It's such a nothing question in the face of the complete rearrangement her reality has gone through in the last hour. Walk me through it one more time. You're ninjas? The very polite rat is your father? You've been living underneath New York City this entire time and no one ever noticed and now I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering what else might be looking back at me from the other side of my bathroom drain?
Also, not to belabour a point, but - ninjas?
She really is working on not fighting what her eyes and ears are telling her, though, and the dual swords strapped to the back of the large humanoid reptile standing next to her haven't stopped being dual swords the last few times she snuck a glance at them. The empirical evidence is strong, and an April O'Neil who is not half-mad with fear and adrenaline is an April O’Neil who accepts rational conclusions - therefore, ninja mutant turtles it is.
This particular ninja mutant turtle's head turns towards her, and she marvels at how easy it is to read the awkward wariness on features that have so little in common with her own.
“Yes,” he says simply.
“Oh,” April says, and tries a smile, tucking loose hair behind one ear. Perhaps the dog years rule applies. They're much shorter than she'd realised while down on her knees in filthy sewer water, and certainly they're a little rowdy and she could have sworn she heard one of them complain about the threat of being grounded, but it's not as though high school sophomores of any species should be waving around ancient weapons and declaring eager readiness to launch corporate sabotage on megalomaniacal ex-bosses, so…
No. Surely not. Fifteen?
As if he can hear her thoughts, the turtle shoots her another little sideways glance, and shuffles on his feet, tightening the arms crossed over his chest and tilting his chin up.
“We'll be sixteen in four months,” he says, faintly defensive, his voice pitched a semitone lower than it had been before, and in that moment April knows dog years have nothing to do with it - can hear her own little sister like it was yesterday, I'm twelve and three-quarters, April, that means I'm PRACTICALLY thirteen - and with the addition of this one last piece of empirical certainty thinks, Ohhh no.
Phew. As someone who operates mostly in the meta space, I'm glad Tumblr rolled that update back quick-smart. Jamming with other people and being able to add ideas, or have ideas added, is half the fun.
His brothers fawned over their reflections, posing in different ways and pressing in close to the glass. Raph even flipped his mask up to see if he had hair, snickering when Mikey reached up to rub the short curls. Their energy was almost contagious. Almost.
At least two instances where Mikey wasn't taking a mission seriously enough and got chewed out by Leo. Both times Mikey's goofing around nearly got him killed. Was the scolding from anger - or fear?
and the set is complete! and Mikey's is predictably my favorite.
he doesn't find a lot of clothes super comfortable, but likes to dress up for fun anyway. especially if he can use it to bother Raph. (he can use literally anything to bother Raph.)
If we ignore the whole ninja crime cult, was Ch’rell a good dad to Karai? Like genuinely, where does he fall on the imaginary-dad-scale. Like Karai obv cares about him but what about Ch’rell, is she just a tool or did he have her school stuff pinned to the fridge wherever they lived?
Like. I think Karai was genuinely the only person he told about the whole alien thing. Even Hun didn’t know and who knows how long he worked for the Shredder. Imagine it was just an accident. 9yr old Karai accidentally walking in on him changing his torso wrap only to make eye contact with an alien.
Also does he just go on walks on a whim? Bc there was no reason for him to be out there when he found her. He likes talking walks, doesn’t he. Imagine being one of the turtles reading a pop culture mag and BOOM a paparazzi shot of Oroku Saki on a morning walk.
I bet there’s documentaries about him. Like first of all the giant Japanese style house on top of a sky scraper (which btw had a garden, my headcanon about him liking walks is becoming more true by the minute), that has to have at least like 2 documentaries about the architecture. Then there’s the time the whole place got destroyed on multiple levels due to the turtles, that shit def got on the news, the police showed up! Someone def noticed when a bunch of gang people went in during the city at war storyline. Then there’s the whole spaceship launch situation. Everybody probably thinks he died in the explosion bc he was a crazy business man that wanted to go to space. 😭
Ch'rell adopting a lone human child is fascinating to me.
In literally everything else, he's a cold hearted villian. Total Bad Guy™️. Completely self centred to the point that he'll slaughter millions for his own agenda, without remorse.
And yet, he saw this human child, abandoned by her parents for some unknown reason, and something moved him to take her in and raise her as his own.
We never find out why he did it. Did her scowl remind him of himself, perhaps? Or was he only thinking of the benefits of moulding a commander from such a tender age to be completely loyal to him?
