Hi!! My name is Lani and I really like turtles :] Welcome to my tumblr!!!!! <3 You'll find me drawing alot of Rise fanart, mainly Mikey-centric artwork but focusing a lot on the other turtles too!! I am also a fan of the 2012 TMNT series!
All of my artwork is intended to be STRICTLY platonic. I love drawing fluff, but I am not opposed to the occasional angsty stuff either :> Tcesters please stay 5000 miles away from my page, I want nothing to do with yall
My askbox is always open, I'm open to receiving questions or doodle requests about the turtles and will do them from time to time!
You can find me elsewhere on Bluesky; https://bsky.app/profile/lanilei.bsky.social
TikTok; https://www.tiktok.com/@_lanilei
And AO3; https://archiveofourown.org/users/jingyuankisser
ROTTMNT X SPLATOON COLLAB WITH TWIN @sukkaraita based on Splatoon's ost 'Suffer No Fools' !!! She did a wonderful job drawing disaster twins whilst I did sunset duo!!
IM SO HAPPY WITH HOW THIS COLLAB TURNED OUT RAAAHHHH we had this planned for a while and finally finished our parts to put together!!
Was such an honour and so fun to be there for the Rise of the TMNT artbook release day stream on the community drawing board!! So happy to have left my mark there 🐢🐢
I haven't been into Rise or TMNT in general for very long, maybe around a month and a half now ? But the impact its had on my life already is incredible <3 I CANT WAIT FOR MY ARTBOOK TO TURN UP IM SO EXCITED!!
this is my revenge for @zinzabee amazing attack on my magirl turtles designs!!!!!!! when i tell you that i LOVE them i;m telling you that i love them, so i had to put 100000% energy into givin it back <33333
the moment i saw ur magicaraph design i KNEW i had to draw him, like it was illegal for me not to, i'm not used to draw the rise boys so this took me all dayyyyyy i really hope that you like it!!!!!
one thing that i love about rise is how vibrant all the colors are, especially on the city, so i sufered making this city in the bg and in the end it you almost cant even see it lmao, rip me
either way i really hope that ypu like tha drawing, your raph design its absolutely beautiful!!!
OH MY GOSH?!??!!? A SPEEDPAINT VIDEO AND EVERYTHING??!?! You spoil me!!!! AAAAAA
Oh thank you so so so much!! I'm honored to know that you took the extra time to go out of your comfort zone, and the effort was well worth it! He looks INCREDIBLE! And so does the background!! I love the kind of motion blur effect to put on, too!
Silly doodle for the weekly magma!! Not bothering with a tag though because it’s small,,
Just some silly thoughts between the brothers when they meet,, I have a specific scenario in mind where they bring Donnie on a mission and tell him he can’t wear his pants because the fabric makes too much noise
“Just take off the pants.”
“No! You guys might have grown up without clothes, but it’s considered indecent to walk around the city without at least some pants!”
“You haven’t experienced the wondrous feeling of living without pants yet!”
just some silly stuff,, I ALSO MADE A TAG FOR THEM 'Tiggsau' so u can find better,, i need to make a masterpost for all my stuff..
blowing stuff up in the sewers. probably no one will notice.
Donnie loves fireworks and has a stash of them always on hand. he likes taking them apart and combining them to make his own custom fireworks, some of which may be terrifying. (he reaaaally wants to make something much too big for the sewers. alas.)
happy 250th to my fellow Americans!! from me and from the goofy turtle children exploding things in a sewer. <3
rottmnt
word count: 2k
title borrowed from staying still by noah kahan
part of the archer au
written for @soldrawss who requested raphael getting his act together in the true neutral timeline <3
x
When Raphael hears familiar voices in the hallway, he fights his first, second, and third impulse to stay as quiet as possible to reduce the possibility of having a conversation. Instead he braces himself as if he’s about to run out into battle, and puts down his dumbbell, and steps out of the dojo in time to meet his little brothers on their way to the front door.
“Oh,” Mikey says, “hey, Raph.”
Gio doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even manage to look at Raph for longer than a couple seconds, eyes dropping to the floor almost immediately.
On the other hand, Mikey’s chin comes up half an inch, and his eyes are level and steely. Not picking a fight but perfectly willing to finish it if anyone else was stupid enough to start one.
