There's a little bit of meaning behind their poses / colour schemes / expressions related to my uni au but I'm too lazy to type it all out so yall can guess if you want
Post Kraang battle he lowkey fucked up his knees, one being way worse then the other, so he uses crutches on a daily and will wear a brace to keep his pain to a minimum. The brace is very restrictive though so he wears a softer one when fighting for mobility.
His crutches are made by Donnie and they can turn into swords. He usually chooses to use his normal ninpo swords though and these are just a last resort.
More doodles!! The first Donnie sketch is actually a redraw / study from a screenshot but for the life of me I can't find the ss anymore
The second page is super messy ik but its just a whole bunch of tiny doodles I've made over the last week put together on one page.
I'm experimenting with their expressions and working out how to even draw cartoon expressions. I've spent the last while doing semi-realism so going back to cartoons has me getting into some old bad habits. It's very fun but very frustrating at the same time.
Some sketches of Leo in the Exam Trenches because if I have to suffer then so does he
These are so incredibly rough but they were also made when I physically couldn't look at chemistry anymore so eh you get what you get
These are also a part of my Uni au! Just some doodles for now but a few of the sketches might make it into a comic I'm cooking up so look out for that!
More doodles!! Adding the fact that Leo plays guitar to my uni au because I can and I think it fits into his character
He picked up guitar because he thought it made him look cool! He mains electric but he brought an acoustic one to uni since it's not as loud. He doesn't have any formal training but he isn't bad and can decently hold a tune. He likes to learn covers and is trying to get better at fingerstyle. Chords are hard cause he's only got 2 fingers
He's also the guy to pick up the household guitar at a party and hold a little jam sesh in the backyard (Like in the movies idk you get the picture)
As a commemoration for nearly finishing first year here's my thoughts on the rottmnt boys in their first year at uni!
I'm imagining they still have age differences with Mickey being the youngest, Leo and Donnie being twins, and Raph being the oldest. They did however all start in the same year because they never went to traditional high school or anything. Don't ask me how they got in without any credentials. That's between god and the admissions staff.
They all go to the same uni and Leo and Donnie end up in the same residence while Mickey and Raph share a room in a different res. They all wanted to be together in the same building but they survive regardless (Mickey, Raph, and Leo cried when they found out, and Donnie won't admit it but he shed a few tears that night as well). They still sleep over at each others rooms and often end up hanging out in Raph and Mickey's room. Their door is always unlocked so sometimes Raph or Mickey will come back from class with Donnie or Leo (or both!) taking a nap in their beds or on the floor.
They still go out and fight whenever something comes up, so they learn really quickly how to manage their time and their sleep. It definetly affects them though and they've all fallen asleep at least once in all of their classes. They also have a rule that there's no fighting during exams, and they're always communicating and blocking off dates when they have midterms or tests. If one of them has to study, they make sure to send a text when they're done with updates but otherwise they leave him alone.
Now onto individuals!
Donnie
He's in mechanical engineering and takes additional computer science and chemistry electives.
He's always sitting in the back of the lecture hall but is vocal in class, the people around him hate him by the end of the year but he makes a ton of friends with the people in the middle/front.
He finds the classes too easy. A lot of the introductory classes are already things he learned ages ago and has been implementing in his own work, so he'll sometimes skip class if it gives him more hours to work in his room. He makes friends in upper years and will sit in their classes when he's annoyed at his own. He does like to go into class to brainstorm with his professors and the ta's though.
He's constantly tinkering with stuff and basically lives in either his room or the maker spaces. He loves the labs and any hands-on physical stuff they get to do. He's also a miserable partner for group projects because he doesn't like implementing other people's ideas (He grew up the smartest person in the house, its basically ingrained that he shouldn't take other's advice). Those who find the class hard love working with him, and those who don't hate him.
In general I like to think everyone knows of him because of his enthusiasm for the actual content. He's really dependable if someone has a question and teaches concepts pretty well to others if they ask (but he will get snarky with it). Everyone either loves him or hates him. No in between.
He is friends with his roommates and has a few close friends, but has wayyy too many acquaintances because of the side quests he somehow gets dragged into. Is the go to IT guy in res and if anyone has tech or appliance issues they'll go to him (he's so much faster at fixing the issue then any of the housing workers).
He'd get his own room but he'd get it suite style so he has a roommate and a living room/kitchen. His room is filled with inventions and by the end of the first month there's already stuff spilling into the shared spaces. His roommates are also in engineering so they like to try to figure out what each device does just by looking at it. Every once in a while Donnie will let them take his stuff apart if they really can't figure it out, especially if the thing was a bust anyways.
