Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25528126-20141013004032/@comment-995426-20141115195430

I love interspecies romance in the TMNT franchise. It drives home the point that these turtles and other mutant characters are fundamentally people with sentience and feelings, like everyone else. I respect Peter Laird in a lot of ways, but I think he's wrong on this point. And I can understand why Nick doesn't want to discourage this either&mdash;a lot of parents and grandparents are still racist (I'm very familiar with the principle), and not too long ago they made similar comparisons about interethnic relationships (calling them unnatural, or even bestial), and in 2014 it would offend a lot of people to appear to tacitly endorse the notion that it's somehow wrong to have a relationship between two intelligent, feeling people just because they look so different. See, even before I was a fan of TMNT, I was a fan of Beauty and the Beast&mdash;not just the myth, but the 1980s TV series that my entire family watched, about an interspecies romance between a human woman and an anthropomorphic feline man, which (like TMNT) also had elements of secret life beneath the streets of New York City and the ever-present fear of being discovered by strangers. My now-middle-aged sister still has a poster of Vincent hanging in her room after all these years.

Also, Leo and Karai are adoptive siblings with no mutual genetic relation, and not half-siblings. And more importantly, neither of them were aware of any possible familial relation when they got to know each other, and they did not grow up together at all. That makes it not gross in my book. It's sort of like in the TV series "Roseanne" where Darlene married David (whom Darlene's parents adopted because of his abusive mother), or in the movie "Clueless" where Cher finally falls in love with her step-brother Josh. I'd chalk Leo and Karai up to being more of a classic soap opera romance with all its strange not-really-incest family entanglements.