Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26489974-20160315055507/@comment-995426-20171013012200

Well, that post was also done in role-playing style, so my question to "Raph" was meant to sound almost like another version of Raph himself was asking that question: Cattily with unflinching bluntness. That's why it sounds "angry."

The argument isn't necessarily that Raph is trans. Calling him a "sister" or "bitch" or "gurl" is largely in relation to his personality traits, which can be used cattily in reference to certain flavors of cisgender gay men. (The spelling "gurl" instead of "girl" is especially used in this context.) I have no doubt this Raphael is cisgender, but that doesn't mean cisgender people cannot have queer (in the non-derogatory sense) personality traits. With Raph, it was also his indifference to the presence of women (which his brothers did not exhibit), while also having the most intuitive understanding of a woman's mind (having a unique insight into the minds of both April and Karai). But this is only one way Raph changed after season 2. The other complaints&mdash;his inability to show convincing anger, how easily he's schmuck-baited, how he went from being pleasantly catty to unpleasantly douchy, etc.&mdash;thsse problems were at least as serious in derailing his character development. I never necessarily needed Raph to be queer&mdash;there are other far less queer versions of Raphael who are still relatively well-written. But I wanted him to be a well-written character, and he really stopped being one.

And yes, I have Mikey pegged as pansexual...and likely polyamorous. But even he seemed to be written a bit disingenuously in later seasons, like in "Turtles in Time" where he is written to imply that, by virtue of never having a girlfriend, he has never been in love, when the show previously repeatedly teased he's been in love with Leatherhead. But even in other ways his character development has genuinely suffered, especially as the series came to downplay his earthy wise-beyond-his-years sensitive side and cast him more as extremely recklessly stupid for laughs. Even early seasons Mikey, with as clumsy as he could be, was not such a liability. The first strong sign of his incompetence was in "Mikey Gets Shellacne", when he becomes too dumb to live by spreading very clearly-labeled reject-retromutagen on his skin. That plot was just bad. This aspect of him just ratcheted into full gear in season 3 and 4.

And I actually have been accumulating a trove of gaydar evidence. I've constructed over 1000 animated GIFs from the 2012 TV series for Turtlepedia, and the vast majority of GIFs from the series you'll find on this site are mine: User:Gilgameshkun/GIFs. Watching and rewatching and rewatching episodes has helped me notice all sorts of subtle little details, and GIF animation software can be a dangerous toy in the wrong hands. :) And among my many 2012 series GIF galleries, I also constructed this one specifically for gaydar blips: User:Gilgameshkun/GIFs/Blips (2012 TV series).  Up to this point, the 2012 series had far more gaydar blips than any other version of TMNT.  Mirage certainly never had this many.

I'll also admit that my impression of Raphael as "sisterly" is informed at least in part by my own experiences. I have older brothers and older sisters. My sisters have always been gruffer, blunter and more likely to slap someone for misbehaving than my brothers ever were. I see this same kind of sisterly sass in Raphael, in addition to the wiser, more sensitive sisterly moments when he intervenes to help Donnie make less of a fool of himself in front of April. So when I call Raph a "sister," I do so part tongue-in-cheek and part in reference to his sister-like traits. But in serious text, his familial relation to the other turtles is always that of a brother.

And Splinter dying... That's complicated. It's not the first version of TMNT where a version of Splinter has died. The problem is, the 2012 TV series repeated this trope until it lost all meaning. At the end of season 2, he didn't actually die, but his spirit was separated from his living body and April had to intervene to reunite them. Then he died at the end of season 3. Then he died again at the end of season 4. Another user months ago previously made the critical comment that Splinter was "double dragon balled." This series was just too fond of giving him repeat deaths (or other surrendings of the ghost) until such writing became cheap. It was reported during season 3 that they planned to kill off Splinter because his character was losing significance and they wanted to write something that would force his sons to abruptly mature from the loss. ...But it was not well-received, and they brought him back. ...And then they killed him off again. I must prefer the way Mirage has handled Splinter's life and death crises. Since that comics series actually allowed the turtles to age into adulthood, Splinter became less important as a parent to teenage sons, but he remained important as family, and he gained new importance as a grandparent. 2012 series Splinter was the most interesting version of Splinter, and he would have been awesome as a grandparent. Fortunately, Amazing Adventures (which was given permission to form a separate continuity) incorporated a few things from later seasons of the 2012 TV series, but kept Splinter alive. Not that AA didn't gradually decline in quality as well&mdash;just not as badly as the 2012 series itself did.