Board Thread:New on TMNTPedia/@comment-25877223-20150202042533/@comment-995426-20160508094231

There's some things I feel you need to understand. People like myself believe in valuing sentience as a measure of personhood, and the logical extension of that is that a theoretical sentient being (for instance, someone we read about in a story) is a theoretical person. This is not necessarily something that must be learnt&mdash;sometimes we just instinctively see the sentient being as a person. You see, I've always been fascinated by the idea that not only do real people come in lots of different shapes, colors and sizes, but that people can come in even more different shapes, colors and sizes, and they are all still people like you or me. All these differences need not be barriers to accepting a person for everything they are: feathers and all.

Now consider that there are people who become interested in stories like TMNT because of how well the story appeals to this very idea. We see characters with thoughts, feelings, joys, sorrows, but above all we are dared to see them as people because of who they are rather than because of what they look like. When someone suggests that these fictional characters should be seen first as animals and that it's somehow invalid or unnatural to see them as people, to some of us it looks too much like a racist attitude, offending us in the same way as when they see real world racism. It offends us because it implicitly dehumanizes someone we see already as a person and sympathize with; we know that, if we were in that person's place, it would feel hurtful to us.

Ultimately, you decide your own values and your own likes and your own dislikes. You are welcome to them in your own life. But you could have saved yourself some trouble by not trying to limit the ways other people recognize what makes a person a person. You don't have to be comfortable with it, but you do have to treat it with respect, because there are few things that can affect us more personally than whether we are seen and treated as people.