#This Person Is Legitimately Bad

[podcastwizard]

my most toxic trait is i fucking love work gossip. i play neutral not to be the bigger person or take the high road but to hear slander and hearsay from every side. two coworkers complained about each other to me in the same afternoon and i nearly blacked out from the rush

[communistkenobi]

whenever right wing people talk about “parental rights” they are talking about property rights. they are arguing for further political and legal enshrinement of their children as their literal actual property

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[runawaymarbles]

guess who just got exposed to WHOOPING COUGH!!!!!!! *jazz hands*

[napping-sapphic]

Really want to fall in love with someone who likes late night phone calls like let’s talk until it’s way too late let’s talk in a way that makes me a little bolder let’s talk in a way that makes me miss you even more than i did before let’s talk when we’re both soft and sleepy and just need some company in whatever form we can get it in

[turtleblogatlast]

Thinking about the Don Suave scene and what it means in terms of LGBTQ+ representation because my brain does nothing if not torment me with random topics to ramble about on the regular.

Anyway, I just wanted to ramble about why I like the scene but to get it out of the way - the scene can very easily be interpreted in so many different ways, and all of them are valid. I personally see it as Leo having at least some attraction to a man. And the following is an explanation of my own interpretation and thoughts on it and what it means especially for Leo’s portrayal in the grand scheme of things.

Long-winded interpretation under the cut!

Now, to start with, it’s important to me that in the scene Leo looks at Don Suave in the very beginning and then for the entirety of the rest of the time the man is on screen, Leo’s eyes are closed. Yet, in the end, he is still visibly enamored with Don Suave, happily cuddling up to him as he’s being carried away.

You can very easily interpret this as Leo being spellbound and that’s honestly super valid and I believe he likely was at least somewhat in the beginning, but considering how fast he looked away and how he never looked again, I personally think it makes more sense to read it as Leo just finding the man attractive, at least somewhat. (For the record, I personally headcanon Rise Leo as bisexual with a heavy preference for men, but I want to be blunt when I say that any interpretation is valid. Literally any. Ace, pan, gay, bi, none of the above or a mixture of something new literally all of it is more than okay and fair. Hell you could even interpret this entire scene as more romantic attraction than physical and it would still work. Anything goes!! Don’t bother people, guys, really.)

The main reason I take this scene to be at the very least LGBTQ+ adjacent isn’t just because of how it’s portrayed, but because of who Leonardo is. Not in terms of Rise of the TMNT, but in terms of the entire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles™️ franchise.

Leo’s a character who, while changing with each iteration, has still at his core been around for decades upon decades as “the blue one”. One fourth of the team. He’s the one most are going to look at as the Leader, and oftentimes he is the one closest to having the title of Main Character. Not to say the others aren’t just as important, but Leo’s presence in the A plots of basically all TMNT media is often something very main character-esque.

And that’s very, very important to note. Here we have a Main Character of a prolific and decades long-running franchise distributed by a children’s television network. You can play around with his and his brothers’ characters all you like, but there is always going to be challenges to dodge around, especially since this was still in 2018-2019.

For example, you can play around with their designs so long as they’re color coded turtles, but their sexualities? Now that’s tricky.

“But what about Hypno and Warren?” Not main characters and also they’re Rise originals. They have a lot more room to play around with than a character like Leo does. But even talking about main characters in the franchise, you could arguably have an easier time playing around with Donnie or Mikey’s sexualities than Leo or even Raph, as (unfortunately) the former two tend to get more B plots, so they’d likely have had a little more leeway (still not a lot though.)

So, where does this leave us?

It leaves us in a place where outright stating and/or showing undeniable proof of Leo’s attraction to men is very, very difficult. So, workarounds!

Workarounds like the entire Don Suave situation.

To be honest, as left up to interpretation and lowkey and deniable as it is, this whole scene means a lot to me because of who Leo is as a character. It’s just nice when we get so see even the bare bones of representation with characters that have been such a large part of pop culture for decades, y’know? Even if more would be so much nicer, this is better than I thought we’d ever get for these boys.

