What is it about April?
 

I just do not care for her. I may be the only one, but after seeing Renet I'm now convinced I just don't like April. When I first saw Karai I loved her. I loved everything about her. I get emotional over everything she's going through. Now that I've seen Renet, I love her too. But I never felt that way with April and I'm not entirely sure what it is about her.

I really can't single out one particular thing, I think it's the whole package. She's arrogant, snooty, b*tchy and rude. I loathe the way she treats Donnie. She is horrible to him, even being nasty to him when he doesn't save her good enough. I even recall instinctively rooting for Karai to kick her rear when she was after her in the past.

I know she has a lot of reasons to be snooty or rude, especially after everything her father has been through, but that's just not enough to even her out. It could possibly be that I know April only as an adult and now the teen version is too jarring.

I don't mind that she's training, but I don't like her alien abilities. Sadly, the only version of her I do like is in artwork created by fans of the show. There she seems more relaxed and kind, even loving.

I may be speaking too soon, she could come through in tomorrow's episode.

I feel the same way on Nick April. Ugh.

Let me ask this, what do you think of April as a teenager? And do you like the concept?

She's okay, but I'm mostly "meh" on her at this point. She's too major of a character imo; less of a friend and sidekick and more the human equivalent of a Venus butting in on the bros and making it one too many characters trying to be in the spotlight. I mean when she's had more development than some of the Turtles... yeah.

And, as you suggested, her personality leaves a fair amount to be desired. Not that it's wrong for her to be portrayed with the personality she has, female characters should not all be made out to be sweet, caring little things, so it's great that their scarce number of female characters have different personalities, but it's only natural to find her sort of personalty a little hard to like at times; as with any real life girl with a similar attitude.

I'm pretty neutral about April...but I'm like that with all of the characters outside of the turtles themselves. I neither like nor dislike her, but I don't hate her. I just don't favor her. It's super difficult for me to outright dislike a character and my list of disliked characters is relatively short.

I'm not sure if her if that's the problem...

I mean I can stand girls with sass and even girls that are bratty I usually love those girls....but April is just...inconsistent...she's not too mean...but not too nice...but not too girly....but not too tomboyish....but not too loud....but not too quiet......

she's just kinda blahhhh.....if she was meant to be bratty then she should own it.

Ally owns it (girl in purple) She's always being sarcastic and sassy, but that makes her likable XD


or she could be motherly and slightly bossy like Katara.

I think the alien abilities are the main thing that make me not like her. She's not 'ordinary,' the abilities she has make her almost like a Sue with how they are described, with her 'barely tapping into her powers bla bla bla' sort of thing.

I hope they have an episode one day that removes her abilities, she is far too super-human to be around the Turtles, it hard to even like her because of it.

True, maybe she's just emotionally unstable. Perhaps the Kraang genes are messing with her brain. lol

If they're going to give her so much development and make her part alien with the powers (definitely agree about the Sue thing), maybe it would be more interesting if it starts going wrong and the alien DNA is affecting her mind, progressively worsening. Nick likes to throw in new twists sometimes... save Karai and make April an enemy for a while. :trazz: (And Donnie would finally understand Leo's grief.)

or-or! April and Kirby decide to take a long vacation to Hawaii and a new girl comes in! :D maybe Renet can take her place....Maybe anyone else!!
....no too drastic?

I find her to be the best incarnation of April so far, also love the alien abilities. Just wish they made her ether half-Neutrino or this show's version of a Neutrino.

I'm not quite as bothered by her personality or reduced age, I'm more bothered by her powers. It's true that she can be unlikable and that making her a teenager is weird considering how she's always been an adult before but both are understandable, her background has some tragedy and her age was revised to make her friendship with the Turtles seem less weird. So I get those, the powers on the other hand are a really strange change.

So despite having been revealed early on in season 1, they really haven't been used a lot which is weird. If it didn't at least serve one point, hinting that the Kraang were after her because whe was their experiment, it would have come across like they did it just because they think it's cool. Granted they do show her powers growing and what not, they just don't seem that important.

