I don't really see TMNT as a talking animal franchise, is that weird?
 

Despite the main characters being 4 Turtles and a Rat, and then all the various mutants in each series even Leatherhead in Mirage or whatever, I never viewed TMNT as one or those "anthro talking animal" franchises. And I think I know why:

1. Mirage barely has any mutants outside the cast besides Leatherhead. There's a few like Bloodsucker who is basically Wyrm and some random one off characters but not many.

2. The Fred Wolf cartoon rarely introduced mutants constantly. Most eps were just Shredder/Krang's schemes or generic humans. And when we did get mutants they were designed to be creepy or action oriented.

3. The 2003 series mutants resembled bugs and monsters, like in Notes of the Underground or the Season 4 mutants.

4. Archie had a ton of mutants, but other than Ninjara none were designed to be cutesty or appealing. Maybe the Mutanimals to an extent.

5. Nick 2012 made most mutants to resemble monsters or horror movie homages. Even Rahzar was like a skeletal werewolf and the others were more creepy like the one off mutants.

6. The original movies had no mutants besides Rahzar/Tokka.


So this is kinda why IDW's Mutant town stands out oddly. I never saw TMNT as a franchise about talking animals or anthro furries because none of the series that had mutants ever portrayed them that way.

I think it's cause the turtles still live in a world of humans. It's not like Usagi where everyone is an animal or Sonic where I guess the only human is Robotnik.

I can't say I've thought about it, but as pointed out it's mixed, it's a human world. Also they are more anthropomorphic/mutant beings and not regular animals that really just talk so that we can udnerstand the show, like in a number of animated movies.

Me either... Always just seen them as a different form of people living quietly among the human type people.

On the "anthro scale" they're relatively close to the human end, esp in stark contrast to some other mutants who retain a lot of the primitive bestial qualities. Who wouldn't always be a little mindful of those like Leatherhead...? That switch could flip for god knows what reason and he'd tear you up before shaking it off and remembering you aren't a foe. The Turtles have the human intellect not to have that issue with momentary breaks in it and wouldn't have to worry about being around them so long a you're a trusted friend. Now... if the TMNT were all mentally much more like Slash, that might be another matter. He's got more of the animal still in him and if that was the case for them, too, I might have been more inclined to see them as "talking animals." (edit: Basically what has happened in the cases of second mutations that made them beast-like...)

In comparison to, say, Bugs Bunny back in the day who, while physically around the same degree of anthro as the TMNT, is still mainly just concerned with doing rabbit things...like living in a rabbit burrow, stealing and eating carrots, and escaping a hunter. If the TMNT were comparable, I guess they'd spend most of their time living in a pond, eating regular turtle things, and be more concerned about the pollution people throw into it. But instead they're living in human-built structures, eating human food (sans first ep of 2012), and crashing in front of the tv and playing video games when not out kicking someone's ass. So... I vote the Turtles as green people of Turtle origin while the likes of Bugs Bunny as just a talking animal.

Yeah, the Looney Tunes are weird cause we're kinda supposed to take for granted that the animals just talk. Elmer Fudd is never surprised Bugs can talk, for all intents and purposes he's literally a talking rabbit. With the Turtles it's clear normal non-talking animals exist and these characters and mutated anomalies in that world and not the norm.

Well, because of the Daredevil/X-Men/Batman/Superman/etc homages, I kind of just think of TMNT as another American comic book franchise.


... Anyone want to list the clear comic book homages?

Neither do I, until I've learnt about furries.

They spoiled my image of the franchise.

Even then there's not that many female mutants.

Mona Lisa was only ever in 1 episode. Venus just appeared in the poorly received Next Mutation back in the day. Ninjara was a major part of the Archie comics and to be fair her design was sexualized, but it didn't seem too bad since it was a kids comic after all.

Besides that there were literally no other female mutants (not counting stuff like April transformed into a cat for a single episode), until basically to the modern era with IDW.

I dunno, its not about lack of female mutants, but just, in general, TMNT registered for me as a fun series, which occasionally had some talking animals as enemies and allies. Of course, nowadays, I see FW obviously as a "cartoon humanoid animals do comedy action", but others not so much.

2k3 in particular very much not that kid of thing. 2k12 went back on it, but I haven't watched it until the end, so I don't know, if what it had become.

