Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25614818-20150529185748/@comment-995426-20191002011819

I posted this in another thread recently (since closed), but in retrospect it was more of an off-topic tangent. It's perfectly on-topic here, though.

No one who has already hit puberty sleeps and spoons like that unless there's a romantic or otherwise intimate factor involved, or at the very least when people are trying not to freeze to death, which is not the case here. If they were the opposite sex, that might certainly be more obvious, and even if it were to keep from freezing to death it would still appear extremely risqué. But it's no less true for the same sex. No amount of cognitive dissonance or mental gymnastics can make it not so.

And that was the whole point of the scene. The memory was startling to suddenly see because of the implications. Even my dad in his 70s immediately understood what was going on when he saw that scene. It was a very, very (homo)romantic moment that instantly rings mental bells for anyone who has been in that situation or been in a romance. It was a (then) shockingly intimate thing the show was flying across the radar. Now? It's not so shocking. Maybe it shouldn't have been shocking even then. It's something gay guys do sometimes when they want to be close and relax. If a male did that with a female, you would think they were in love. It was only relatively shocking at the time because a lot of shows still weren't showing that kind of thing, but now we have a lot more of them. In retrospect...they were a young couple, not so different from Warren and Hypno, or Korra and Asami, or Ruby and Sapphire, or Princess Bubblegum and Marceline, or Blubs and Durland. They didn't even have to be in a relationship or think they could have been in a relationship&mdash;the hormones (strong pulses of dopamine, etc.) were still there.

Like I said, you may think whatever you want of them. But that happened, and it's very hard for a person&mdash;especially an older person&mdash;to mistake for anything else if they were really being honest with themselves.

That stuff was also happening around the same time IDW Mikey and Slash had a very similar close bond with romantic overtones. They, too, characterized themselves as friends, but they still had some remarkably romantic exchanges, and even April noticed (and stared at) how affectionate they were together. And the way they repeatedly gave each other candy as a special token between them, they might as well have been giving each other flowers. After Slash died, Mikey admitted to loving Slash, though Leo observed that Mikey seems to love everyone. The relationship was shown in the language of ambiguity and plausible deniability, but there was enough there to make you think maybe they were more than simply friends.

My take is that it's possible 2K12 Mikey and Leatherhead did not necessarily think of themselves as boyfriends. They just acted like them, because the same chemical process was happening anyway that made them bond romantically whether they intended it or not&mdash;that's why they call it "falling in" love. And Mikey may have also genuinely been polyamorous, similar to the way IDW Mikey has multiple crushes and keeps spreading love and friendship around to practically everyone, with the exception of a strong reciprocated resentment of Hob.



"I thought we were friends." But the sudden dramatic dilation of his eyes is what happens when a strong jolt of dopamine floods the system. This was by far one of my favorite easter eggs in the entire 2012 TV series, and whoever scripted that was a genius for detail. Mikey may not even have been actively aware of it, but his irises were telegraphing loud and clear that he was in love with the person he was talking to.

Okay, so...for a moment, let's talk about the nature of love. And why I find relationships like Mikey and Leatherhead's (and also April and Donnie's) so much more compelling than the manufactured waifus of later seasons.

There are different kinds of love. Platonic love, romantic love, intimate love, the love of immediate family members, etc. They also tend to exhibit themselves differently.

Sometimes people develop an infatuation, which is often one-sided but sometimes can be mutual. This is a strong hormonally-driven attraction that overwhelms body and mind. What they call "love at first sight." It can also be very dangerous because it can so, so easily blow up in your face and crash and burn in disaster once you run into utterly irreconcilable differences. Infatuation is what Donnie initially had for April, what Leo initially had for Karai, etc. It can develop into something more stable loving, though, under the right circumstances, but the path can still be a turbulent one.

There's also the gradual familiarity over time, in that you feel reassured by someone's presence and you feel diminished by their absence. This can lead to a perfectly platonic friendship, but it can also lead to romance.

In addition to the hormone dopamine I mentioned before and its involuntary effects, there are also telltale behaviors of a more romantic attachment, and one of the biggest of these is a strong recurring need to be in sustained close physical contact. The hugging, the hands, the cuddling, the kissing. The tactile pair bonding behavior of potential mates. This can lead to something a lot more intimate, but sometimes people, especially if they are actively aware of it, want to pace themselves and not rush into things.

I can't really say whether this kind of restraint is something Mikey and Leatherhead actively sought. The show was very obviously not going to delve into those details, nor should it have, for a variety of very good reasons. Yet it remains undeniable that they were not just holding each other affectionately for long periods of time, but they were sleeping together like this. It's possible they may not have been aware at first that they were in love, but they almost certainly did later, for entirely predictable reasons. And later on it was certainly true that by the episode "Battle for New York", it became impossible for Mikey and Leatherhead to see each other without racing into each other's arms and holding each other for extended periods, and this happened no less than three times in the space of a single hour-long episode. Boyfriends or not boyfriends, they were and remained very much in love.

With IDW Mikey and Slash, something similar applied. There weren't as many strongly homoromantic moments as with 2K12 Mikey and Leatherhead (particularly because comics publish less frequently), but they would still become increasingly reflexively tactile upon meeting as time went on. And there was the whole thing with Mikey staring grief-stricken at a photograph of himself and the recently deceased Slash, and saying how he loved him. Again, the characters may or may not have toyed with the idea of a romantic relationship, but there were still times when they appeared to behave like people in love.

And now...the problem with the waifus of later 2K12. "I think I love you." "I think I love you too." "Let's be boyfriend and girlfriend." "Okay." "Look at how in love we are." "We were meant to be together." Basically, anything that comes close to resembling this. That may be enough to convince young children, but it's enough to insult the intelligence of older people, not to mention nauseate them. These relationships are far too shallow, far too easy, far to fast, and involve far too much undisguised juvenile wish fulfillment fantasy. This is why Mikey and Renet were terribly written, and why Raph and Y'gythgba were even more terribly written. It's not that the idea of these relationships happening at all were flawed, but that their delivery fatally flawed them from the onset. These didn't build character development into something more appreciably complex and layered&mdash;these derailed the characters involved. On top of that, they made it all but impossible for the recently-introduced preordained love interests to be taken as anything more serious than a glorified blow-up doll. I mean, sure, give characters an infatuation, give them a meet-cute, give them chemistry, tension and moments of frustration and epiphany. But don't do that. Just don't.  It's one of the most annoying, acrid, unholy plot devices known to fiction. Love may have many different kinds of onsets, but any love that can be appreciated as precious is a love that is earned. Not dropped in your lap, not won like a prize. Earned.

In this respect, it may have actually been helpful that Mikey and Leatherhead weren't quickly declared to be any kind of item. They hit it off really quickly, but they were never shallow with each other, and it actually would have made sense that they weren't certain of more than that they cared about each other. Anything resembling a lasting relationship would have necessarily been established after they had spent more time together. I'm talking about parts between the episodes "It Came from the Depths" and "T.C.R.I." that we didn't see, but were later reflected in that startling scene from Mikey's memories.