so much happened in this whole episode but i’m still on fig infiltrating ruben’s dream, making it look like the place where his friend was murdered, and then disguising herself as kipperlilly & repeatedly saying different variants of “somebody needs to take the fall for this, and it’s not going to be me. it’s going to be you.” while adaine as the elven oracle shows up next to her. can you imagine waking up from that, the idea of a horrible truth being pinned on you by your friend to save her own skin while the personification of fate and destiny stands there, almost as a promise that this is GOING to happen to you. we don’t even know if this kid is guilty. my god.
Imogen was so utterly smitten, you cannot tell me otherwise. Girlie was still angry, jealous at dusk, and yet it only took her overhearing laudna still being protective over her for her to finally offer an olive branch to the poor woman. AND SHE IMMEDIATELY GAY PANICKED. It just hits different because now it’s been confirmed that Imogen WAS figuring out at that exact moment that she had feelings for Laudna SO THAT’S WHY SHE WAS SO NERVOUS AND COULD BARELY LOOK AT HER!! Not only because things were a little strained between them, ALSO BECAUSE SHE WAS STARTING TO LIKE LAUDNA WHEN THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE JUST FRIENDS
“peeta is bisexual” you guys are losing the vision. peeta isn’t even straight. katniss INVENTED sexuality for him. whatever katniss identifies as, he’s like “yeah, i’ll take that one” no questions asked
dude. foolish surviving a 3v1 inside a tiny obsidian box for over a minute, taking away most of the eggs health with phil before dying for the first time. making nuisance of himself, playing smarter not harder, operating as a distraction with half a heart and a dream as phil deals the final blows. then him and cellbit’s collaboration on their base, the large build and crazy fucking lava maze and decoy obsidian boxes making it impossible for the other team to destroy their egg in return. red team winning not by being the better pvp team, but by playing to their strengths - building, strategy, communication, and complete and utter chaos. they started preparing early, they made weapons, they built extensively and prepared traps and decoys. and with their gas masks and bombs and chainsaws and complete refusal to give up, they had to have been terrifying. if they played the tower defense strategy, they would have lost faster than green had. if they had spent time getting just armor and gear and none actually working on their base, they would have lost worse than blue. the red team won by playing smarter, grinding their ass off, and by turning the playing field into incomprehensible chaos even they couldn’t navigate. they didn’t even know where their egg was and they defended it perfectly. it was a well earned victory today - here’s to hoping there’s no repercussions
I have not yet finished the show but I will vote for himemiya anthy on every single poll that comes across my dash. That girl is scheming. She is up to something. I will find out what it is by the time I finish the show but for now I have faith that she is the best at whatever the poll says she does
Thinking about the Don Suave scene and what it means in terms of LGBTQ+ representation because my brain does nothing if not torment me with random topics to ramble about on the regular.
Anyway, I just wanted to ramble about why I like the scene but to get it out of the way - the scene can very easily be interpreted in so many different ways, and all of them are valid. I personally see it as Leo having at least some attraction to a man. And the following is an explanation of my own interpretation and thoughts on it and what it means especially for Leo’s portrayal in the grand scheme of things.
Long-winded interpretation under the cut!
Now, to start with, it’s important to me that in the scene Leo looks at Don Suave in the very beginning and then for the entirety of the rest of the time the man is on screen, Leo’s eyes are closed. Yet, in the end, he is still visibly enamored with Don Suave, happily cuddling up to him as he’s being carried away.
You can very easily interpret this as Leo being spellbound and that’s honestly super valid and I believe he likely was at least somewhat in the beginning, but considering how fast he looked away and how he never looked again, I personally think it makes more sense to read it as Leo just finding the man attractive, at least somewhat. (For the record, I personally headcanon Rise Leo as bisexual with a heavy preference for men, but I want to be blunt when I say that any interpretation is valid. Literally any. Ace, pan, gay, bi, none of the above or a mixture of something new literally all of it is more than okay and fair. Hell you could even interpret this entire scene as more romantic attraction than physical and it would still work. Anything goes!! Don’t bother people, guys, really.)
The main reason I take this scene to be at the very least LGBTQ+ adjacent isn’t just because of how it’s portrayed, but because of who Leonardo is. Not in terms of Rise of the TMNT, but in terms of the entire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles™️ franchise.
