I've reblogged my moots' posts, but i want to say it for myself as well
I don't care what you make, I don't care what you support, as long as you tag your stuff properly, I have no problem with you
This goes for Tcest, April x Turtle, NSFW - if you create or engage in this content, you're welcome here as long as you don't force it onto me, which despite what a lot of people complain about, is not a problem I've run into
They're fictional characters, I just wanna have fun with my silly little turtles, and if you wanna have fun with these silly little turtles with me, you're welcome here
i don't care for the whole ~shovel talk~ thing in GENERAL bc it doesn't always vibe for me but sometimes i do like it in my fiction if it feels right and anyway what i'm here to say is
100% full belief in my heart i can feel it i know it, if the fam does shovel talks then in a surprise sweep, it's any s/o raph brings home who gets the worst ones LMFAO
i for one would like to know where this "family therapist bearing everyone's feelings" mikey fanon even comes from
to say nothing for "raph and leo were having constant terrible arguments and poor baby mikey was so upset and traumatized about it that he curled up hidden away in donnie's lab where donnie comforted him, powerless to do anything about the fighting" bc like
well the family therapist thing fascinates me but i think i've talked about that and why it doesn't read true to me before.
and the pre-movie raph and leo fighting so bad headcanon stuff, though, bugs me doubly hard bc i would assume that start of movie is like. as bad as it got for that tension. the breaking point. like, lecturing and needling that didn't come to a full head (raph punching out leo's wall and then trying to square up w leo) until leo specifically messed up a mission that involved the foot clan (which i would imagine is kind of a trigger point seeing as the last result of "foot clan gathers mysterious artifacts" was "the world almost ends, we lost our home, gram gram died in front of us, we nearly lost our dad etc").
like. mikey was fine as anything blowing off training w leo! he was having a grand ol time, doing his best lil bro copycatting of leo's smugness, playing the "every time raph says hero take a bite of pizza" game no complaints, no looks of doubt. heck, donnie's fine going along with the goofing off too! when raph follows leo into his room to try to talk to him, mikey and donnie both straight-up have their faces pressed to the window to try to eavesdrop! they both look equally freaked out about the sudden escalation to Big Punch!
like idk the evidence is just not there for me to buy the fanon interpretation on this one. there's no world where mikey and donnie wouldn't get fed tf up and stick their noses in that business if it was so upsetting imo. i think everyone's movie characterization suffers a little bit overall tho tbh, that's a whole other post though
idg people using crowley's "i think i understand a whole lot better than you do" as like. legit. like just taking at his word that of course he knows better about heaven and what it's like than aziraphale, who's actually had to be part of and work for heaven for the past thousands of years and who knew even before the rebellion that it was dangerous to ask a lot of questions
like idk it's very dismissive and kind of condescending to me, it's hard to explain
their experiences with heaven and how heaven treats them are fundamentally different. a large part of that is based directly around the fact that crowley was cast out and aziraphale remained part of that system
and this isn't me hating on crowley, this isn't me sweeping his trauma under the rug, he was right to say no and put his foot down about going back. but like. it's this pervading idea that somehow despite his pre-rebellion anxiety and thousands of years of manipulation and abuse from heaven, aziraphale simply ~doesn't know better~
the entire argument is so much more complicated than one of them being totally right and the other one being totally wrong
where was splinter during the pizza puffs episode though fr
raph is in the main living area of the lair yelling at the top of his lungs about how his brothers just ate mystic poison and then yelling about how he’s trying to teach them responsibility for their own problems bc they always expect him to do it for them and meanwhile their whole entire dad is not present LMAO
raph was never any less suited to leadership than leo
raph was never any less suited to leadership than leo
raph was N E V E R any less suited to leadership than leo
idk how many times i can say it before it sinks in that in rise there was never once any point where that was the point being made
if you just like leo’s character better than you like raph’s, that’s fine! if you just like it better when leo is leader, that’s fine! i have no issue!
but we need to stop trying to circle that leadership change back to somehow being about better or worse or ~more cut out for it~ because it sucks to throw the great job raph did through the series under the bus in order to prop up leo’s good qualities.
they’re both great leaders. they both have strong suits and weak suits in the role, they both have growth and development when they’re in that role. they BOTH make on-screen mistakes in that role and aren’t very good at it at first! not getting a more in-depth explanation about it in the movie or series stinks and it’s very interesting to explore, but seriously.
i feel away about the fact that when the boys all get in trouble raph is the one who always says the apology to splinter about it 😭
off the top of my head i’ve got in ‘evil league of mutants’ when they get caught sneaking back into the lair, he’s the one with the “we’re sorry we snuck out but we learned a real important lesson”
‘insane in the mama train’ raph leads on the “we’re sorry please train us we’ll do better”
annnnnnd ‘endgame’ he’s the one who apologizes to splinter about them not being able to do things the traditional hamato way
i am going to stand on my Raph Is The Sun soapbox forever ftr. not that anyone has said not to.
