Thread:Sonicisawesome2448/@comment-995426-20160128044156/@comment-995426-20160129073941

Okay, bit at a time.

Unlocking Raph's full potential may have been one of Slash's reasons, but if you pay attention to his mannerisms and his body language, he is extremely obsessed with Raph, where he alternates touching affection with savage violence, especially before Raph realizes Slash has gone axe-crazy. Check Slash and Destroy/Animations&mdash;I've made more GIFs for that episode that any other.

I've heard that suggestion about Leatherhead before, but I don't think it holds enough water. Leatherhead is intelligent, he speaks in full sentences, he and Mikey have complete conversations. I suppose it can depend on how Leatherhead is seen to begin with&mdash;if you see him first and foremost as a person instead of like a pet dog, then their scenes together are extremely sensual. There's also little easter eggs like that scene with Mikey literally hanging off Leatherhead's arm while Mikey still had his feet on the floor ("hanging off his arm" is a relatively more mature dating metaphor), and the scene where Mikey pleaded to Leatherhead and Mikey's pupils spontaneously dilated (which happens when the brain gets a rush of dopamine, the chemical of romantic longing). I can see how a lot of things may have been easy to overlook with someone unfamiliar with gay dating and romance. But for those of us who are, it was as subtle as an anvil dropping. Like I said, even my dad assumed they were a couple, and he's not even gay, but I've never known him to be ignorant of gay people either. The clincher was the sleeping-and-spooning scene in Into Dimension X!&mdash;if Leatherhead is to be considered a person who is past puberty (as Mikey also is), it's conventional wisdom that you just don't sleep and spoon with another guy without it having a romantic context. To be honest, I was more surprised that there was anyone who didn't notice it.

As for Mikey and Renet, Turtles in Time was one of the most ridiculed romance plots in TMNT history. Even many users who didn't care about Mikey with Leatherhead, thought that episode was terribly written. It was a fast, easy, shallow romance with no believable chemistry whatsoever, and all of Renet's personality was in her D-cup. When Tale of the Yokai further established that the time scepter destined them to meet (and by implication also fall in love), it became even worse, becoming a Twilight-level of bad. However, that said, again, I figured Mikey to be pansexual&mdash;it was always possible he could have loved someone like Renet, or April, or Karai, or whomever, but Renet and her episode plot were a waste of writing from the onset. Another way I put it back then: IDW Renet had the power to create new dimensions, while 2K12 Renet had the even more impressive power of reaching into the audience's mind and destroying dimensions, turning two-dimensional into one-dimensional.

And no, what I mentioned about Donnie was someone else's theory that I said I didn't believe. I'm sure Donnie is quite straight.

Well, both Raph and Karai are tomboyish, brash, impulsive, short-tempered, sarcastic, cynical, like to mess with other people's heads, and have a strong women's intuition. As I see it, Raph is what Karai could have been had she remained Miwa and been raised by Yoshi. The main difference between them are the men who raised them, but otherwise they are very similar sisters. As for Raph giving Leo advice (and Donnie advice), it wasn't just knowing what to say, it was appearing to have a strong intuitive sense of what's going on in a woman's head&mdash;or more accurately, what someone wants in a man. Combine Raph's keen women's intuition with the indifference to women he showed in season 1 and the scenes of implicit camaraderie he showed with April, and the gaydar signals could have hardly been more powerful for a TV-Y7 show.

Then there's the whole Raph and Slash thing, which took the behavioral and body language quirks established in season 1, and multiplied them exponentially. There's a reason I GIFfed that episode more than any other. :)