Leo Is Often Viewed As Moreskeptical & Distrusting Than His Brothers, As Seen With How He Didnt Trust

Leo is often viewed as more skeptical & distrusting than his brothers, as seen with how he didn’t trust Big Mamma in the episode Bug Busters but something I’ve noticed is that Leo is so quick to latch onto any new family members

Leo: Hey so Gram-Gram? It is Gram-Gram right? 

It’s interesting that Leo is the first one to call Karai, Gram-Gram, as soon as he found out she was a Hamato he was like ‘hey free grandmother!’

Leo: Gram-Gram!

I know that originally Karai was supposed to have a larger role training the Turtles & with the family spanning around 10 episodes but due to the Rise team rushing to finish the series most of Karai’s episodes got scrapped. But Leo is so attached to her after a day, all the Turtles are sad about loosing Karai but Leo is screaming for her, Raph literally has to pull him away.

Of course Leo getting attached to Karai so quickly could be a small nod to now Karai & Leo have been close in past iterations but the thing is Leo does a similar thing to Casey Junior.

Leo: Hey, future me would be real proud of you. I’m proud of you

Leo has know Casey Junior for less than a day & he’s already emotionally adopted him, all he knows is that his future self was important to Casey Junior & that was enough for Leo to decide that Casey Junior was important to him too.

Leo: Hey, the rest of the world we saved is pretty great too.

He cares a lot about Casey Junior & he wants Casey Junior to experience all the things he never got a chance to in the apocalypse.

Leo: Wherever you go, remember that your family will always be here for you.

Leo even outright calls Casey Junior family in the deleted ending of the movie.

Look how emotional Leo gets when Casey Junior is hugging him goodbye before going off to explore the world

He even has to literally wipe away tears.

Yes, Leo is often the skeptic, but the literal second someone becomes family, he loves them with all his heart & is willing to pretty much die for them. It really shows Leo’s loyalty to his family & how much family means to him with how quickly he gets attached to new family members.

This was originally a warm up doodle, but then it just kept going

Brotherly Love 🫶

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.