April turned into a mutant turtle in one issue of the Archie comic, This predates Venus.

That's why I like comics over cartoons sometimes. In just this one panel alone we see April actually coming to terms to possibly being a mutant for the rest of her life and empathizing with her friends (I guess mostly Splinter since the Turtles are def better off as mutants) while she's been mutated into so many things in the 80's cartoon show but never really dwelled on it.

If it's one thing I like about human-mutants in the series is just the overall comparisons between the fact that the turtles were actual turtles instead of kids that got mutated or whatever. Like it's hard for them to empathize with say, a mutated April that would be horrified at being mutated because while they are mutants themselves, they can't really complain much because they wouldn't want to to go back to being regular turtles either. I can already tell the IDW series didn't even touch this fact whenever Jennika had to come to terms to being a mutant turtle.

If it's one thing I found interesting about IDW Mona Lisa, is the fact that she assumed Donnie was another human turned mutant. It goes to show just how human the turtles have become and aren't like Slash or Leatherhead.

I think another thing that that keeps the Turtles human is that they have a family to rely on and also are overall interested in overall human life and pop culture (some more than others). Other more animalistic mutants would have zero interest in going to a movie, playing videogames or catching a basketball game for example.

Well I've never thought about it until I saw this thread.

I guess it's because they live in "our" world where talking animals are an exception to the rule unlike in Animal Crossing or the Looney Tunes and Disney universes.

I'm by no means an expert on this subject matter, but I don't think the TMNT fandom has it that bad. I can point several issues within the TMNT fandom, but furries don't even cross my mind.

Now, if you mention Sonic the Hedgehog and Star Fox, oh man...

More like scalies, I guess.

I don't know if fanfiction.net cracked down on that, but for a while there, there were tons of 'the Turtles meet a female OC obviously based on the female writer... and then they bang' kinda fanfics.

Like maybe if April was a mutant, but I'd say Thundercats with Cheetarah had most of the kids wishing they would bang a catwoman. Most of the female characters like April, Charlie, Eliza, Teela, She-Ra and so forth from the those cartoon shows were all humans or humanoid in the case of Teela and She-Ra. Like technically speaking, Teela and She-Ra are aliens, but you kinda don't think about that when you're having those thoughts about them.

People act like Krystal don't got dat azz.

In a way I guess those fics were either depressing or therapeutic or whatever. I don't know, whenever I saw guys do those kinds of fics it would usually be the in-story character banging, or even if they were OCs, there would usually be a mini-adventure or whatever before they got to that.

While the female-written OCs ones were mostly 'the girl's a loser, which I'm sure means so is the writer' but the Turtle or whoever the character is will be like 'naw, you're awesome, and beautiful and perfect' and blah blah, and then they bang.

IDK, I'm sure the guys were losers too, but at least their OCs were always 'cool' and 'ladies men' from the start. The female ones would always spend a few paragraphs emphasizing how much of a loser she is and how she cries herself to sleep or whatever until suddenly Michealangelo tells her everything is gonna be alright.

But then again, dif people like dif things. Not gonna say 'all' but for the majority of them, the guy-written fics would mostly be about the lust, and the female written ones would be more romantic about it.

Gotta love how literally all fanfics involving a samurai or some sword-using character always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS has to use the term 'and then he unsheathed his sword'. It's pretty much a rule.

It would probably surprise many people to know, I've never actually read a fanfic.

Snippets, sure, but never a whole one, that I recall. So I really can't speak to much. Most of what I did read definitely did little to disprove the negative things people say about fanfic in general. I don't even mean subject matter, I never even got too far into anything to judge any of that. I mean like... it's shocking some of those people can READ, let alone write. Lousy grammar and sentence structure and all that, which is partly why I never got very far to start with.

I read a bunch when I discovered what that there internet is. While obviously I can differentiate cartoons from reality, I've always had it for April and whoever else, so I was curious to read some of these fanfics once I found out they were a thing.

Yeah, some of them were terrible. Or some of them were just.... horrific towards characters the writer hated.

Honestly, making Scrappy Doo the villain of that one Scooby Doo movie was something someone on fanfiction.net would have wrote cause they really hated the character.

