rest of my human designs for the 2012 and rise turtles 🐢!! (leo)

Sorry not sorry, @goatlilly, but I'm obsessed with the Minnie Miraculous AU.

the two types of minecraft players

Dame Chanda

Yesterday I watched my best friend fail catastrophically at basketball 🤓☝️, and I remembered Donnie, and the question came to me...

Do you think Donn is good at any sport???

LMFAO DEFINITELY NOT

magnetic duo would be insufferable about beating him everytime they play a game of any sport..

Fun AU idea for Miraculous

So like…. Miraculous, but small. I thought, what if Master Fu was trying to make power ups without the grimoir and accidentally did something that age locked all the miraculous, making it so that they can only be used by elementary schoolers? (All except the Turtle, cuz he was wearing it.) I know, it makes no sense, but like….

Miraculous. But small. Really I just wanted Manon as Ladybug. And just the idea of Marinette as the Turtle running around and trying to coral all these little kids with superpowers while trying to fight Akkumas is just… really really funny to me. So yeah—you’ve got Chris as the cat and Alya’s twin sisters as the Fox and the Bee. And that’s the ida. :)

Why Rise Raph and Mikey are Unappreciated and Underrepresented in the Fandom: Leo/Donnie Favoritism, Anti-Black Racism, and Sizeism

It's refreshing to see that more Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans nowadays seem to be waking up to the fact that Leo and Donnie get way more attention from the fandom than Raph and Mikey do. However, what's still missing from most of these discussions is exactly why that's the case.

With Raph and Mikey being voiced by Black actors (Omar Benson Miller and Brandon Mychal Smith, respectively) and Raph being a character with a big, burly physique, anti-Black racism and sizeism (in the case of Raph) are definitely factors in all of this. In contrast, Leo and Donnie are voiced by white actors, and both characters have a much smaller build than Raph does. And in the world that we live in with both anti-Blackness and sizeism, sadly and upsettingly, being the norm, it's easy to see why Leo and Donnie receive the favoritism that they do compared to Raph and Mikey.

But this favoritism doesn't just begin and end with the RotTMNT fandom because the series itself shows a preference for Leo and Donnie as well. Arguably, it's those two who receive most of the focus in the show, with many episodes revolving around them or being from their point of view.

The way both the series and the fandom downplay Raph’s parentification due to Splinter’s neglect also is a notable example of how a Black-coded and big teenage character like Raph is treated so dismissively by the creators, writers, and fans. After having raised his three younger brothers for years, Raph has his role as team leader stripped from him by his neglectful father with that role given to his much thinner, white actor-voiced brother, Leo. And, that's not even going into the proverbial mess that is the season two episode "Raph’s Ride Along," which makes light of police brutality and profiling against a Black(-coded) child. The adultification of Black children, and in this instance, specifically large Black boys, is likewise tied into the implications of "Raph’s Ride Along" as well as Raph’s treatment within the series overall. Honestly, all of that deserves its own write-up, but that'll have to be for another time.

Anyway, my point is that Raph and Mikey, especially Raph, haven't been given as much appreciation or grace by pretty much anyone, including the folks who made the series. All this also serves as a reminder for why it's important to have Black talent on all levels of production, not just as performers but as creators and producers. Or if not that, at the very least, projects should have non-Black creators who have enough know-how to portray Black/Black-coded characters adequately, treating them with as much care, attention, and respect as they would their white/white-coded counterparts. RotTMNT fans could also stand to do more questioning as to why they don't feel as drawn to represent Raph and Mikey as much as they do Leo and Donnie.

DUCK STANS LETS RISE UP AGAIN

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

"Ninjago!" I yell before spinning directly into a wall knocking myself out

IM GONNA BE GONE UNTIL WEDNESDAY.

take these stupid memes for compensation in the stead of my usual amazing posts

mostly magnetic duo bc i say so

they both discover the magic of friendship

ROTTMNT ART CHALLENGE DAY 13: Sunita!!

Some cleaned up sketches of everyone’s favourite slime girl <3 (If she’s not your favourite slime girl I apologise)

Sunita they could never make me hate you

AU Masterpost

Closeups, colour pallet and textposts under the cut!

Michelangelo would be the type of guy to eat vanilla pudding out of a mayo jar to fuck with his brothers.

Made this post then realized i wanted to make it into a comic instead. So i did!!

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