Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26431570-20150914005621/@comment-995426-20160401092027

That's been the problem since season 3. Raph's personality has become either bland or inconsistent. We only saw the briefest moments of his deeper personality once every 13 episodes or so, then he went back to being bland and one-dimensional. Seasons 1 and 2 gave his character much greater depth and cultivation on a more regular basis.

Note that it's not just the way Raph talks or behaves. This show used to have some of the best, subtlest body language, too, which provides clues about what he's not saying. I once compiled a series of video clips for best of Raphael in the first two seasons, which together paint a rich portrait of his character. Let me show you GIFs of some of these moments:

And I can go on and on and on for the first two seasons.

One of the most fun things about him? He was such a lovable bitch. :) Not just a jerk or an angry person, but someone who had fun making catty remarks and talking back. And at other times, he could be very tender in very meaningful ways that further fleshed out his character rather than standing in isolation.  These moments were are deeply character-building.

I had so much to choose from in season 1 and season 2. But in season 3, such moments are very few and far between, and most of them uninspired and uninteresting. It was sad seeing Raph go from the deepest character on the show to the shallowest so quickly. The problem is not that hard to understand&mdash;it took someone with a strong attention to detail and continuity to carefully cultivated Raph's subtler personality quirks. But commercial TV shows often have a turnover in writers, etc. Someone crafted Raph with great care, but the later writers or the higher-up producers were not necessarily going to care as much about that in the long term. The fact that Mona Lisa's first episode was so jarring in its indelicate mangling of Raph's personality is the most obvious sign of this. It was also when I lost all respect for the newer episodes.