And, again, literally nothing I’ve said is the only way to interpret it, I’m more than happy when people interpret media on their own honestly, it’s just something I’ve been thinking of lately and I was wondering if others felt the same way.

Whatever you think when you interpret this scene or Rise Leo as a whole, I just thought this would be interesting to think about, even if it was ramble-y, haha.

[wendigoruble]

This is a very condensed way to say it but. Like yeah.

[spacemancharisma]

heyyy if your response to "this space isn't being made accessible to me" is to say "well then just don't go there", youuuuuuu are actively discriminating against disabled people bc we add even a slight inconvenience to your scene/vibe

[galedekarios]

I’m not surprised honestly, but I don’t need an award to validate how much I love it. Veilguard is my personal goty, that being said if it can’t be that. Go Metaphor!

that is very true.

i'm just feeling some kind of ways about the positive aspects being completely dismissed in favour of endless criticisms, some deserved and some not.

the same thing happened with inquisition back when it released.

it's funny when i see large parts of the fandom - and even outside of that - now getting misty-eyed over it.

i do remember all the thinkpieces back then on how the inquisitor is actually the worst protagonist, the companions the weakest, the tone too goofy, the plot and chars too railroaded, the lore and stories retcon'd and/or ignored, and so on and so.

i talked about this before and i suppose it's the cycle of bioware games and the bioware fandom at this point. in additions to that, we sadly live in a time now where grifters picked up on it and i do genuinely think that influenced the decision process to some degree.

[manyblinkinglights]

lol even npr’s coverage of the shooting is soooooo slanted to making the dead guy and his wife look villainous and the shooter look based. rare public radio w (I haven’t ceased being irate with them since some generic housing piece they did in which they interviewed several landlords and 0 tenants).

[honourablepranksinatra]

Maple Leafs discourse on their team social medias makes me lose brain cells because wdym they're first in their division and coming off a 5 game win streak & people are commenting that the top players are only in it for the money and have no drive, that particular players are useless and need to be traded asap, that they're a garbage team, that they'll never make it past the first round just because they lost one game.

Apparently because they are being payed handsomely the players must be mindless automatons who perform perfectly every night. It drives me absolutely nuts how quickly alleged fans will completely turn on their own team.

[sometimesanequine]

now draw a hoarse based on the fictional character you hate the most

i have a hard time holding hatred in my heart but joker fans are so fucking annoying, the joker isnt even a good narrative foil

[erazonpo3]

tbh I really don't see Malva as a gossip beyond like, what she does on her own free time. She's a news anchor, not a gossip columnist, and honestly I think it's a far more insidious portrayal of the media to show that she's not leading smear campaigns, it's the spin-doctoring of "objective" facts. She reports on the attack on the Pokeball factory, but conveniently leaves out who committed it.

Her portrayal in the game also lines up pretty close with that character concept sheet in that she presents a calm, respectable (if a little arrogant) persona as a front; she's not going to want to be seen as someone who is a controversial figure, because she wants to be someone who people accept their information from without question.

I like her being messy as much as the next person but I do think it's worth taking her more seriously as a journalist, for all the good and bad that career has the potential for.

[sun-marie]

being so honest. i have so little attachment to v*rric tethr*s. when i realized the reveal i literally cheered out loud 😶

[rimouskis]

can I be soooooo uppity right now

[starbuck]

i’m truly so bad with vent texts… i’m the kind of person who only reaches out to people if i need their help in a practical sense (help making a decision, asking them to do something together, stuff like that), so i don’t know what to do with people just being like “things are bad”… i’m sorry things are bad???? and THEN (because of how i was raised) i have to physically fight my brain so it doesn’t trick me into believing that the goal of the texts is to passive-aggressively make me feel guilty that i’m not doing more to help