Board Thread:New on TMNTPedia/@comment-27896416-20161207160823/@comment-995426-20190929215331

I headcanoned that Leatherhead was still young himself when he first met the Turtles, and was large because he's just large. Either way, it seemed he'd had no real prior experience socializing, and Mikey brought that out of him.

Another thing to consider: If he was born on Earth but raised in Dimension X, the temporal differential applied just as much before he first escaped as it did when he was later trapped there. It's entirely possible he could have been born on Earth after the beginning of season 1, and his adolescence in Dimension X was just a blip on Earth. He was almost certainly born after the Turtles in any event, considering he was still young and green when he first escaped. So was Leatherhead robbing the cradle, or was Mikey robbing the cradle? Such a question is extremely unfair to someone like Leatherhead who was effectively a slave of the Kraang and wasn't given the freedom to choose how to live his life. So I just headcanon him as having been a teenager at his first meeting anyway.