i don’t mean that in an “everything and everyone revolves around raph all the time, bc he’s the most important one of them all” way. bc i’ll reiterate forever that there is no one member of this family who is the Most Important or most special, there is no member of this family who would be the most or least devastating to lose. like. if the hamatos lose anyone they’re never fully recovering.
i do mean what i say in the general sense of raph being a source of warmth and support, and in the sense that he does a lot of holding everyone together.
but more than anything when i say raph is the sun and his family is his solar system i mean like
raph isn’t the sun bc he’s the most important one that everyone revolves around, he’s the sun bc without a planetary system, a sun isn’t a sun. and i think so much of raph’s sense of personal identity and purpose is wrapped up in the roles he serves for his family so like. it just all checks out
obsessed w this whole shot btw it captures SO much
raph highlighted by the sun, at the center of the scene and the other characters’ focus even without being center-frame (they are looking towards the sun, who brings safety and warmth; raph is facing towards his entire solar system, what he exists to protect
and i think about that metaphor a lot especially since when raph falls back, they all follow after him immediately, like he’s a center of gravity)
the wide and very noticeable gap between him and his brothers, who are all grouped closely together on their end, like a reflection of the distance in their relationships and viewpoints, a gap raph is understanding only exists because he kept it there.
the throughline of the boards they’re standing on!! like one very long beam they’re all standing on, raph alone on his end of it trying to carry enough weight to balance the rest of them out, but also one very long beam they’re all standing on at the same level, balancing out. (and april/karai at the center as the resting point, as the fulcrum of this realization and what comes next, the driving force for this breakthrough)
all the rise boys get done dirty on characterization by fandom in different ways i think. (not ALL the time every fanwork etc etc these are just like, trends i tend to notice?) every fandom suffers from losing character nuance.
- leo i’ve talked about plenty on this blog, how some of his canon traits (genuine belief in his skill and cockiness, capacity for joy, his manipulativeness whether for good or ill) seem to get watered down or wiped off the board and supplemented with generic sad boy. his struggles with purpose and identity and not wanting to fail somehow morph into “he hates and completely holds no value for himself”
- donnie’s canon personality gets blurred out and largely replaced with whatever list of Neurodivergent Traits. and i think there’s such a fine line to walk between exploring a character that’s been word of god confirmed as on the spectrum and overwriting what’s canonically there. it’s a hard needle to thread. it also feels like a lot of his canon emotiveness gets left off the table for some reason. bc he does have his moments of flat/deadpan delivery, but a lot of the time he’s honestly very emotive. he has the passion of a theatre kid and the vindictiveness of… also a theatre kid. and the mind of a scientist.
- raph loses so much of his rowdy teen boy energy it’s kind of wild? like interpretations sand off that he’s also impulsive and can be reckless and dumb and LOVES fighting and roughhousing and isn’t the most eloquent person. suddenly there’s this pitch perfect soft boy big bro who would never hurt a fly and always says the exact right supportive thing and singlehandedly raised his 3 brothers (which simultaneously sands off all the nuance of splinter’s issues emotionally connecting with his sons and how that affected all of them). and like i LOVE raph, he’s so full of love and care and anxiety, he clearly has learned to put a lot of work into being aware of his strength and size. but there’s a difference you know?
- mikey is like. where raph gets overparentified by fanon, mikey gets over “family therapist”-ed IMO. the impulsiveness, the goofiness, the powerful emotions including a VERY powerful temper, the flat-out dumb teen boy choices… they get ignored. suddenly there’s this only very sweet and earnest boy who has read a hundred psychology books and runs group family therapy weekly or something. he is crying in his room bc leo and raph are arguing about something. which is so. he IS very sweet and can be very earnest and is full of love! he HAS come in with his opinions and unsolicited advice a couple of times and life coached for the greater good. but there’s a difference between what he does in canon and the role he gets in fanon.
I know this is about the boys (specifically), but - April gets a lot of this, too, I think! She tends to be largely portrayed as like the no-nonsense badass or cool, tough, sporty girl with confidence for days. Which, she sometimes is, but she’s also quirky and awkward and a huge nerd! She’s super prone to peer pressure and really wants to be considered cool by people that she considers influential (this is true of both her and Donnie, actually).
She’s implied to have trouble making friends with other people her age, despite seeming very laid back and easy to get along with, and she flickers between being confident and lacking confidence depending on the circumstances. She also seems to struggle with finding her niche in a similar way to Leo.
