Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20160509012936/@comment-995426-20160725045047

KunokitaxD4 wrote: this is what I'm saying, it's not realistic it's more like you're hot moving on. leatherhead, chris bradford mikey like literally had feelings for them. he never stopped talking about chris bradford even when chris betrayed him he never got over it lol and leatherhead is his boyfriend. it's not formed properly. mona and raph were pathetic, it's not taken properly like raph and slah they have chemsistry. even though leo and karai is kind of confusing, still their bond is strong and it developed. so i hate these love interests out of nowehere and forced

There's a bit of ambiguity in your words, so I had to reread what you said several times. (Run-on sentences and ambiguous pronouns are not our friends. XD) But if by "hot moving on" you mean "fast, easy and shallow love interests," I agree. Those annoy me to no end.

Mikey may have lingering baggage from Chris Bradford, and there were signs of that in later season 1 episodes, though he seemed to gradually recover from it in a relatively healthy manner...except for still keeping that life-sized cardboard cutout of Bradford in his bedroom. It was so not healthy for Mikey to keep a life-sized reminder of the object of his infatuation who manipulated his trust to get to try to kill the rest of his family. (Alternative interpretation: Mikey perhaps na&iuml;vely hopes Bradford can still be saved, in which case the cardboard cutout is creepily touching. XD)

With Leatherhead, I liked how they had some natural chemistry at first, but were sincerely trying to be friends even when their actions, emotions and body language were saying more. And then you knew something was there when Mikey tracked LH to his home...to share anger, hurt and love for his friend. His pupils spontaneously dilating at "I thought we were friends" was a really nice body language easter egg. (And the hormone rush of the day is called "dopamine," folks. :) ) Personally, I think it's possible they never called each other boyfriends, but their feelings and actions did that for them, which is why, in retrospect, it shouldn't have been too much of a surprise that they were sleeping together&mdash;only surprising that a TV-Y7 show would actually show that, up front and center.  It's not just the way Mikey always rushes to Leatherhead's side, but also the way he calls LH "buddy" or more colorfully "my big green buddy" which in context sound more like a terms of romantic endearment.

But Mikey and Renet? I don't think I can imagine a worse way to write that in TV-Y7. It not only felt lazy and thrown together, but the stark implication that Mikey had never been in love with anyone was insulting to the intelligence of anyone more socially aware than a grapefruit. (But if you understand the industry, it's less surprising. The Fleeting Demographic Rule allows showrunners relatively free rein to recycle storylines and even drastically retool elements after just two years, because the average member of the target audience has reliably forgotten they existed.  ...And that's the sound of me losing faith in humanity's intelligence. XD)

As I've been saying, I think all these interpersonal entanglements were handled with a lot more depth and subtlety in seasons 1 and 2. But come season 3, it's not just the romances that became one-dimensional&mdash;everyone became more one-dimensional. I recently compiled a private collection of clips of "the best of Raphael". 50 minutes in season 1. 35 minutes in season 2. ...a scant 5 minutes in season 3, and those were painfully tedious to hunt for in scene after scene of characters being self-contradictory or just plain wooden. Starting season 4, Splinter was dead, but it was everyone else who died on screen.

But it also seems Nick is already taking this show's popularity for granted in the way they've stopped running previews for it while continuing to milk it for revenue. It took the 1987 TV series a few episodes to really start sucking, and it took the 2003 TV series five seasons before it really started sucking, but Nick went the middle route with two seasons of mostly-better-than-not episodes before the mediocrity really started to set in. Not that season 3 had no good episodes at all, but they were so scant.