Karai talks about him with love. She genuinely loves him as her father, to the point that she becomes blinded with rage and rejects her own honour when he's banished. Just listen to her voice when she talks about him - this man means the world to her.*
*Not saying that he didn't manipulate and emotionally abuse her, of course. Abusive parental figures are so successful because they manipulate their charges into loving them - through everything from carefully dished out affection to love bombing. I'm not suggesting Karai's love for him was a good thing, or that she wasn't the victim of abuse.
And Ch'rell seems to care for her, in his own twisted way. He risks Hun's life to save her when she gets caught by Bishop. He noticeably bristles when she's disrespected. He lets her in on his deepest, most personal secret of his true identity, like you said OP. And she is perhaps the only one who could defy him (by say, stopping him from cutting down one of the Turtles in cold blood) and not immediately get a blade in her gut for such insubordination.
Perhaps it's sunk cost - he's put so much effort into raising and training her that it would be a waste to let such a commander fall. And keeping himself in her good books keeps her loyal. There's no doubt he's manipulative and scarily intelligent.
But I've always thought it's at odds with everything else we know about him to have raised a human child to the point he readily calls her "daughter".
I don't think he was the kind of father that read her bedtime stories or tenderly dressed her skinned knees. In fact, I doubt he was around much at all as she grew up. He was already in New York, hunting the Utroms, before Splinter and the Turtles got mutated. Allowing for Karai being a young adult in the series, that means she was potentially already adopted by him at this point. But she grew up in Japan.
Also, where did her sense of honour - that Leo notes is so unlike the Shredder’s - come from? I'd guess she was mostly raised by teachers and appointed guardians in Japan, who trained her and cared for her physical needs, with Ch'rell popping back now and then when he was checking on the Japanese faction of the Foot.
This absence, I'm willing to bet, elevated Ch'rell in her mind, to the point that she was desperate to please him and do anything to gain his favour. She longed for those precious visits from her father figure, and threw herself into her training to gain his approval.
She's Leo's foil, after all. They both idolise their father to a potentially unhealthy degree. It's just that Leo's father has morals, and Karai's does not.
Still, it's a fascinating question: why did intergalactic war criminal Ch'rell save and raise this one human child? Was it purely for his own gain? Or did he have (for want of a better term) a moment of 'humanity' in a lifetime of selfishness?
And: did he only ever do it once? Or did he raise other children in the centuries he was on Earth, only to outlive each one of them?
A Turtle By Any Other Name is a tally of the names everyone’s favourite sewer family uses for each other throughout the primary five seasons of TMNT 2003.
It includes all direct addresses, names given to a third party, and names dropped during the pre-episode narrations.
Totals (excluding times they referred to themselves)
A Few Additional Nicknames / Pejoratives of Note
Leonardo: Teacher's Pet (Raph), Splinter Junior (Raph), Boss (Don), Sword Boy (Raph), Hotshot (Raph), Mr Sunshine (Raph), Psycho Boy (Raph), Master Leo (Raph)
• All up, 2,296 names have been tallied over 5 seasons and 7 characters. Hooray!
• After a long and ferocious battle, Leo emerges as the character most likely to say someone's name by a significant margin, while Mikey is the character most likely to have his name said by someone else by a smaller one. This (very broadly) tracks to Leo's position as leader of the team and being at the centre of a couple of arcs, and Mikey's position as family goofball.
• Raph is the second mouthiest when it comes to shouting names after people, but gets his name said the least of his immediate family. Shocking no one, I'm sure, Leo makes up a full 44% of the times a family member says Raph's name, and in return Raph tops out with 34% of the Leo variants - even though Leo technically says Don's name more often, and Raph Mikey's!
• Don and Mikey more noticeably favour each other among the brothers - nearly 50% of Don's brother namings are directed at Mikey, and 38% of Mikey's are for Don.
• Leo is responsible for 49% of the times Splinter's various names are used, partly because he quotes his master a lot, especially in the earlier seasons. Likewise, 39% of Splinter's son namings are Leonardo.
• Don's name count in season 4 blows his previous counts out of the water - unsurprising, since Good Genes happens. He also gets a pretty significant season 3 boost as the only turtle whose solo multiverse adventure landed him amongst replica siblings who are a little bit obsessed with him. Exclude the single episode of SAINW, and his name count total falls by 17.
• Chunking all the seasons together obscures some other funny outliers - out of Casey's 20 uses of Leo's name? Eighteen of those are from season four, thanks to Leo's mental breakdown and sudden urge to run vigilante missions with their local masked wonder. If you exclude that, then the Raph-Casey (as well as the Don-April) match-ups are predictably apparent.
