#Also Cass I love your peepaw comics! Leon needs some joy and lightness to him!

[mutantninjamidlifecrisis]

hahhh okay, I started doing a little rant in the tags and decided I might as well say my peace here. (I'm going to be talking from the perspective of mnmc and omo here as those are the stories I'm most familiar with).

I understand why there may be some kickback in terms of F!Leo's first interaction with his younger self being steeped in aggression, rage, hatred, etc. but I think for F!Leo not to feel that, even for a split-second, would be doing a disservice to the complexity of his character and the possibility of him having ptsd and depression coupled with the fact that F!Leo holds resentment towards the idea of Leo, and not Leo himself.

Omo!Leonardo had literally fallen from the sky, fresh from a war and a brush with the dead, high on adrenaline and the losses he's just experienced, and one of the first things he lays on is the one person he can project all responsibility for his problems onto. And of course, he knows this is not rational - he has to know that, but with literally no therapy and having no way to communicate how he's feeling in an understandable and healthy way for the last two decades or so, how else is he supposed to react?

Mnmc!Leon is in essentially the same boat, but is also literally brainwashed, with the power over him essentially bringing to life his worst nightmares, and it just so happens that little Leon ending the world is one of those nightmares. A very prominent one, I imagine.

In both omo's and mnmc's cases, Leonardo's attack is more a trauma-based response that clouded their judgement and ability to perceive the situation than it was an active decision to "hate" their little me's. When they looked at the current timeline's Leo, they didn't see a young kid fresh off the bat from saving the world. They saw themselves as they were right at the ignition point of every bad thing that'd ever happened in the apocalypse and to their family by extension.

I imagine it from the perspective of spending a lifetime staring at the ceiling, every night, wishing you could go back. Every loss you suffer going back to that moment - you as that boy: so arrogant and so desperate to prove himself that he would cause you to lose everyone you've ever loved. And perhaps he hadn't done so intentionally, and yes, there were probably more contributing factors to it, but he did that. He played a part in it. There's no escaping that.

Seeing that boy again, the very concept of that person, for the first time - and you don't know them, you don't remember them, you can't recall all the reasons you did what you did as a kid or why you acted so foolishly, all you know is the loss. That's you. You did that. That's the person that destroyed everything. And gods. You hate him. You hate him so much.

But then the fog of rage falls away, and you realise. This kid is so small. He is so, so young. He shouldn't ever have had that weight on his shoulders. It wasn't his fault. But it had to be his fault, because it's still your fault. It has to be. Because otherwise what were all those losses for. How do you consolidate that in your mind? What was the purpose, if not to learn from your mistakes?

And of course, once Leonardo has a clear head he wants to take this kid in, wants to help little Leo, uplift him, make sure they will never the experience the life that he had to survive. That he'll never have to regret like he has. Essentially, so he'll never become him.

The process of learning to forgive oneself, even after you've done something you believe to be unforgiveable. Being able to analyse that. Learning how to live with it. This is kind of the whole entire point.

Like valid, everyone is entitled to their opinion and I love the idea of F!Leo being able to instantaneously love little Leo from day dot, but if you do not see merit to the ideas coming from the other side, I do not believe you've thought this through to its fullest extent.

"every f!leo hates their little leo" is a misconception. MNMC Leon who said he wouldn't care if Leo died (BLUFFING) is a statistical outlier and shouldn't have been counted