Thread:The S/@comment-995426-20170603074713/@comment-995426-20170613005747

Well, knowing that Donatello took a sample of Splinter's fur is one thing. It's not uncommon for families to keep physical mementos of loved ones who have passed on, such as locks of hair. Even my own family has done that, so I never had a reason to think anything unusual of it happening in fiction.

But I find the cloning arc entirely too eerily similar. It's something we'd seen in MNT Gaiden, but didn't necessarily expect to see from Mirage Donatello in such a strikingly similar fashion with so many of the same circumstances&mdash;Donatello, cloning Splinter, in a secret lab, keeping a secret from everyone, then being discovered when someone stumbles onto it, and a fight breaks out (though for different reasons). People have spotted allusions to other Mirage TMNT scenes with less similarity. I'd rather lean towards keeping the trivia point and image intact.

Also, I learnt something recently after having a long online one-on-one talk with Sophie Campbell: Creators aren't forbidden from reading fanfiction or viewing fanart, and many of them certainly do casually browse it, even if discreetly. Sophie herself admitted to reading some MNT Gaiden, though it's not quite her cup of tea. We at Turtlepedia used to assume as a rule of thumb that this practically never happens because of issues of legal liability, but it does happen, which drastically raises the plausibility level of fan fiction osmosis even if we can't necessarily prove anything is an easter egg inspired by a fan work. It's still possible, as said before, that even if that osmosis does occur, there could still be issues of legal liability in admitting it, which raises a different plausibility level in such easter eggs being difficult to empirically prove. But hey, nothing exists in a vacuum, and for me, documenting eerie similarity is perfectly acceptable, as long as we're also clear on what kinds of proof of correlation exist or don't exist. Mysterious oddities are still very much relevant to the interests of trivia.