30 Day TMNT Challenge: Day 1

I need an excuse to ramble about Turtles. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a challenge here on Tumblr, which I’m sure is probably more related to Tumblr’s crappy search system than anything else, but on Google I did find a picture of some prompts that seems to have come from Amino, so I’m going for it.

Day 1: Favorite Turtle

It’s Donatello, of course. Though as I’ve gotten older, Leonardo has become a close second.

Though I’ve used a picture of the 2003 series, my first exposure was actually an arcade game called Turtles in Time, and I originally played as Raphael. The girl next to me playing as Donatello absolutely hated the mechanics of the bo staff, and I was having a hard time using Raph’s sais without taking damage from being too close, so we switched and Donnie became my main ever since.

Then I got into the 2003 series on Cartoon Network. At the time, I didn’t realize they were two different adaptations, or that the cartoon I was watching was a new one. I don’t think I fully grasped the concept of series having different adaptations that weren’t in the same timeline until I was about 13 or 14. (It’s part of why I took so long to branch outside of Cybertron with Transformers, because I didn’t understand that things like Beast Wars were separate continuities and not just continuations or prequels that replaced all the characters for no reason).

But of course, even without my understanding of separate continuities, I instantly became attached to my former main. To some extent, I wonder if I would have turned out as nerdy as I did if that hadn’t happened, but I definitely already had some predisposition to get attached to the nerdy characters in a given series even before that. I went through a phase where I had to tinker with things, and I think I still have the circuitry and motherboard of an old DVD player I took apart. 

For the character of Donatello and my own nerdiness, I think it’s kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario, because I don’t think I would have been as drawn to the character if I hadn’t already shared some of his traits, but I also don’t think those shared traits would have become as pronounced as they are if he hadn’t been my favorite character.

Donnie’s enthusiasm for the stuff he built and tinkered with also proved to be a bit contagious, and the only thing I couldn’t really relate to was his general lack of artistic skill, which I attributed to lack of interest since his tech stuff took up so much of his time. But I can get that. When you have access to the thing you want to do, it’s easy to hone in on it and lose track of everything else, and since he had access to all kinds of technology, well, it’s pretty easy to see how that would end up.

Though actually, as I’ve gotten older, I can definitely appreciate that he goes ahead and draws a crappy stick figure. Some engineer-types I’ve met in real life still attempt to draw at the same level of someone with 15+ years of experience, while somehow mathematically calculating the perfect angles and shading, and just end up frustrating themselves by comparing their work to that of someone with more experience. So I definitely appreciate Donnie being like, “Well, a stick figure’s the best I can do” and then just slapping that thing down on the paper. You don’t have to be perfect, and I appreciate that he gets that.

I think his having a softer voice helped things, too. When I was younger, a lot of things sounded like shouting to me even when they weren’t, so his voice was a lot easier to handle even in scenes were he actually was shouting.

Hmm....I’m trying not to get too far into later prompts, because there are a few others that could be answered with Donatello, and which may overlap with what I might say here. But anyway...

Donnie was also one of the characters who helped me to learn to understand sarcasm. Between Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers: Cybertron, I started being able to pick up on it, where before I just thought that people were being peevish and snapping at each other for no reason, and it didn’t make sense why they would say something like that and the other person wasn’t getting upset. But for Donnie (and really, Raph as well, even though his short temper sometimes made it harder to tell) it was generally pretty obvious that he didn’t mean it maliciously. At least part of this could be attributed to his voice, since the softer tone kind of blunted his sarcasm a bit, but I think in the Ninja Turtles series, there was also usually something of a change in vocal tone when they were being sarcastic which didn’t exist in some of the other series I watched, where the sarcastic voice was virtually indistinguishable from a character’s normal voice, or their behavior was consistent with it enough that I couldn’t tell they weren’t serious. The Turtles, but especially Donnie, were usually pretty obvious either in vocal tone or like, the kind of body language they were using. 

Though admittedly, as I’m rewatching the episodes, there actually is at least one Donnie moment I can think of where I didn’t understand he was being sarcastic. That one’s in “Tales of Leo,” when Donnie is telling the story of losing his car, and in the end, asks, “What, you didn’t get the car?”

I think in part because I was used to an obvious change in tone whenever Don was being sarcastic, and because of how Leo’s head turned with that expression immediately after, I didn’t realize he wasn’t being serious until I was about 18. So really, even characters I think I understand very well can trip me up at times.