Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20150613052057/@comment-995426-20150803041807

Well now I know what happened. I had a, which I can still feel now even after hours of mid-day sleep. I apologize.

And I must clarify&mdash;Raph is the gay one. I just understood Mikey to be bi. It's not that he couldn't fall in love with Renet&mdash;I honestly thought he was going to. It's just the show had made it look like he was in love with Leatherhead too, and this episode either implied or retconned that it may have never happened. It was a good faith understanding. With Leatherhead being an intelligent person who spoke in full sentences, there was no way I was going to see him as like a "puppy"&mdash;he was a guy. Mikey even gave him the same gaga heart eyes in the episode TCRI. Also, until this season, I thought the turtles were aging normally, which meant Mikey wouldn't have still been 15, but closer to 17, which is totally legal in New York&mdash;if they were doing things Nickelodeon was never going to imply anyway. (Personally, I preferred to think they weren't doing that.) But even so, Leatherhead was the same age in Mikey's memories, and Leatherhead's memories of Mikey aged along with him in Dimension X.  While I admit it may have been unlikely they would have allowed them to keep such an age-disparate relationship because of what the appearances may have implied, it was still my understanding that it happened. And for them to now imply that it hadn't, now seems like retcon, and that's disappointing.

Raph is a very different matter altogether. Raph is certainly not stereotypically gay, but what he is, is "woman-minded", albeit in a brusque and unladylike way. Not that I think he's transgender or untough or anything. But crucially, you could gender-flip his entire character to a hetero woman and change only the pronouns, and it would all still totally work. He acts more like a tomboy sister than an ordinary brother (having only my own brothers and sisters to compare).