🌈🌈🌈THE QUEER TMNT FANZINE IS FINALLY HERE AT LAST! WHICH MEANS I CAN FINALLY SHOW OFF MY PAGE!!! 🌈🌈🌈
🌈I chose to do a drawing of Mikey creating a mural of some well-known queer people throughout history because a) art is a very powerful and effective to convey a message and evoke strong emotional responses, and b) I think Rise Mikey (and Rise Raph) really needs more love and recognition within the Rise TMNT fandom. I love the Disaster Twins as much as the next Rise fan does, but the Sunset Duo deserve some love too.
The zine is available in its Itch.io page (link). You can name whatever price you want, and all donations will go to ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) to help support their fight for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community and other minorities in America.
Huge thanks to @queertmntzine for letting me take part in the making of the zine. 🌈
Can someone please tell me what the head cannon femme!leo or transfemme!leo is all about. I’m not against it. Love me some queer/trans pride but I personally don’t see it. I’d love to hear some other peoples thoughts on it because I don’t really have a fully fleshed out idea of where it came from and the basis behind it.
This is primarily for @neromia but y’all can do all the interacting, mkay? Mkay. (Just please be nice.)
I’m gonna keep this fairly shipless and canon-compliant but I have Other Theories that go with my fics, so let me know if another thread is wanted (those other ones would probably feature nsfw hcs, btw, fair warning).
Let’s start with the boy scout: Leonardo
Long post, so headcanons under the cut!
First of all... I subscribe to the Tiny Leo headcanon trend where our Blue Boy doesn’t get past 5′5″ and is thus the Short One by the time they’re 20-somethings, and it just stays that way. Forever.
Onto queerness!
I usually headcanon Leo as either transmasc or intersex (think Plastron's fics, if you can, or ChickInRed 's story "Call Me What I Am;" it really depends on what kinda mood I’m in lol), but for me he's also very feminine. He gives me "I double check my nails before leaving my room every morning to make sure I got all the paint off" and "I wonder if makeup would look okay, or if it would just cake between my scales?" type vibes. Very "I don't subscribe to gender roles or put much stock in societal norms but I'm a People Pleaser and don't want my brothers to bully me." He/him pronouns but might use feminine names/titles later when he's more comfortable with himself (e.g., jokes about being a queen or lady). I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a femboy, but Mikey and April could probably coax him into a nice dress if they felt like it. (He’d love it, too.)
Leo is bisexual with a preference for people who can kill him with their bare hands. He's totally Weak for cuties that are batshit fucking FERAL but will get defensive if called out on it. (Also, if they're strong enough to throw him around like a sack of potatoes during training, it's even better. Or worse if you're the onlooker watching Fearless flirt-fight.) After he comes out, he gets teased about probably having a crush on characters like Steve Rogers or Thor because of their strength, but in reality he'd rather Bucky (though he still drools over all three of them). Wolverine was probably his queer awakening but he had a thing for Mulan way before that. Girl can Fight.
He's always a little awkward/shy talking about gender or sexuality with Splinter, especially if it's HIS gender or sexuality they're talking about, but it has less to do with Splinter's views or reactions (he’s a little confused about how gender expression, but he’s got the spirit and will to learn!) and more to do with Leo just being insecure and holding his dad's opinion to an almost detrimentally high regard (which is a whole other list of hcs). He answers everybody’s questions as well as he can but he stops talking to Raph and Casey if they’re drinking because one time Raphael called him a “twink brat” and Leo still hasn’t gotten over that level of embarrassment (he wasn’t exactly wrong, but still. It didn’t need to be pointed out in front of the entire clan, Raph, come on.)
Overall, Leo’s just a disaster bi running from the toxic-masculinity police.
Next one’ll be Raph! And boy do I have some shit to say about him!!!
First off, happy pride month!! Second of all, Mikey would be an AMAZING person to have at pride celebration. He'd go all out and become a rainbow eyesore. My guy would be dancing like it's carnival. No cops at pride, only the ninja turtles uwu
HEADCANON ACCEPTED-
Nah, it's just canon at this point. Mikey is a pride parade all by himself.
