Talk:Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/@comment-995426-20171208120214

King Phelous:

When Shadow was 13, she was a goth who liked niche music genres. Judging from her belongings, she also likes My Neighbor Totoro. Her friend was Sloane, until Shadow accidentally killed her. She had a boyfriend, though he turned out to be a Xihad member. She didn't have many friends outside her family, but remained closest to Casey, Mikey, Raph and Splinter. She attended college, but her life began to fall apart after she accidentally blinded Don during training and Raph disowned her as a pupil. But even then, the audience cared about her.

The appeal of adult TMNT is not in always having some kind of moral to the story. The appeal is atmospheric, and full of complex moods, and slice-of-life stuff, including both life's joys and sorrows, and both its achievements and mistakes. It's not a perfect life, or an easy life, or a glamorous life, but it's life, and there's a lot of subtler things to relate to.

And I absolutely love Samurai Jack. It's a visual feast with excellent mood-setting and progression. I also love Steven Universe, but for very, very different reasons. Can't say I'm wild about Friendship is Magic, though&mdash;the only character from that series I like is Big Macintosh.

And what this debate tells me is that you don't like adult TMNT comics because you were never their target audience to begin with. And even if there were an adult TMNT television series that adult TMNT comics readers love, you still likely wouldn't like it. It's not for you, because it was never for you. It is for us&mdash;the people who have been reading and enjoying adult TMNT comics all along. Conversely, the 1987 TV series for me is like sheer nails on a blackboard, practically start to finish&mdash;and yet I dislike it for exactly the reasons may of its fans love it, and it matters little because I was never the kind of audience it was targeting. Different fandoms, different interests, different appeals, different styles, different priorities. Adult TMNT and cartoon TMNT have always felt like opposites, and their fandoms have had very little to agree on.

What I want is for that adult audience, which has been around since 1984, to enjoy at least as much recognition and respect from Viacom as they've been lavishing on the cartoon audiences recently, and more like the attention Mirage as a property owner used to give us before Peter Laird's abrupt sale. If an adult movie or television series has trouble getting produced because of ordinary production troubles, it's very different from such a work having trouble getting produced because Viacom wants all TMNT materials to remain accessible to kids. Decades of adult TMNT fans, who at least could at times find an overlapping appeal in works like the Archie comics or the 2003 TV series, have always found this kind of kids-first approach insulting, belittling and alienating, when the original work was never for kids to begin with. It's jarring when Murakami-Wolf-Swenson did it in the past, and it's jarring when Viacom does it now. It's not merely enough that Viacom licenses (but heavily creatively vetoes) an IDW comic series or a subpar IDW video game. Another project on the level of the 2007 film might be nice, since it was otherwise predominantly Mirage-style, as long as it has better writing, direction and voice acting than that film actually got.

In fact, you know what I really want to see? A film or television miniseries adaptation of Mirage's 13-issue "City at War" arc (not to be confused with the varyingly different 2003 TV series' or 2012 TV series' story arcs of the same name). All in black and white, with the same kind of moods and pacing, and perhaps even in the art style of Jim Lawson. That remains the crown jewel of adult TMNT storytelling style by which other adult TMNT stories are ultimately judged. It also provided a splendid milestone for the main characters' coming-of-age arc: Morally-ambiguous adult responsibility and having to live with whatever decisions you make.