#it took me like 3 hrs to find a color palette for him i was happy with

[edains]

slowly making me3 into a game i really enjoy

bonus:

[davids-cartoon-corkboard]

Here’s the final part of the “Raph is a system” theory compilation post! It’s the last of what I can scrape up from canon; while I still have ideas on how it might loop back into character interactions and plot and so on, they’re much more speculative in nature. (Part 1 is here) (Part 2 is here) (You’re reading Part 3)

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"Red” is the alter with the least screen time, so it took a while for me to connect the dots on when and why he formed.

His shadowed face, the dramatic background music when he speaks, and his seriousness are reminiscent of the “brooding on rooftops in the rain while gloomily staring off into the distance” thing that Raphs throughout the franchise will do sometimes. That’s easy to poke fun at on a superficial level because most of us look back on our edgy phases with self-deprecation, but it’s a lot less funny in the context of the life he lives. Being a normal human teenager in normal human society is a fucking nightmare; being a mutant teenager who has no idea what to expect in terms of development or lifespan, only five people he can safely interact with ever, and a very limited future hiding from everyone else for as long as he lives has got to be just awful.

RR’s few lines in “Pizza Puffs” tell us a lot. “It’s the only way they’ll learn” and “this is for their own good” suggest that he formed when the turtles started exploring more of the sewers and going aboveground, and Being The Leader became more of a responsibility. A thousand new ways for them to get in trouble meant a thousand new ways Raph would have to bail them out, and that got old fast- especially since they didn’t have April’s knowledge to help them in the beginning. I doubt they met her the very first time they left the sewers. The wiki says April knew the boys for five years as of “Mystic Mayhem”, so they would have been nearly eight at the time, perhaps the mental equivalent of a ten- or eleven-year-old human.

A while back I sifted through all the eps with Raph in them in the vague hopes that “Pizza Puffs” wasn’t the only episode featuring RR... and lo and behold, I found something! The shadowed face and dramatic background music are also present in “Minotaur Maze”!

“I can’t do it. I got no mystic mojo. I’m useless.”

“Hey, that’s not true, brother. You just gotta believe in yourself, and know this: If I die in this maze, I will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

(I know that’s only two data points, but y’all canonically cannot scoff at me.) RR shows up when HR is no longer able to tolerate the bullshit at hand. “I’m not going to baby you Leo, get your shit together before your ego kills us all” was a reasonable response to nearly being shish-kebab’d.

“Pizza Puffs”, on the other hand... LDM pulled through in the end, but that RR got HR to stay behind added an unnecessary level of risk. Getting his brothers to learn a lesson should have waited until after the giant mutant cannibal had been dealt with and they were no longer poisoned.

This hands-off “figure it out on your own” approach probably came from Splinter. I swear to Pizza Supreme In The Sky I’m not trying to shit-talk him, but his lack of involvement with his sons was a major flaw. Before all that character development he was terrible at things like “emotional support” and “life lessons”, leaving Raph without the blueprints to deal with a lot of problems. HR would respond by rushing in and figuring things out as he went, but sometimes RR would have to say “No, we’re maxed out and can’t deal with this, we’ve gotta step back”. As we’ve seen in other iterations, when Raph is maxed out and doesn’t step back...

...he goes too far. Plenty of folks have commented on how rarely the Rise turtles smack each other around compared to other versions; it’s telling that RR spoke up just a moment after HR smacked Mikey in “Pizza Puffs”.

Raph is much bigger and stronger than his brothers this time around, meaning such an outburst would have a much higher risk of Genuine Grievous Injury. And while his size and strength also mean a measure of gentleness has been baked into him since day one, there would still be times HR would feel himself boiling over and RR would head off somewhere quiet for fear of the above situation; which was potentially alluded to in “Hot Soup: The Game”.

“You went out on your own when you were his age.”

The context of “Man vs. Sewer” suggests Raph isn’t going to go off on his own without very good reason- such as cooling down before he does something he regrets. That this detail shows up in Casey’s debut episode suggests it is how they will properly meet and bond, since befriending Casey and doing vigilante shit with him is what usually gives Raph a way to blow off steam while having someone nearby to keep him in check. But that probably won’t happen until partway through season 3, since I doubt we can cram the rest of Casey’s redemption arc into the movie alongside the invasion and time travel trauma shenanigans and leader drama. So in the meantime RR will continue to brood on rooftops in bad weather and listen to Ephemerality songs and monologue to himself because he knows nobody’s going to hear him over the incessant background noise that makes up the cities above and below.

I was a bit stumped about how that meeting would take place- the events of the finale (and possibly also the movie) would no doubt have both the human and yokai populations on high alert, making it dangerous for RR to slip away for some peace and quiet. But the events of the finale also gave us some insight on Raph’s powers; he has a way to leave without actually leaving!

Hardlight Clone Jutsu, baby!

So whenever HR finds himself in a particularly sour mood, a wisp of power winds its way up through the open-air portion of the lair and forms into a clone aboveground. HR doesn’t have to leave for a while to cool down before coming back and dealing with the situation calmly, because RR is already on a rooftop somewhere dissipating those bad feelings by listening to the rain and/or yeeting trash cans.

But mutants can’t freely walk the streets of New York, and the Hidden City Police probably still have it out for Raph. And someone, hero or villain, will eventually realize that Raph has a gloomy stray clone running around and ask questions that can’t be answered without cracking open the can of worms that is This Whole Situation. RR needs to get creative. That we’ve seen clones have both full color and the basic red/white palette suggests their color could be altered in other ways; and that the holo-form grew extra arms in the lair fight vs. the Shredder suggests their shape could also be changed further.

So what will he choose to look like, if not his body?

Obviously he’ll use a red and black color palette because it slaps, leaning more towards black since I compared him to Batman back in Part 1. A low-detail design makes it hard to identify him, giving onlookers the impression that they just couldn't see him well in the dark. Mentally filing down his spikes and decreasing the curve of his shell are easy enough, but it takes him a while to figure out five fingers instead of three, and there’s not much he can do about his voice other than lowering the pitch so he just opts to not talk much within earshot of others. A cape further disguises his silhouette and again, it slaps. The impression of a mask means he doesn’t need a face and it lets peoples’ assumptions work for him. Humans are more likely to think he’s human than a Very Human-Shaped Mutant, and yokai come in so many shapes as is that he could be anything from a witch to a dehydrated googlyschmootz.

(You know how it is with franchises. Old patterns repeating in new ways.)

New York City never sleeps, and I doubt the Hidden City does either. He’ll run into Casey eventually, but in the interim he stumbles across and intervenes in some attempted purse-snatchings and kidnappings and the like. Most of the would-be victims use his arrival as their chance to escape, but one of them is too frozen with fear to move until their attackers are chased off into the dark. He escorts them home, and it’s only once they’re at their doorstep that they work up the courage to ask him who he is.

It’s... a difficult question, in more ways than one. “Raph” is out of the question. “Red” isn’t quite right, and neither is “Angel”- they’re a tad too identifying still, and the R.A.P.H. thing was HR’s idea anyway. So he shrugs, and melts away into the shadows.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m Nobody.”