Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-174.126.39.102-20130623181457/@comment-995426-20150924030737

Yeah, that's generally how I see Mikey too. I've written some incomplete fanfiction, but then hit writers' block, then felt too disgusted by his character derailment in Turtles in Time to continue. XD

But a month or two has passed, and I'm realizing my fanfiction still has value. It's a product of regarding the characters and its setting with respect, even if the show's writers themselves don't seem to respect them very much. Perhaps it's better understood as an alternate universe where the characters aged normally, and their personality traits didn't magically change in completely unrealistic ways when the plot demanded it. My friends and I have had more cautious hope that the new TMNT Amazing Adventures comics series will be better, based on experience with the TMNT Archie comic which split off from the 1987 show's canon, matured in ways the show wouldn't (it became a lot more PG-13), and became really good in its own ways.

So far, I've taken decent plot points and run with them. I kept Mikey and L'head in love, though as a relatively G-rated romance, as an homage to the Renaissance artist Michelangelo who was openly gay and had passionate romances with men, but was celibate as a monk. I figure this Mikey is pansexual, or maybe panromantic asexual. And though the fanfiction was originally intended to be a Mikeyhead story, I wrote it organically, and it quickly turned into a Raph and Slash story instead, with Mikey and L'head as supporting characters. The story is unfinished and still has no permanent title.

And while it's certainly possible for him to love a woman like Renet, there's no way in hell I'd want such a plot to be as terrible as Turtle in Time was. If the way I write Mikey held sway, they might have chemistry, but they wouldn't be all over each other immediately like they were in that episode. And it needs to be remembered that Mikey is a lot deeper and wiser about love, as the earlier seasons established. The way that episode implied he'd never been in love, just seemed farcical, in a bad way.

By the way, I realized something about Mikey's psionic extractor experience in Annihilation Earth. If it were really Mikey's psyche, it would also have had loved ones in it, including beloved family like Splinter and his brothers, other loved ones like Leatherhead, and if the show were respecting the changes they made with Turtles in Time, he would be thinking of Renet too. Instead, besides some weird images of Ice Cream Kitty, the readout claimed that the only thing in his psyche was pizza. We know Mikey has a lot more in his heart than pizza. Earlier in this same episode had a brief Mikeyhead moment&mdash;the tender warm fuzzy kind I thought we were never going to see again&mdash;and the show promptly forgot about it again the way they keep doing. While the psionic extractor scene was certainly one of the funniest Mikey moments in the entire series, it was also rather insulting to his character development, as if it hit his reset button just to keep him a comic relief character simple enough for a 4-year-old to digest. But moments like these (and the show keeps adding more of them) can be very damaging to Mikey's chances for long term stable character development. He can still be a genuinely funny character while not always writing him into a million plot holes. He's Michelangelo Hamato, not Patrick Star.