#sometimes I’m talking about/around you

[redflannelsheets]

The funniest thing about being a “home wrecking whore” is that I’ve been celibate for over eight years with no chance of a genuine physical connection anywhere near me at this point in time because I’m still heartbroken over the ghosting of my sexual soulmate and best friend, and we’re also still in a pandemic (and I am determined to never have covid again), and also I actually don’t randomly hook up? It takes me a long time to build a connection like that. I am totally in support of any proudly sexual girlie (gender neutral sense) out here getting it, but I’m not built to post nudes on Reddit for the one-handed consumption of anonymous freakniks. I’m fucking shy. If you have ever seen my tiddies, it’s because I liked you more than I could possibly express in words, therefore I sent you one of your favorite things to make up for it. That and I didn’t want to scare you by expressing forbidden feelings.

(Also, even though it may have seemed like I was out for a random hookup when I first messaged the love of my life who ghosted me (after becoming so intoxicated at a failed poly meetup that I finally discovered the courage to speak directly instead of just awkwardly, terribly flirting through social media comments), I had actually been thinking about them nonstop since we first met and made eye contact and I awkwardly blurted out that they were pretty. When my heart knows, my heart knows.)

But I think I’m just considered a terrible mistake at this point, and that hurts more than everything that came before. Well, except the idea that I was banned from falling in love but nobody else was.

[turtleblogatlast]

Leo getting hit with a truth curse but instead of forcing him to admit to super sad or worrying things it’s things like “it was me who broke the remote” “I saw Mikey prank Donnie and helped hide it because it’s way funnier if he didn’t know who it was” “I rip my clothes to look more like Raph’s because he’s really cool” “my stripes aren’t even red they’re pink!”

[creativity-deficient]

South Park fans! How many things do you have in common with your favorite character(s)? I’m curious!!

[angelnumber27]

It’s so embarrassing and heartbreaking being in so much pain over losing someone while knowing they don’t give a fuck if you live or die. Your favorite person becoming a stranger is a special kind of hell.

[lunaelume-n]

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[negativepeanuthoarder]

crying easily is not fucking manipulative. what IS manipulative is using your stress response as an excuse to continue being an asshole. idgaf if you cry while we have a conversation about you hurting my feelings. I DO gaf if that means you’re going to ignore me and continue hurting my feelings anyway.

[cranberrymoons]

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[that-was-anticlimactic]

questioning as a love language,,, asking what the song is called, what they love about something, what the rules of a sport are,,, asking self-explanatory questions because you want to show you care, asking (maybe excessive) questions because you care so much and don’t want to do it wrong or mess it up,,,

[seilon]

love when this is referred to as the gifted kid website. shockingly my mental disorders made me mentally disordered and school never really vibed with that so. couldn’t be me

[kimetsu-chan]

Thank you for bringing up how much you don’t like Harris, extremely Christian conservative family member, that makes me feel absolutely amazing

[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.

[itspileofgoodthings]

one of my fave things about teaching is that I’m NOT a counselor and I don’t have to get into the weeds with a student but also I’m part of their life every day and i see when they’re struggling and I can ask how them how they’re doing and make sure that they know I see them on a steady, daily basis and it will be healing for both of us

[akkivee]

they aren’t very good pics but i got a few shots of kuroda-san in the rusty rabbit panel 🤭

[bravevolunteer]

michael ships moodboard

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

The last family reunion of my mom’s family was wild, not because of the reunion itself, but because afterwards my brothers and i were like “is that how normal extended families act? Unironically where was the gaslighting and gatekeeping?” And that’s how my world view was shaken about how a big family reunion doesn’t always have to have a few “gaslight gatekeep” people who make things around them more complicated and awkward

[none-tadashi-left-hiro]

hi what is wrong with me