Now I've seen some people here saying "oh yeah they're totally hinting that she will be a reporter one day", I don't see it, I'm not seeing her getting a normal job at all. With these powers and all other crazy crap in her life, I'm seeing her going down a darker path, maybe she becomes a supervillain or something.

I don't like the alien stuff, as I just described it's been presented in a kind of pointless way and the only compelling direction for the powers as I see it is a rather dark direction.

As for the Neutrino thing, why do you want that? I've pretty much only heard negative opinions about their original depiction and the heavily revised version of them IDW uses are really just there so they wouldn't have to depict the Federation or Triceratons as good guys.

Nothing wrong with the 80s Neutrinos, other than their coming across as beatniks and using 50s slang, but it was the 80s...seems 1950s throwbacks in general were common. Look at Muppet Babies. lol I guess it was because of the ages of those working on these series at the time finding 1950s stuff nostalgic. I guess it's similar to how the Nick show make references to 70s/80s stuff.

She's a true New Yorker, every trait you said about her feels real about living in downtown Manhattan. It's true NY moxy.

If she wasn't any of that stuff, I would dare say she'd be out of character. That's always been the one problem I've always had with April is that she doesn't feel she is part of that NY life-style. Just a random person thrown in to this environment.

For this new age, of a teen living in NYC, this is what this generation would 99% come off as.

It feels in-character and real. I love it.

I forgot to ask this in my previous post but for those of you who prefer 87 April, what do you think she has over this one? I'm only asking this because the argument against 87 version is that she's just a damsel in distress.

Most negative feelings that I have towards her is her friendship/relationship with Donnie. Just something about it feels really unhealthy to me. However that is entirely on the writers, but it's weird that other female characters come across fine to awesome.

I think there is more to April underneath but maybe that just my overactive imagination. Honestly, in the show she is more then less a generic sassy action girl that says one liners which is fine if she's a small recurring side character, but she is not and that's the problem. She is almost dead center of alien conspiracy for nearly two seasons, but she is so underdeveloped, and so "just there in the background say one liners." that it makes me not care what happens to her.

Everything with Karai are the things missing in April. Goal, desires, outlook on the world and maybe some ****ing thoughts/feelings about certain people. Maybe it's because April was written to be subtle but then are times when she out spoken. I just don't get her and none of the writers are able to get a solid grasp of her character either.

The one thing that irks me more about April than anything else is the fact that she's downright cruel to Donnie. I can understand her awkwardness towards the situation but she leads the poor guy on just to crush his encouragement, and then turns around and leads him on again. If she had any sort of decency she'd sit him down for a talk. If she actually felt icky and awkward with the situation, she wouldn't lead him on. The whole jewelry box thing was cruel. She was obviously uncomfortable with the whole thing and when Donnie tries to talk to her about it and how he understands now, she turns around and gives him a kiss. :tgrumble:

Come to think of it, I'm not a great big fan of Kirby either. He cowers on a couch during the invasion and freaks out about "his poor April" instead of acting like any adult and doing something about the situation. That whole family tree rubs me the wrong way.

Her powers make me like her a lot less. It seems too much for a character so underdeveloped as her. She found the turtles, has epic adventures with them, contains alien dna and is training...does she really need untapped super natural powers too? :ohwell:

Wow, I'm a whole bucket of negativity in this post.

All of you have really good points. I think it is because she doesn't have a goal or something to strive for. She's just there. I always think she's hiding what she's really thinking and feeling. Could be that she'd make a great villain at some point.

Oh and whoever said she could be replaced by Renet, yes please! I'd love that. Maybe Renet can accidentally send her off to another time in the future and take her place for half a season or so...:P

Y'know, eventually, once we meet Mona Lisa, and Karai is restored to normal, all the girlfriends could be together and have one episode to themselves. Can you imagine all of them trying to work together to save the guys? I am partly joking there.