Donnie is also very often portrayed as being the least trusting, most skeptical one of the group, because he’s the least emotionally reactive (generally speaking). When the truth is…that’s much more accurate to Leo. Leo is the skeptic who doesn’t believe in ghosts despite using literal magic every day. He’s also the only one who is suspicious of Big Mama when they first meet her.
Donnie is actually shown to be too trusting a lot of the time; he has a really poor track record for knowing when he’s being manipulated (see: the Purple Dragons, Big Mama, Repo Mantis…even Warren Stone). He lacks the social awareness to realize when people are being genuine with him, so he tends to just believe that they’re telling the truth…unless given good reason to assume otherwise (or unless he’s just projecting, like with the residents of Witch Town.) In comparison to someone like Mikey, he does appear more on the skeptical side, but his judgement is still highly questionable at times.
i wish i had the energy and eloquence to fully and properly get into the family therapist mikey thing tbh it’s so hard to just. explain what i MEAN.
(ftr i am an adult who does regularly touch grass. i understand interpretation and ymmv on characterization. i understand the catharsis of vent art and vent fic and projecting issues onto characters to process them. i don’t read through stuff i’ve found issues with and then seethe about it, i keep scrolling or hit the back button and find something else.
i am still gonna talk about trends i’ve noticed and things that i don’t get or that rub me the wrong way. please don’t come into my posts about my personal thoughts and opinions to, however well-meaning or politely, judge me for expressing them. consider doing what i do and keep scrolling. i won’t engage with that. i would ask that no one else engages with that in replies or comments.
i also legit don’t Get tone indicators just ftr. they elude me.)
bc so much of the draxum moral realignment stuff was mikey being motivated largely by what mikey wanted. he wanted to see barry as family, he wanted barry to become part of the family, he wanted the story of their mutation to be less uh. objectively crummy.
now, mikey’s wants in that area served as a CATALYST for other development, him pursuing that (often very hamfistedly and despite many objections) wound up paving the way, but it was ultimately in the spirit of his personal desire. which ftr im not criticizing that’s very much part of the character.
he brought draxum to the big hidden city day out because it was a Family Event and he personally considered draxum family. splinter and draxum kinda coming to a truce, splinter reconciling that his mutation (despite the horrific trauma and long-lasting impact of it) was still what gave him his sons who he loves more than anything, that was all splinter and draxum. mikey’s action of bringing barry along was a catalyst, he was able to speak to his own feelings about it to splinter when it came up, but he wasn’t sitting there going “tell me how that makes you feel and we’ll talk through it” yknow?
and it’s the same with the dr feelings thing with donnie, which is arguably as close to Playing Therapist as mikey gets on screen. bc that was just a very Extra way of confronting donnie about the shelldon stuff. like. that was mikey inserting himself into the situation so he could give his personal opinion about how donnie was messing up, just with a sweater and a powerpoint. like. an intervention i guess. if donnie hadn’t gotten the picture from the slides he was probably all lined up for a dr delicate touch meeting.
which like, was also not being donnie’s therapist as much as a once again very hamfisted way of addressing something that mikey felt in the right about?
i’m wondering if maybe what i picture when i hear about a child having to play therapist for the family isn’t the same as what modern fandom means by saying it. because i picture like, what steven universe went through. which was practically singlehandedly, as a child, walk a bunch of adults through their own grief and insecurities and shortcomings with unending patience and support, to a point of pushing all his own needs and emotional issues aside.
where steven seemed convinced there were things that he wasn’t allowed to express or outright things he never got to learn to express, mikey is probably the most emotionally open and honest of all the brothers. he feels more outright sheltered.
especially where his big brothers are concerned. the entire episode about his first solo mission he was chafing about being unnecessarily overprotected by raph. there’s a lot tied up in his relationship to raph if we take what the creators said about them growing apart as they’ve grown up into account.
so i guess for me, in my understanding of the trauma of playing therapist at a young age, i can’t really reconcile what canon gives us with the idea of any of the other brothers or splinter (who is notably emotionally disconnected from his sons at series start) genuinely dropping their issues on his lap.
but in that vein, for as much as he’s emotionally open and honest, i’m sure there are also insecurities and issues that mikey doesn’t express. or. that canon for some reason just decided to not dig into in any of the episodes that actually got made.
all the rise boys get done dirty on characterization by fandom in different ways i think. (not ALL the time every fanwork etc etc these are just like, trends i tend to notice?) every fandom suffers from losing character nuance.