At first he hates his roommates but does a 180 after they help him fix a personal project he was stuck on. They end up collaborating on a few things, and it helps Donnie develop some skills for working with others. It's still a work in progress but he gets much better at it by the end of the year. His roommates also didn't like him at first because he's a very loud insomniac and also has a really loud voice when he's excited or explaining something, but they learn to love his quirks and appreciate his help around the suite. He's also pretty funny in a dry way which helped them warm up to him a lot.
He sets off the fire alarm in their room several times because of his experiments, and the first time his roommate had a panic attack because of it (it's another of the reasons they didn't like him at first). After the third time he hijacks the alarm and turns it off completely, and just buys a fire extinguisher instead. It gets used a total of five times in the year for various reasons.
He'll forget to eat and only remember when his stomach starts to hurt bad, so he's often creeping around the kitchen at 3am making instant noodles. He basically lives off noodles and carboloading because his weird sleep schedule and bad hunger cues make him miss the dining hall hours. Despite having a kitchen, he doesn't touch the stove in his entire first year. He makes the noodles in the cup with a kettle. During his first week he discovered energy drinks, and he became obsessed with them. Exam season has him drinking 4 Redbulls a day.
He goes dumpster diving at the back of the engineering and science buildings for spare parts and equipment, will bribe the cleaning and disposing staff for anything they can get him, and he's always looking for weird trades with other students. Anytime someone is getting rid of an appliance or a piece of tech he's all up in their faces. At move out, he has piles of stuff people don't want waiting for him at his door. It's the best day of his life, he feels like a kid in a candy store.
I like to think he has chronic pain (they all do in some way) and generalized weakness. He sometimes finds it hard to get up stairs and will use crutches on his bad days, so he's got a room in the building with the elevator. He also has accommodations for when he's writing tests where he writes them in a separate room because he needs to move to get his ideas out and will mutter to himself. The test accommodations are more so for others then for him.
Leo
He's in BioMed and really loves his health related classes. He also really likes to work with his hands so his chem labs are super fun. He doesn't really know what he wants to do with his degree but picked the one that sounded the most interesting. Plus he already knew a lot about medicine so he had a lot of transferable skills.
He loves going to his lectures and participating. Answering questions is his favourite part because its low stakes. He also likes to ask his professors weirdly specific medical questions and they're all somewhat concerned afterwards. He's super charismatic and funny so he makes friends with everyone he sits next to. His contacts are full with everyone he met in lectures and labs, and he loves to set up study hangouts. In general is pretty loved overall but some find his humor and energy annoying.
He's got chronic pain in his leg (pulling from 2012 here whoops) and he uses crutches everyday to keep his baseline good so he can still fight. It's one of the reasons he got the same res as Donnie. He also has the worst anxiety out of all of them and it makes him freeze up when it's because of school (There's no physical outlet so his brain and body short circuit). He gets extra time on tests and projects and gets to write in a smaller room.
When he's over at Donnie's they sometimes get their crutches mixed up because their height difference is so small. He ends up putting a blue streak on his to stop that from happening. Donnie also puts some purple highlights on his crutches because he thinks it looks cool. They argue over who's looks better at lot.
He has a huge group of friends and they always get up to some shenanigans, and he especially loves their late night food runs. He gets drunk for the first time and finishes two full burritos in one sitting.
He gets invited to a dorm party during his first week and never looks back. He's always looking to go out somewhere, but he also doesn't like the vibe of frats or big college parties, so he sticks to the ones his friends host. He really likes dancing and collecting friends to go on drunk walks post party. He has a lot of deep conversations with a lot of random people throughout his first year. He also loses a lot of crutches while out partying because he just puts them to the side when dancing and deals with the consequences later. Donnie pulls his metaphorical hair out when he finds out he has to make a third pair after he lost the first two that same month (He ends up keeping his closet full of spares).
He also has a roommate and they get along right from the start. They'll often stay up talking shit and they get super close by the end of the year. His roommate knows all the gossip and Leo loves to stay informed and get the tea. They're very similar in personality so they'll often go back and forth on topics for hours. It's honestly one of his favourite parts about being at uni.
He gets pretty homesick in the beginning so he spends a lot of time in Donnie's dorm because its so close. He also likes to go study in Raph and Mickey's room because the change in scenery helps him focus. Mickey always stocks up on his favourite snacks because he's a stress eater.
When his insomnia and anxiety hits he goes to Donnie's room. He likes to sit on the floor while Donnie is working on whatever his new project is, and he'll sometimes bring a textbook with him when he knows he's not gonna be sleeping anytime soon. Reading passively while listening to Donnie work always helps calm him down and he'll sometimes fall asleep in his bed. Donnie just pushes in beside him if he actually goes to sleep that night.
Mickey
He chose to major in studio arts but has a minor in psychology. His arts classes are definetly his favourites, but he also loves the psych classes a lot, especially the ones that talk about theories, diagnoses, and therapies. He does struggle with the more biological anatomy psych classes, and will sometimes go to Leo for help with those.
