Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20160227225840/@comment-995426-20160413135639

Yoshimickster wrote: Okay say what you want about 2K12 Raph, but we BOTH know season 3+4 Raph isn't the least interesting version of him. That is probably "Next Mutation". Remember, no matter how bad it gets, it'll never be "Next Mutation" bad.

WHILE ON TOPIC THOUGH- maybe season 3 and season 4 is jut Raph AWAKENING to the concepts of sexuality, as I've said if he was attracted to Slash MAYBE he didn't consciously know it. Same with Mikey in all honesty, that is one obviously bi turtle. To be perfectly honest...I saw maybe one episode of The Next Mutation. ^_^; And it was really bad...but I don't remember much about Raph.

And while what you say about awakening to sexuality after 15 is in some way theoretically possible (it's also the premise of the film In & Out in the opposite direction), there's still the issue of Raph becoming extremely bland over the past year and a half. It started sometime in North Hampton, as I said. Some scenes of even Raph's plain scripted dialogue come across as painfully routine. I mean, I'm in a family of snarky teasers, and that doesn't necessarily go away as you age. If season 1 Raph is a zesty medley of herbs, post-North Hampton Raph is plain rice cakes.

As for Raph's sexual awakening itself, I wouldn't necessarily say he was sexually unaware during season 1 and 2. You don't have to be a straight male to see your brother has a blinding infatuation with a conniving femme fatale. He knew enough about what someone wants in a man to quickly intuit and counsel Donnie and gripe at Leo over their lady problems. And I think it's fair to say he was in love with Slash, and probably even with Spike as an emotional substitute for another accessible non-related male that didn't exist in Raph's world yet. And I think empathic Splinter knew exactly what Raph was feeling when he lost Slash that first time, hence the super-rare ear-to-ear smile. And the way Raph's eyes were all over the place, drinking in Slash's presence in that scene at the end of Newtralized (right before Slash declined his offer to return home), I think it's fair to say that Raph was feeling something. And if memory serves, there would be enough other evidence of such a feeling that only full-reverse full-blown denial could dismiss, and I honestly don't think Raph could be in denial about what he felt, especially with the funk he had been in at the end of Slash and Destroy. And the fact that he chose Spike/Slash's photograph as his one most precious possession to take with him when they abandoned the lair, showed how much he wanted to be reunited with that guy.

Fast forward (joke welcome but unintended) to Return to New York, and I had a double-u-tee-eff moment at Raph and Slash's reunion scene. Raph appeared fully composed, and he and Slash reunited with...a fist bump? I remember complaining at the time that this was the guy Raph pined over, and the man deserves a hug. A friend then suggested that Raph still doesn't like an audience having a front row seat to their spontaneous displays of affection, so anything more tender he'd probably save for private. Of course, suggestions like these are a familiar pattern for viewers who don't want to believe writing is actually getting worse&mdash;coming up with excuse after excuse for an apparent lapse in continuity. Though I later decided that maybe Raph is more the very private affectionate type (especially since I realized how much that gibed with his heart-to-heart scene in the kitchen in Rise of the Turtles and how mad he was at Mikey for eavesdropping), I still couldn't shake the feeling that Raph wasn't all there, somehow&mdash;huge portions of his personality seemed missing after North Hampton, and he couldn't even express anger anymore without looking like a complete caricature:

A Raph who's losing his complex personality doesn't seem conducive for conditions necessary for sexual awakening. As many excuses as I tried to give for what was going on, in retrospect it was simply bad writing and playing fast and loose with characterizations by writers and producers who just didn't seem to care as much as they used to.

As for Mikey, I honestly thought I was prepared for him having an interest in Renet. But even if he was theoretically ready and willing, Turtles in Time was still the worst episode of that entire season, and of the entire series up to that point. They spent way too much effort going full blast on the Cipes-Johnson gag, but ignored all character depth and complexity in the process. Renet, for her part, had all her personality in her D-cup, and she also had this strange supernatural power to reach into the audience's mind and delete a dimension or two (in stark contrast to the IDW Renet who had the power to create dimensions). That episode was...so, so wrong. I think one of the things that annoyed me most was how painfully ignorantly the whole script was, especially the assumption that, since Mikey has never been in a love with a girl, he has therefore never been in love. He had previous episodes that bent over backwards to show how remarkably sensual his love for Leatherhead was, and also how much earthy wisdom he had in the ways of the corazon and its real squishy feelings and how soft a muscle it is.

Turtles in Time was such a barreling steamroller of blatant discontinuities and indelicate personality alteration that I realized I was having a clinical  while watching it.

Though in retrospect, this may still be more evidence that the post-North Hampton turtles (including Raph and including Mikey) seem to come from some alternate universe (perhaps even one where normal rules of character continuity don't exist XD).