Donatello (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2012)

**Donatello** or **Donnie** is one of the main protagonists of the *Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles* 2012 television series.

## Why He Rocks

1. He's the most intelligent of the Turtles and the one that uses brain smarts the most.
2. He has awesome skills at using staff-like weapons, even brooms.
3. He’s also an inventor that is able to develop multiple advanced devices. He even made a functional robot.
4. Rob Paulsen does an impressive performance.
5. He cares for his family and friends.
6. His action moments are awesome and well choreographed.
7. His introverted personality can be related with, and his social awkwardness with April makes sense.
	* In the episode "Fungus Humungous", he greatest fear was revealed to be the fear of April hating him (and going out with someone else).
8. He can be very humble. He will correct people if they exaggerate what he does.

## Bad Qualities

1. His voice can get annoying.
2. He has anger issues and he can take it out on others in degrading ways. Such as insulting Raph just because his vocabulary is not as vast as Donnie's, and also arguing with people on nearly every mission and getting mad that at them for various reasons that aren't justified. Other examples:
	* He blamed Raph for losing the spy roach, but Raph was only asking questions and Donnie was the one that lost the roach in his fit of stressed rage.
	* He hated Casey simply for being close with April.
	* He laughed at Casey getting crushed by a car out of spite for Casey laughing at Donnie failing at chemistry. Casey could have died, while Donnie was fine when mixing the chemicals. Casey laughing was rude, but Donnie is very unjustified in laughing at Casey. Donnie wasn't being playful, he was being sadistic and spiteful. Also doesn't help that Donnie doesn't remove the car off Casey's body. Casey is shown to be fine later, but he probably had to heal for at least a week (this happened during a narration from April so the audience could be seeing this as a day from their month at the cabin and not the present day). Since it's not shown how Casey got out from under the car, it could be assumed that Casey either helped himself or someone else other than Donnie did, because Donnie isn't shown helping Casey but instead laughs at him even though a heavy car is on top of him.
3. He can be perceived as creepy for having pictures of April on his laptop, knowing that April might be at the park (Mikey evens implies that he finds this creepy of Donnie), calling her "my April", and being generally obsessed with her.
4. Though he's a good friend, his compassion can be argued to be deadly for others, as when Donnie saved The Pulverizer from The Kraang and let them escape with the power cell which was used later to open the portal, and the portal was used later to let Kraang Prime through and nearly the world got terraformed.
5. He isn't very wise when compared to Master Splinter and Leonardo. He may be intelligent in both a book-smart and street-smart way, but he isn't careful when it comes to certain things. He argued with Leo in the first part of the season 2 finale and wasted his brothers time in the process. He also only apologized to Leo while Leo was *unconscious*, and in the premiere episode of season 3 he doesn't apologize when Leo comes out of his coma. Donnie also did missions on his own just to impress April, such as going to free her dad on his own even though infiltrating with a team and a plan would have been wiser AND smarter.
6. He isn't like his previous versions, which could be nice but it can be jarring given his anger issues and lack of understanding of others. Doesn't help that he is a jerk that gets angry when people ask him important questions.

## Trivia

1. It's a running gag that Leatherhead will grab Donatello by the face whenever Leatherhead goes crazy.

* He's the least favorite turtle in the 2012 series, judging on fan reception from IMDb, Reddit, and several wikis. Mikey and Leo seem to be the favorites, with Raph taking up third place usually. Donnie doesn't even come close in many polls. He is almost always beat by his brothers, April, Splinter, Casey, Xever, and The Rat King (Aristotle as well). Overall his fan reception is significantly lower than most characters in the franchise, but he is still popular.