Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151024145123/@comment-995426-20151103062304

Yoshimickster wrote: Yes, but SHOULD it matter to us that much? Should we not take it with a grain of salt? Should we take it LESS seriously than we should? Maybe it shouldn't. But we all have hobbies and interests. Never underestimate a fan's devotion. Don't forget that "fan" is actually short for "fanatic." We are fanatic about the things we love. I mean hell the creators sure didn't, the conception art was on a damn bar napkin! Initially it didn't matter much to them. Then it came to matter more to them over time. Kevin Eastman said that his time with Mirage was one of the most exciting times of his life.

Consider this: It took me a while to really become a fan of this series. My first hunch was, "Nickelodeon doing TMNT? I doubt it'll be that good." And the one thing that finally snagged my devoted fandom? Raph and Slash's engaging story. The single most interesting animated storyline I'd seen since Arashi no Yoru ni. I came to like other things too in this series&mdash;Splinter, Apritello, Mikeyhead, Leorai, Spike before he mutated, hell even Jason, and all the attention to detail the show puts into body language and easter eggs&mdash;but this Raph and Slash and their complicated relationship had become the keystone of my interest in this show. I like other TMNT works for their own different reasons, but this was the single largest of the various reasons I liked 2K12.

People have different reasons for liking a work of fiction. Some things are more important to them than others. This is one of those things.

And since the show quietly buried their storyline, I kept watching, kept hoping, that it would come back in some form again. There were just too many uncashed plot coupons the show had left dangling. Even when Mona Lisa was announced in advance, I hoped she could be developed as a good warrior sister character and keep Raph's previous character development intact. But when I finally saw what they did with them, it was an unbelievable feeling of fan betrayal. The rewriting of Raph's character was complete, and he was now a complete stranger to the character I remembered.

One of my friends who had already dumped the show, explained that this was just symptomatic of a bigger problem the show had developed&mdash;it was getting cheaper and dumber in general. We still loved what we had seen in the past, but 2K12 was increasingly no longer worth the fuss.

...except for me. I'm #2 most achieved editor on this wiki, ahead of even all of the administrators. I have edited 2K12 articles extensively for almost two years. I wrote large parts of them. And there's the already mentioned more than 1000 GIFs, and smaller numbers of collages, screenshots, and documentation of textual easter eggs. I even searched the world for someone fluent in Chinese who could read Traditional Chinese characters to verify that this scroll was indeed gibberish. I wasn't just a fan&mdash;I was the fan. It's a fanship that doesn't die easily, or prettily.