Same here, even though sometimes she is ungrateful to the turtles. As long as they don't overuse her abilities, I'm fine with it.

What do you mean ? The turtles could take her out if they wanted to.

Yeah, this is why I don't have a problem with the powers thing because they're not overused and that there's an obvious, consistent pattern to them.

Well she was a damsel in distress, that is true, but the core problem isn't really that, it's that the FW April seemed to make no attempt at improving herself on that front. Nickelodeon April, while maybe not competent, still tries to improve her ability to take care of herself.

If we're going by personality, then Nickelodeon April has more of an excuse to act in an unlikable manner. Being mad at her friends for accidentally transforming her dad is understandable, but putting her career above anything else is just selfish.

And finally, speaking from a rather personal stand point here, I don't like the idea that the Turtles' best friend is a reporter. It seems so counterproductive to their goal of remaining in secret.

OT April really wasn't a damsel in distress, and I personally hate when people actually refer to her as such. She was a young investigative reporter who was just starting out and wanted to make a good impression. It was more so "wrong place wrong time" with her. She would also fight and argue back. I just don't consider a woman doing her job the majority of the time ending up in the clutches of the enemy since she isn't a trained martial artist as a DiD. Notice how much different it was when she started to freelance and stayed at home more? Peach is a DiD...not OT April.

I like April's powers, they are not overused, in fact this season they seem underused ever since they got back to the city. I hope April will be the one to defeat Krang Prime, it seems very fitting that there creation/experiment would be there undoing.

My god do you people know how real 16 years olds act? April's personality is a "smart" version of a teenage 16 year old girl. She's intelligent, she's witty, she knows when someone says something stupid, and she speaks her mind.

I can understand not liking April's powers or whatever, but her personality is exactly what it should be. Its like you guys want some bland 1 dimensional character who just agrees with everyone and stands around smiling.

I'll second this- and add that even when she was "in distress", she was still tough enough to either get out of it herself, or find a way to alert the turtles to whatever threat was brewing. Heck, she even saved the day a few times herself! That's hardly "distressed damsel" territory, by any means. She only ever needed "saving" because her JOB got her into trouble with the bad guys! And she was also WAY more proactive than Nick April has ever been....

If the 80's April wasn't a distressing damsel, she certainly came off like it on more than one occasion. I remember never wanting to play April as a kid because April couldn't seem to care for herself and always invoked more trouble than need be. As kids, we fought over who got to be what turtle because the turtles were the heroes, not the victims.

Turtles Forever even makes a stab at this insinuation when the 80's turtles travel back to their dimension to grab their Technodrome Bag. Don exclaims "We save April at least once a day!", and then says something about how you can set your watch to it.

80's April...I disliked her so much. Here the turtles are supposed to be kept secret, and she kept throwing them up on the evening news. Selfish.

As negative as my previous post was about Nick's April, I gotta say that I like her a lot more than the 80's one.

Even as a seven-year-old kid I never saw April as a DiD for the reasons mentioned. She was very proactive and her JOB put her in those situations, which is seriously unfair to blame her for. Later on when she started to freelance, she had calmed down considerably and wasn't all about "finding the action" and hung back.

2k3 April is, for my money, the most independent and badass.

Out of curiosity, is 2k3 April anything like 2k7 April?

I haven't seen the 2k7 more than once, so at the moment, I couldn't tell you. I feel like the answer would be yes, but I'm not sure...

Right now they can. Later they might not be able to. She can 'see' through a mutant's eyes, she can mind blast monsters into goo, she mindblasted that Kraang drill when she was on that table, she can sense when some mutant (and humans too) is following her, and Donnie's testing radio device made her do telekinesis. That's only three seasons in. Can you imagine what she'll be like in Season 4 and possibly 5? :ohwell:

I say yes, but with a few differences. 2k3 has her as a scientist while 2k7 as an archaeologist. They're the most proactive and skillful Aprils in the cartoon versions, I think.

Ironically, 2k7 April (out of the mediums I've been exposed to) is my least favorite April, but I've yet to favor April in any incarnation (for the toons and comics) getting down to it.