- leo i’ve talked about plenty on this blog, how some of his canon traits (genuine belief in his skill and cockiness, capacity for joy, his manipulativeness whether for good or ill) seem to get watered down or wiped off the board and supplemented with generic sad boy. his struggles with purpose and identity and not wanting to fail somehow morph into “he hates and completely holds no value for himself”
- donnie’s canon personality gets blurred out and largely replaced with whatever list of Neurodivergent Traits. and i think there’s such a fine line to walk between exploring a character that’s been word of god confirmed as on the spectrum and overwriting what’s canonically there. it’s a hard needle to thread. it also feels like a lot of his canon emotiveness gets left off the table for some reason. bc he does have his moments of flat/deadpan delivery, but a lot of the time he’s honestly very emotive. he has the passion of a theatre kid and the vindictiveness of... also a theatre kid. and the mind of a scientist.
- raph loses so much of his rowdy teen boy energy it’s kind of wild? like interpretations sand off that he’s also impulsive and can be reckless and dumb and LOVES fighting and roughhousing and isn’t the most eloquent person. suddenly there’s this pitch perfect soft boy big bro who would never hurt a fly and always says the exact right supportive thing and singlehandedly raised his 3 brothers (which simultaneously sands off all the nuance of splinter’s issues emotionally connecting with his sons and how that affected all of them). and like i LOVE raph, he’s so full of love and care and anxiety, he clearly has learned to put a lot of work into being aware of his strength and size. but there’s a difference you know?
- mikey is like. where raph gets overparentified by fanon, mikey gets over “family therapist”-ed IMO. the impulsiveness, the goofiness, the powerful emotions including a VERY powerful temper, the flat-out dumb teen boy choices... they get ignored. suddenly there’s this only very sweet and earnest boy who has read a hundred psychology books and runs group family therapy weekly or something. he is crying in his room bc leo and raph are arguing about something. which is so. he IS very sweet and can be very earnest and is full of love! he HAS come in with his opinions and unsolicited advice a couple of times and life coached for the greater good. but there’s a difference between what he does in canon and the role he gets in fanon.
ik it’s probably a classic case of extrapolating way too much but... the way raph’s character design lines up w his whole arc and role and struggles...
like the fact that he is so so so much bigger than the others. raph is big, raph is strong, raph is steady and sturdy and he can literally pick up his entire family and carry them all at once.
and like, when raph is so big and so strong and such a reliable thing. when raph is the protector, the one calling the shots on missions, the mother hen, the first point of authority. when raph is there, overprotective, when raph (for all that his brothers poke at him not being good under pressure) always always ALWAYS comes through at the end of the day when things are serious, ALWAYS gives it everything he’s got.
his design and his learned role/behaviors in this family are just the perfect storm of why it took up to the season finale to drive home the issue.
so much of the series carries the default energy of “raph will handle it.”
raph will hold up the ceiling above you. raph will throw himself over you and take a hit and get back up and keep fighting. raph has a power that makes him even bigger and draws more attention and makes him able to carry MORE. raph will be the substitute parent. raph will be put into the mentor role through leo’s leadership arc.
and raph is big. he’s built to carry heavy loads. raph is strong. raph is bold and loud and always ready to try to push on. even if he doesn’t know what to do or what he’s doing, he won’t give up and we’ll all pull together and things will turn out okay.
(his room is full of teddy bears. he dipped out on a mission to try to take a picture of a pigeon carrying a slice of pizza. he’s terrified of being alone.
he’s just as much of a kid as his brothers are. he’s just as new and inexperienced with the things happening to them as his brothers are. but for him, for some reason, there’s like this double standard where that becomes a huge glaring flaw.)
idk this got very sloppy and uncoordinated. i’m very in my feelings about raph right now though.
me thinking about the moment in the movie where leo is fighting krangified raph and he is feeling so much pressure and so much stress and guilt and he is so so scared for his family and for raph especially because he just wants to get raph out safely, he just wants his brother with him and their family unharmed and in one piece, but he can’t get through why won’t raph HEAR him why isn’t raph LISTENING he just wants to SAVE HIM why is he making things SO HARD--
and that is the moment where it finally fully clicks for leo, after all this, where raph was coming from at the start of the movie. that it wasn’t about being stubborn or wanting to call all the shots and be the boss, it wasn’t pettiness or raph being hard on them for no reason. it was always just raph wanting them to be safe, and getting scared and frustrated when doing that was difficult. or when, perhaps, certain stinker lil brothers seemed to be going out of their way to make it difficult.
like he really has that hard stop moment of realization while he’s looking directly at raph... at his own reflection u could say... love that
u could make the best point about something rise-related in the world in a post. u could say something very interesting and funny and cool.
but if at any point u try to draw a line from a thing to the conclusion “raph is/was not fit to be leader” im gonna disregard everything else about that post, bc there is a base level fundamental misunderstanding there
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