He also has a massive group of friends and loves to hangout at the skate park near the uni. He spends so much time skating and will sometimes bring his laptop there to study with the sounds of his friends in the background. He loves to explore the city with them and sticker tags everything. He also works with two of his friends to design some art for the bowl at the skate park and they throw it up together. It's a hit.
He begs his arts profs to let him paint a mural in the hallway and eventually they let him. It's also a hit and some people add little bits to the sides and around it. He's so happy that others are also contributing to the hallway art and that his work inspired other students to share theirs.
He gets high for the first time with his skate friends and he discovers making art while high. It's life changing for him. Whenever he has some free time (which isn't a lot), he gets high and fills a few pages of his sketchbook. He loves to make a nest in the bean bag chair he and Raph have, and he'll snuggle up in there with his various paints and markers. His work is always very vibrant, but a different kind of life gets imbued in it when he's smoked a little. He also really likes the social aspect of it.
He goes to a few parties with Leo and ends up enjoying them a lot. He can't quite keep up with Leo's enthusiasm though, so he passes on many nights out. He likes to hang around the outside to talk with people, but he also joins Leo in the dancing when the dj is hitting. He'll drink when he's out, but in general he prefers to smoke because his hangovers are terrible.
He hates online courses because the lack of structure and human connection make him forget he's even in the class. He made the mistake of taking his Intro to Psychology class online and he nearly failed it because he missed so many assignments. He ends up getting it fixed through accessibility services and gets an official ADHD diagnosis but it does take a lot of begging the prof to let him submit the assignments late.
He has dyslexia and sometimes struggles to write when his hands flare up and shake, so he has the option to write his exams proctored online with voice to text and text to voice enabled. He also gets his friends to type up their notes and share them with him, and he makes sure to buy all his textbooks as electronic. He gets extensions for his arts assignments because of it as well.
The switch to uni hits him hard at the beginning of the year, and it's mainly because of the distance from Leo and Donnie. He's very glad he got to share a room with Raph and is always finding ways to get physical contact in with him, whether it's sprawling on the floor while he works beside him or forcing his way into the tiny bed to cuddle while drawing. He also often visits Leo and Donnie in their rooms, but he prefers it when they come over to his. He loves when they do turtle piles, and he makes sure they do at least one during every midterm and exam season.
He also goes over to Donnie's room a lot to cook and use the kitchen, since Donnie isn't using it anyways. He makes friends with his roommates and they'll sometimes host meal prep days. Donnie isn't even aware that Mickey made friends with them until he stumbles out of his room and sees them all hanging out waiting for their food to cook. One of them is obsessed with baking so Mickey learns how to bake various things throughout the year. He also learns the various ethnic cuisines of the roommates and the turtles eat well once they go home for the summer.
Raph
He goes into uni with an undeclared major and takes every class that looks interesting to him. He finds he really likes the liberal arts, and loves his philosophy and sociology classes.
He sits in the back at first because he's self conscious about his size, but he slowly moves forward as the year progresses and he becomes more invested in his classes. He likes to chime into the conversation when his soc prof asks about personal experiences, and finds himself analyzing his thoughts after class. He goes to a few office hours to pick the brains of his profs as well.
He loves sharing a room with Mickey but finds it difficult because of the small size. Their stuff often gets tossed around and mixed up and they don't really have a clear divide on who's side is who's. He does get frustrated early on because of the smell of his paints so they come to a compromise where Mickey only uses watercolors in the room.
He struggles a lot in first year with making friends because people find him very intimidating and he's pretty shy and reserved with everyone at first. Eventually he learns to open conversations with people in his lectures and they realise he's just a big softie on the inside. He makes a few good friends by the end of the year, but still keeps to himself a lot around new people.
He also lives for the turtle piles during exams and it's one of the only things that keeps him from dropping out (that and the distance it would put between him and his brothers). He often gets anxious when he doesn't know where his brothers are, so they learn to text him once a day to check in, especially if they haven't seen each other in a bit.
That's all I've got for now! I definetly need to rewatch the show to get a better grasp on Raph's character, I'll come back with some more updates later. This post is already too long as is lmao
Here have some pre uni au angst for Leo because I've been reading some fics and they've inspired me (I apologize if this is messy it's just a lot of ideas being thrown into somewhat of a storyline)
When he first woke up post Kraang battle he genuinely wasn't even aware that he was alive because of a mix of three things:
One, he wasn't supposed to survive the prison dimension and had fully committed himself to death.
Two, he doesn't remember being pulled out.
Three, he woke up on so many pain meds that he felt like a ghost.
It took him a few days of being in and out of it to understand he actually survived, and those few days were hell for his brothers. He thought they were figments of his imagination and that he was in the spirit world, and he would cry and scream and lash out at them because they weren't real, none of this was real, he had died.