He used to be so anxious about his big brothers getting along with his little one, watching every interaction between them like a hawk, making himself a buffer the second a conversation became stilted or uncomfortable. He so desperately did not want Raph or Donnie to drive Gio away, this little light that had miraculously found him in the dark, and he was so worried that they would. And it wasn’t an unfounded worry, because they had certainly come close.
Now Mikey has drawn a line in the sand and if his big brothers on the wrong side of it then that’s their problem.
Raph really doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of it.
“Hey,” he replies, trying to sound casual. Striking up a conversation with his two youngest brothers shouldn’t feel like picking his way through an active minefield but it manages to anyway. “What are you two up to? Big plans?”
Mikey smiles, because Raph hasn’t ruined everything yet. “You know it. Grocery day. And I mean full restock.”
Normalcy softens the frayed edges of Raph’s nerves. He’s stood right here a thousand times before, his childhood home, Mikey smiling up at him, talking about a grocery run. He knows how to stand here.
He glances at Gio, who is still doing his best to become part of the scenery, not daring to lift his eyes from the floor, and then back at Mikey. Mikey tilts his head, like he’s curious about what Raph is going to do. It’s not quite an invitation but it’s not not one.
“If you need an extra hand, I’m free,” Raph says before he can overthink it. It makes Mikey’s brow shoot toward his hairline and Gio’s head jerk up, neither of them expecting the offer, but one clearly more surprised than the other.
It takes all of two seconds for Raph to regret opening his mouth. It takes three for Mikey’s smile to spread across his face like warm, golden dawn.
“Hey, I’d never turn down extra muscle,” Mikey says, and gives Gio’s arm a friendly nudge with his elbow. “What do you say, Clementine? Wanna put our big brother to work? It’ll leave us a hand free for Crazyshakes on the way home.”
For all the work Raph hasn’t put in until now, Mikey has picked up the slack and then some. Gio looks up at him and his expression does something long-suffering that Raph has never seen it do before.
“We would have done that anyway,” Gio says dryly.
“If you say so!” Mikey sing-songs back.
So Raph finds himself tagging along. It’s easily been years since he’s come along for the full Saturday afternoon gamut, but some things are like riding a bike. Mikey’s favorite markets and bakeries are the hidden gems, those mom-and-pop places that have been operating for longer than he’s been alive, and Raph’s heart swells with every familiar street, every unchanged route.
He didn’t have to wait for an invitation. If he had wanted to show up for Mikey, it would have been simple to find him.
He keeps his word about the extra hand, hauling the reusable shopping bags while the little turtles fill them. There would need to be about thirty more bags than just their half-dozen for Raph to even begin to feel the weight of them. He catches Gio double-taking when he realizes the two gallons of milk and sack of potatoes and twenty-four case of Donnie’s sparkling water have all disappeared into one of the enormous totes dangling off Raph’s elbows.
Affection hits Raph like a truck. For once in his adult life, he doesn’t try to dodge it.
“Like holding a handful of grapes,” he says.
“Show-off,” Mikey scoffs, clearly amused. “I’m gonna stock up on rice and flour while we’re here just to wipe that smirk off your face.”
“And a watermelon,” Gio pipes up. It’s not quite the goading tone Raph’s three little smartasses would have said it in when they were all kids together, but it’s almost that.
Giorgio opens up around Mikey in a way Raph has never seen before. In the lair, he’s a cautious, watchful creature, waiting for his cue to make himself scarce, always holding his breath. In Fairway, he’s a teenager getting distracted in the bakery section for long enough that Raph knows he’s going to wander back over with something that isn’t on the list.
Sure enough, he returns with an entire carrot cake. His eager step falters when he realizes that Mikey is nowhere to be seen and only Raph is there waiting with their stuff.
“He’ll be right back. He ran off to grab some chili oil,” Raph explains, holding out an arm so Gio can find a bag to stick the carrot cake in. They can reorganize the mess after they check out.
Now that it’s just the two of them, Gio is slow to approach. That playfulness that had bravely been inching out all afternoon has bolted back into the hole it hides in when Mikey isn’t around. There’s no door here for Raph to close in his face but Gio still looks at him like that’s an option he could take.
“I can pay for it,” Gio says, looking like he regrets picking the cake up at all.
“We both know Mikey would buy you this entire store, down to the deed to the building, if that’s what you wanted,” Raph says mildly, and keeps his arm steady.
