User blog comment:JoFanForever/Total Drama: Season 5 help? My first fanfiction?/@comment-1874924-20110807014304/@comment-1874924-20110807043051

Personally, I wouldn't describe Gwen's Season 1 persona as either "calm" or "peaceful". More like, "resigned to her fate".

Unlike many people, I liked TDA well enough, just not as well as TDI, and I still think it's the weakest of the three seasons to date. The reason I think it's weak, and the reason so many people despise it outright, is the wholesale character derailment. Several characters--most notably Gwen and Courtney--were turned into completely different people under the rubric of "character development". I heard somewhere that TDA lost about half of TDI's audience, and nearly killed the franchise. Even among the creative team, the attitude seems to be, "the less said about Season 2, the better", although TDWT did make a few references to Season 2 events.

I've said elsewhere that Season 2 should have had an all-new or mostly new cast, just as Season 4 will. That would have eliminated most of TDA's problems.

As for Alejandro, my impression is that he is what the Season 2 Justin was supposed to be but never really became. I think I would have liked "Al" better as part of an all-new or mostly new cast. Being one of only two new contestants, though, he always felt like an interloper. (Sierra was a lot more palatable in that regard, because being an interloper was the whole point of the character.)