Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25614818-20150529185748/@comment-995426-20150530005930

Warning: Essay to follow. :P

What is romance exactly? As I understand it, romance is a strong love and emotional attachment with a degree of intimacy above and beyond a typical platonic relationship. This intimacy can be sexual, but it can sometimes just be intensely emotional, or non-sexually physical (hand-holding, spooning, lots of close physical contact in general).

The part of the show that really drove home to me that Mikey's love for Leatherhead is romantic, was his scene in Into Dimension X!, where he has a strongly emotional recollection of memories with Leatherhead. It's not just the spooning scene, but this entire sequence, where Mikey is strongly romanticizing his memories with Leatherhead in general. The intensity of love is part of the difference between mere love and being in love.

Although, to one of my friends who is from Maryland, the big giveaway was another scene in that same episode. Leatherhead offered to stay behind to cover the turtles' escape. It was a practical decision, and Leatherhead had already done that before, which is how he got stuck in Dimension X in the first place. But Mikey would emphatically have none of that, so he took Leatherhead's choice away from him, kicking him through the portal to the safety of Earth. This particular friend found strong meaning in Mikey acting quickly to save his man.

But all my TMNT fan friends and I were especially startled by Battle for New York's three romantic embrace scenes. Mikey ran and leapt into LH's arms at literally every reunion. And what Clash of the Mutanimals drove home is that this is the normal way the two of them meet and interact.

I recently made a compilation video of all of Mikey and LH's scenes together where they interact or discuss one another in any meaningful way. I showed it to yet another friend from Wales, who had never watched TMNT before. But he was startled by how gay most of the video was.

Mikey and LH are impulsively tactile, very strongly emotional, and they have no real personal space boundaries between them. It's not so much that they hug. Friends hug, but friends tend to stop holding each other after a few seconds. Mikey and LH don't maintain this "polite platonic distance". If they're near each other, they're each other's cushion and teddy bear. They seem to crave being close to each other. And they don't act like human and pet either&mdash;Leatherhead is intelligent, social, and speaks in complete clear sentences.

One could call them "friends with sleep-and-spoon benefits who share a strong love, attachment and affection", but it's really a lot simpler to call them "boyfriends". :)