#turtleblogging

[halogalopaghost]

TMNT 03 episode "Hunted" really is one of the best. Featuring hits such as:

the exact SECOND Leo realizes he's stepped on a landmine

"that dress? with THOSE shoes?"

what the fuck are you doing Leo dot jpeg

hat inspector

AND

gods cutest creature

[paperlifted]

Just a Number

“You're fifteen?” April says.

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.

[getvalentined]

I've been heatsick literally all week (we've had a heat wave and I've left the house to help with some fairly strenuous things literally every day) and today the "responsible adult" animals decided it was time to Do A Concern in my lap.

The average body temp of both dogs and cats being 100-103F (37.8-39.4C) is not helping the heatsickness, but they are trying so hard and it is very sweet.

[jadeykitties]

all iterations of casey jones are butch lesbians of varying levels of transmasculinity except for the casey jones from tmnt 2012, who is in that fun "figured out that she enjoys being a girl, hasnt yet realized that she can be a girl without bodyswapping with her girlfriend" stage of transfemininity

[paperlifted]

The 2k3 Ratdad Supercut: featuring every time a turtle refers to Splinter as their father in seasons 1-5.

[paperlifted]

The way 2k3 constructs Michelangelo's character is so interesting to me because really, they give him quite a lot of agency when it comes to his ‘class clown’ attitude? And in making it clear that there's a level of deliberate choice involved in how Mikey behaves, in the jokes he makes and the pranks he pulls and exactly when and why he locks in, they also make it clear just how vital his seeming goofiness is to the team.

Leo and Raph and even Don are working within their own particular paradigms: what it means to be a good leader, a good son, a worthy warrior, an intelligent and rational person. Mikey's the only one willing to take a step away from it all - to step back and look at the absurdity inherent in who they are and what they do, and have a bit of a giggle about it. Because it's crazy, right? They're teenage mutant ninja turtles and they go to space and other dimensions and back in time and their arch-nemesis is an angry alien blob who happens to be a war criminal. Mikey definitely takes pride in their accomplishments and in Being A Ninja - and I'd argue he finds the most joy in it out of his entire family, which is a huge boon to his overall emotional stability - but he is so-o-o not interested in sacrificing his entire identity on the altar of becoming a master. He's a teenager, and he wants to get to be a teenager, and he wants to get to slow down and actually live his life. He's not stupid, he's certainly not incompetent, he's not even younger or smaller or less experienced than the others; he's 15 years old and he's a calculating little shit (affectionate!!!) who refuses to smother his own spirit under the weight of existence or grim expectation.

And I love it because it's equally clear that what sometimes gets brushed off as irresponsibility is Mikey applying this ability to think outside the box. Splinter sets them to training in darkness: Mikey cheekily defeats this environmental challenge by effectively breaking the fourth wall and turning the lights back on. Don obsessively tries to understand the crystals through his pre-existing understanding of how they should logically function: Mikey unlocks both of their main functions through his willingness to get silly with it. On two separate occasions Mikey undoes Raph by refusing to engage in the contest of strength that Raph finds most gratifying, that would ‘prove’ who's the best warrior: instead, he plays his own game, and uses that very drive against Raph. And all that's without even starting to get into the many occasions he applies his antics as a balm to an otherwise scary situation.

He's creative and he's perceptive, and the very nature of being a wild card means his plays don't always work out for him, but I appreciate the subtle credence the show nonetheless gives to the fact that when they do, it's not just ‘by accident’. There's method to his playful madness. And it follows that there is nothing fundamentally stopping Mikey from being crunch-time Michelangelo all the time - except the fact that in the process he would cease to be Michelangelo, and they'd all lose something crucial to their family in the process.

[paperlifted]

A Turtle By Any Other Name: TMNT 2003 Seasons 1-5

[Season 1] - [Season 2] - [Season 3] - [Season 4] - [Season 5] - [Bonus: The Ratdad Supercut]

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)

Donatello: Bud (Leo), Einstein (Mikey), Egghead (Raph & Mikey), Slick (Raph)

Raphael: Ninja Dropout (Leo), Hothead (multiple), Mr Raphie (himself), The Green Avenger (...himself)

Michelangelo: Motormouth (Don), Laughing Boy (Raph), The Mikester (himself), The Turtle Titan (...himself), Chucklehead (Don)

April: Young woman (Splinter), Girl (Mikey), Rebel Leader (Mikey in SAINW)

Casey: Mister (April), Hotshot (Raph), Case-man (Mikey), C-Man (himself)

Statistics, Commentary & FAQ

• 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!

[paperlifted]

There's this curious thing in 2k3 where... Don is pretty much the only family member Leo never gets truly sharp with at least once? And I think there's a fair case to be made for it having a lot to do with their particular relationship.

