Continued from a discussion that started at Thread:118450#176 and (as of this writing) was most recently mentioned at Thread:118450#196.
Let's discuss Lita, the newest mutant turtle in the IDW continuity.
Continued from a discussion that started at Thread:118450#176 and (as of this writing) was most recently mentioned at Thread:118450#196.
Let's discuss Lita, the newest mutant turtle in the IDW continuity.
Well if she is a reincarnation of someone, which I know it would be a retcon but maybe the Hamato's had a baby girl who died, Idk how she died. I just thought it would make sense if she was a reincarnation then it would be some related to the Hatamo Clan in someway like Shredder or a Familiy member.
Well, if Yoshi and Shen had had a baby girl who died, who would remember her now? Splinter's gone. Shen's gone. The Turtles have had a hard enough time recalling their own memories. A reincarnation of a baby who died is a reincarnation of a life that never really had a chance to live.
Of course, with Hamato Miwa (2012 TV series), what made that idea work was not that Miwa herself remembered her parents, but that her father was still alive to care that she was still out there, and that the man she had thought was her father kept lying to her for his own selfish reasons. Yet after Splinter himself died, the only real family Miwa still had was the Turtles by virtue of their mutual connection to Splinter.
The closest analogy I can think of to a new little girl coming into the Turtles' lives, is Shadow Jones (Mirage), and the Turtles had an opportunity to help raise her as uncles. Shadow even became closest to Uncle Raph of them all. No prior family link was required for her to become part of her family.
One could then reason that the same is true of Lita—she doesn't need to have any shared past, real or supernatural, to become a cherished part of their family. And yet it still tickles the imagination to think she could possibly be the reincarnation of someone they once knew and loved, but that's because the IDW Clan Hamato is the reincarnated structure that it is.
It was the Mirage continuity where no characters were necessarily related to each other. At best the four turtles could have been biological brothers but even this was never firmly established or even strictly necessary. Their family came into being because such a thing does not require people being related to each other in this life or any previous lives. To be clear:
Ultimately, it didn't matter how these characters were(n't) born or who was(n't) related to whom—they still formed a family.
Of course, with Hamato Miwa (2012 TV series), what made that idea work was not that Miwa herself remembered her parents, but that her father was still alive to care that she was still out there, and that the man she had thought was her father kept lying to her for his own selfish reasons. Yet after Splinter himself died, the only real family Miwa still had was the Turtles by virtue of their mutual connection to Splinter.
The closest analogy I can think of to a new little girl coming into the Turtles' lives, is Shadow Jones (Mirage), and the Turtles had an opportunity to help raise her as uncles. Shadow even became closest to Uncle Raph of them all. No prior family link was required for her to become part of her family.
One could then reason that the same is true of Lita—she doesn't need to have any shared past, real or supernatural, to become a cherished part of their family. And yet it still tickles the imagination to think she could possibly be the reincarnation of someone they once knew and loved, but that's because the IDW Clan Hamato is the reincarnated structure that it is.
It was the Mirage continuity where no characters were necessarily related to each other. At best the four turtles could have been biological brothers but even this was never firmly established or even strictly necessary. Their family came into being because such a thing does not require people being related to each other in this life or any previous lives. To be clear:
Ultimately, it didn't matter how these characters were(n't) born or who was(n't) related to whom—they still formed a family.
Even if I stopped liking the Mirage series by Volume 4, I'll admit that your statement is incredibly poignant.
So should Lita become a Ninja or not?
The kid can do whatever the heck she wants, or whatever the writers want her to do. Maybe they just want her to live a relatively normal, ninja-free life.
Well, I could imagine Lita at least having some defense and fitness training, like April and the orphans. But just as with the orphans, I think whether or not she becomes ninja should be her decision alone, and that's not the kind of decision she's in a position to make right now.
Wingnut II wrote: Lita. Short, but sweet. Not bad!
Yes, according to a released snippet of TMNT #104, the albino turtle didn't know her own name, so Jennika named her Lita. Short and sweet, without theme naming or legacy naming, much like Jenny herself. From what I've gleaned, "Lita" can be Latin for "gladly," but can also be a clipped form of any number of possible names that end with "-lita,"
I wonder... If Lita didn't have a name, then where did she come from? I have some clear memories from when I was as young as one or two years old, but I know not everyone remembers anything from that far back. I do know that unaccompanied children who don't know their own backgrounds have been a feature of literature before, such as Fantine from Les Miserables who was first found in her own youth as an unaccompanied street child. Lita could have been homeless even before she mutated, or her family abandoned her when she mutated or died during the EPF-Triceraton war, or she lost her parents for other reasons altogether. Or, possibly, she may not be a human-born mutant at all, but was an albino turtle who just happened to be at a certain place in the city at a certain time.
It might seem implausible for an animal-born mutant to develop speech or a sense of self in only six months, but the same thing happened to the Turtles (IDW). Granted, they already inherited from (at least fragmentary) memories from their past life as the Hamato Sons, but that wouldn't have taught them how to speak English, etc., which is relevant given that only Splinter and Michelangelo could remember from their past life how to speak Japanese. Splinter was already sentient with full past life recall even before mutation because of StockGen's psychotropic compound, but Mikey like his brothers never had that, so what he remembers (and what they can't remember) almost seems to be a matter of chance.
Another possibility is that Lita herself could be an animal-born mutant who is also a reincarnation. From Shredder and the Shredder in Hell miniseries, we already know that afterlives in-story do not strictly exist in linear time, and that the immortal spirits of people can be communed with on the other side even when theoretically a living incarnation of them is "still" alive, which was how Splinter's spirit could keep Saki company in the afterlife as soon as immediately after Saki's most recent death in Vengeance, part 6 even while Splinter himself was still alive. So I can't help but find myself wondering... Could Lita also be a reincarnation? And if so, of whom? It's not out of the realm of possibility that she could be a reincarnation of Tang Shen, or even of Splinter himself. ...Or she could just be a new character with no revealed previously cosmically connected history.
It would be interesting if she was an animal born mutant rather than a human as assumed; even though we saw the fallout of the mutagen bomb as affecting humans, it presumably affected animals in its range too.
You're absolutely right. So far, we've been generally assuming newly introduced Mutant Towners are human-born mutants, and that's usually been a safe assumption the more exotic (and non-native) their species are. Puggle is extremely unlikely to be animal-born, as platypuses are only indigenous to Australia. But I can't be certain about Bandit, as raccoons are indigenous to most of North America and have adapted to life in large cities. I also can't be certain about Diamond or the weasels for the same reason, though I've generally had the impression that the weasels are animal-born anyway.
Honestly i'm not a fan of human-born mutants. Almost all OC's in the fandom are human-born mutants. I guess original Mona Lisa started this trend. I prefer animal-born mutants.
Lita can also mean Joyful. And in Spanish the meaning of the name Lita is: Diminutive of Dolores: Sorrow.