Open Thread: Crossovers!

This might be jumping the gun a bit (Me?  Never!) but since I seem to have finally gotten something of a regular audience for this blog, and even a number of regular commenters (hi!), I think there’s a chance for this not to be completely neglected like a penny on the street on a rainy day.  An open thread, as the title suggests, is a post that is mostly there to allow conversation between commenters.  It may be either completely open, or be based around an ice-breaker question from which the conversation then flows.

This entire site is based on the conceit that the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Gargoyles have so many elements in common that a crossover with them could occur fairly seamlessly, with a minimum of weird tone disparities or contradictory elements, while having enough differences to allow such a story to say something about both of them that could not otherwise be said.  What other stories do you like to see TMNT or Gargoyles get crossed over with, and why?

Please keep in mind the comment policy, especially the part about not auditing people’s preferences.

TMNT (2012): “It Came From The Depths” (Spoilers)

Now this is more like it.  After a series of what I thought were rather lackluster episodes, this one is rather alright, and if it weren’t for the usual stuff–the turtles are mean to the point of unlikeability, Michelangelo is capital-S not smart–it could have been excellent.  The central conflict is a rather good one, there’s progress in the Kraang story, we finally see Splinter kick some ass, and we finally get proof that April is not the only woman living in New York (*).  I really hope next episode is disconnected from either of the overarching plots, since the series works better for me when focusing on the less-important villains.

(*) Not that this means I’m ready to give the series any sort of cookies.  All this means is that they’ve finally done the absolute minimum when it comes to representing women, which is nothing to celebrate.

The Karai Essay, Part 1: A bit (okay, a lot) of history (spoilers)

I’ve been working on this for several months, but never had the will to take it to the end. However, I don’t want to have two consecutive posts about the Nick cartoon, so here’s the first part, basically a recap of who Karai is and what she does throughout the series.

The original incarnation of Karai was introduced during the Mirage comic’s  “City at War” arc, at the tail end of the first ongoing book. A ninja whose only relation to the Shredder was their membership in The Foot Clan (where she actually outranked him) she recruited the turtles in order to complete  her plan to consolidate the warring elements of the Clan under her leadership. In exchange for their help, she would formally end the Foot’s vendetta against the turtles…which, in the end, is what happens. While they would occasionally tussle when their agendas were at cross-purposes, the turtles and the Foot became uneasy allies, and Karai became their friendly face  inside the ninja force.

Unfortunately for me, I always found that incarnation of the character somewhat bare, from a characterization standpoint. She’s Foot Ninja Leader Lady…and? Is this a role she relishes? Is it something she does because nobody else can? I don’t know–we’ve never been told, I believe. How is she different from anyone occupying that same role? I don’t know–we know she’s not like the Shredder, but even that doesn’t tell us as much as it could, since the Shredder felt like such an outlier in the first place. The one distinctive thing about her–the fact that she had a teenage or adult daughter in the Foot Clan—has lots of story potential, but nobody’s really did anything with that since that detail was first revealed, just after said daughter was found dead. She is, in short, a character without a driving motivation.

Karai’s introduction in the 4Kids cartoon generally mirrors her comic book’s–she arrives in New York to restore order to the Foot Clan and end the gang wars currently laying off-screen waste to the city in the wake of the Shredder’s demise, and in the process she strikes an alliance with the turtles and a kinship of sorts with Leonardo in particular. However, there are two notable changes to her character: not only is she no longer a mom, she instead the Shredder’s adopted daughter. While the first one doesn’t really have much of an effect except to make her substantially younger—she comes across as somebody in her early- to mid-twenties here, while her original version had to have been somewhere around thirty five–the second shifts her role immensely, turning her into a foil for the turtles by allowing the series to explore the question of what would have happened to them had they been raised differently, by a person whose teachings did not align with hir actions.  Would they remain loyal to their parent?  Would they turn away from him and follow their conscience?

In Karai’s case, she attempts to do both. After it is revealed that her actions in “City at War” were all on behalf of the very not-dead Shredder, and that her agreement with the turtles was not meant to be made in good faith, the ninja princess nevertheless attempts to personally adhere to it, while making it clear that she will otherwise not turn against her father. And that works, for a while, thanks to some subterfuge on her part. But it’s not a permanent solution, and a end game only presents itself when the Shredder hatches a plan to salvage technology from a recent alien invasion to build a spaceship with which to resume his campaign of intergalactic conquest. Once daddy dearest leaves, she’ll be in charge of the Foot Clan on Earth, meaning she can truly put an end to the vendetta, or at least put it on hold until the Shredder’s return, which, given Utrom lifespans, could conceivably not take place until centuries in the future.

