#turtleblogging

the exact SECOND Leo realizes he's stepped on a landmine

"that dress? with THOSE shoes?"

what the fuck are you doing Leo dot jpeg

hat inspector

AND

“You're fifteen?” April says.

It's such a nothing question in the face of the complete rearrangement her reality has gone through in the last hour. Walk me through it one more time. You're ninjas? The very polite rat is your father? You've been living underneath New York City this entire time and no one ever noticed and now I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering what else might be looking back at me from the other side of my bathroom drain?

Also, not to belabour a point, but - ninjas?

She really is working on not fighting what her eyes and ears are telling her, though, and the dual swords strapped to the back of the large humanoid reptile standing next to her haven't stopped being dual swords the last few times she snuck a glance at them. The empirical evidence is strong, and an April O'Neil who is not half-mad with fear and adrenaline is an April O’Neil who accepts rational conclusions - therefore, ninja mutant turtles it is.

This particular ninja mutant turtle's head turns towards her, and she marvels at how easy it is to read the awkward wariness on features that have so little in common with her own.

“Yes,” he says simply.

“Oh,” April says, and tries a smile, tucking loose hair behind one ear. Perhaps the dog years rule applies. They're much shorter than she'd realised while down on her knees in filthy sewer water, and certainly they're a little rowdy and she could have sworn she heard one of them complain about the threat of being grounded, but it's not as though high school sophomores of any species should be waving around ancient weapons and declaring eager readiness to launch corporate sabotage on megalomaniacal ex-bosses, so…

No. Surely not. Fifteen? 

As if he can hear her thoughts, the turtle shoots her another little sideways glance, and shuffles on his feet, tightening the arms crossed over his chest and tilting his chin up.

I've been heatsick literally all week (we've had a heat wave and I've left the house to help with some fairly strenuous things literally every day) and today the "responsible adult" animals decided it was time to Do A Concern in my lap.

Leo and Raph and even Don are working within their own particular paradigms: what it means to be a good leader, a good son, a worthy warrior, an intelligent and rational person. Mikey's the only one willing to take a step away from it all - to step back and look at the absurdity inherent in who they are and what they do, and have a bit of a giggle about it. Because it's crazy, right? They're teenage mutant ninja turtles and they go to space and other dimensions and back in time and their arch-nemesis is an angry alien blob who happens to be a war criminal. Mikey definitely takes pride in their accomplishments and in Being A Ninja - and I'd argue he finds the most joy in it out of his entire family, which is a huge boon to his overall emotional stability - but he is so-o-o not interested in sacrificing his entire identity on the altar of becoming a master. He's a teenager, and he wants to get to be a teenager, and he wants to get to slow down and actually live his life. He's not stupid, he's certainly not incompetent, he's not even younger or smaller or less experienced than the others; he's 15 years old and he's a calculating little shit (affectionate!!!) who refuses to smother his own spirit under the weight of existence or grim expectation.

And I love it because it's equally clear that what sometimes gets brushed off as irresponsibility is Mikey applying this ability to think outside the box. Splinter sets them to training in darkness: Mikey cheekily defeats this environmental challenge by effectively breaking the fourth wall and turning the lights back on. Don obsessively tries to understand the crystals through his pre-existing understanding of how they should logically function: Mikey unlocks both of their main functions through his willingness to get silly with it. On two separate occasions Mikey undoes Raph by refusing to engage in the contest of strength that Raph finds most gratifying, that would ‘prove’ who's the best warrior: instead, he plays his own game, and uses that very drive against Raph. And all that's without even starting to get into the many occasions he applies his antics as a balm to an otherwise scary situation.

Leo works hard at his iron core of self-control, but it's an open secret that he has a temper, and over the course of the series most of the family cops a lashing at some point, usually when he's stressed or anxious. Leo and Raph have their own occasionally vitriolic love language that leads to them outright throwing down more than once, Mikey earns a couple of sharp dressing downs, and even Splinter takes both a verbal and physical beating during Leo's extended mental breakdown.

At the same time, I've been plumbing the archives over this point specifically and I still can't find a moment where Leo hits Don as an individual with anything heavier than exasperation or a silent Look. He kind of bites at Donnie at the end of Dragons Rising, but even then his anger is spread across the whole team, not aimed at Don alone.

It's all the more interesting because this restraint doesn't quite go both ways! Don's mild-mannered overall, but he absolutely lets it be known when he's tilted into the realms of genuine annoyance: whapping Mikey for messing with the Battleshell, rounding on Raph with a dangerous glint in his eye upon being judged 'cranky', grousing at Splinter about being forced to train on a supposed vacation - and scorching Leo with the sulky underside of Don's injured pride during the same. "There goes Leo, making us look bad again."

