Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-32442791-20170714193508/@comment-995426-20170718082943

I haven't watched most of the 2003 TV series, and though I know Same As It Never Was is from that series, that doesn't actually mean a whole lot to me, let alone fanfiction inspired by it.

Also, while I find Donatello having an occasional dark side somewhat interesting in terms of character development, and I do sometimes read novel-format fan fiction of various kinds, I generally don't read very dark or creepy fiction written in novel format. When it comes to bodies of text, I tend to skim first, and then read in depth. But if the non-dialogue text is too florid in its prose, I'm not usually actually carried by the feeling it's trying to convey&mdash;rather, it's one more noisy layer to sift through.

I prefer screenwriting anyway because you can focus on scene description and dialogue, inspiring the reader to imagine finished production in their mind while reinforcing the general rule of "show, don't tell." I mean, you can leave notes to assist in production in various ways, but the end result is something that can only be seen and heard, so you want to make sure the audience sees and hears what you want them to.

I have tons more fan screenplay moments involving Donatello, with him either being acid, or being taken down a notch, or both, though all of them are in stories where he's mainly a supporting character. My binge-screenwriting phase came at a time when I was increasingly frustrated that the 2012 TV series went from showing lots of subtle character development and banter, to increasingly showing little to none at all. The first two seasons were jam-packed with that kind of gradually-built detail, and alone seemed to promise a show that would only get better in the drama department. Yet in season 3 onward, writers seemed to get really, really lazy, and character interaction became more wooden and rubbery compared to the zest and bite of earlier seasons, with the result that characters lost a sense of depth. It's most fun to see characters like Donatello interact in an environment of baggage-lain subtle characters, where the things they say to each other have more context and more flavor. Maybe someday I'll publish what I've written, but it's still unfinished after two years, and it's gone from "TV-Y7, plausible in-series" to "TV-14 or TV-MA, must exist in an alternate universe", a change which only accelerated after the character derailment sideshow that was season 4.