I highly doubt this unless she loses control. Besides, she seems to react to the Kraang and doesn't seem to have control over that. That's been consistent since that Kraang Conspiracy ep. Also seems like emotion plays a role. Mom Thing ep showed that as well as the Kraang conspiracy when she saw the Kraang capture Raph and her reacting and her powers coming into play.Thanks to a fluke... *points to what I said earlier*She's part mutant (sensing mutants) and has a heightened sense and started training with Splinter which helped her increase that ability.A fluke caused by Donnie. We haven't seen her do this on her own.If they continue the pattern of her reacting to Kraang related things, then I could see nothing happening since the Kraang will be dealt with permanently sooner or later.

I'm sure the psychic powers are something she wishes get rid of or at the very least being able to pick and choose what powers she can use and when.

Right now she has absolutely little to no control over her power which is why they only appear in big deos ex machina like bursts. Her psychic sense is helpful as it lets her know when something is wrong with her friends, or when they are in danger. But the major stuff most of the time she doesn't know how she was able to do it, it just happens because **** is going down and the **** that is going down is stressing her out.

Think of it in the same manner of Jean Gray when she was becoming the phoenix (in the X-men evolution and X-Men cartoon sense not the marvel comic sense) in those shows when Jean was starting to become the phoenix she would get burst of power that she couldn't control and it would make her become a danger to those around her.

Aprils powers through out season one was just her psychic sensing ability. She says herself she doesn't understand how she is able to sense things. She just knew it's something she's always had.

It was only in season two that her psychic powers have truly manifested. It is likely that what was being done to her during Showdown knocked something loose. As her powers don't manifest themselves before Kraang Conspiracy and that was only a sonic scream when she was in mortal danger. And we learn the reason she is a psychic is because she has Kraang DNA.

This is a concept that doesn't sit well with her given her reaction at the end of Kraang Conspiracy. And also the fact that she hasn't actively looked into the circumstances regarding her origin. Even when Casey asks her about her sensitivity she just explains it away by saying "I'm special."

As she begins to understand and control her powers, she would be able have better control of when and how she will use them.

I don't know if I can see that since April hasn't really shown any resentment or remorse past that episode. Even at the end "Eyes of Chimera", she was generally interested at the results of Donnie's radio testing experiment and seems that Donnie still uses April's DNA for testing new versions of Retro mutagen. Understandably she would want to help in any way that she can but for someone who suppose to be sensitive towards being half kraang mutant, this doesn't come across as convincing to me.

Donnie was studying her psychic powers as a way of helping her understand them and by that regard control them. She knows her powers do have their uses, but I can imagine she does find her powers scary as well because she doesn't know how strong her powers actually are. As they mostly manifest when she's under emotional distress, but it's always possible that something they see as helpful right now can be a danger to her friends in time. Also she has shown her powers do give her a head ache at times such as when she senses something she gets a small pain, and when she gave that sonic scream in Kraang Conspiracy. Her comment of feeling like her head was about to pop sounded like she had a severe headache. Sort of close to migraine level pain.

I hated the 2003 series April, she was such a Mary Su and seems like every other sentence out of her mouth was a jab at the OS or at least that version of April.

LOL, what? You're claiming every other sentence out of 2k3 April's mouth was a jab at the original cartoon April? Because of that one scene where she said she would be a reporter in another lifetime when she dressed up in the Channel 6 outfit?

How the hell do you think ONE line which was clearly meant to be a joke out of a 156 episode series was April, "making fun of Fred Wolf April?" Seriously, this is the most bizarre thing I've ever read. The amount of petty hate people have in this thread borders on asinine.

Well first of all, there's like one joke in there about the jumpsuit like Cubed said. Secondly, even if it was true that she was used to jab at the FW cartoon, making fun of the FW cartoon is like making fun of Super Friends or the 60's Spider-Man cartoon.

I think you might be better off explaining why you think she's a Mary Sue instead.