User blog:Gilgameshkun/Bebop & Rocksteady Destroy Their Own Character Development

I love TMNT: Bebop & Rocksteady Destroy Everything!&mdash;it's one of my favorite TMNT comics of all time. And one of the things it did particularly well, was give a huge helping of character development to the titular characters and, casting them in a more human light, and inspiring the audience to sympathize with them, as flawed as they still are. They came to epiphanies about themselves, and about the two of them together, and all in all, it was comic writing done well.

Things turn south for B&R, and once again they're faced with a life or death situation&mdash;not at the hands of the EPF, but from Xiang Fei Tong, a triad leader they had ruined when they were still members of the in New York City.

But this is where the story takes an extremely unsettling turn. What jars me isn't so much how they reverted to some of their old habits, as we honestly expected them to do. What jars me is this one page:



B&R are running for their lives, and find a kind and sincere-sounding man driving a truck who offers to help them. But then, realizing how weird this whole situation has become, they...kill him in cold blood, and they enjoyed it. They're not people, after all, they're monsters, and they always will be. You know, because LOL.

The problem with this is, it doesn't just paint them as flawed anti-villains, as Destroy Everything was so good at. It paints them as completely irredeemable sociopaths, and the murder they just committed of such a sympathetic victim is played for laughs. No lesson, no commentary, just breathtaking savagery for savagery's sake...because comedy.

By the end of the issue, B&R are lying in a dumpster in pools of their own blood, critically and perhaps mortally wounded. They have been both figuratively and literally written into a corner.

The remaining three issues of Hit the Road have a big task on their hands if the writers want the readers to continue to feel any sympathy or caring for these two. Because as it stands, this story is making the reader want B&R to be put out of their misery altogether.