Nico and Percy's dynamic through the series is eternally funny to me, because it's just. like.
Percy's having a constant mental struggle between his fatal flaw of loyalty with a promise he made to Bianca to protect Nico, versus his Big 3 kid desire to maim other Big 3 kids / Poseidon descendant urge to totally maim Nico specifically. He hates Nico so so much. He thinks Nico's annoying and weird at best, and creepy/sketchy when he's older. The only positive thoughts Percy has towards Nico are "He's Bianca's brother and Bianca was my friend and I owe her/He's Hazel's brother and Hazel is my friend and would kill me if I was mean to him," "He's a powerful asset and useful ally (if questionable)," and "He's kinda pathetic and I feel maybe a little bad about it." Percy has multiple occasions throughout the series where he strongly considers - and on one occasionally actually goes through with - throttling Nico.
Meanwhile, Nico is following around Percy like a lost puppy. He explicitly can never bring himself to even dislike anything about Percy no matter how hard he tries. He has a whole bit in BoO where he's mentally going "UGH he's so stupid BUT IT'S ENDEARING HOW DARE HE." He's totally smitten. He's making deals with his dad for Percy. He's making convoluted plans to help Percy stand a chance against Kronos. During the entirety of BoTL it's like he's playing tsundere - "I'm helping NOT PERCY SPECIFICALLY with this quest! Me helping Percy would be SILLY because I DEFINITELY HATE HIM." Then he proceeds to show up to Percy's birthday party to basically ask him on a weird date and spend the entire next book scrambling around trying to help him or protect him or impress him. And Percy could not give less of a shit.
Just. That dynamic is so funny to me. Percy is the founder of the Nico Protection Club in that he's the one they're all protecting Nico from and meanwhile Nico is throwing himself at Percy to the point where the literal god of gay love calls him out on it.
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love when men cry about body hair bc "it's hygiene" and yet 15% of cis men leave the bathroom without washing their hands at all and an additional 35% only just wet their hands without using soap. that is nearly half of all men. that means statistically you have probably shaken hands with or been in direct contact with one of these people.
love when men say that women "only want money" when it turns out that even in equal-earning homes, women are actually adding caregiver burdens and housework from previous years, whereas men have been expanding leisure time and hobbies. in equal-earning households, men spend an average of 3.5 hours extra in leisure time per week, which is 182 hours per year - a little over a week of paid vacation time that the other partner does not receive. kinda sounds like he wants her money.
love that men have decided women are frail and weak and annoying when we scream in surprise but it turns out it's actually women who are more reliable in an emergency because men need to be convinced to actually take action and respond to the threat. like, actually, for-real: men experience such a strong sense of pride about their pre-supposed abilities that it gets them and their families killed. they are so used to dismissing women that it literally kills them.
love it. told my father this and he said there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. a year ago i tried to get him to evacuate the house during a flash flood. he ignored me and got injured. he has told me, laughing, that he never washes his hands. he has said in the last week that women are just happier when we're cooking or cleaning.
maybe i'm overly nostalgic. but it didn't used to feel so fucking bleak. it used to feel like at least a little shameful to consider women to be sheep. it just feels like the earth is round and we are still having conversations about it being flat - except these conversations are about the most obvious forms of patriarchy. like, we know about this stuff. we've known since well before the 50's.
recently andrew tate tried to justify cheating on his partner as being the "male prerogative." i don't know what the prerogative for the rest of us would be. just sitting at home, watching the slow erosion of our humanity.
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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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Hello! Been sick for the past 3 days and did what any artist does at one point in their lives, draw art about it. So enjoy a drawing of me in stick form suffering while bubbles talk about the past 3 days I’ve been sick.
Content Warning: Discussion of nose bleeds, sickness and mental health.
Side Note: wanted to add a bit about me going through a crisis but didn’t know where to add it. So here is some lore about me. Every time I get sick I go through a mental crisis over what ever is happening in my life. Crisis this time was me getting sick after years of not getting sick. Last time was about my relationship status I believe.
Now enjoy the art, all of it is exaggerated so fear not, I have done a mental health and physical health check in. I am safe and alright!
