Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31255465-20170923034221/@comment-995426-20171122213234

Not that I necessarily think this was a good story, as I generally don't like the entire second half of the 2012 TV series. And sometimes there can certainly be something to enjoy in TMNT not made by Mirage. But Mirage TMNT is the quintessential TMNT, and everything else is an alteration of it. They may draw varying levels of inspiration from Mirage (or eschew it altogether), but the more they diverge from Mirage formula, the less they feel like "the" TMNT.

This story wasn't quite Mirage-style anyway. Mirage has always been more complex than the simplistic notion that it's all gritty grimdark all the time&mdash;rather, it's a style about living in an impermanent world, in both good times and bad, through a gradually-maturing adult lens and all the complex emotions and personal baggage that come with it. If anything, the Mutant Apocalypse is far more like After the Bomb, Road Hogs and other dystopian future TMNT role-playing settings by Palladium Books, which were technically very early mid-1980s licensed TMNT works made outside Mirage. And I generally like a lot of Palladium TMNT stuff, but there are certainly areas where it departs significantly from Mirage style. Its future Earth scenarios are similar to Mirage in involving environmental and infrastructural cataclysm that decimates the world and complicates the lives of survivors, but Mirage appears to treat this as a temporary setback with the world gradually recovering and rebuilding its civilization within a century, as shown in future stories like Silent Night and Swan Song that include functional urban settings that rejuvenated after a difficult time. It was Palladium's approach that envisioned Earth's future being much bleaker with the near-extinction of humans in a world that comes almost completely controlled by competing mutant fiefdoms&mdash;a setting sharing far more in common with First of the North Star or Mad Max or Samurai Jack than with Mirage TMNT future stories.

Palladium's ultra-grim future mutant dystopia setting was ideal for a sci-fi tabletop role playing game setting where players are expected to create a growing roster of exotic mutant wasteland wanderers. Some of the 2012 TV series characters, such as Tiger Claw, originated as past RPG characters created by some of the showrunners, and some episodes like Mazes & Mutants and In Dreams were love letters to some elements of that scene, and the Mutant Apocalypse is a love letter to other elements of it. A completely unrecognizable world full of decayed ruins and roving mutant gangs is inherently an exotic world with much to explore, which makes for more wondrous tabletop role-playing scenarios. Mirage's future stories may have less exotic settings, but can still be engaging on a character-driven level. Palladium makes the exotic world the centerpiece and very little about it is mundane. Mirage's centerpiece is more the ongoing personal and familial struggle to be whoever you are, wherever you are, regardless of whether it's exotic or mundane.