Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25684889-20150822230425/@comment-995426-20150824205535

If it was a joke, I'd say it was in extremely, extremely poor taste in 2014. Gay people are not a racy joke, because it doesn't just offend gay people anymore&mdash;it offends their straight loved ones too. I'm more inclined to think they'd not stoop that low.

I didn't know what to think of Spike's first appearance when I first saw it. But with Raph heavily tripping our gaydar since season 1, and the whole drama with Slash and Destroy, and Newtralized!, Spike's first scene took on new meaning for me. Raph and Spike had been together for years, and might have been like brothers, but Raph seemed to crave a romantic companione. There being only four mutants known to exist (and they were all brothers), Raph could bond to no one outside his family but Spike, and projected his feelings onto him. After Spike mutated into Slash, they quickly treated each other as partners, not parent and child. And Raph was more than thrilled at the chance to spend life cooperating more closely with his loved one. And, again, Slash went undeniably yandere on Raph. Splinter didn't mince words&mdash;Slash was Raph's loved one. And since they weren't like parent and child (as Yoshi and Miwa were), that made them more comparable to Yoshi's other loved one, Shen.

I discussed this all extensively with my friends, and we bounced all sorts of impressions off each other to build upon our understandings. And for all of us, gaydar played a big part. You have to understand that gaydar is a strong intuition based on years of personal experience and acquired conventional wisdom knowing other gay people. The impressions can be very strong, and experience (at least with real life) helps refine this sense until it's usually accurate. I know fiction can make this less predictable because writing and realism don't always mesh. But we're still audience members, and we still draw on our own knowledge to relate to what we see. And in terms of raw solid impression, 2K12 Raphael is one of the gayer cartoon characters we've ever encountered. I mean, gay people are long used to feeling invisible, but it's even worse to feel noticed and then feel unceremoniously ignored as if you never existed. If this is indeed what the writers are doing now, then you can understand how upsetting it can be.

My weekend? Been a tad bumpy. I recently found myself abruptly debating with someone on Turtlepedia who seems to have all the gaydar of a tree stump. Not that I can really blame him for it, since not everyone has a keen sense for that. But having to it again and again, in minute detail, with long drawn-out Q&A, is really one of the more frustrating experiences in life. It's not just me noticing these things. I really wish other people could just see that which is obvious to me and my friends&mdash;TMNT 2K12 has had a lot of conspicuous (to us) gay material in it. And I haven't even gotten to Anton Zeck. XD

But this thread is about Mona Lisa. My first comments in this thread were in context to her. Then I answered questions when asked. Then I answered followup questions when asked. And now, we're barely talking about Mona Lisa at all. XD We could have saved a lot of technically off-topic discussion by taken it as a given that this show trips a lot of sensitive gaydar, and that certain specific characters are very conspicuous in that regard.