After an excruciating six seconds that Raph counts in his head, Gio finally crosses the last couple steps between them and puts his dessert in one of the offered bags. Then he moves around to stand next to Raph so he isn’t blocking the aisle.
They’re shoulder to shoulder, and Raph can’t think about anything except how small Giorgio is. How little-brother-shaped he is. And the longest conversation they’ve ever had, just the two of them, has been about an illicit carrot cake.
“I thought you were mad at me,” Gio says without warning, so quietly Raph almost doesn’t hear him over the ambient noise of the other shoppers and the PA system.
“What?” Raph says stupidly. “Why would I be mad?”
Gio takes so long to answer that Raph begins to think that he’s not going to answer at all, that he’s just going to let the question hang and the silence stretch until it’s broken by Mikey’s cheerful return and the entire conversation gets left behind. But that’s just Raph underestimating the kid’s remarkable bravery again.
“Donatello’s mad,” Gio finally says. His voice comes out flat, like it doesn’t cost him anything to say it, but his expression crumbles just slightly, a tell he’s probably not even aware of.
Raph feels like someone took a melon baller to his insides.
“Hey, Donnie’s not mad at you,” he says automatically. “It may have looked like he’s angry, but he’s—it’s not that.”
He doesn’t know how to explain to someone who didn’t know who Donnie was before that Donnie hasn’t actually been angry in a long time. He makes himself look big and mean to trick the unassuming eye into seeing a whole person where only half of one is left. The part of himself that he was the most proud of, the part he loved without caveat or exception, was the part that wore blue. Now he moves through life like he’s already dead.
“It’s okay,” Gio replies, still staring ahead. “I understand. I’m not the brother that’s supposed to be here.”
It would have been less painful if Gio had stabbed him.
Raph hadn’t known until three days after the fact that Gio had almost disappeared forever. Apparently Renet had planted the idea in the kid’s head that he could go back in time to rescue Leo from the Prison Dimension, and Gio had almost gone.
A full month later, Raph still isn’t sure how he feels about it. Mainly because he’s feeling about half a dozen things all at once and they’re all in direct competition with each other for the number one spot.
The idea of rescuing Leo should have made his heart race, but instead it only felt ridiculous and impossible, like a bedtime story, or a child’s first idea of what they want to be when they grow up. Not grounded in realty, just nice to listen to.
Somehow it bothers him more that it would have happened behind his back. Gio would have slipped away one night and Raph wouldn’t have known about it until there was no spotted face at the breakfast table with watchful brown eyes for Raph to carefully avoid.
The only reason Gio is still here is because Mikey asked him—begged him, if Donnie’s retelling of the security footage, in a tone void of any emotion, is to be believed—not to go.
It wasn’t a betrayal. It wasn’t Mikey choosing one brother over the other. It was Mikey prioritizing the brother that was still here over the one who was already gone. The way Donnie and Raph should have been doing this whole time.
And now Gio is left standing here feeling like he’s done something wrong. His shoulders are hunched, arms folded tight against his plastron. Raph thinks of earlier, in the hallway back at home, when Gio couldn’t even meet his eyes.
He would have left without saying goodbye. He thought Raph wouldn’t miss him.
How many little brothers is Raphael going to let slip through his fingers? When is the lesson finally going to stick?
“You know,” Raph says, reaching into the aching pit of himself for honesty and managing to come up with a handful, “when you first showed up, I was terrified of you.”
It takes a moment for that to land, and then Gio actually turns to look at him, brow furrowed in blatant disbelief.
“You’re seven feet tall and holding my body weight in grocery bags,” he says flatly. It’s the most polite way Raph has ever heard anyone say are you fucking with me? and it’s enough to make him smile faintly.
“I’m big and strong, sure, but I’m also a coward,” Raph admits. It isn’t even hard to admit it. If anything it feels like lancing a wound, letting the ugly out so the healing can begin. It hurts and it’s a relief at the same time. “I’m so afraid of getting it wrong that I won’t even try. I just hide in my room and ignore you at dinner and have the audacity to be surprised that you think I don’t love you.”
He has never seen Gio’s eyes get so wide. Everything guarded and inscrutable about the kid falls away like water, leaving him wide open and vulnerable. He suddenly looks his age, impossibly young. He looks like he has absolutely no idea what those words out of Raph’s mouth could even mean.
