Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32181199-20170619135553/@comment-995426-20170827194339

It's unfortunate Leorai haven't had a decent storyline since season 2. When you write a good romance storyline, you show your work by portraying believable, compelling chemistry and character development, so that the love they share appears more three-dimensional. You don't just ignore a pair for a long time and then suddenly show them together as if they always were&mdash;it insults the audience's emotional intelligence. There might be a certain storytelling tradition in portraying the hero winning the girl as a prize for saving the day, but that not only trivializes relationships by chattelizing the love interest, but also has more in common with porno than with love.

Why complain about these things? Well, if this show had always been this shallow, there would be no disappointment. But the show initially showed character chemistry in more complex, realistic dimensions (one-sided infatuations, nontrivial relationship stumbling blocks, long gradual changes of heart, etc.), steadily built up in story arcs, before they abruptly started pandering to the interests of fast instant love, even if doing so turned the men into shallow idiots and turned the women into easy bimbos (not to mention some of the carefully-cultivated LGBT subtexts that were also suddenly and jarringly abandoned). I spoke to another fan about it, who became so dismayed by these undignified snogfests that she would turn off the show whenever her daughter was in the room.

I heard down the grapevine that this change was largely the influence of Brandon Auman, and Ciro Nieli actually tried to counteract it. (For example, a rebooted Mona Lisa and her instant love with Raphael was Auman's idea, and then Nieli wanted to kill her off quickly.) But reportedly they couldn't get along, struggled for dominance of ideas, undermined each other behind the scenes, the show suffered for it, and as a result both Auman and Nieli have been fired and blacklisted by Nickelodeon&mdash;neither of them will be working with Nick again after they finish their contracts for the 2012 TV series.

As the adage goes, "this is why we can't have nice things."