Someone on Facebook did a thing that asked "What do you miss from your teenage years?" And the first thing I thought of was my New York accent. Being born and raised in Brooklyn and Manhattan and living on the East End is like a soul thing.
But... I was a teenager in a decade where being gay, being bi, just being queer, just existing, was a moral crime that got you killed. I was in college when Matthew Sheppard was murdered. SUNY Purchase had the largest LGBTQIA+ community of the NY state universities. And I saw both beauty and horror, indescribable. Today online I see Baby Queers rejecting the word queer because they're taken in by TERF rhetoric that doesn't mention the reasons behind the labels we chose. My lesbian neighbors in the 80s were carefully out and I didn't realize why they lived together until I was in my teens. Silly me!
But... out of all of that, I miss being a Brooklynite. And I miss the show Gargoyles.
Oh, and I miss my first cautious forays into Ninja Turtles fanfiction, which I didn't know was called fanfiction, which I just called "Scenes From... [Stories I probably wouldn't write]" because I was influenced by the X-Men and the What If... comics.
I miss the extraordinary power of The Macarena. I miss the rise of Ricky Martin. I miss the first airings of Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine and Stargate SG1.
I miss hearing the sounds of modems booting up, of being fourteen in 1993 with my first computer with AOL Messenger and the bizarre confusion and how my first online penpal lived in New Zealand! and how nobody in charge knew what the hell The Internet was. The beginning of Google, which was whooaa...
And how my very first email mailing list was for Ninja Turtles fans. Fans who helped me publish my first long chapter fanfic on Geocities. Who became the best friends I had for over a decade. Who told me insider things about the fandom and franchise. Who changed the face of the fandom by introducing queer ninja turtles and queer original characters that the fandom immediately embraced because TMNT was one of those fandoms that nobody conflated with real human ethical issues but they could see things in life represented by mutant turtle humanoids and it was satisfying. Who left imprints on my memory that my foggy brain now clings to so I can remind New Fans about Don't Like Don't Read and No Bullying Over Headcanons.
And sometimes I look back at ten, fifteen years ago, and I look at Tumblr right now, and rest my head on my desk and wonder where the anti cult came from to invade this particular fandom. And then I tell myself that overthinking it is not really worth much. But the point of that is that antis think they can "purge the fandom" and my first reaction is that it's super creepy and hypocritically predatory with evangelical overtones, while my second reaction is exhausted exasperation. And then I remind myself that there's no point. So, um, okay. Keep the fanfics coming, move past the hypocritical creepiness of the anti-shipping anti-fiction crowd, eventually it will become distant, like Kato Kaelin.
What I don't miss: being disabled and gifted but not having the words or terms or labels to describe, because "girls couldn't have ADHD or Autism" even as my parents figured out that was probably what it was beyond the cerebral palsy and its comorbidities and neurological cousins.
For some really annoying reason, Tumblr never shows me my big Autistic 2003 Ninja Turtles post when I search for it. So I'm going to link it and tag it and hope I'll remember the tags. I've decided that this also fits the Bay and Batman turtles because it does and people should add to it or make their own headcanons to fit. I had a post about the Rise turtles being autistic and queer and I can't find that one either. And it really just reminds me to keep finishing the chapters of my 2012 AU with the psionic polyamorous OC.
*flapping fluttering* aaaaAAAAAAAA yes THESE ARE BRILLIANCE YES THANK YOU. Raph with alexithymia makes so much sense and it's perfect. Mikey
(Also: Hey. Bullying of writers for self insert OCs, imagines, and theories really must stop. It's 2020, we've been here for decades, none of this is real, it's just fantasy creatures, fans have been having headcanons forever, they're not hurting you, your hatred and disgust and desire to threaten violence is very puzzling, you can't control other people's fanfic ideas, and remember the original adage of Don't Like Don't Read.)