Behind him, a supermarket employee accidentally drops a wooden pallet they were carrying to the storeroom in the back, and it lands against the tile floor with a loud crack. Raph saw it happen out of the corner of his eye. Gio, who was staring unblinkingly up at him, didn’t see it happen at all.
Either the suddenness, or the volume, or the combination of the two, was enough to completely startle one already-overwhelmed little turtle—Gio pops into his shell.
Some things are like riding a bike. It’s pure big-brother reflex that has Raph surging forward to catch him, grocery bags swinging wildly, almost tripping over himself to get his hands under the slim, spotted shell before it can fall more than an inch toward the floor.
Gio’s head and limbs come out again almost instantly, and he looks as surprised as Raph feels by that turtle maneuver he just pulled. Or maybe he’s just surprised that Raph is holding him up in the air, his feet dangling.
They stare at each other, and Raph can’t help it. He smiles crookedly, and says, “See? Like a handful of grapes.”
Gio’s cheeks darken all the way across his spotted beak and he starts to do the upturned-beetle scrabble of a little sibling who wants down now. Raph sets him down and he immediately books it toward the line of registers without another word or a single glance back.
“I’ve never seen him look so embarrassed,” Mikey says, appearing at Raph’s elbow. He says it fondly, like the surly teenager waiting for him up ahead is something to look forward to. “I’ve also never seen him do the shell thing. I kind of thought he couldn’t for some reason, like you.”
“How long does it take you to get one jar of chili oil?” Raph asks gruffly.
“Long enough,” Mikey says, and then tucks his arms around Raph’s elbow and squeezes, cheek tucked against his bicep, the clingy little brother Raph hasn’t seen more than a glimpse of in years. “Thank you, Raphie,” he adds, all wobbly.
Then he peels away to go catch up with their youngest.
Raph follows at a slower pace, giving his heart time to settle. It’s still racing like he’s sprinted a mile. In some ways, it’s both the easiest and the hardest thing he’s ever done to keep walking, one step after another. To move forward after so many years of standing still.
But we do it anyway, Leo’s voice in his head reminds him. It always pipes up when he’s thinking about doing something brave and needs one final push.
Ever since the turtles remember, yokai and humans have been two separate civilizations, aware of each other, yet in unending hostility, never crossing paths as dictated by their laws.
Hidden within the human city, they didn't believe they would be able to meet the world outside of their little corner.
Until an announcement from the authorities, finally, gives them the chance to see what they have missed for years and...
Wait, what do you mean magic is real?!
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✨ WELCOME TO THE RESURGENCE OF MAGIC AU MASTERPOST! ✨
Resurgence of Magic is a Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles AU greatly inspired by the magical girl genre, where the isolated turtles have to do a lot of self-reflection, while they save the human and yokai cities as the next Magical Guardians.
TRIGGER WARNINGS: Discrimination (this is a main theme here), blood/gore (moderate, and if not, censored), death, suicidal ideation, possession/corruption, hallucinations, manipulation, eye trauma (censored), kidnapping, experimentation, non-consensual use of drugs.
More will be added as I keep writing and developing.
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To avoid confusion, I clarify that to tell them apart between other versions of themselves across the multiverse, I usually refer to them as their hero names!
Raph: Dragon Spike (also called Spikes by his brothers during battle).
Leo: Starflower.
Donnie: Bug Catcher (Leo calls him Pixels during battle to mess with him).
Mikey: Gryffin
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✨ MAIN COMIC ✨
(SOON TM)
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ROTTMNT Scavenger Hunt 2025:
Backstory One-Shot (important read if you are interested knowing more about the AU!)
Gryffin Prompt Drawing
Starflower Mini Comic
TMNT AU Competition 2026:
The Magical Guardians were not competing, BUT they were hired as cheerleaders and moral supportive roles!
Their arrival
Magical Guardians meet the Puppet Show crew
Bug Catcher meets the Blue Switcheroos
Bug Catcher provides the Blues with resource farms
Starflower meets Kaiju Leo
Gryffin starts looking for the ToddlerMNT tots
Gryffin offers himself to help with the Daycare
Gryffin posed for the camera!
Dragon Spike helps Karai Blue
CreatureCon 2026:
(SOON TM)
More Extras:
Dragon Spike and Gryffin during the Anti-Shapes Inc Magma!
