#tlr2

I'm so torn on how tlr2 ended because on the one hand, intrigued with that last minute villain reveal???? Kinda wasn't too surprised though... I had a stank feeling the longer jiro stayed away from the resistance. He already had my stink eye from being a cop but now he's well and truly lost my respect, lol.

I'm also not mad by april's death, tho I think given how heartbreaking the turtles/casey's deaths were in tlr I think they could have gone harder... Like really made us suffer through it... Had the kids come in right BEFORE she was shot so they had the survivors guilt of not reaching her fast enough... Really hype up that feeling of regret prevalent in tlr, that "if I'd only been fast enough" mentality present at every death. Idk, I think it lacked some impact, which as I'll explain below, was probably not helped by the fact she felt detached from the family for most of the run.

Thinking back to how every single teaser synopsis was like "oooooh... You'll NEVER guess what these turtles are going to do next... Finally we'll find out the True Secrets Of Everything"... But then chapter 5 was 90% human gang fighting and 10% Ronin kids, the characters I'm actually sticking around for. As usual I loved every scene with them in, but there was so much going on it felt a little like they were background characters in their own story 😭

Also, going back to all of the chapter blurbs being about the kids powers... Did we actually get anything from Uno? Or is his colour change power It? If that's the case that's fine but it felt a little weird that we saw the other three get something, he felt forgotten...? In the lost years I assumed Uno's colour change ability was less of a superpower and more of a cool attribute of whatever turtle he mutated from.

It also feels like a lot of things were left hanging. I know they wanted to save some plot threads for if they get another run, which I really hope they do, but it left me feeling a bit stumped that they set up the plot of casey and april finding out the kids can communicate using telepathy / are developing all these wacky powers and then it was... Never followed up? I know they had other things on their mind but everything felt very quick. We had a scene with the kids winding down to sleep, so surely casey could have come in and been like okay real quick can you tell your mother wtf has been going on with you guys lately? Idk. It would have been nice to have a scene with April too - considering how much she doted on these kids in lost years, she felt so detached from them in the last couple of issues. I know she has other stuff on her mind but you'd think we could have seen just one hug, one snuggle, her and casey kissing the kids goodnight as a last ditch effort at maintaining normalcy when everything else in their lives has been turned upside down? Especially because April, yknow, DIED at the end? Wouldn't that have hit so much harder if she'd had one more scene of embracing these kids and telling them no matter what, she's proud of them and she loves them? How much more it would have hurt if she'd died because the kids came back in time to see her fighting for her life, and in a last ditch effort to prevent them from getting hurt, she'd angered jigsaw into taking the shot?

I don't know how I feel tbh. Throughout this run I adored every single scene with the kids, but I feel like the familial love that was so baked into the family scenes in lost years wasn't considered important. Was it crucial to have So Many Gangs I Didn't Really Care About? Couldn't we have cut one faction out and used the extra page time to show some love between Casey, April and the kids?

I get that a big draw of the last ronin was how bleak, gritty, gory and action packed it was. But when it comes to the whole draw of tlr2 being the new gen of turtles, it felt like a lot of the time they got shelved for a whole cast of characters who we barely knew or cared about. I assumed the lost day special was introducing us to characters who would be key players in tlr2 but zaragoza, his wife and the rest of the resistance mostly appeared in the form of ordering casey to different areas of nyc to fight, tinker only appeared for maybe 2 scenes tops? Jigsaw turned out to be important but even then I feel like we got more of the Chevalier's leader than him. I definitely would have preferred it if instead of hinging the plot on multiple factions fighting, jigsaw and the purple dragons were the key players. This might be controversial but in my honest opinion we did NOT need the foot clan coming back in any capacity. They should have ended with hiroto. His death alongside Michelangelo's symbolised closing the book on that chapter of tmnt history, so why are we dragging it back out again? 😭 Jiro being a double agent absolutely could have worked without him being a sleeper agent for the foot. We had So Many Gangs to choose from in this run. I definitely need to go back and read it in its entirety, but yeah ... I don't know about this one guys.

I'm all for jiro being a villain after he was cast as Casey's love interest, that's juicy as hell. I'm all for Jigsaw getting more screen time too because we could tell in the lost years that he would be trouble down the line. But so much of the story - the Chevaliers, the NYC mayor/police, and who knows who else I'm forgetting - all just kinda felt... There, without providing anything to the story that made me emotionally invested. I know I shouldn't be salty about a gang whose gimmick is dressing as Arthurian knights given how weird tmnt enemies get, but I really struggled to care.

It was nice seeing Tinker get some praise, and I hope now that in the wake of April passing she might become more of a kooky old aunt to the turtles? Her beef was with April but she liked the kids enough in the lost day special, so I hope she fills the grandma sized hole in the turtles lives in future issues. Amanda was interesting but she also left without anything groundbreaking happening, so I can only hope she'll show back up again some day? (Now that jiro is confirmed to be working against the resistance, there is a very small part of me hoping casey marie will get with amanda in a future run, but that's my lesbian wish fulfillment acting up.)