However, things don’t quite work out that way, and in the end, thanks in large part to the turtles’ involvement, the Shredder is imprisoned, tried, and exiled offworld in a manner that suggested that the sentence was actually meant to be a really slow execution.

Up to this point, a good segment of the fandom expected Karai to betray the Shredder, which given the genre and the role characters like Karai tend to occupy, was not an unreasonable assumption.  This does not happen.  Instead, her father’s imprisonment drives Karai in the opposite direction, as she then takes the mantle of the Shredder and turns against the turtles.

From them, things get weird, since we don’t see a whole lot of the character.  In season 5, Karai ends up allying herself with the turtles in order to stop the resurrected Demon Shredder, but it’s left unclear whether this signifies a turning point in their relationship, or if their alliance is merely one of convenience.  Later, in season 7, Karai makes a cameo appearance as one of the invitees to Casey and April’s wedding, with no context given: while she’s clearly on friendly terms with someone, we have no idea whom and under what context. We have no idea what she’s been doing in the time between seasons, and what her relationship with The Foot clan is.  Making things more confusing still, she then shows up in Turtles Forever, where she saves her returned-from-exile father and assists him as he gains the power to destroy the entirety of existence.  However, her loyalty turns out not to be absolute, as she later saves the turtles in secret and sets the stage to allow her father’s enemies to stand against him.  While it’s clear she’d like her father to live, she stands against him in the final moments of his life, as she fights to help save the universe.

So Yeah…

With all her shifts and turns, Karai is the source of a lot of spirited debate and speculation in the fandom, a lot of it relating to her true loyalties, what her decisions say about her, and what her relationship with Leonardo.  And thanks to the genuine ambiguity surrounding the character–some intentional, some not–a determined fan can make an argument for almost anything.  Speaking personally, these ambiguities help make her what is to me the most interesting character in western animation and in part two, I’ll be using a variety of means to outline my thoughts on the character, and how those affect my approach when writing both her and about her.

TMNT (2012): “Mouser Attack!” (Spoilers)

“I Think His Name Is Baxter Stockman” left me conflicted regarding this show’s take on our favorite can’t-stay-human mad scientist.  While amusing, there didn’t seem anything to make him viable as a long-term character.  His skills did not indicate a way in which he might be a threat, his motives did not give him a reason to interact with the turtles in a way that felt natural, and I didn’t see what else could be done with the character aside from the clichéd “tries to get revenge on the turtles” plots, or any way that would go that would say anything new about the character.  In short, unless something about him was retconned, he seemed like the sort of character destined to star in Batman Cold Opens–there to provide a familiar face to filler action scenes.

After watching “Mouser Attack”, it seems like retcon is it, as the Baxter shown here seems fundamentally different from the one seen in his debut, in a way that hearkens back to Batman: The Animated Series and its tendency to have its villains undergo motive decay, or, if you’re inclined to be less kind, to more mediocre fare like Ben 10. Unexplained throughout the episode is how the same Stockman who could barely make a semi-functional battle armor, whose motives were limited to harassing his former employer, and who had been taken away by the police after his rampage is now once again free, possesses the skills and the resources to build  an army of robots far more advanced than anything he’d built before, and has progressed to semi-random theft–in fact, it’s not even a question any of the turtles ever thinks to ask, which suggests its a question the writers don’t care to have the audience thinking about either.

In any case, the only notable thing about Stockman here–aside from his unexplained changes–is that he is now in the Shredder’s inner circle, a historically familiar position for the character, and one that I fear might have been drained of all novelty value.  He’ll almost certainly be responsible for giving the recently sushified  Xever a measure of mobility, but after that, who knows?

Intent Isn’t Magic: “Outfoxed”

“Who said you’re not responsible?! It doesn’t matter you were tricked!” –Halcyon Renard

Written by: Cary Bates
Original Air Date: September 26, 1995
Introduces: Halcyon Renard, Preston Vogel, Anastasia Renard (Mention)
Timeline placement: November 17 – November 18, 1995
TMNT episode I could make a forced comparison to: N/A