I had a phase when I was a teenager where I browsed fanfiction.net daily and read fanfics often. Mostly Zelda fics, among other properties. There weren't a lot of TMNT fanfics around at the time and 99% of them were of the 2k3 series which was current at the time and most fanfics are written by teenagers.

I wrote some fanfics as well when I was young. Tried to write two big ones as an adult, including a FW TMNT one but haven't updated it in years. I just forgot about it and lost motivation, I guess.

Everyone has written a story or two involving their favourite fictional characters. Fanfiction is basically fans writing plots they have imagined in their heads. Sure, most fics are lousy and even the better ones aren't going to win the Nobel Prize of Literature, but they're a good way to motivate younger generations to read and write, and you gotta start somewhere. The fanfics I wrote when I was 14-15 are embarrassing to read nowadays, but then again, I was 14-15. That's expected. Of course I have grown and evolved since then.

As for fanart, I don't understand furries but they have the right to draw their furry art.

Society should be less judgemental overrall. There's nothing wrong with writing fanfiction or drawing fanart or coming up with OCs in those fan works or taking part in Role Playing games online. It's just fans sharing their ideas and their passion for their favourite fictional characters and properties. Even if the stuff they come up with has low quality, we shouldn't discourage them. They're just having fun and there's no harm in that.

I encourage people to do whatever they wanna do, creatively. I just missed the whole period where it was a "trend" and only really tagged along on the end of it. So I've never read a "good" one A-to-Z. I'd also rather write stuff than read stuff, generally.

I'm the first one to dismiss the idea that there's no good ones, I always stick up for the genre just in general. Just for whatever reason I've seen a lot of stuff that seems like the person writing it is like, eight.

Bad fanfic is only good when it's so bad in the right ways that it's accidentally funny.

But YouTube videos of dramatic readings of bad fanfic are awesome.

Actually never saw any of those, but I can imagine. :lol:

I couldn't take it if someone did one of those for any of mine (although mine were "Award-Winning", technically :trazz:), and that's a huge reason why they're not for public consumption.

I know for a fact that I'm a better writer than most people who dabble in the hobby, all modesty aside. And I can take some heckling, I put up with it every time I put tights on and play-fight people for money. It's just that the heckling is easier to take when you're getting paid for it, I'd be pretty annoyed if people were giving me sh*t about stuff I did off the clock in my free time. :lol: I just can't be bothered. Like even if you're not "a bad writer" someone's always gonna try and razz ya.

I see TMNT as a talking animal franchise, With some occasional humans mixed in, Because of this, It inspired a bunch of copycats that are also of the talking animals variety.

That's... Literally the reverse of what it is, the vast majority of the characters are human.

The humans are supporting characters.

Supporting characters that make up like, what? 50-70% of the major characters? With a significant portion of the remaining characters being alien that either skew towards human in appearance or at least away from a real world animal, as well as some characters being demons, robots, etc.

I haven't read a fanfic in ages. But I mostly stuck to the better written ones. You just need to read the synopsis and a couple of paragraphs of the first chapter to determine if the person writing it isn't illiterate. Also, remember most fanfics seem to be written by teenagers. And English isn't the first language of a lot of those people. So it's not surprising.

Even the best fanfics I read come nowhere close to the quality of a good novel. Neither have I ever expected them to. I view fanfics as a good gateway for aspiring authors to write stories about established fictional characters and universes. But ask any book author for advice on how to write and every single one will tell you to read a lot of books. None tell you to read fanfiction online.

I didn't know that was a thing but I'm not surprised.

And yes, I've always avoided the ones with "lemon warning" in their synopsis.

The one I've been working on for the last number of years is actually longer than The Lord of the Rings. :lol:

Whenever anyone tells me I take everything far too seriously... I can't in good conscience disagree. :trazz:

I've been told similar things throughout my life. I tend to take my hobbies and interests seriously. And for some reason, people tend to find that annoying and strange. In HS I was the stereotypical wrestling fan who talked about it 80% of the time and thought about it 24/7. Many other classmates of mine liked wrestling too, but gave me flack for my "obsession" with it. Even though some of them were just as obsessed with football, drinking and smoking weed. I hated being a teenager.

God, I can hardly even remember being a wrestling fan. I've hated it for so long it feels like another life.

