#bad news and good news we gotta

[tuliptiger]

I will keep going with you, and you.

so. bad news. we have to keep going tomorrow. good news is that I’ll keep going with you

[moeblob]

A lil guy !

[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.

[isbergillustration]

1.5 min wip to reiterate how deeply open for commissions I am, how very much all my originals are for sale, etc

[tomwambsmilk]

fr tho @staff why are you trying to make tumblr more like other sites why are you destroying your niche in the market please there have got to be ways to make tumblr more accessible to new users without sacrificing the very things that your existing userbase loves

[welcometoteyvat]

jing yuan and yanqing are giving zhongli and xiao if the latter’s canon relationship was Actually fanon’s made up father figure/adopted child dynamic

[carcarrot]

this time last year i was probably sitting in the kitchen while my dad started making an early dinner of chicken bolognese trying not to get too nervous about the concert i'd be going to in a few hours

[boyslit]

bout to dissociate and write entirely too much into a guyroy arranged marriage miscarriage tea poisoning plot

[bunnyb34r]

I wish my brain would let me play video games again without a care

Now I'm like "no I can't bc I'm wasting my precious free time. I can't reason using my day off to play video games when I could be using that time to do literally anything else" like fucking come on

[junonreactor]

just did all the party sidequests. that was really cute

[orcelito]

FANTASTIC NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i finished & posted the ITNL 14 re-edits, WHICH MEANS!!!!!!!!!!!!! i'm officially done with my re-edits project!!!!!!!!!! :D!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ive been thinking a lot today about my plans for ITNL 15, AND i have tomorrow off, so if all goes well i'll be able to start writing again. TOMORROW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

and if the chapter grips me like i expect it will then... hehehehehe

could be an update in as little as a few days, depending. i'll keep u guys updated

[hermitw]

I'm going to invest in building this itafushi playlist so hard

[b-blushes]

So bonkers how my general ability to do tasks has changed since new playlist and tv show. No longer pulled into spending one million hours stuck on The Apps either, I’m doing things. The power of feeling happy and excited…….

​silly. but I’ll take it!!!!!!!!!!

[uselessgay10101]

Ok I genuinely don't see why everyone is being huges jelly beans about the use of AI in multiple different settings. Be it work, art, apps, or anything (Feel free to inform me! Heaven and Hell know I despise being uniformed)

It's not that I necessarily agree with it (it is laying ppl off work. Stealing art- etc), but AI isn't necessarily bad it's literally just being used wrong! You can blame the creators and government for not setting regulations. Ai is not only made to do bad things and to cover the work ppl do, but to take some of the workload off people do. Or can't do.

Is it good?

.................... Questionable.

You can feel stingy about Ai for stealing art, work, and dawned MONEY

But! Seriously try to at least understand why instead of instantly hating the use of AI all together

We often times get SO into a thing we forget to take a step back and really acknowledge the big picture! I do that shit too! and trust me it a lot harder to see you're doing it lest someone taps u asking "yo you good?"

Ai isn't bad but it can be if it's influenced by bad people. And we can be pretty f-ing bad. And not in the cool way.

[volfoss]

my beautiful personal experience with anne rice that im always like haha ok new book ^-^ the last one kind of sucked a decent amount for most of the book but the ending was cool. cant wait to start the next one, sure hope its not anything bad!! and then shes like sneaking behind me with a comically large sledgehammer on my head that is labelled "the beginning will suck heavily". and it keeps happening to me.

[lesbianworlock]

Anyway for my first good wife post I will be posting this text I received in the middle of calling a trauma level one at my job 😭😭😭