Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-995426-20150603174047/@comment-25614818-20150603200009

Gilgameshkun wrote: I posted this in the Mikey+LH thread earlier.

So they don't even necessarily have to be dating to be romantic. But realizing that they're romantic, makes it all the more likely they were in love with each other. It does tend to follow, because people tend to like each other (often as friends) before they fall in love with each other, and falling in love becomes that much easier when the emotions are more intense, as they are when they reach a romantic level of intensity. (There's also "love at first sight" (infatuation) which is usually just a flood of dopamine in the brain, and when it wears off, people can quickly find they had nothing in common and don't actually like each other. This was not love at first sight, since they already knew each other so deeply.)

I think Spike being a pet created a barrier to their relationship progressing much further than it did before mutation. But after mutation, Slash was a person, their love intensified (in typical teenage emotional roller coaster fashion), and Slash in particular had trouble dealing with the angst and sexual tension, especially in the wake of an unstable mutation.

You know what a "yandere" is, right? Slash went yandere. He became possessive of Raph, wanting to kill Raph's family to have Raph all to himself. That's a very dark, chilling flip side of romance. That's one way of putting it, and wasn't it in "Battle for New York" when Slash said: "I wasn't myself back then...it-it was the mutagen..." Slash hestitated. He was evidently trying to get on Raph's good side again and the hesitation suugests that he is desperate to blame his actions on something else so that he can be together with Raph.