I'm not that big of a fan anymore either. Haven't watched a show in a long time. WWE I haven't watched since the pandemic began. AEW? I don't remember the last time I watched it. I've seen nothing from CM Punk and Brian Danielson tenures there. AEW wasn't as bad as WWE but still not so great, so I lost interest.

It's easy as hell to drop off wrestling since most entertainment out there is way better than it. Why sit through a 2 hour long wrestling show when I can just play video games, listen to music, watch anime or a movie?

I hope people are getting over those stupid double standards, esp since after "geek" stuff became cool. I mean, come on, things like football (either kind but esp the U.S. one) are hardly any different to be hardcore into just because it's a sport. Unless you're (general "you") the most boring person on Earth, there's surely at least one thing that you're a total unapologetic dork over. Everyone should have their thing.

Big football fans are indeed very geeky. They know the squads of every club out there and the names of the winners of every single competition throughout history by heart. Not to mention they spend a ton of time discussing tactics and the soap opera aspect sof the sport. Like who's dating which model and which club president is more corrupt.

That sounds pretty damn geeky to me.

The four turtles and Master Splinter aren't just regular animals that have the ability to talk. The have humanoid forms. Its not as though theyre normal size animals walking around on all fours. They basically live and act as normal humans, well outside of living in the sewer.

Y'know what was a cool book? Hepcats. Too bad the creator was a flake, I've always wanted to see where that was going.

Is that about cats that have hepatitis or something?

LOL no. "Hepcat" is very old slang that basically means someone who's "cool" or "with it".

It's a book about a bunch of college students, one of whom is dating a stripper who's got Heavy Damage nobody knows about, and the book starts off kinda lighthearted but then it takes a hard Left Turn into Very Dark Stuff when the girlfriend abruptly tries to kill herself out of nowhere. They then get into her backstory and it's a whole big thing about her Dad having a psychotic break one day and trying to rape and murder both her and her sister before he kills himself, all for reasons never explained. So she'd run into someone from her past and all the memories came flooding back and that's why she tried to kill herself.

The story never got more than a couple issues past that because the creator had his own personal stuff going on, and he just never got around to finishing it. It's kind of held up as an example of the Good and Bad in independent comics; Good in that it was initially very popular and successful for an indie comic, but Bad in that without any oversight the creator just meandered away from it and so it's forever unfinished, despite having a pretty passionate fanbase. He's apologized a million times and sometimes he even says "Maybe I'll wrap it up one day" but by this point 20+ years since the last time he published anything, nobody believes him anymore.

But yeah, it is very much NOT a "talking animal book" in any fashion, it's just a "slice of life" drama. It just happens to feature an entire cast of characters with animal heads, partly because before he started the comic book the writer had used those characters in a strip for his college newspaper and those things tend to get more attention than strips with Regular People do.

It's a book worth a look, it's very well-written but it literally never gets anything close to a resolution and that's incredibly frustrating.

Well, that sure is an unexpected plot for a book with such title.

I think it was carried over from the newspaper strip. I never read the strip but from what I understand it was totally different from the eventual comic, it just had the same cast of characters. The newspaper strip was a standard three- or four-panel humor strip but obviously for an ongoing series the writer wanted to have a completely different approach.

It's interesting because the first chunk gives you NO idea at all what's to come and it's just a "regular" story about a bunch of friends who hang out and are trying to find direction as young adults. Then out of nowhere you open up an issue and the female main character is half-dead in the hospital and the male lead has no idea what happened any more than the reader does, and it's a huge emotional sucker-punch.

I picked it up ages ago after it showed up on a ton of Recommended lists. Definitely earns its reputation BUT at the time nobody knew it was an abandoned work, it was supposedly just "on hiatus" while the creator dealt with some personal problems. Too bad, I think the issue where things suddenly went dark had won some awards or something. People really wanted to see the conclusion but we never will.

I can relate more to a bunch of talking animals than I can to the Eternals.

I found the Turtles very relatable as well when I was a kid, as I found the Tiny Toons and Looney Tunes characters and Garfield. But I don't think it has to do with them being talking animals. Any fictional character can be relatable to me if it has the right personality. Doesn't matter if they're Eternals, human, ghosts, animals, aliens, robots, etc.