#mirage turtles

[alien-prince-roger]

HAPPY 16 YEARS SINCE TURTLES FOREVER BITCHES WE BE OLD AS FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

[emeraldhonour]

So, you know how the Mirage turtles all have red masks, right?

Great for real ninjutsu techniques of confusing your enemies by all dressing alike. Terrible for readers to tell which Turtle is which, especially if they're not carrying their signature weapons 😅

Well, while doing a bit of research for a fic, I came across this Reddit post which, if true, might just offer up a whole new way of thinking about those red masks...

What if the Turtles are able to distinguish the differences between their red masks, even if no one else can?

What if everyone else – even Splinter – sees them as identical shades of red, but the brothers can tell who's mask is whose straight out of the laundry?

"No, Master Splinter. That's Donnie's mask. Mine's more of an orangey red."

Splinter looking down at the masks in his claws: "But, they're all the same...?"

What if the Turtles come to associate each other with the distinctive reds of their masks, the same way later versions associate each other with their totally different colours?

[iztarshi]

Mirage and Ideological Violence (Part 3)

I’m finally getting back to this essay (parts one and two found here and here). This means it’s been longer since I read Mirage, so forgive me if I get anything wrong. This is also a rather scrappy essay compared to the first two parts, covering a few different ways violence gets used by side-characters with a less solid conclusion about it.

I’m hoping to continue with how other versions of TMNT have used these plot points, which is why I'm including them, because often the bones get taken forwards with the themes changed or even inverted.

Splinter and the Rat King: The violence of beasts

What I would consider Mirage proper (as opposed to the anthology stories written by outside authors with very little guidance from Eastman and Laird) mostly doesn’t get into the question of the turtles as animals. It’s inherently funny that they’re ninja turtles, but their turtleness has little impact on their story beyond isolating them. Splinter being a pet rat also starts as a dark sort of humorous. A feud taken so far that the pets are in on it.

The Rat King is Mirage’s introduction to themes of humans and animals and the way Splinter and the turtles combine them. In the post-hiatus volumes this is expanded on, I believe, with animal gods becoming part of the lore. For now, he is a human but does not believe himself to be so.

This makes him dangerous, a human mind that doesn’t consider himself beholden to human morals. The violence of a beast without a beast’s limitations.

It's ambiguous whether he can even control rats, although he seems to have befriended them, especially since when his corpse is found later it appears they may have eaten him.

He reappears during City at War. While the turtles are dealing with New York City, Splinter is attempting to transcend his animal nature. His quest leads him to the Rat King’s territory where he falls and breaks his leg. The Rat King appears to him and tells him that to survive he must eat the rats around them, or he will die and be eaten by them. Splinter refuses at first, not wanting to descend to the level of a beast, but ultimately chooses to eat instead of dying. In the end he discovers the Rat King has been dead all along and was either a spirit or a hallucination.

Splinter considers this a valuable, if disturbing, lesson. He has tried to block off the animal parts of him and in doing so shut out knowledge associated with the tenacious, scavenging ways of the rat. This is violence, not as part of an honour system but simply as part of nature, something that cannot be ignored.

Nobody: Police violence and a foil for Casey Jones

Nobody is a cowboy cop vigilante. He’s wearing a superhero costume and going after criminals off the books. This does not mean he’s doing it without the support of the other police officers, on the contrary he has their help for the asking. Nor does it mean he doesn’t take advantage of being a police officer in other ways - he shows the turtles his ID on first meeting them and they agree that as a cop he must be a good guy and set out to help him. He’s dramatically violent, shooting down a helicopter during the mission the turtles help him with. Later he helps them break into area 51 but his determination to use explosives leads to his death.

He is also the one who comes after Casey Jones for killing a kid at which point the turtles ask him, how is what he does different? They saw him shoot down a helicopter with a bazooka and he ws okay with that because the people inside were criminals.

Nobody is exactly the kind of protagonist Casey admires in his movies and, like them, he’s toxic on closer inspection. Circumventing any laws that would limit how he goes after lawbreakers because, hey, he’s the good guy. They’re just criminals.

Ultimately he decides Casey was acting in self-defense and lets him go after the other kids turn themselves in. He seems disappointed he won't get an arrest, but disillusioned with the system, and then gets weird about it, suggesting society is falling apart and saying when he first met the turtles he thought they might be a sign of the end times, "beasts rising up".

He sees himself as, to borrow a modern phrase, the "thin blue line" holding back the collapse of society into lawlessness.

C.R.A.P.: Domestic terrorism and longing for the apocalypse

The Committee to Rebuild American Patriotism are survivalists, or that's what they started as, planning for the nuclear apocalypse. However, they're afraid they won't get the chance to put their training to use and, having gone from convincing themselves that a nuclear apocalypse will happen to convincing themselves it should, they've decided to start it.

Preparing for violence becomes longing for violence and survivalism becomes terrorism. As the ones who were preparing for nuclear war they see themselves as the only ones worthy to survive, so those their bomb kills deserve it.

America's culture of violence rather than (historical/fictional) Japan's is highlighted here.

The Triceratons: State-sponsored violence and shooting your leader accidentally

The triceratons are treated much less seriously than they are in 03. The arena is a sports stadium, with sports commentary, even as the matches are just as deadly and fought by people forced to be there. There’s a decadent edge to the violence as a result.

The triceratons also shoot their leader.

It’s an accident but they’re so used to responding to things with violence that they don’t hold back even in a hostage situation. It’s also just… really funny. The “oh shit” of it all. A joke at the expense of a society that reads as fascist.

