Board Thread:New on TMNTPedia/@comment-27896416-20161207160823/@comment-995426-20190930080416

Okay, so...for a moment, let's talk about love. And why I find relationships like Mikey and Leatherhead's (and also April and Donnie's) so much more compelling than the manufactured waifus of later seasons.

There are different kinds of love. Platonic love, romantic love, intimate love, the love of immediate family members, etc. They also tend to exhibit themselves differently.

Sometimes people develop an infatuation, which is often one-sided but sometimes can be mutual. This is a strong hormonally-driven attraction that overwhelms body and mind. What they call "love at first sight." It can also be very dangerous because it can so, so easily blow up in your face and crash and burn in disaster once you run into utterly irreconcilable differences. Infatuation is what Donnie initially had that for April, what Leo initially had for Karai, etc. It can develop into something more stable loving, though, under the right circumstances, but the path can still be a turbulent one.

There's also the gradual familiarity over time, in that you feel reassured by someone's presence and you feel diminished by their absence. This can lead to a perfectly platonic friendship, but it can also lead to romance.

In addition to the hormone dopamine I mentioned before and the involuntary effects it has on the irises of the eyes, there are also telltale behaviors of a more romantic attachment, and one of the biggest of these is a strong recurring need to be in sustained close physical contact. The hugging, the rubbing, the cuddling, the kissing. The tactile pair bonding behavior of potential mates. This can lead to something a lot more intimate, but sometimes people, especially if they are actively aware of it, want to pace themselves and not rush into things.

I can't really say whether this kind of restraint is something Mikey and Leatherhead actively sought, but it remains undeniable that they were not just holding each other affectionately for long periods of time, but they were sleeping together like this. It's possible they may not have been aware what was happening at first, but they almost certainly did later. Why? Because one of two things was likely: They either became more intimate, or they made a conscious decision not to become more intimate, both of which involve the understanding that greater intimacy had become likely. So even if then they had decided not to become a formal item, it still would have become extremely unlikely they didn't at least come to know that they were in love, whether this was a realization each made to themselves or whether it was something they recognized and acknowledged together. And later on it was certainly true that by the episode Battle for New York, it became impossible for Mikey and Leatherhead to see each other without racing into each other's arms and holding each other for extended periods, and this happened no less than three times in the space of a single hour-long episode. Boyfriends or not boyfriends, they were and remained very much in love.

With IDW Mikey and Slash, something similar applied. There weren't quite as many strongly homoromantic moments as with 2K12 Mikey and Leatherhead (particularly because comics publish less frequently), but they would still become reflexively tactile upon meeting as time went on. And there was the whole thing with Mikey staring longingly at a photograph of him and the recently deceased Slash and saying how he loved him. Again, they may or may not have toyed with the idea of a romantic relationship, but there were still times when they appeared to behave like people in love.

And now...the problem with the waifus of later 2K12. "I think I love you." "I think I love you too." "Let's be boyfriend and girlfriend." "Okay." "Look at how in love we are." "We were meant to be together." Basically, anything that comes close to resembling this. That may be enough to convince young children, but it's enough to insult the intelligence of older people, not to mention nauseate them. These relationships are far too shallow, far too easy, far to fast, and involve far too much undisguised juvenile wish fulfillment fantasy. This is why Mikey and Renet were terribly written, and why Raph and Y'gythgba were even more terribly written. It's not that the idea of these relationships happening at all were flawed, but that their delivery fatally flawed them from the onset. These didn't build character development into something more appreciably complex and layered&mdash;these derailed the characters involved. On top of that, they made it all but impossible for the recently-introduced preordained love interests to be taken as anything more serious than a glorified blow-up doll. I mean, sure, give characters an infatuation, give them a meet-cute, give them chemistry, tension and moments of frustration and epiphany. But don't do that. Just don't.  It's one of the most annoying, acrid, unholy plot devices known to fiction. Love may have many different kinds of onsets, but any love that can be appreciated as precious is a love that is earned. Not dropped in your lap, not won like a prize. Earned.

In this respect, it may have actually been helpful that Mikey and Leatherhead weren't quickly declared to be an item. They hit it off really quickly, but they were never shallow with each other, and it actually would have made sense that they weren't certain of more than that they cared about each other. Anything resembling a lasting relationship would have necessarily been established after they had spent more time together. I'm talking about parts between the episodes "It Came from the Depths" and "T.C.R.I." that we didn't see, but were later reflected in that startling scene from Mikey's memories.