4.0 KiB
Rational Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Brainstorming
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Author: u/hoja_nasredin Dai-Gurren Brigade*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8khrqt/rational_teenage_mutant_ninja_turtles/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2018-05-19T00:29:27
Post:
Just finished watching the 2 Bay TMNT movies and hated them.
Probably the only things i liked was Shredder in 2nd movie, Krang and April character designs.
Anyway that got me thinking, how would you construct a consistent world where their confrontation would make sense?
We have:
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A ninja clan that somehow fares better then any other criminal organization in New York. Why? Does being ninja grants you magical powers? Even a small set of low key powers (hide in shadows, silent walking, mind tricks) can get you that edge... maybe. What is their recruitment process? Do they take people form the streets and teach them ninja stuff in 4 weeks?
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Why Turtles have an edge? The number of mutants is very limited so that technology would have not been human science as it would have been discovered again in 16 years.
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How more difficult is the task if we add all other 90s turtles rip offs: Bike Mice, Battletoads, Shark something?
Several themes of TMNT are simple but cool, Shredder that tries to unite old traditions with the new world and tech, turtles being big guys but still able to hide from the world, ninjas... Now that I think about it not many great ideas were present in the original.
Comments:
u/Roneitis [+5] (2 hours later)
I mean, the various cartoons all end up getting pretty space opera, going hard on alternate dimensions, aliens, and other mutants. Surely the whole mutagen thing could fairly reasonably come about with a little handwaving as some sort of weird interaction between some of these things.
I think you'd need to lean pretty hard into mysticism and "ancient magic" type stuff to make the ninjas relevant, but it's not wholly impossible as I see it. That said, Shredder, to my knowledge, invariably gets caught up with dimensional junk and Krang, etc. Which gives a decent capacity for combining sci-fi benefits with ancient ninja skills. Maybe even a Matrix-esque thought download solution to your training problem. (In all honesty a good rationalist fiction /probably/ leans a little less on the whole henchmen thing).
Once you allow for that though, you can just combine a little bit of the mutagen aspect / being an actual giant mobile turtle, with all the benefits that entails, along with Splinter's mastery of the aforementioned ancient ways and you get a decent basis for the TMNT's superiority.
With all this, depending on the strength of this mutagen, those other mutant animal characters all sorta slot in fairly well into such a world, if I'm being honest...
I don't /really/ know how you'd approach a rationalist fiction, and I can't say I'm intimately familiar with any of the overarching Ninja Turtles plot lines, but I don't think the world is necessarily hostile to it.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (5 hours later)
Maybe you could do a sonic the hedgehog crossover. All those intelligent anthropomorphic animals need an explanation for their existence, so why not have them share a reason in common with TMNT?
u/Chosen_Pun [+7] The Chosen Ones (6 hours later)
OP's idea of throwing in TMNT ripoffs like Street Sharks sounds like it could be awesome, since they already have pretty much everything in common, and I'd love the meta aspects of a crossover; in contrast, the Mobians in Sonic actually have quite a bit of lore (much of it conflicting, of course) and personally I'd prefer to see that setting Rationalised independently rather than as a crossover with this one. Could be just me, though.
u/kaukamieli [+2] (18 hours later)
Ninjas have edge because of mystical fighting arts.
Turtles have obviously the edge because they have a very good teacher who can train them 24/7 and concentrate on them, instead of them getting the 4 week bootcamp.