Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-4779545-20170124053126/@comment-995426-20170624010021

I dislike what they've done to all the characters in the series. They turned it from a series with great potential, into just another poorly-written hypertoyetic clusterpunch suffering from a massive case of Fred Wolf Syndrome. So yeah, April's suffered character derailment. Practically all of them have to some degree or another.

Here's something I recently commented on the subject, written in a more humorous character-role-played format, which helps put the underlying cause into perspective. Characters like April are assuredly the same as they've always been. How? Because we've actually been seeing more than one different version of them, from slightly different parallel realities from episode to episode. Those changes merely gradually accumulate over many episodes, until characters increasingly no longer quite resemble characters we were introduced to. That can actually happen for better or for worse.

But in this case I'd say it's for worse, because the writing has become far lazier, far more formulaic, so the characters seem more one-dimensional, often more "flanderized," and their character development derails and craters as a result. This is common in longer-running TV series, with a strong burst of creative effort in the beginning as the showrunners are trying to find their audience, eventually becoming something more phoned-in once slacking showrunners have found a reliable core audience and decides to milk them more narrowly for the greatest effect and profit at the lowest cost and effort. This often jars and alienates more detail-oriented viewers with longer memories, but they are no longer being courted as part of their target audience at all, especially if that audience is kept at a fixed age because of that age group's likelihood of asking their parents to buy them merchandise. Viacom has had generations of experience refining this technique to a formula in all its various demographic-oriented media platforms, most infamously with MTV and Nickelodeon, but also in more recent decades with BET, LogoTV and Spike. It takes an unusually dedicated showrunner to consistently show quality in any TV show that survives longer than two seasons. These kinds of shows certainly exist, but often seem rare and special when they do. As it turns out, a show isn't necessarily required to be good for it to still be comemrcially profitable, which is what makes franchise zombies the thing they are.