for writing requests, the chain givin wars a big ol group hug and letting him cry cus let’s be honest bro is not holding up well
Sunsets were always Sky’s favorite.
It was strange, how much a moment in time could change something like that, though. A few evenings ago, the sunset was stained blood read, dripping with anguish and fear, held together by a firm hand and guidance. It hadn’t come from their leader, however - the Hero of Time had been completely consumed by worry over Twilight’s condition, and Sky hadn’t blamed him for it, particularly after finding out they had a blood connection.
But after that initial horrifying sunset, Sky found that the dusk brought only exhaustion and melancholy, a worry that there would be another sunset that would stain the sky with blood.
Sighing, the young knight glanced out his window and saw the person he’d been looking for. While Time had been by Twilight’s side that entire evening, there had been another Hero who everyone had heavily relied on. Sky had tried to mediate and help as best he could as well, but he paled in comparison, certainly in terms of leadership capabilities.
But everything had a toll. Sky could see it well enough.
Exiting the inn, Sky heard the gentle serenade of crickets filling the air as the sun disappeared beyond the horizon. The town was not as peaceful and quiet as camping out in the woods, but it held a warm sense of safety that they usually didn’t have the luxury to enjoy. Any town gave Sky a small degree of anxiety, as they were all foreign to him, but settlements like this put the captain at ease far more than anyone else.
At least Sky knew Warriors could get some peace somewhere. It was obvious the man was trying to seek it.
Warriors heard Sky’s approach, turning his head slightly. His sharp eyes were analyzing him in an instant.
“Hey,” Sky greeted softly, trying to settle the man’s worries; he’d been on high alert ever since Twilight’s injury, and he’d yet to calm down. It had been three days since then. “I just wanted to check on you.”
Warriors blinked, baffled a moment, not expecting such a remark, and then he huffed out a small laugh. “Me? I’m alright. Are you?”
Him? Sky was fine. Sky was always fine. He honestly didn’t feel much of anything anymore, except that sunsets made him anxious. He hoped that would settle eventually, as he did love them. “I’m okay. But I just… you’ve been on edge, you know. Since everything. Do you… our Ordonian is going to be okay now. They said so. You know that, right?”
“Of course I know that,” Warriors replied, his smile fading, voice growing slightly snappish.
“It’s just… you’re not acting like you know that,” Sky continued carefully. “You’re… anything sets you off. Everything has to be in perfect order, everyone has to be on their best behavior. You know? I just… wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Warriors watched him for a long time, face blank. His eyes steadily moved downward until they were staring at nothing, boring a hole in the cobblestone beneath Sky’s feet. The Skyloftian waited patiently, knowing when to be silent and let someone else process. Eventually, the captain sighed heavily.
“You were a great help that night,” Warriors said softly. “I wanted to thank you.”
“It was nothing,” Sky brushed off. “That’s not answering my question.”
Warriors huffed ruefully in response. “You’re not usually this persistent.”
“No,” Sky admitted. “But I’m not usually this worried, either.”
The captain’s eyes finally snapped back up to meet Sky’s. His stony expression softened, and he smiled gently. “I said I’m alright.”
“You can be, yeah,” Sky commented. “Like… you don’t have to wrangle everyone in now, you know. I’m here. Our leader’s getting back into, well… leading. It’s okay to step back.”
Something in the captain’s expression wasn’t quite readable, a kind of strange gentle amusement and haunting sadness. Sky wasn’t sure what to do about it. So he just walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. Warriors seemed both inquisitive and slightly apprehensive at the touch, so Sky asked to be sure, “Can I hug you?”
The captain looked as if he didn’t even know what to say with such a request. He blinked once, twice, before a breathy laugh escaped his lips, eyes holding a tenderness to them that Sky wasn’t sure he’d ever seen in them. “Yeah. Yeah, you can.”
Sky smiled in return, leaning in and letting the captain wrap his arms around him. Sky gave what he received, not squeezing too tightly when Warriors’ embrace was hesitantly gentle. As they stood there, though, it seemed like the older knight settled into his predicament a bit more, letting himself relax as Sky held him tighter. Being a little shorter, Sky settled his ear against Warriors’ shoulder, and the gesture made the captain shift a little, resting his own head against Sky’s. His breath was shaky a moment, and Sky heard him swallow thickly.
It only lasted a few moments, but it was enough. Sky ached for the contact, honestly, and wished he could hug him more, but he knew better than to push the matter. Slowly, the two pulled apart. If Warriors’ face was a little more flushed than before, neither of them commented on it.
“Thanks, Sky,” the captain said quietly.
Sky’s smile was brighter than the sunset. “Anytime.”
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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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Do you think fandom can be sexist towards female characters?
