Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20150613052057/@comment-995426-20150803100603

Well, again, I must apologize. I may have been mistaken, and I also had the slow onset of a really nasty panic attack. If I'd realized I was truly panicking, I'd have wanted to stay away until it was resolved. Instead, everyone got a front row seat. I try to keep my susceptibility to panic attacks more discreet, because it shouldn't all be about me&mdash;it should be about the show we all like. Really, I'm sorry about all that.

And, I would like to answer Rampagingjaeger's question, if I may. Like I said, I expected Mikey and Renet to fall in love. What I didn't expect was the implication that he'd never been in love before, when my friends and I truly believed he had. For a show I've been following so faithfully for some time now, it was truly jarring to hear that. Turtles in Time makes us feel invisible and ignored all over again. We're used to feeling invisible, but it's even worse when we feel like we've become visible, only to be treated like we were never visible to begin with.
 * The conclusions came from the collective common wisdom of me and my friends. I didn't really want to make this too personal on a demographic level, but in this area I guess now it's unavoidable, since I walked right into it without fully realizing it.  All my TMNT fan friends are also either gay, or very gay-friendly hetero people.  When it comes to entertainment in general, gay people have long felt ignored and invisible&mdash;nothing written for them to relate to.  Nickelodeon is different.  Young people today are different.  Glimmers of recognition abound.  There's no longer the automatic assumption that everyone is hetero or that gay people are uncommon.  And especially since Legend of Korra ended, it really has felt like a brave and optimistic new world of feeling visible in a good way.
 * This takes me to the second point. Most gay people, especially in a gay community, have a strongly exercised sense of "gaydar" (gay "radar"), based on the cumulative wisdom of life experience in helping realize, "Oh, that person is gay."  This tends to work in real life with a more accuracy than inaccuracy (some gay people are genuinely invisible to gaydar).  I suppose the pitfall here, is trying to apply it to fiction.  Writers don't always write what is realistic&mdash;they write whatever they want to write.  And since, once again, the gay demographics have been mostly invisible in the past, I suppose writers don't always consider how those gay audiences will perceive what they're seeing.
 * For Mikey, all my friends think he's having a relationship with Leatherhead, because it has so many strong similarities with what they've experienced or what they've seen in their friends, etc. For one thing, he is 15, and people often have their first loves at that age or even younger.  Secondly, the audience draws from their own experiences to relate to what's happening on the screen.  And Mikey and Leatherhead were pressing a lot of buttons.  I mean, just like with hetero people, whether you're in love with someone is not about whether you want to do them&mdash;it is deeply personal, emotional, etc.  And Mikey appeared to be falling in love the same way we did at that age.  And every time he bared his soul or felt a profound closeness and felt that eagerness to run into the guy's arms, we remember doing all those same things for the first time when we were about that age.  It's only natural to relate to it, and draw honest conclusions based on that.  We wanted to congratulate Nickelodeon for its courage in portraying such a love story we could relate to.
 * With Raph, his angst and drama with Slash helped, but it wasn't the only factor. Raph seems gay on his own, without being paired with someone.  Again, it comes down to the gaydar.  One of the underlying principles of gaydar, is that men and women are different.  Equal, but they still have their differences in perception, instinct, etc.  We know this because of the men and women we all know in our own lives.  But one thing that is disproportionately more common of gay males, is all the (often subtle) ways they behave more like our hetero sisters than like our hetero brothers.  Most gay males are not stereotypes, of course, and, again, the differences can be subtle.  So, with Raph, we see how he's...very sassy, extremely catty, appears to have a strong intuitive sense of someone wants from a man (which he keeps using to counsel Donnie on April or argue with Leo about Karai), and is always so indifferent to a woman's presence.  And, as if that weren't enough, when given the chance to freestyle dance, he vogues like a prima donna.  We know so many gay men just like this, but hardly any hetero men at all like this.  So, if this were the real world, we would strongly suspect Raph is gay.  Again, a good faith perception.
 * And I think maybe misunderstandings like these are what can happen when gay and hetero audiences are reluctant to talk about what each of them are seeing, or even dismiss each other out of hand. One person's honest understanding can look like another person's "poorly-written fanfiction," I suppose.  A hetero audience may not always think about the gay audience, but today's gay audience fundamentally wants not to feel like no one understands them, and now this even extends to what they watch on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network.