Leo works hard at his iron core of self-control, but it's an open secret that he has a temper, and over the course of the series most of the family cops a lashing at some point, usually when he's stressed or anxious. Leo and Raph have their own occasionally vitriolic love language that leads to them outright throwing down more than once, Mikey earns a couple of sharp dressing downs, and even Splinter takes both a verbal and physical beating during Leo's extended mental breakdown.

At the same time, I've been plumbing the archives over this point specifically and I still can't find a moment where Leo hits Don as an individual with anything heavier than exasperation or a silent Look. He kind of bites at Donnie at the end of Dragons Rising, but even then his anger is spread across the whole team, not aimed at Don alone.

It's all the more interesting because this restraint doesn't quite go both ways! Don's mild-mannered overall, but he absolutely lets it be known when he's tilted into the realms of genuine annoyance: whapping Mikey for messing with the Battleshell, rounding on Raph with a dangerous glint in his eye upon being judged 'cranky', grousing at Splinter about being forced to train on a supposed vacation - and scorching Leo with the sulky underside of Don's injured pride during the same. "There goes Leo, making us look bad again."

(Which is also, incidentally, one of those moments that will always have me arguing for a subtle mean streak being part of 2k3 Don's characterisation. Like, ouch buddy, you know that's a collective sore point.)

It's not favouritism, exactly, but Leo definitely seems to find it easier to extend a measure of grace to Donnie that he really struggles to extend to Raph and himself, and even somewhat to Mikey. Part of it is that Don isn't a 1:1 competitor in the ninja family hierarchy scene; top combatant isn't a role anyone's expecting of Don, Don himself isn't levelling challenges at Leo most of the time, and he so obviously contributes through his tech speciality that he gets cut a fair bit of slack on the ninja front - being excused from training to focus on the crystal problem, copping mild exasperation from Leo at worst for cheating at ninja hide and seek, not getting chewed out by even Angsty Mode Leo (TM) for accidentally bringing an entire spaceship down on their heads.

On top of that, Leo clearly regards Don as the next most 'sensible' brother, especially in those early seasons where Raph's still working through the worst of his impulsive tendencies and they're all still pretty green when it comes to real combat. It's not that he's never anxious about Don (and certainly not like Don never makes a bad call), but he generally just... trusts Don, even beyond the obvious trust earned by being their technical specialist. From where Leo's standing, Don's not going to launch himself into ill-advised fights, and he's probably not going to thoughtlessly poke buttons or goof around at the wrong moment, so he doesn't need to be 'managed' as actively as the other two. He's not quite as serious as Leo, but he's introverted and thoughtful in a way that meshes well with Leo's own tendencies, so Leo just sort of seems to automatically expect that Don's assessments will generally be correct and his decisions sound, because he naturally gels with how Don's forming them. (Of course, this has its own pitfalls - Don insists it's just a cold, so Leo lets it go, and, well... he should have pressed Donnie much harder on that whole situation, as it turns out.)

So yeah, Don gets a lot of grace. And, as noted above, he's not always completely gracious in return: there are a few snide comments, a few unkind laughs and more than a few moments of figuring that asking for permission seems like a lot of hassle when he could just go ahead and check out that blackout or duck off with April into a dangerous side dimension. At the same time, I actually think Don - more than Raph or Mikey - takes Leo's steady shelter for granted. He laughingly remarks in The Shredder Strikes Back that Leo's the one turtle they don't have to worry about; after that's proven rather dramatically incorrect, he tells an unconscious Leo that "you're going to pull through this, I know you are - you have to". Over two months into Leo being sent away to the Ancient One, Don's the one who keeps forgetting he's not there. Leo relies on Don as a veritable fountain of tech and knowledge, but it's partly because Leo's busy doing what he does that Don's been given the space to develop those skills in the first place. Don's often quite taken-aback any time Leo goes down, and always full of wide-eyed relief once his brother's fighting fit again.

It's an understated symbiosis compared the other match-ups you get between the brothers, and the show is strangely reluctant to show the two of them spending much time together as just a pair, but it ends up forming the critical spine of how and why the family makes a successful field team. It helps that we get to see how things go when one or the other is taken out of the picture, and the answer is pretty universally "not well". (Not to say I think it would go much better were either Raph or Mikey removed under similar circumstances, but there's something to be said for the particular practical scaffolding Leo and Don provide in both the day-to-day and in field operations.)

As a final sidenote, I think it's therefore very fitting that Leo's the only brother to distinctly preference the name Don over Donnie! I don't think Don dislikes 'Donnie' at all, but he only uses 'Don' or 'Donatello' when referring to himself, so it's kind of a cute nod to their particular partnership within the family.