Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-30325285-20161120231321/@comment-995426-20171007231830

The sad thing is, I've been working on a really big 2012 series fanfiction project for the past few years. Initially, it could plausibly take place within the series' continuity, and it kept track of many small details from the series so far. But in season 3 the show began to get really, really bad and kept appearing to break its own continuity left and right, so I decided to stop trying to write in-continuity and rework it to exist in an alternate universe of its own (and allow it to become more mature, Mirage-style). The problem now is that season 4 and 5 have been so terrible that no one can really take any of these story arcs or characters seriously anymore, and that means even the best-written fanfiction has a problem with the source material's tarnished reputation.

This show has done incalculable damage to the TMNT mythology as a whole, and I can already see signs of its bad influence on other versions of TMNT. One of the recent IDW TMNT story arcs (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Dimension X) decided to portray the IDW version of with some of the most asinine character traits from his version in the 2012 TV series, like being too dumb to live, always making himself a costly liability in ninja missions, thinks only of pizza 24/7, and is both the cause and ex machina solution to everyone's problems. These problems didn't used to be so bad in the 2012 TV series itself, but they became bad to the point where any good character development Mikey had would repeatedly be undone by his next derailment, because the writers increasingly had no interest in portraying him as a well-rounded character, and seemed far more interested in writing him as a turtle version of Patrick Star.