[Text: *Internally Screaming*
(Rebooted up 2DS to play Pokémon Moon Rowlet Beloved)
(They are ready to Fight God or Become God they’ll decide once they finish walking their dogs)
(Been sick for 3 days is completely over it)
(Pokémon Go addiction returned)
(Gets chronic nosebleeds. Whenever the nose is dryed out of to soft. The nose will bleed. They have bleed enough blood need for a sacrifice to a high power)
(And this was my prayer “Save me from this terrible Nightmare” the tornado - owl city)
(tiktok edits getting them through the day new crush acquired what is this madness)
(Unable to sleep for more than 8 hours they tried send help) ]
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Yo! Just noticed it’s the anniversary of when I finished my second fanfic Dreamcatcher, which is the work I actually started to lean into writing fanfiction (since my first work I really just wrote for myself before being encouraged to share it).
So, in honor of that, here is some of the original second nightmare which was actually written from Dream’s pov before I ended up changing it to Punz’s.
TRIGGER WARNINGS: Referenced Torture, Blood, Death, Injuries, Profanity.
Dream is wet and panting, in a puddle of watery red flowing into an equally crimson pond to his side, where the non diluted liquid gets thicker.
There’s white fur stuck in it as the body of a dog, slashed to bits lies there next to him. Both sitting in the despairing silence of the box.
Tears form in the corners of his eyes and his vision gets blurry, but he doesn’t let them fall. He just exhales.
Why does everything die around him? Why does everything he dare to care a smidge about get taken from him?
As if to follow his thoughts, the white turns to black. The fluffy bloodied dog shifts into a cat that’s long since stopped breathing. Dream turns his head, and faintly smirks at the sight of the additional body sprawled out on the floor next to him.
He mutters to the corpse under his breath, rolling his eyes, “To be fair, you were being a bitch. Like don’t blame me, you know you d—deserved it… I mean I lasted like—how long before beating your head in? That’s pretty impressive—pretty fucking impressive, you know.”
Tommy’s unmoving body doesn’t respond, just stays there, unmoving and uncharacteristically quiet. His face swollen and bruised, not unlike the innocent cat he beat to death.
Then his body evaporates and Dream finds himself in a new room, accented with black walls and bedrock. It’s detail is perfectly ominous like he wanted.
He’s kneeling, unguarded by armor with an audience of people surrounding him. His heart beats rapidly threatening to burst out of his chest at the danger. But he ignores it.
Indignant, Tommy rips off the mask that always covers his face. Exposing his pale skin to the cool air and the venomously judging faces.
Despite the frustration at his denial of privacy, he doesn’t so much as dignify it with a flinch. It was expected. He was ready. He’s not about to show weakness in front of a crowd.
They are silent as the axe lands, and lands again before lady death finally embraces him.
They are silent as the sword finds its place in his chest and he falls to the ground, bleeding out into the cold stone beneath him.
It’s ok. He knew this would happen. It was expected, it was planned. He didn’t know they’d kill him twice, but it’s fine.
On one life, he makes his way back down with sharp pain running through his veins. Somehow it seems duller than the pain in the prison cell, though it can’t have been less excruciating.
Tommy once again stands above him savagely firing arrows away. As they pierce his flesh and bone, he searches the cold faces around him and listens intently, hoping to hear one sound of objection to his approaching final death.
Surely, someone will say something, right? Surely, someone will oppose his final death, right? Surely, they woundn’t let Tommy kill him off in cold blood. Would they?
But there’s nothing from them. Absolutely nothing. Standing there, dripping in blood, he feels his heart entirely disintegrate into nothing. Leaving only a hollow emptiness in its wake.
Then suddenly he’s freezing from more than just death and despondency. He’s surrounded by ice. Their pillars, tall and sharp, casting the land in a pointed terrain. Despite the bone chilling air and his frozen insides, he stands, planted to the ground, looking at a sign pinned to the glacier. The wood marking the death of his parrot that travelled so far only to die there.
A deep sigh is released from his lungs and the scene smears into broad strokes of colors. Until a well known bleak room encases him in lava and obsidian again.
Sitting there with nothing but the annoying sounds of the prison to keep him company, he wonders if he’s always destined to lose everything. Was it always going to end up like this? Was he always going to end up alone?
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