Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-28655620-20161117184919/@comment-995426-20190927193500

Venus was permanently disavowed by Mirage and now also by Viacom, and I believe there's a very good reason to do this as I suggested in Thread:227506: What I'm saying is not only that her portrayal was sexist, but also that she never should have been named Venus de Milo in the first place, because with it already not striking anyone as a realistic personal name in any language, it combines the namesakes of four male artists of skill and one female art subject of looks. If a character with that name existed in isolation, it wouldn't be an issue. But when the symbolism of her name is compared with the symbolism of the other four's names, the implications were always going to be unfortunate: That men are doers, and women are there to look pretty for men. And considering both Venus de Milo's naming and portrayal came from the same show, I don't really think this was an accident&mdash;she was conceived from the top down in a sexist manner, which hinders any rehabilitation of a rebooted version of the character as long as she has that name. Seeing Venus de Milo as a rebooted character is about as likely and as welcome as seeing Vulvana rebooted in a kid's cartoon.

And on the subject of renaming her something like Alexandra, I mentioned in Thread:227506: Naming her Alexandra would be like naming her Leonarda, Raffaella, Donatella or Michelangela. A gender flip. And that would be all right if it were just as easily to gender-flip one of the main four turtle templates as it was Alexandros. But the reasons for naming her Alexandra would only be a band-aid for Venus de Milo's template being so sexist to begin with. Better in context to just name her after an actual woman artist, such as Artemisia. Venus de Milo's original conception was fatally flawed from the start. Characters like Jennika are the closest we're going to get to a licensed reboot of her. There was never anything intrinsically problematic with having women mutant ninja turtles. The issue is how you go about it, and just as Venus de Milo was an extremely bad way of going about it, Jennika is a very good way of going about it.

Jennika is well-developed, she's proven capable, and the story's art and narrative have made as big a deal about her being female as it has made about the four turtles being male&mdash;very little, which is as much a service to balanced dignified gender portrayals as it is to gender parity. She can be feminine when she wants to be, but she is not expected to be anyone but herself, and her new family and her boyfriend never seem to judge her character on the basis of her gender or level of femininity. Jennika has been fantastically successful at avoiding sexist character design baggage every step of the way, which is a feat Venus de Milo will never be able to claim, because sexism was baked into her character template from day one.