Garmadon and Wu have an excuse of being demigods to explain their age. But Chen being old enough to mentor Garmadon always makes me think he must be at least 100+ years old. And you know...he ages very well for a centenarian. But I wonder if he was always so mentally...you know. Was Chen in his prime obsessing over buttons and acting like an overgrown child? Or has the man gone stir crazy being isolated so far away from civilization? Honestly, I think both options are plausible. But in order for Chen to have successfully managed to find a partner to help conceive Skylor, I have to assume something happened.
Either Skylor's mom matched Chen's crazy and she was equally insane, or she must've been taken in by a much different man then the one we see in the present day. And if Chen was once a man capable of tenderness...what happened to him? What destroyed him and made him the mad man running an island like his own private kingdom? What broke him?
I think Chen was always evil, at least to some extent. But I want to at least see one version of ninjago where Chen is clearly mentally unstable. I want to see the angst of Chen being a man who's losing his mind, with Clouse staying around out of dogged devotion to his master. Everyone else abandoned Chen. But Clouse stayed. Why would he stay? What did Chen mean to him? A father figure? That's sort of what I see in them, and I think an exploration of this relationship could be both very sad and yet incredibly beautiful. Garmadon cared about Chen once, too. Assuming Chen is going senile, how does Garmadon feel seeing a man who trained him (even if he was evil) has been reduced to this shallow shell of himself? It must be painful to see someone you once knew so thoroughly broken.
