if I stopped watching, it's still hard to know that a once good incarnation of TMNT had gotten so bad but is still limping on like a zombie.