Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-34172004-20180217191803/@comment-995426-20180218095336

While I did like the way April and Donnie developed bits and pieces of chemistry in satisfyingly gradual ways (at least earlier in the series), I do in general find the "love at first sight" to be a lazy plot device for trying to build a serious long-term relationship, because it usually just doesn't work out that way. I mean, there's a realism in teenagers acting impulsively and being governed by their hormones, and that can be...adorable, I guess? But it's not epic. Perhaps I'm just too old to take such shallow fantasies at face value, and can't really believe in a relationship unless the story shows its work and proves to the audience how and why their chemistry is genuine. But I've always tended to approach TMNT from a mature lens anyway, as I've always been primarily interested in the mature works and only became interested in TMNT for a time because its storytelling style grabbed me while it did.

And speaking of Raph, I always saw him as being in love with Slash. It was like, when you're one of only five sentient people avoiding contact with the outside world, and you're all in a family relationship, it's very limiting to your social opportunities. Donnie immediately had a crush on April at first sight, and that in context was logical in the moment. But what did Raph do? He kept speaking to Spike as a guy would to a boyfriend he deeply trusts and is in love with. Not that I thought he wanted to get it on with a non-mutant turtle, but more like he emotionally craved a ooyfriend, and projected it onto Spike because Spike was always there and Raph didn't risk feeling rejected by him. And of course to Spike, it made no real difference whether Raph was a mutant or not&mdash;he loved him back in the way he could. This is part of why Slash and Destroy was such a powerful episode to me&mdash;Spike was suddenly a mutant, and suddenly all those impossible wishes became theoretically attainable, and they both wanted to explore all their dreams as soon as possible. But being impulsive and inexperienced (not to mention Slash having an initially unstable mutation), all the cracks in the potential relationship were quick to show themselves. If you watch that entire episode purely for body language, it's full of passion&mdash;passionate attachment, passionate hope, passionate enthusiasm, passionate hurt, passionate anger, passionate fury, and then passionate grief. Anything heavier that might have been there was obviously filtered through a G-rated lens, but it employed the kind of rich subtle symbolism I rarely notice outside shows like Steven Universe, such as when Slash places his hands on Raph's shoulders from behind while talking and seems to be saying far more with just his hands than what he's saying with words. Now that's showing your work and making chemistry appear convincing. The fact that the series ended up not sticking with that direction with those characters doesn't really negate how well they portrayed those two for the rest of season 2.

In contrast, every other relationship from sometime during season 3 onward seems to be portrayed with extreme shallowness and laziness on the part of the production, like they had completely stopped caring. If there are detail-oriented adults like me in the audience who are hooked on a story because it had been so good at delivering all those details, it's hard for me to keep caring if the production obviously no longer cares, and this extends to its portrayed relationships. With April and Donnie, their last episode I thought developed their relationship in any interesting way, was "A Foot Too Big", as it portrayed in an appropriately awkward way how people's excessive expectations of each other can frustrate them and further complicate how they think and feel about each other moving onward. Donnie was trying hard, April was being distant, and yet there was the appearance of enough personality layering that it could still leave you wondering just what complicated thoughts and feelings were being left unsaid. There's a certain underrated art in storytelling being able to suggest an unseen internal dialogue by appearances alone.

But soon after "A Foot Too Big"? WYSIWYG&mdash;what you see is what you get, period. All of it. No depth. No layering. No suggested internal dialogue. Just...two-dimensional delivery. And when storytelling and characterization like that appears to lack depth, it feels wooden, and the characters start losing their dimension. Seeing such erstwhile richly-developed characters like Splinter or Raph repeatedly deliver unemotional wooden dialogue was truly a moment of uncanny valley for me. And when the show eventually shifted to unabashed fanservice ("Turtles in Time", "The Moons of Thalos 3", etc., basically any episode where cup size was passed off as a significant personality trait), the characters and their relationships were not only no longer interesting, but outright disruptive and irritating, and unfortunately that also began to apply to April and Donnie.