[romanceissboring]

hello, turtles fan! You said you were accepting requests so I'm gonna bring up an idea form chapter seven of my fic, TMNT CHRISTMAS EXPO CONCERTO. Could you draw the mirage turtles singing Chic' N Stu by System of a Down? They would also be in their Christmas elf outfits from one of their holiday special comic covers. Hope you might consider my idea and check out my fic :>

For some reason your ask was duplicated but ill answer this one. I will definitely try! I'm gonna read your fic first because I haven't read it, but it sounds really cool and I would love to see! I've never drawn mirage before though, so I gotta see if I can do that lol.

Even if i can't ill definitely check out your fic! I think I've seen it before, but ill read it tonight!

[random-tmnt-drawing-ref]

[soldierofsirens]

Probably already been made, but I did it anyway.

[icedmochasi]

Any version of the turtles: *Ends up in the Mirage Universe*

The Mirage Turtles: 

[iztarshi]

Mirage TMNT and Ideological Violence (Part 2)

Casey Jones: toxic masculinity and imitating movies where guys like you are the hero

Casey Jones is a deconstruction of a trope which hasn't been a thing since the very early 90s - the Vigilante Man. In Mirage he starts mostly as a joke, becomes an ally, and then gets a story deconstructing his whole deal.

Mirage is the kind of comic that hates people being able to start at the beginning and read it to the end, so Casey's first appearance is in a side-volume which was not part of the main series titled Raphael #1.

Casey Jones is a guy who watches too much television. One of the movies in there is Dirty Harry so he's a fan of cowboy cops. He's an uneducated white guy with violent tendencies watching movies where guys like him are the heroes and indulging his worst impulses by imitating them.

Raphael puts a stop to his rampaging, but does wind up stopping crime with him. At this point the fact that Casey is willing to kill people for stealing tape decks is a joke - he's a parody - but it's going to be less funny later.

Casey's next appearance is when the Foot break into April's home after throwing Leo through the window. Casey shows up, sides with the Turtles, and takes them all to stay in a farmhouse he owns. This marks a big change in how the comic treats him. For the next little while he's the Turtles' doofus buddy. The toxic masculinity is still there, but he's also genuinely on their side, and he's often fun to have around.

Casey immediately jumping in on the Turtles side here and offering them shelter kind of fixes what I would see as Casey's two most immutable traits, the ones that usually get carried through later versions in some form

He wants to inflict violence and feel righteous about doing so.

He will up-end his entire life to help a bunch of teenagers he barely knows.

The fact that the audience by this time sees Casey as the Turtles friend is played with when things take a turn for the serious. The Turtles are playing tag with Casey as a training exercise and while avoiding them he runs across a bunch of teenagers who try to mug him. He attacks them with his typical lack of restraint and ends up killing one of them.

The two sides of Casey Jones come into conflict. He's not able to believe that he's righteous for destroying scum when the "scum" is just a kid. Normally he draws a clear, black and white line, between the kids he'd want to help and the people he feels good about beating up, but this story is called Shades of Grey and it finally destroys Casey's black and white perspective.

Following this he abandons his mask and rather than something to aspire to his vigilante self becomes something that haunts him, a representation of all the worst parts of him - which it always was, but now he can see it.

Casey's initial reaction to dealing with this is drinking and April, who he'd previously started a relationship with, struggles to deal with it. When she learns her father is dying she leaves Casey to be with her family. Casey, not wanting to stay at the farmhouse alone, sets out on a journey to nowhere in particular.

After stopping at a diner Casey gets beaten up and gets his car stolen. And, you know, I'd remembered this as a lack of willingness to fight - especially since it's bookended with him winning a similar fight later - but he does fight back. Maybe it's a lack of confidence, or him being out of condition from the drinking, or just bad luck and being outnumbered. But he ends up injured and with all his stuff taken. A cute waitress, Gabe, takes him in.

Gabe ends up fridged, which is not a part of this story I like. She's pregnant when she meets Casey and she dies in childbirth shortly after marrying him. But the relationship between them is interesting. It's hard to say whether Casey is in love with her, although he's obviously fond of her, but they fall into a relationship very quickly. Mostly he's desperate to be something good and stable in someone's life. He cooks and cleans for Gabe, he's gentle and caring, and he finds himself again in learning he can be those things, that he's able to live a life without violence.

I don't think it's entirely coincidental he's acting as a housewife of sorts, even if it's partly because his temper is making it hard for him to hold down a job, considering how much toxic masculinity was tied up in his vigilante alter ego.

Toxic masculinity which is definitely acknowledged, because when Casey's vigilante persona shows up in his nightmares it looks like this.

It's a violent, musclebound hulk of a creature, a parody of a bodybuilder, coming to threaten the domesticity Casey has been building for himself.

The crooks that stole Casey's car return to the diner after Gabe's death. Casey goes out to fight them, beats them, and takes his car and stuff back. It shows his confidence is restored but also, like Donnie shooting someone to protect Karai, Mirage once again paints violence as not all bad. Fighting to protect yourself, or someone else, or your property, is not the same as setting out to hurt someone for the sake of ideals. In the same way the character arc for the Turtles focuses on their experiences with revenge and leaving that behind, but doesn't critique their tendency to come to the rescue of anyone they happen across who needs it.

Whether you agree with that or not, I think the work itself is more interesting for taking a perspective and drawing its lines.

At the end of his story Casey goes home first to his own mother and then to April, along with Gabe's daughter, who he names Shadow. The domesticity he's learnt to appreciate is something he gets to hold onto moving forwards.

Ultimately I really appreciate what Mirage does with Casey. Having included someone like him in the comic it takes a hard, unflinching look at what he is, and gives him a chance to become better without making excuses for him.