Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-11469381-20150831022901/@comment-995426-20150921055846

Ironically that would be better written than what we've seen.

Your second idea would be even more awesome. Raph's indifference for women even in the face of someone who likes him! But I'd make one change to that: Raph intuitively understands how women think, remember? So Raph wouldn't be oblivious&mdash;he'd actually be aware every step of the way&mdash;but he would try to ignore it, only until she makes that impossible.

I'm actually reminded of a Star Fox manga Nintendo released a good 13 years ago called Farewell Beloved Falco. If you know Falco in the Star Fox series, you know he's brash, he's a hothead, he's argumentative, he doesn't like to accept help. In many ways like Raphael. There was also a woman from his past named Katt Monroe, introduced in Star Fox 64. It was often assumed they were romantically involved. Farewell Beloved Falco delved into their background, and revealed it was a lot more complicated than that: Katt had been in love with Falco for years, but Falco treated Katt more like a sister, not reciprocating her romantic affections. Eventually they drifted apart, and Katt found a new love interest. In this story, they meet up after not having seen each other for years. The Japanese text and English scanlations kinda vary in their exact words, but basically Falco isn't interested in girls, at all. It didn't clarify whether he was gay or just asexual, but just that girls (and Katt Monroe) were permanently off the table for him. It sure made the yaoi fangirls squee though. In the end, Falco loved Katt, but more like a little sister he sometimes needed to protect from danger. But when it came down to it, Falco's romantic chemistry with Katt was purely one-sided, as Falco was otherwise quite indifferent to her. We've already seen some similar nuances in Raph's characterization in past seasons, and it's helped make him interesting. I wish they'd have just stuck with that.

If Raph is indeed in love with Slash (again, we're talking about a series with inconsistent writing and inconsistent characterization), it shouldn't be lost on him that Slash is dead. The question is how much Raph would hope of ever seeing him again as soon as he learns that time travel is an option. But the last time Raph and Slash were separated, Raph angsted about him whenever the thought came up, for basically an entire season. Knowing that Raph, I wouldn't figure him as necessarily eager to jump into a relationship. After all, he didn't just lose Slash&mdash;he lost his father, and his entire world, and he has some grieving and recovering to do.

Of course, the last two episodes just made it feel like much of season 2 hadn't happened at all, and Casey thought the ending was awesome even though his human family had surely just died, which doesn't bode well for continuity and believability of characterization in this series. Characters will be retooled and rewritten as needed for whatever reason they see fit whenever they see fit, which I think contributed to creating such a dull unsympathetic North Hampton arc. See, I used to approach canonical conclusions as a na&iuml;ve collection of deductive reasoning. If we have A and B, and A+B=C, then logically we must have C, right? But what this series taught me in a jarring way, was that nothing happens unless the writers say it does, and writers can just as easily decide something before didn't happen that way at all. And since there seems to be a musical chairs of rotating (often unimaginative) writers, we shouldn't be so surprised when the result of their efforts is character-derailing crap.

We can hope that a Mona Lisa story line won't be as vapid as Renet's, but I for one am not holding my breath. Sometimes I think I just keep watching this series because of an obsessive-compulsive "I wanna see what happens next," even when I'm fed up with what I'm seeing. A bad habit.