Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25139993-20190226082336/@comment-995426-20190226151218

And the topic of teenage turtles acting like teenagers. I don't actually mind them behaving like realistic teenagers. And even in some other incarnations, they do have teenage-like maturity moments. Example:



But there are a few things that need to be understood about previous portrayals of turtle ninja mutant teenagers.

For one thing, the first incarnation of turtles were Generation X teenagers, whose mutation happened in 1970. There are some timeless things about teenagers across the ages, but different generations still have their cultural differences. Compared to teenager today, on average, Gen X teenagers drank more, smoked more, had more sex, and spent more time without adult supervision; they were the "latchkey kids," who regularly went all sorts of places without their parents knowing where they were. The turtles even then weren't typical Gen X teenagers (though heavily influenced by Gen X pop culture), because these turtles were also basically raised as child soldiers for their father's revenge against Oroku Saki. Even as preteens they had taken human lives&mdash;they killed combatants in a conflict, and even though they weren't in the habit of killing innocent people, it didn't change the fact that they were still killers at a time when most kids are playing video games or learning long division.



So right off the bat, you know they're not as innocent as typical teenagers of practically any generation.

Then comes another consideration. Being both mutants and ninja, they also lived in social isolation for most of their lives, where in everyday life they only knew each other, their father, and later on also April and Casey. Which means that, apart from activities as brothers and family, they did not have typical teenage social lives, or practically any social lives outside the people they lived with.

And while it seemed they were more mature and acted like adults during their teenage years, that's not necessarily the case, either. After 2002 in the Mirage continuity, the Utroms made public contact with the Earth and within months there were aliens walking down the sidewalks of major world cities, especially New York. The turtles no longer stood out in a crowd, and they could finally live public lives at the not-so-tender age of 32.

Michelangelo was hired by the Utrom tourism agency as an Earth tour guide for alien tourists. But the moment he was assigned an attractive alien woman (Seri), he started doing what he hadn't been able to do as a teenager: Have a teenage social experience with someone he was attracted to. So, while he did try to do his job at first, he also found himself maing impulsive and ill-advised decisions: He ditched Seri's entourage, "borrowed" Casey's motorcycle, took a joyride with Seri up the New England coast, and finally had a one-night stand with her. And it led to this:



Not Mikey's most responsible moment. Teenagers often make naive and impulsive mistakes at a time when an adult guardian still has to answer for them. In today's society, they are also often taught important life skills&mdash;such as sex education in a high school health class&mdash;so that the mistakes they often do make anyway aren't quite as bad as they could have been. All this so that teens can mature into adulthood having a better idea how to function as responsible adults. But when people are effectively denied a social life during their own childhoods, they often have their teenage social maturity phase not in their actually teens, but in their adult years as soon as they are free to start having social lives.

The 2012 series was relatively novel in emphasizing the turtles' teenage personalities from the very start. I think it was possible for them to still be relatively innocent teenagers, in part, by the fact that those turtles had never been on a battlefield until they were 15, and Splinter was still determined not to get them embroiled in unnecessary conflicts. Instead of training his sons to enact his revenge and kill his nemesis, he wanted a peaceful family life where ninjutsu was practiced as a traditional art and means of survival and self-defense rather than as a tool of war. The show actually was doing something right about this in season 1 (and to a lesser extent season 2), giving them a relatively believable teenage banter with each other and with the father who was responsible for raising them. But as the seasons went on, bad writing habits started to creep in, with more wooden dialogue, less believable behavior, more rubbery teenage personalities, and the damn waifu fanservice. It was even worse with Mikey, who went from being a relatively child-like but still believable teenager to becoming Patrick Star with the maturity and impulse control of a 5 year old.