Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25684889-20150822230425/@comment-995426-20150825030113

Well, LGBT friendships/relationships can be complicated in a way. You can have feelings for many of your friends, and it's unpredictable which ones gain critical mass to become full-on romantic attachment. Sometimes things just happen the way they happen. One-sided infatuations can come and go, especially with friends whose appearance or personality are attractive. I'm afraid it's just not easy to understand the phenomenon of a same-gender close friendship that has no possibility of developing stronger feelings. And if you're gay, friendship with the opposite sex is a very different creature altogether; you respect their sentience and intelligence, but you can feel remarkably blind and indifferent to their physical presence. At least, all of that is my experience.

Anyway, one of my friends told me something today, explaining the complication of what we'd seen in the first two seasons. He said he'd be very surprised if they let any of the core main characters be openly LGBT. He used to be more hopeful that things were changing, but not so much since this season. I asked him if he thought that the gay moments were supposed to be seen as a joke then, but he said no. He thinks it's more likely that someone on the crew put the signals out there to be noticed, seeing if any of them would stick. They stuck on us (me and my friends), but maybe not on a lot of other people. And by season 3, they became less willing to experiment with their audience as they had done before, and were more focused on pleasing the core target audience with no more real experimentation. After he said that, I began to intuit why Bryke waited until after the final episode of Legend of Korra before announcing Korrasami. And he said that was exactly the kind of thing he was talking about&mdash;creators who try to do things under the radar of their bosses. With Korra, they did it all under the radar, and only announced what they had done after it was too late for the network to change anything.

What this means is, Mikeyhead, Slaph and sassy tomboy Raph probably weren't jokes&mdash;they were sincere experimental phases of the characters, that may have been overruled later by higher-ups. It seems increasingly likely that, after all that Korrasami press, it wasn't that Nickelodeon was becoming more accepting of the issue, but that they were embarrassed with how much their shows' creators had snuck under their noses, and they started clamping down harder, with TMNT season 3's conspicuous lack of experimentation being a good example.

If this is true, then it's all the more depressing, because it means Nick still hasn't evolved as much as we thought they were evolving. They still pander to the lowest common denominator&mdash;white male hetero viewers who buy toys. And just look at their primary marketing vehicle for teenagers, MTV&mdash;it's been unabashedly soulless and market-manipulative for decades.

It also means 2K12 Mona Lisa was conceived primarily as merchandise from day one, and will likely appear as exactly that with the most predictable of reactions&mdash;the 1987 series nostalgia market will squee, and the show will have yet another new character with no depth or substance. I mean, technically, all the characters are merchandise, but they used to have a more varied side because of experimental creative freedom of the show's creators. Those days are over now.