Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20151024145123/@comment-995426-20151029232425

UltimateTitan6:

I'm glad you understand. Still, not sure I'll have the heart to watch the episode at all.

The whole Raph and Slash arc made a stronger impression on me than most anything on screen has made on me in a long time. Perhaps nothing since the 2005 romantic comedy anime film, Arashi no Yoru ni. By the time season 2 ended, I already shipped Raph and Slash (Slaph) with absolute certainty, and so did my other gay TMNT fan friends (as well as many a fangirl on deviantART: ). I thought this story arc was one of the best things to come out of the entire series.

And it's not just Raph and Slash together, but also all those other episodes developing Raph himself as a "big sister" character who had such an intuitive understanding of the minds of women while simultaneously being so indifferent to their presence. And on top of that, he could effortlessly tease and cat like a fantastic alpha rhymes-with-witch, even while never making us forget that he was still indeed a guy. Raph went beyond being an "ambiguously gay" character to really feeling like "one of us." Even in The Alien Agenda where Raph acknowledged that Leo thought Karai was hot, it felt more like Raph subtly teasing Leo like he had previously done all episode, rather than a personal agreement that Karai was hot. (In Raph's position, I might have told Leo the same thing. XD) And best of all, Raph was portrayed in a refreshingly unstereotypical fashion, making him all the more relatable and respectable for it.

After all that, any Raphalisa romance in this particular series will feel uncomfortably manufactured. It's just not the Raph I got to know and care about. Of course, that's the risk you run with a fictional character&mdash;the way they're written doesn't always stay consistent over time, especially when a whole committee of different writers and planners are involved and constantly changing their minds.

So, this gives us the paradox where the new plot may indeed be realistic for Raph, but only because the Raph we see now isn't quite the Raph we knew even 12 months ago. He's a rescripted, retooled version. And he may indeed again become a finely, deeply developed character in his own right, but that won't change the fact that he will still fundamentally be a different character who happens to look and sound the same as a character I remembered. That's not easy to contemplate.

Anyway, you can see my special gallery devoted to all the gaydar-tripping moments in the series. Marked mature only because I say the word that rhymes-with-witch, and marked as fanwork because much of it is a personal essay and many of the GIFs are annotated with my own commentary. Other than that, it's not actually mature or fanwork, as it documents stuff that's already on the show.

Yoshimickster: For that matter, nearly all my GIFs can be found here. It is a directory of many separate GIF gallery pages stored as subpages of my own user space (User:Gilgameshkun/), and they all show the GIFs at full size and annotated with dialogue. The gallery I just linked UltimateTitan6 is just one of those many pages. You and everyone else on the wiki are welcome to use any of them&mdash;in other articles, in other discussion pages, plaster them all over Tumblr, do whatever you want! :)