Leo’s a character who, while changing with each iteration, has still at his core been around for decades upon decades as “the blue one”. One fourth of the team. He’s the one most are going to look at as the Leader, and oftentimes he is the one closest to having the title of Main Character. Not to say the others aren’t just as important, but Leo’s presence in the A plots of basically all TMNT media is often something very main character-esque.
And that’s very, very important to note. Here we have a Main Character of a prolific and decades long-running franchise distributed by a children’s television network. You can play around with his and his brothers’ characters all you like, but there is always going to be challenges to dodge around, especially since this was still in 2018-2019.
For example, you can play around with their designs so long as they’re color coded turtles, but their sexualities? Now that’s tricky.
“But what about Hypno and Warren?” Not main characters and also they’re Rise originals. They have a lot more room to play around with than a character like Leo does. But even talking about main characters in the franchise, you could arguably have an easier time playing around with Donnie or Mikey’s sexualities than Leo or even Raph, as (unfortunately) the former two tend to get more B plots, so they’d likely have had a little more leeway (still not a lot though.)
So, where does this leave us?
It leaves us in a place where outright stating and/or showing undeniable proof of Leo’s attraction to men is very, very difficult. So, workarounds!
Workarounds like the entire Don Suave situation.
To be honest, as left up to interpretation and lowkey and deniable as it is, this whole scene means a lot to me because of who Leo is as a character. It’s just nice when we get so see even the bare bones of representation with characters that have been such a large part of pop culture for decades, y’know? Even if more would be so much nicer, this is better than I thought we’d ever get for these boys.
And, again, literally nothing I’ve said is the only way to interpret it, I’m more than happy when people interpret media on their own honestly, it’s just something I’ve been thinking of lately and I was wondering if others felt the same way.
Whatever you think when you interpret this scene or Rise Leo as a whole, I just thought this would be interesting to think about, even if it was ramble-y, haha.
I’m gonna have to accept my brain may always be soup at this point. But it beats feeling tortured all the time?
Anyway, pointless tattoo plotting. For myself. I don’t think it’s wise to consider what is basically an upper arm sleeve for my first, but it’s fantasy land if it’s just in the sketchbook and honestly? Anything to kick at the art block.
It’s all birds: blue Jay and Baltimore oriole, with fresh spring green ash leaves and an autumnal red oak. And maybe a hexagon in there somewhere, I can’t sort that out.
Anyway, this would encapsulate a lot of my favorite things in one go. All that’s missing is bugs! And a loon and pines, but that’s going on the other arm!
Maybe it’s futile to say this, but this humble scribble is for my use only.
AA4 spoilers plus im also ignoring aa5/6 canon for this little thought i had
So I’m deathly curious about what Shu Takumi’s original plans for Apollo’s backstory were. All we know is that his father is dead from a performance incident and his mother was presumed dead a few years later. But not only that, it seems like although Zak knew she had another child, we also know that Apollo wasn’t with the Gramaryes when Trucy was born. So… what the fuck happened to Apollo 😭 bc I’m thinking like the only logical thing is that Apollo was ALSO in some freak accident and Magnifi once again hid the body but it turned out he was okay. Bc Magnifi was for sure behind Thalassa’s disappearance and reappearance in another country, so something similar must have happened to Apollo?? Did he end up at an orphanage??
I feel like Apollo is the kinda guy to have the craziest environment that he was raised in but he turned out so normal. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if a circus troupe adopted him or smth hfjdwkfhj and he would casually bring up in convos how his adopted mom can swallow knives or smth
From what I know from bits and pieces is that 5/6 rewrote his backstory to have Jove the musician as his dad but that honestly doesn’t make much sense to me. If Apollo had prominent famous musician parents then they would have had that influence onto him in some way, even if it’s only learning a little guitar when he grew up or having a decent ear for music and music theory. But in 4-3 he states that “he should’ve learned to play the guitar” because “there’s not much romance in Chords of Steel.” Not only that but someone with a musical background like that would at least know who the hottest band is at the time 💀 like I loveee musician!Apollo so much but I highly doubt aa4 Apollo has any major connection to music until he met Klavier