Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26431570-20150914005621/@comment-995426-20160403125448

Even if Raph gets better, he'll still be paired with someone he has no chemistry or depth with and whose sole purpose is to give cheap instant gratification to a quarter-century-old fanwank. The show would need to do a lot more to go back to what really helped Raph's character development&mdash;his complex emotional attachment and sexual tension with Slash. They became the most interesting thing about this series, with the already most interesting version of Raph ever written having one of the best TMNT storylines ever with the most interesting version of Slash ever written. Season 1 Raph was merely noticeably gay (I mean, if you don't live under a rock) and the season helped establish his character. Season 2 was ingenious in the way it transformed his already emotionally-intimate relationship with Spike into two mutant turtles who couldn't seem to wait to continue on with and for one another. The end of season 2 seemed to promise that Raph wanted nothing greater than to see Slash again, and that there would be much more to come. Then season 3's plot crickets, and season 4's...unholy developments.

See, character development and depth don't just happen at the snap of someone's fingers. It takes time and good writing to make them happen. What happened to Raph's more recent development was already jarring because it rewrote an entirely different character. Raph's current development is in a state of extreme damage by virtue of his past and current selves being like different people. The only way I could see this situation being salvaged, is if it turns out they actually are different people from perhaps slightly different universes.

And consider this: The turtles went six months back in time and are trying to save the Earth from annihilation, right? If they succeed, there will be two coexisting versions of the turtles in the same timeline. So the genre savvy question is...which of the two sets of characters will be sacrificed? By now I wish it would be the Ulixes turtles. This would also provide an interesting opportunity for the turtles who never left Earth to get to learn about the universe all over again. ...though all that assumes a conscious effort to try to return to the old style of writing, which I'm not optimistic enough to expect from a show that has disappointed me with appallingly bad writing for over a year now.