MUST rant about the disaster duo stuff for a second.
it’s prolly a fandom hot take that I DO NOT like fanon disaster duo. like, at all. obviously these characters are just dolls that people get to play around with and make their own stories with, and I love people’s creativity!! I think it’s very cool that people are so invested in these characters and honestly the stories people make with their whole “twin” thing is mind blowing. Poetic, even.
buuuut at a certain point, it just feels like poeple are stretching leo and Donnie’s characters into something they definitely weren’t originally, you know? because SO MUCH of the content I see of them is sickening codependency. and like I get if you think it’s cute to see Leo and Donnie being close twins, but I mean… I’m praying that y’all know that outside of your story, they are DEFINITELY not that close. I mean they’re brothers so they obviously love eachother a lot. But the way I see them characterized sometimes pisses me off.
this kinda stems back to my fanon leo mischaracterization post, but so much of what I see in the fandom is “Leo and Donnie this!” “Leo and Donnie that!” while mischaracterizing them in a way that also somehow disrespects and disregards their connections with every single other character! Its insane! Pretty much everything I see about them is something happening to one of the “twins” and the other being really broken about it and Mikey and Raph acting as nothing more than therapists who “simply cannot understand the level of twinship Leo and Donnie have with eachother!!”. sometimes it borderlines making Mikey and Raph and brothers which I do NOT stand for. (also note that Mikey and Raph are more often than not being written by people who have NO GRASP on how their characters/minds work, and leave them as empty husks of a turtle. even if a character isn’t your favorite, the least you can do for your audience is learn how to write them.)
aaaaaand here is where we get to thing that inspired this post to begin with. The Twin Thing™. if you’ve noticed during this I’ve refrained from calling them twins without the necessary quotation marks, and that’s because I’m not going to because I don’t think they’re twins. (Which is hella petty, but I’m gonna do it anyway.) It’s pretty much canon at this point that Leo and Donnie are twins, and somehow they have come to a mutual agreement on this. This is….. uh in the nicest way possible, troublingly out of character? Seeing eachother as twins and calling eachother so possesses a level of self reflection, self consciousness, and emotional intelligence neither of them quite possess, especially at the young ages I see them headcanoned as telling eachother about their twin stuff. I guess I kind of understand people seeing two characters who are similar in height, stature, shape, and who bicker constantly and thought “wow, definitely twins right there!” But really, aside from them both being fan-favorites, there is like. Absolutely no basis for them being twins. I’m pretty sure people only saw two characters they liked separately and thought “huh. wouldnt it be cool if they were like super duper close?” which I guess.. yeah? A lot of the stuff I see about them is super touching and is pretty decently written, but a lot of it seems fundamentally empty because I know these characters would never act this way because they wouldn’t see eachother as twins, nor would they have the twin senses everyone’s talking about. Honestly, in the show, they constantly bicker, and aren’t really that close! The one Leo n Donnie centric episode we have is them competing agaisnt eachother. Not to say that siblings who are competitive can’t love eachother, because they obviously love eachother to the moon and back. But they wouldn’t love eachother more than they love their other brothers.
if you’re asking my honest and humble opinion? Leo and Raph are the true twins in ROTTMNT. The magnetic twins partnership has a lot of hints alluding to this in the show, like Leo being the only one to care when Raph is missing in Man Vs. Sewer for example (something i’m sure that disaster duo fans would use as hard evidence for them being twins if Raph was Donnie.) But in the MOVIE? Oh don’t get me STARTED. Them both sacrificing themselves to save the other? Pure gold (and pure twin behavior if you ask me.) The Kraang Raph and Leo fight scene? LOOK AT LEO’S FACE. LEO’S FACE IS THE FACE OF SOMEONE WHO’S HAVING TO FIGHT HIS TWIN, THE TWIN HE’S BEEN AVOIDING AND MAKING OUT TO BE HIS ENEMY FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS. And in the Bad Future, when Leo wears RAPH’S ARM for a prosthetic once he’s dead?? Literal fan behavior dude. It’s wild. Also, in all of the other iterations I’ve watched, I’ve considered Raph and Leo to be the twins. Why should it be different in rise? @somethin-strange-27 said it perfectly, actually. “They both have the same issues while desperately wanting the other be normal and okay.” that pretty much summarizes the movie. And I can hear the angry mob already, “oh no! but they can’t be twins! they’re both soooo different, they can’t be biological twins!” Well, in almost every fanwork i’ve seen about the disaster duo, being twins is more of a state of mind rather than them being “biological” twins. Them being twins hits home for me more than any random pairing of two popular characters does because they mirror eachother MUCH more closely than leo and donnie.
my final issue with them is that all the disaster twin fans pretty much block out every single other fan of any other duo. It’s been said in @t1atam3ra’s post about the other duos, but there’s so much to the other duos that gets pushed to the side in favor of non-canon and mischaracteristic disaster duo content, meaning that other duos never truly get their chance to shine. Sometimes I even see media that steals rare moments from other duos and makes it disaster focused, which I mean. Sure. Play with your dolls, I guess. Everyone’s entitled to that. But if you’re entitled to do that I’m entitled to feel atleast a little angry about it.
And that concludes my rant. If you actually read all of this then I applaud you. Feel free to DM me if you wanna hear more (surprisingly I could’ve gone on LONGER, but I cut some of it out for convenience’s sake. (Especially if you wanna hear more about how the fandom disrespects raph and Mikey, mostly raph.)) if you disagree then you can just block me or scroll lmao, I definitely don’t expect everyone to like this take.
also note, I DO NOT hate the disaster duo. It’s very fun and chaotic and evil and bickery and I love it. I only have a distaste for the large majority of interpretations of their relationship. Anyways that’s it
