Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25115701-20140629045455/@comment-995426-20141103151847

Well, Sugilita, I don't know how old you are or a lot of the other users are. But I'm well into my 30s now. And as late as when I was a teenager, many people still thought it unacceptable for people of different skin colors to be in love. They likened it to bestiality too, and they even thought it was gross or an abomination. Now that I'm almost middle-aged, I must assert that there is no legitimacy in such a belief, and it has no place in polite discussion. People are going to believe what they're going to believe, but that doesn't mean I won't call our their bigotry for doing so, because ultimately there is no difference in those kinds of discrimination. All that matters is that if someone is sentient and especially if they have feelings, they're a person&mdash;full stop. :)

That said, there's also an in-universe consideration. There are only five mutant turtles known to exist in-universe, and they are all male, and all but one of them are related to each other. And by all appearances, they have the same social drives and instincts as humans. Though fictional, they still serve as hypothetical thought experiments with applications in the real world. If they seek a love life, their only options are going to be interspecies or incest. (And even Spike/Slash is a different species of turtle from the other turtles.) Could you honestly tell such a person that they must never be allowed to have any sort of mature love life because they're a different species from every other non-incestuous option? Just because of other people's potential disgust towards such a relationship?

And another consideration: 2012 TMNT isn't the only TMNT universe. The others have had characters having romantic relationships with other characters of different species, up to and including the following adult intimate relationships: Leonardo with Radical, Michelangelo with Sara (third base), Michelangelo with Seri, Raphael with Ninjara, and April with Casey (though they didn't find out April wasn't human until they were already married), just to name the ones that come to the top of my head. April and Casey had been trying in vain to have children before she found out, and Seri actually managed to lay eggs after her rendezvous with Mike. I think the ship has long since sailed on TMNT multiverse interspecies love. :)