Once he was off the good drugs and the concussion settled down, he became lucid but with it came the pain. As much as he was now aware of what happened, he was also suffering tenfold. He had a constant migraine and all of his muscles ached as they struggled to repair themselves.
But the worst was his knees. They were on fire, like someone poured burning lava onto the joints, and the searing radiated down to his toes and up to his back. They tried all concoctions of meds but the ones that took his pain away were also the ones that made him loopy and stupid, so he decided to just tough it out.
(His brothers needed his medical expertise, and he was responsible for their injuries. If they were hurt then he needed to help them regardless of his personal struggles)
Draxum tried to help as much as he could. He performed several surgeries to repair as much damage as possible, replace all the torn ligaments and piece together his bones and cartilage. It helped, but each surgery took more out of Leo, and the harm was starting to outweigh the benefits. Eventually Draxum made the call that there was nothing more to be done. It was all up to physical therapy and rehabilitation now.
Two months in his bones had healed and he was cleared to start bearing weight again. He was ecstatic at first, until he tried to stand for the first time. Even simple movements like rolling his ankles or bending his knees had been slow and painful, but standing with help for the first time made him see white.
Draxum and Mickey ended up putting together a plan to slowly build up his strength so that his atrophied muscles could better support his joints. They started simple, with gentle resistance as he lifted his legs while sitting or pushing on his feet while he counteracted. Eventually he gained some muscle back and it helped the pain subside slightly.
The second attempt to get him walking again went slightly better. He was still on the verge of tears and shaking all over, but he managed to stand with help and he even took a few steps. They installed some training bars in the medbay to help with his rehabilitation and he slowly worked his way up to standing and weight bearing on his own with their help.
He moved from using a wheelchair full time to using crutches for short distances. He could feel his confidence coming back as he cracked more jokes and smiled more often. He was getting back to his old self.
And then his progress plateaued.
He wasnt able to ditch his crutches because every unassisted step led to another ice pick digging into his knees. The pain just wouldn't go away even though he was so much stronger and so much more stable now. He couldn't understand why the wall was in front of him so he kept throwing himself at it hoping he would break through at some point. But the wall didn't budge and the pain didn't go away.
He threw himself into tending to his brothers' injuries or physical therapy and trying to get back into training. His brothers rarely ever saw him outside of the medbay. He lived in there and every day consisted of pushing himself to exhaustion.
It didn't help that every time he tried to sleep the anxiety for his brothers' health would eat at him, and every time he fell asleep he awoke in a panic from a nightmare. Being physically exhausted helped him fall asleep, even though the subsequent pain rarely let him sleep for long.
At the back of his mind was always the thought that this would be permanant. That he would never be able to walk properly again. That the pain would never go away and the life he lived before this was over. All he wanted was to go back to who he was, but he couldn't see that happening unless he could get through the stupid wall his recovery had hit.
His mental health tanked as time went on with no progress. He isolated himself from his family under the guise of pt or studying his medical textbooks. He couldn't accept that he wasn't going to get better.
One day, several months post Kraang battle, he was out in the kitchen making food when his knee gave out and he crumpled to the floor in front of his brothers. It was the first time that week they had even seen him, and he looked terrible. The fall had made his knee flare to an 11 and as tears started to form, something cracked.
He sobbed to his brothers as they stood there shocked and concerned. Raph quickly hugged him and Mickey soon joined. They sat there for hours while Leo cried incoherently, letting all of the months of bottled up frustration, anger, grief, and hurt flow out of him. Donnie held his hands while he screamed out his emotions.
They had a long talk and Mickey managed to painstakingly drag out Leo's true feelings (Not without a lot of arguing, frustration, and insults). Everyone left the family meeting a little hurt, but a lot lighter.
He finally started to accept that this was forever, that he would always carry this pain with him. Donnie made him a brace, and upgraded his crutches to custom ones. Mickey painted shaky blue stripes on them and any future versions Donnie made included those stripes.
At first he refused to accept either, still forcing himself to push his knees to their limits. No amount of yelling from Donnie about his stupidity could make him see how stubborn he was being. He struggled for another month to walk around the house, until eventually another collapse made his brothers force the aids on him. He hated to admit it but they did help.
As time went on and his muscles became stronger, and with the help of the braces and crutches, his pain did slowly decrease. Long days on his feet made him hurt at night, but he worked with Draxum to get on a med regiment that helped improve his baseline, and they worked out a setup for his flares.
He studied as much as he could about the musculoskeletal systems and neural pathways in both humans and turtles to hopefully figure out how to help himself even further. He studied long term physical therapy for himself and for his brothers, and he slowly built up better programs for everyone.
He never did get rid of the pain, but he got to a point where he could fight again. He got his mobility back, and he got his freedom back, albeit with the help of his aids and his brothers. He eventually accepted their usefulness, even though it took a long year and a half to truly get to that point.