(Which is also, incidentally, one of those moments that will always have me arguing for a subtle mean streak being part of 2k3 Don's characterisation. Like, ouch buddy, you know that's a collective sore point.)

It's not favouritism, exactly, but Leo definitely seems to find it easier to extend a measure of grace to Donnie that he really struggles to extend to Raph and himself, and even somewhat to Mikey. Part of it is that Don isn't a 1:1 competitor in the ninja family hierarchy scene; top combatant isn't a role anyone's expecting of Don, Don himself isn't levelling challenges at Leo most of the time, and he so obviously contributes through his tech speciality that he gets cut a fair bit of slack on the ninja front - being excused from training to focus on the crystal problem, copping mild exasperation from Leo at worst for cheating at ninja hide and seek, not getting chewed out by even Angsty Mode Leo (TM) for accidentally bringing an entire spaceship down on their heads.

On top of that, Leo clearly regards Don as the next most 'sensible' brother, especially in those early seasons where Raph's still working through the worst of his impulsive tendencies and they're all still pretty green when it comes to real combat. It's not that he's never anxious about Don (and certainly not like Don never makes a bad call), but he generally just... trusts Don, even beyond the obvious trust earned by being their technical specialist. From where Leo's standing, Don's not going to launch himself into ill-advised fights, and he's probably not going to thoughtlessly poke buttons or goof around at the wrong moment, so he doesn't need to be 'managed' as actively as the other two. He's not quite as serious as Leo, but he's introverted and thoughtful in a way that meshes well with Leo's own tendencies, so Leo just sort of seems to automatically expect that Don's assessments will generally be correct and his decisions sound, because he naturally gels with how Don's forming them. (Of course, this has its own pitfalls - Don insists it's just a cold, so Leo lets it go, and, well... he should have pressed Donnie much harder on that whole situation, as it turns out.)

So yeah, Don gets a lot of grace. And, as noted above, he's not always completely gracious in return: there are a few snide comments, a few unkind laughs and more than a few moments of figuring that asking for permission seems like a lot of hassle when he could just go ahead and check out that blackout or duck off with April into a dangerous side dimension. At the same time, I actually think Don - more than Raph or Mikey - takes Leo's steady shelter for granted. He laughingly remarks in The Shredder Strikes Back that Leo's the one turtle they don't have to worry about; after that's proven rather dramatically incorrect, he tells an unconscious Leo that "you're going to pull through this, I know you are - you have to". Over two months into Leo being sent away to the Ancient One, Don's the one who keeps forgetting he's not there. Leo relies on Don as a veritable fountain of tech and knowledge, but it's partly because Leo's busy doing what he does that Don's been given the space to develop those skills in the first place. Don's often quite taken-aback any time Leo goes down, and always full of wide-eyed relief once his brother's fighting fit again.

It's an understated symbiosis compared the other match-ups you get between the brothers, and the show is strangely reluctant to show the two of them spending much time together as just a pair, but it ends up forming the critical spine of how and why the family makes a successful field team. It helps that we get to see how things go when one or the other is taken out of the picture, and the answer is pretty universally "not well". (Not to say I think it would go much better were either Raph or Mikey removed under similar circumstances, but there's something to be said for the particular practical scaffolding Leo and Don provide in both the day-to-day and in field operations.)

[Season 1] - [Season 2] - [Season 3] - [Season 4] - [Season 5] - [Bonus: The Ratdad Supercut]

A Turtle By Any Other Name is a tally of the names everyone’s favourite sewer family uses for each other throughout the primary five seasons of TMNT 2003.

It includes all direct addresses, names given to a third party, and names dropped during the pre-episode narrations.

Totals (excluding times they referred to themselves)

A Few Additional Nicknames / Pejoratives of Note

Leonardo: Teacher's Pet (Raph), Splinter Junior (Raph), Boss (Don), Sword Boy (Raph), Hotshot (Raph), Mr Sunshine (Raph), Psycho Boy (Raph), Master Leo (Raph)

Donatello: Bud (Leo), Einstein (Mikey), Egghead (Raph & Mikey), Slick (Raph)

Raphael: Ninja Dropout (Leo), Hothead (multiple), Mr Raphie (himself), The Green Avenger (...himself)

Michelangelo: Motormouth (Don), Laughing Boy (Raph), The Mikester (himself), The Turtle Titan (...himself), Chucklehead (Don)

April: Young woman (Splinter), Girl (Mikey), Rebel Leader (Mikey in SAINW)

Casey: Mister (April), Hotshot (Raph), Case-man (Mikey), C-Man (himself)

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