sometimes i think about what could have been tdroi’s design
I think it’s kind of rad how they ended up changing several characters to be POC, instead of Lightening being the only POC in a sea of whiteness.
I think one of the things that really bugs me about Mike’s character concept is that you know the creators of Total Drama weren’t aiming to make a good representation of a mental illness. They were not trying to be progressive like a lot of us tried to see Mike as up until TDAS.
Had they actually been aiming for that, they would have tackled something like anxiety or depression, I think. But let’s face it, TD is NOT that kind of show, and that’s not what the writers were going for. From the get-go, they wanted another “zany” character, and it just so happened to work to their whims that their idea of somebody with DID would be zany enough for their show. They planned to use him for comedy from the very beginning. They never aimed to make him a good representation of mental illness.
And once I realized that, it made me completely unable to defend Mike in any way at all.