#ask welcome

“HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!AS A DAMN TREAT HERE!”

Two forms are thrown out a rift tumbling to the ground.

You all know them.

“GO HAVE FUN WITHT THESE FUCKERS!”

[original miner and diamond are open for asks! Happy late pride!!!]

You mentioned the boys trying to stay together in order to make Actually Worrisome Kidnapping (from an outside party) more apparent—Does your Donnie plant trackers on anybody?

Does Draxum have them patrolling (or something else?) to test their combat skills, or is it mostly in-home sparring instruction?

Which of the boys is most likely to signal their location to one of the co-parents that they're ready to be "kidnapped"/taken home?

Have any of the boys ever individually gone to stay with another parent during an argument? (sibling argument or otherwise!)

What's something about your AU that you're especially proud of?

What aspect of your AU would you say diverges the most from the source material?

You mentioned the boys trying to stay together in order to make Actually Worrisome Kidnapping (from an outside party) more apparent—Does your Donnie plant trackers on anybody?

Donnie has trackers on everyone(of course) but he rarely needs to use them. Their parents don’t confiscate their phones or anything when they kidnap them. So usually a text is enough to let the others know where they’re at. 

Does Draxum have them patrolling (or something else?) to test their combat skills, or is it mostly in-home sparring instruction?

Draxum had to tone down the child soldier thing down hard. He’s got a very insistent social worker(who shall be introduced later) hanging over his shoulder. If he was obviously training the kids as weapons he could lose all rights to custody and have an even harder time getting to the boys.

So he needs to convince the kids to train on their own terms. He would probably be more successful if the crux of his plan wasn't to kill all of humanity. Donnie wouldn’t be entirely opposed but he’s gonna need more concrete evidence than a prophecy to enact his plans. Mikey isn’t down for genocide but he likes training his mystic mojo with his pops. He’s good at it and can always whine and complain if Draxum pushes him too hard. Raph is the closet Draxum has gotten to convincing one of his kids, unfortunately Raph draws a line at genocide.

Leo just doesn't like his Pops, so even if he brought the whole humanity is evil thing he probably wouldn't do anything about it just to spite him.

Which of the boys is most likely to signal their location to one of the co-parents that they're ready to be "kidnapped"/taken home?

Ohhh that's an interesting one I actually haven't thought about it, lets see.

Leo usually doesn't need to, if he needs to see another parent he can sneak out himself. He would usually rather just stay with Splinter but his brothers like to spend time with each parent. So Leo sticks with them and waits out until Splinter comes to pick them up.

Mikey would try to be the mediator and make sure they were spending equal amounts of time with each parent. He keeps a long list and schedule of how long each parent has had them(it’s colour coded in case the brothers get split up). He tries to orchestrate everyone but his plans are often disregarded by his opportunistic and stubborn parents.

Raph is the one who gets homesick and will signal whoever he misses most that he’s ready to be picked up. Usually he tries to gather his brothers and get them ready to go. Subtly as to not hurt the feelings of whichever parent he’s with. That's also the same reason they don’t tend to break out themselves- don’t want to upset whoever they’re with.

Donnie will reach out whenever he’s overwhelmed or needs to be in a particular space. This is usually Big Mama who always keeps his room open and is more than happy to have him. It’s usually more peaceful in the hotel. Draxum is always all over them about training and destiny. Whereas Splinters life as a celebrity can lack privacy. Big mama will let him decompress alone while she uses his mere presence there to her advantage. She also has better security so kidnappings to get them back from here are often more discrete and less eruptive.

Have any of the boys ever individually gone to stay with another parent during an argument? (sibling argument or otherwise!)

Oh absolutely, they all have their favourites, which I discussed in another ask, and will go to them whenever they are upset. Even if they don’t need comfort, it is convenient to have places to go away from what’s annoying you.

What aspect of your AU would you say diverges the most from the source material?

Besides from how they grew up I would say Draxum. This man is feral, unhinged, liable to have rabies. His design was just too supervillain chaotic in this simplified style to give him any dignity. The yokai had to juggle a messy divorce, two bitching coparents, four chaotic children who don’t want to put their energy towards the one thing he needs them to, and a social worker who knows he’s full of shit and is waiting for any excuse. He’s lost his sanity and would bite his canonical self if they ever met.

What's something about your AU that you're especially proud of?

The art style! I was doing a market yesterday and was sitting there bored. I already had the idea for this au since last year before my burn out hit. But I didn’t draw it because I was dreading drawing more of the same when I could spend more time working on comics with bigger plots. At most before yesterday it was going to be one or two stand alone comics just to throw the idea out there and get it out of my head. But I had time between customers at the market and started sketching. I got really excited and thought this au would be the perfect vehicle to keep doodling.

I spent a good three hours trying to decide what I wanted for the colours but once I did? Dude I’ve drawn ten different comics for this already. The ONLY thing slowing me down is that I have to go to work.

Ahhh thank you! Actually posted the second chapter just now so I will be continuing. As for writing tips I’ve never been asked that, so this is gonna come out rambly and very much neurodivergent.

I’ll first establish I have aphantasia, meaning I don’t ‘picture’ things so much as I think in words(and in abstract concepts of movement). So when I write I don’t spend much time describing what things look like, I can’t picture it so why would I spend time explaining what it should look like? This means my writing is very dialogue heavy. It focuses on what character are saying and how they sound and what they do when they say it(because of how I think about movement)

So one of my best writing tips is when I get stuck or am slowing down with a scene I’ll start jotting down the dialogue. No actions in between, no they said this or that, no quotation marks they waste time, usually I won’t even note characters names and trust future me to know. Or trust I've written the charcters with strong enough individual voices that it's obvious at least to me. For example later in the fic is this scene:

We actually don't have a last name

Not until we had to go to school then we had to choose one

We didn’t really know what to pick so we settled on Stockman!

Stockman

Yep that’s our cousins last name and Baxter Stockman technically created us so that makes him our uncle-dad

I see, here Baxter Stockman is an associate of the shredder

… yeah we learnt that yesterday, but our Baxter stockman never did anything really bad!

Unless you count animal extermination as bad

Which we do

It’s still better than going with something like Smith

Writing it like this means the dialogue flows better. It also helps my brain out since I don’t have to constantly switch tracks meaning I can write faster. Also lets me move onto other scenes I have the itch to make. Often I won’t come back and fill in the gaps until I’m editing.

Another thing that helps me is using the fact fanfiction comes with prebuilt stories to work on top of. I like having an episode with premade plot points to build off of. My best example of this is another fic I wrote, The Bat Trap which was based on The Parent Trap(a movie I love). In it I had a bunch of one liners and situations from the movie that I wanted to include, so I would follow(and adapt) the plot to fit and follow. While in other places I could go off script so I wasn’t following it word by word. To this day it’s the only longform fic I’ve completed and that's entirely due to following a movie plot, so I had an endpoint I could work towards. Instead of an overeaching storyline I made myself with no end in sight.

And my best piece of advice! Give yourself a voice in your story. Especially if you’re doing something comedic. It’s all well and good to give your characters hilarious lines but ultimately only a fraction of your writing is going to be dialogue. Most of it is that connective tissue, what characters are thinking, where they are, what they’re doing. So think as the ‘narrator’ of these parts as a character equally capable of jokes. Such as my favourite technique the ‘smash cut’. My art for the first chapter is an example of that. 

“They will be fine”

“Mikey was not fine”