I see the Jegulus fandom wanting to write Lily completely out of the picture and wolfstar people generally hate Tonks.
oof. i have…a very rambly, very long answer to this bc i don’t think it’s a simple yes/no so i’ll put this under a cut for people to skip if they wanna, yeah?
so, straight off the bat, im not a fan of using pejorative labels for writers in general but particularly for fanfic authors. for one, we don’t know who’s writing behind the screen + what their motivations/inspirations/intentions are. two, everyone writes for a different reason. perhaps someone is venting, or projecting, or using it as a therapeutic release; often it’s lifted straight out of their own life. so i try not to judge the text in front of me based on stuff like that. (this leeway could also be because i used to read a lot of bashing fics where the majority of them are women, i think, and often with the flimsiest, most irrelevant reasons that are straight out of the Sexism Handbook of Traditional Patriarchy too so maybe i just started rationalising it for myself? idk)
second, i think it’s pretty well known that the majority of fandom is some combination of women/queer/neurodivergent/POC etc etc. so applying the lens of ‘critiquing mainstream media produced by cishet men’ doesn’t…really work here, i don’t think. the way we would analyse sexism in say, marvel or disney won’t (shouldn’t?) be the same as how we do it for fandom imo.
that being said, it’s still entirely possible for certain ‘problematic’ tropes/ideas to be prolific, right? this is where the sexism u mentioned comes in. i prefer to use symptomatic language here so saying ‘xyz has sexist/x-phobic elements’ instead of an absolute ‘the work/author is sexist/x-phobic’ because i don’t think the latter is either useful or accurate. when it comes to this, there’s one really important thing i look for here. is the author aware of what they’re writing? (which is a whole other issue tbh, complete w why i feel more comfortable around darkfic authors but let’s not go there rn lol) because a lot of the authors who write out lily or tonks in these ships do so knowingly bc it’s the only way for their plot to exist/evolve. sure, you can have an amicable resolution but will it provide the conflict u need? will it make for good entertainment? will it lead to 3D characters?
stories often need an antagonist and is it unfortunate that women often end up filling the role? sure. absolutely. i’d argue that one of the reasons we have so many mlm ships compared to wlw is because of mainstream media giving us better written men more often than not. and i think it’s totally fine to feel angry/frustrated/upset about that, especially when it carries over into fandom which is supposed to be a fun, inclusive, safe space. i get really frustrated at a lot of wolfstar discourse that entirely ignores the possibility of bisexuality. the vehement insistence that that a certain character can’t be with a woman bc they’re queer, for example, rubs me the wrong way and i think what you’re mentioning is something similar too. but, i always stop myself from assuming malicious intent on the author/fic’s part bc just because they write/believe something in fiction doesn’t make it true, ykno? and i can always step back and go look for something else that’s more to my liking.
and i think every creator would have something like this in their works tbh. i certainly do. i know for a fact that the way i’ve written lily in shovel talk and the patronus fic isn’t exactly favourable to her—even though i’ve tried to be neutral, she has definitely come out looking worse than the others and i admit that that’s on me. i wanted a certain dynamic & characterisation for james & sirius and this was the way to achieve it. people are allowed to dislike that. but they must also acknowledge that i’m allowed to write her that way.
i think, more often than not, we end up looking at this in simplistic binaries. ‘i like this -> good -> allowed to exist’ or ‘i don’t like this -> bad -> shouldn’t exist.’ i’m…not a fan of that. my opinion is we should advocate for more mindfulness within our writing but allowing writers to craft their stories the way they want (bc ultimately fic is supposed to simple and fun and not something you agonise over). and this is all interlinked, right? because the moment we say ‘ok. this might be portraying women in an icky manner, i don’t like it but the author can do that bc it’s a piece of fiction’ then u open the gates for more responsible reading & writing. authors would feel comfortable tagging their works with this, they can discuss it openly w/o being worried about reproach or ‘being cancelled’ and readers can make a more informed decision. but if you go in guns blazing with ‘ugh this fandom is so sexist, look at how it’s treating its women’ then you’ve pretty much killed all possibility for dialogue and improvement and that’s not helping anyone.
this kind of also ties in with my previous point about having differing standards for mainstream vs niche mediums of art. fanfiction authors are often, ironically enough, held to higher standards than published/paid creators which is interesting bc u can argue that their work doesn’t even have the kind of social impact that mainstream media does.
anyway. i’ve gone off on enough tangents here lol but i think i’ll end it with this: yes, women definitely come off worse in certain spaces, especially when they have to compete with mlm ships but i think that’s a conscious decision that authors take within the bounds of the material they have. as long as they are conscious of the fact/acknowledge it, i think likening it to sexism isn’t fair because u can’t have a story without plot devices, uncomfortable as they might be. if you see a pattern in someone’s stories of women being constantly shunted aside negatively, then i think u can take note of it and avoid it. maybe have a conversation with the author if they’re willing to talk about their creative choices. i feel like that’s the most u can do when it comes to online writing where u have no idea who’s on the other side of the screen.
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