Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151024145123/@comment-995426-20151104013922

Yoshimickster wrote: Gil, you kinda missed my point. I'm not blaming you for not liking the direction it went, I'm saying maybe focusing SO much energy into a fictional story might be the reason you took it so hard when it went in a direction you didn't see coming. Plus, was that really why you did what you did? Because you expected the writers to tailor to you and your friends specifically? Not us specifically, but it had certain elements that snagged us as fans, and seemed to promise to get better in that regard. Note that some characters were indeed written in some very different ways earlier in the series, and we loved those characters. They were retooled over time in ways inconsistent with natural character development. When that happens, it's called character derailment. Many people may indeed love the changes, but usually only if the previous developments were not so important to them as fans.

If the series suddenly had Donatello showing no interest in April without explanation, a lot of people might take notice. The fact that a lot of people didn't notice the collapse of Raph and Slash's storyline likely had more to do with many people not expecting to see gay love interests on a TV-Y7 show (or in society in general), rendering it effectively invisible to them. (And for gay people who want society to respect them more, abject invisibility can be a very soul-crushing feeling.) Even after The Legend of Korra ended and in those few days before Korrasami were announced as canon, there was an online chaos between people who knew exactly what they saw (two women in love), and people who conspicuously required more evidence to believe same-sex relationships than to believe opposite-sex relationships. Straight people routinely require so little evidence to believe opposite-sex relationships. Hell, lots of people on this wiki are still assuming Karai is Leo's girlfriend, when it was still never clear whether Karai ever felt for Leo the same way Leo felt for her. But gay people who actually regularly watch these shows, know that writers can and do sneak this past the radar, just as Bryke did on The Legend of Korra for two seasons before their announcement. And gay people know just how much many of these fictional situations are so uniquely realistically relatable to their own lives as gay people, and they still have no trouble telling the difference between opposite-sex chemistry and same-sex chemistry and recognizing both when they happen. Or did you do it because you loved the turtles, because the act of contributing is reward enough? I can think of no TMNT fan I've known before who does it for that reason. Of course TMNT fan love is often conditional. Some fans drew a line at 1987's European vacation season. Some fans drew a line at The Next Mutation. Some fans drew a line at Fast Forward. Some fans drew a line at Michael Bay's movie. I mean, yeah, we're TMNT fans who often dump a certain TMNT production (or parts of it) because it's terrible, and we still like other TMNT works. Fans draw lines for various reasons, and I'd never met a fan whose interest in all forms of TMNT could keep him supportive the whole way.

...until now. One of my friends warned me that you might be that kind of fan. Speaking from experience, he said you might be impossible to reason with in an argument. But my friends and I, none of us want to be that kind of unconditional TMNT fan. It's like liking every single music genre under the sun, liking every different food under the sun&mdash;we would go insane trying them all, when some of them will feel just plain awful. Stories change, people change, that's life, and we all have to accept it painful as it may be. That is true. But no one every said it was always going to be a graceful process. And its actually not that hard, it just FEELS hard. Rip off the band-aid, clean off the gunk, call it a day. Ain't no point leaving it on for longer than it needs to. Please take a break man, for yourself. A break from 2K12 after the middle of season three (after The Deadly Venom or so), and I've already stopped contributing to any of the new articles outside of this specific discussion with you, if you check my edit history log. But trying to ignore what 2K12 is going will continue to be a work-in-progress. And if you're still an active fan of works still closely related to it, it won't be as trivial as ignoring Twilight or Justin Bieber. You have to realize that this cannot be like just ripping off a bandage all at once, because it's not like we've stopped being fans of other TMNT works. It's easier for those of us who can just focus our attention into individual shows or comics and pretend the rest don't exist. But I regularly edit at a wiki and am responsible for other parts of the wiki. And for regular editors at this wiki, it's certainly been uncomfortable in the past, such as during Fast Forward and Back to the Sewers, before I started editing here. And now you're seeing what my fan dissatisfaction can look like, and you should realize it has never been pretty.

You should hear what Sugilita has to say about Apritello. That's not pretty to see either, but I still understand and relate to the feeling of strong distaste for certain active elements in TMNT shows. :P