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.
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why are you friends with them if they’re aro/acephobic?
oo what a lovely question that for some reason places blame entirely on me for experiencing acephobia! I’m joking mostly but this does put me in the position to need to defend both my friends and my already very small and unrecognized identity.
So, real talk, pretty much everyone who isn’t ace is on some level acephobic or will say something acephobic at some point without necessarily meaning to. And that’s not because they’re assholes or they’re terrible people and need to change but rather everything to do with their own perceptions of the world and relationships that have been beaten into them since birth through our society. Like, not trying to be a ~pick me~ but I’m the odd one out here and I always have been and I always will be! How many aroace people have you ever met in your real life outside of the internet? I’m guessing the number’s pretty small because I’ve never met any.
I’m in college right now and most of my friends are also college students. All of my friends are dating and having sex and exploring themselves. And that’s fantastic for them!! I love being privileged enough to watch them discover themselves. But they’re all confused as to why I’m not doing it too. Why I’m not dating or having sex or even attempting to explore this other part of life!! And it’s not coming from a place of hatred or cruelty against me and entirely from a place of cultural confusion. Like people just don’t… Get where I’m coming from. And frankly that’s okay. I don’t expect them to considering how every single person on the planet has been socialized since birth. It’s hard to see perspectives other than your own especially when this perspective is held by less than 1% of the global population. And doesn’t show up really anywhere in any of our media. No one really thinks it’s normal to be like this. But why would they? When everyone is always telling them it’s not?
So, if I stopped being friends with everyone who said something that came across to me as acephobic or that made me feel ostracized or weird for how I feel, I simply wouldn’t have very many friends! And I can point out those moments to people and explain how it made me feel but often times it’s simply not worth it and, ultimately, I’m the odd one out and sometimes I just have to take that as it is.
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Listen, I love the LGBTQ+ community as much as any other queer person. But we have got to stop ostracizing people in our community to fit in with cishetallo people.
Some of y’all really do go ‘these are the acceptable boxes for queer people and their definitions, anyone outside of these is actually not queer and making us look bad’ and act like that’s ok. Now that being queer is generally acceptable in online/progressive areas (as long as you are one of the ‘well known’ orientations), a big part of the community has started regulating what’s ‘acceptable’ of a queer person and how we should fit into society.
I’ll see people hating on trans people who don’t fit into the ‘normal’ expectation of ‘Trans girl, Trans boy, or Non-binary’ or use Neo pronouns because that’s how they feel the most comfortable. I’ll see people hating on queer people who don’t like labels ( or try to assign people one even if they don’t want it). Or people who use a label in a way they don’t like (bi people who mostly date the opposite sex, lesbians who use pronouns other than just she/her, gender non-conforming people who don’t identify as trans, obscure micro-labels, etc.)
And it’s so frustrating because we as LGBTQ+ are supposed to be better!!! We are supposed to empathize with the feeling of not fitting in with regular society and help others like us! But the community has become part of the oppressive ‘societal standard’ for some people.
Some people just can’t be put into a perfect little label box and a lot of y’all aren’t cool about that. And I can’t believe I have to tell my fellow queers this, but there is nothing wrong with denying societal standards in order to live in the way that is genuine to you and makes you happy. End of story. If you disagree with that, look inward at your internal biases and try and fix that. Get rid of the cop in your brain telling you that you have to police others self-expression.
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