Talk:Shredder in Hell issue 1/@comment-995426-20190122223816/@comment-995426-20191104145519

To be honest, if Yoshi and Splinter's spiritual essence are one in the same, I wonder if Splinter actually changed form at all. It may have been some kind of visual device used in storytelling.

But still, it appeared rather disruptive after repeated scenes over the years of Splinter communing romantically with Shen's spirit while looking like Splinter. If the story up to this point had been trying to drive home the point that they are just as much husband and wife as they have ever been, and that nothing between them has changed even as everything has changed, it seems anticlimactic, story-wise, character-wise, to abruptly briefly change the appearance of one of them during a kiss because Splinter kissing Shen was considered too weird. It better be Splinter who was the uneasy one, as The S suggested (and I'm still skeptical of), because the alternative doesn't seem very respectful to Splinter or to their marriage.

I mean, it's not like Oroku Saki ever changes in appearance to Takeshi Tatsuo while kissing Kitsune, and the ongoing series recently had a major character development moment of coming to accept and still love Jennika even after her mutation. Hell, this very kind of character plot point has been in TMNT stories at least since and Candy Fine back in Archie back in the 1990s. A long-time TMNT fan, in general, is ready to accept relationships like these happening as a given, and whether or not they actively like them, they are at least not shocked by them. So in effect, in trying to avoid looking weird, this comic panel succeeded in doing just that.