Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25684889-20150822230425/@comment-995426-20151224194735

Well, in fairness, a lot of people don't see them that way (for whatever reason), but there are still people who do. For those that do, it comes down to perception, cumulative wisdom, cold-reading and intuition. Another issue that complicates this is the plastic nature of show production and its canon. There's a revolving door of writers, directors and storyboarders, and producers themselves can change their minds over time. So, the strong signals interpreted by certain audiences may have been very real and deliberate&mdash;at one time, the show may have actually been subtly (or not so subtly) presenting Raph and/or Mikey such that they registered on gay people's radar. Until showrunners like Nickelodeon are no longer averse to discussing things like this while a show is still airing (provoking the attention of "moral guardian" press has the potential of hurting some of their merchandise sales), we may never know what was going on behind the scenes.