Thread:Trigger009/@comment-995426-20151217235540/@comment-995426-20151224051305

What the hell are you talking about? Raphael has never been gay. It's more sensitive and respectful to treat people and characters as undefined, who may be hetero, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, male-brained, female-brained, transgender, genderfluid, whatever. When someone implies it's preposterous that it was ever possible for a character to have been gay, it sends a message that gay people are unwelcome. And it touches on a raw nerve: LGBT people still feel largely invisible and marginalized in popular all-ages entertainment. By feeling less invisible and positively represented as a demographic, they feel like popular culture respects them more.

And when it seems like a character who is gay (or perceived to be gay) is being retooled and rewritten in such a way that all their most subtle gaydar-tripping characteristics disappear altogether (as gradually happened to Raphael during season 3), it feels even worse to a gay audience than having felt invisible all along. And I know it's not just gay people who feel this&mdash;I have other TMNT fan friends who are persons-of-color who are upset the show has been gradually erasing visible human ethnic minorities by mutating most of the characters who are persons-of-color (Xever, Baxter, Zeck), so that most of the remaining human characters are Caucasian or vaguely Japanese.