• As far as preferred usage goes, Leo is pretty much just Leo to everybody. Raph has the special privilege of being the keeper of his one recurring nickname though - and 'Fearless / Fearless Leader' can be either reassurance or challenge, depending on the situation.
• Don is most often Don to Leo, April, and himself, and Donnie to Raph, Mikey, and Casey. Raph and Mikey will also sling the occasional Brainiac at him.
• Raph is mostly Raph, but Mikey in particular likes to use Raphie and Raphie-boy, usually as part of their ongoing banter. Casey will also use Raphie in a friendly way, and Don drops a single Raphie in a tense moment.
• Mikey is Mikey. Quelle surprise! Leo, Raph and April all slip a couple of Mikes in, though (noting that one of April's Mikes is technically from the SAINW universe). Mikey also looooves talking to himself out loud and using the third person - even moreso than Casey freakin' Jones.
• Master Splinter is by far the preferred title for our venerable rat, supported by Sensei as a slightly more casual form of address. Splinter tends to be used when he's being talked about, not to. And I have no explanation for why Donatello is the only turtle never to call him Father or Dad! (I believe he does finally use Father at least once in Back to the Sewer.)
• In return, Splinter strictly uses full names for his children, though he refers to them as "my son/s" almost as often as he calls them by name. Interestingly, he's semi-formal with the humans but does noticeably warm up to them over time, and in return they're largely respectful with their Master Splinters.
• All the turtles tend to introduce themselves and each other with their full names, though this is boosted by them also often using full names when talking to us in the audience during episode cold opens.
• Raph seems to start dropping nicknames when he's either cranky with and/or concerned about someone. I don't think I need to specify that he's a big fan of "bonehead" and "moron" as insults, either. Mikey also likes nicknames and using full names comedically.
• Comparatively, neither Leo nor Don are big on nicknames, but it's cute that they both use a rare Case.
FAQ
Q. Why doesn't this include Fast Forward and Back to the Sewer?
I chose to evaluate the show as the core seasons plus The Lost Season as a finale, versus the divergence into FF/BttS. This is mostly down to what seasons I had available to me plus (more importantly) what I was willing to spend hours of my life watching.
Q. Does the count tell us which character has the most/least amount of screentime? Does it mean certain characters aren't as close as I thought?
Ehhh, sort of but not really. The number of times names get said isn't a meaningful 1:1 match with character relationships or narrative importance; at the same time, we all know the show leaned into Leo as the mainest main character at times, and that sort of thing shows. Individual season notes include some further commentary on trends if you're interested.
Q. Do you remember when xyz name was used?
I might. I might not! You're welcome to ask.
Q. Aren't you missing...?
Entirely possible. There are definitely a bunch of one-off nicknames I missed because that wasn't explicitly what I was tracking (hence the 'of note') - feel free to flag 'em for me.
Q. Why isn't nickname xyz in the main count?
'Hothead (multiple)' torments me. However, please understand that I made this up as I went along and every time I changed something I would have to go back and re-count if I wanted it to be accurate. I could only do that so many times. Someone else may simply have to count the 'hotheads' for me.
Q. How many times did they call each other bro / dude / my son?
TOO MANY.
Q. I want to do this for another TMNT version!
Please do! And link me to it so I can delight over your tallies!
If you're writing a version of the turtles that takes place significantly in the past (say, before 2018), like the original 1987 series, the 2003 series etc, do you write your stories in present day or do you keep it in the timeline of the show?
I typically write mine in the timeline of the show. It means I sometimes have to do research but it makes it feel more authentic to me.
Haha 😭 Caught myself out using "DVD case" in a 2003 fic once and then had to go sit in the "oh lord the time do be passing" corner about it for a while. It's not something that will make or break a fic for me as a reader, but yes, I like to keep to the show's timeline.
A video I made for the show’s birthday on the 8th February
(I was planning on doing sth to include my fave fight scenes and this was a perfect opportunity)
based on a convo me and @revenhaunted had a while back, we said it sounded like the kind of dumb shit raph would walk in on his idiot sleep deprived brothers discussing way too late in the night
Here is the spot art piece I created for the Leader in Blue Zine a little bit ago! I did this work for the wonderful @redstringraven who created a beautiful piece of prose about Leo forging a new sword with Raph during the farmhouse arc in the 2003 series!
I still think about this fic frequently. Hannah writes so beautifully and the way she captures emotion is truly wonderful. It's by far one of my favorite TMNT fics I've ever read! Thank you so much for having me as your spot artist!!
You can find the fic here! I highly recommend giving it a read!
