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Good Listener, Part 3

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My brother and I couldn’t be more different in our interests, and if we were strangers I doubt we would find anything we had in common. Even so, he and I talk quite often. No matter how much we might not understand the things the other likes, we care about each other enough to listen and learn.

I feel like Donnie and Mikey would be the same. Polar opposites, but that’s exactly why they get along so well.

Sometimes when I’m confused at how to comfort someone, I’ll ask if they need to vent or if they need advice. I can get really frustrated sometimes when I get unsolicited advice, so it helps me not make them feel any worse if they just need a shoulder to lean on. Sometimes that’s all you need :)

Anyways! My favorite kind of character relationship is one where they can just be comfortable vibing in the same room doing their own thing parallel the other while listening to them talk about it. Great basis for friendship. Very relatable lol

Good Listener, Part 2

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I’ve always felt like I’m inadequate at comforting others, since I find it rather hard to empathize even if I can sympathize. My first instinct is always to try and fix whatever hurt them, but more often than not, things are rarely so simple as to have an easy fix. Sometimes all you can do is offer your support.

So, I’m relating to Donnie in this one! I get so internally flustered when I have to comfort a crying person lol, not that I’m going to let them know that. However, this is also inspired by my oldest brother, who is very similar to me in that way. Even if he had no clue what to do with his little sibling bawling their eyes out over something silly, he still cared enough to sit with me until I calmed down, no matter how confused he was with my dramatics lmao

Mikey might be crying, but don’t worry. He’s a growing boy and he’s got some big emotions to figure out still, but nothing terrible caused this. If anything he probably got some light teasing from the others and it hit a bit of a sore spot. He’ll be alright lol

Good Listener, Part 1

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The third in my comics reflecting on the older brothers’ reminiscing on their youngest growing up.

I absolutely love to hear people talk about the stuff they like, even if it’s usually something I couldn’t care less about otherwise. If someone is excited, I’m excited for them, and it’s fun to have a litany of random knowledge and fun facts from everywhere! There’s so much to learn from listening to people who are passionate :)

I like to think Mikey is the same. He tends to hang out in the background and enjoy the antics around him in the show when he isn’t goofing around himself.

The next part gets a little melancholy, but I swear it’s not actually angsty! Y’all got so scared for Leo last time lmao

Donnie skeletal anatomy! Click for better quality

Alright so softshell turtles right. They funky. It’s a lot more obvious that their shells are part of their ribs, as you can actually see the faint outline of their fused vertebrae and ribs on their shells. The reason their shells are so soft is because the edges and much of the lower half of their shell is actually all just cartilage and skin. Their plastron are weird, because the bone plates are largely separate and pointy, held together by harder cartilage the same way human ribs are attached around the sternum.

Donnie was weird to figure out on account of the cartilage lower half of his softshell, but I tried to compromise with his lower back vertebrae being unfused to still allow for the higher mobility required for his waist. Another fun fact about softshell is that they don’t actually have scutes or scales, but because of the look of his plastron and consistency with his brothers in the show, I’m just going to pretend that Draxum mixed in some DNA to let him grow scales for extra protection even if he has less coverage than his brothers. He can “breathe” water by absorbing oxygen through the skin of his throat, not actually by inhaling it. While most turtles can do this to a point, soft shells can stay quite active while doing so.

Personally I like to think of Donnie’s softshell as both a weakness and a strength depending on the situation! While more vulnerable, his skin can heal faster than scutes, and if he sustains blunt damage to his shell he can more easily disperse the force of it because of the give to his cartilage, rather than have the force crack his shell and cause a much more traumatic injury. Kind of like how seatbelts have some give to them to ease into a stop instead of giving someone whiplash.

Just some personal head canons! Feel free to disagree or expand upon :)

[General][Raph][Leo][Mikey][Splinter]

Tech Support: Part 3

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Yes, this was a real thing we had to help with once.

Even though he complains, Donnie feels a lot of pride being looked to as the family expert for these things, I’m sure. For all that Splinter probably doesn’t know the deep intricacies of computers, I’ll bet he knows the basics. Could there be a deeper meaning to his confusion?

I personally headcanon that Splinter is the one who introduced computers, phones, and appliances to his sons way back in the dumpster diving days, and probably showed Donnie how to fix his first toaster or something. However, the special interest kicked in hard and pretty soon Donnie could run circles around Splinter when it came to fixing and engineering stuff. Perhaps, this is a way Splinter can find time to partake in Donnie’s interests and boost his confidence despite being way out of his depth on technical know-how himself.

When you don’t have a lot, it’s important to be resourceful and handy with a quick fix. Donnie had to have started building stuff somewhere!

It makes it all the more bittersweet if they were really close only to have Splinter struggle to bond with Donnie when he’s a little older. Don’t worry though, they’ll figure it out :)

Shell quirks! Part 3, Donnie!

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Donnie, you flat fuck. Pancake lookin mf. He makes for the perfect floating table when relaxing in the water (at least until he’s awake enough to murder, that is)

Ah, yes, familial urge to stack random objects on a sleeping person to see if they notice. I used to balance, like, up to five plushies on my dad’s head before he’d wake up lol

Movie night at Aprils!

I love their friendship, in any iteration, but Rise April is definitely one of my favorites! She’s just so chill and unhinged at the same time.

A real incident I witnessed amongst my roommates

The wrestling was legit and yes, one did lift the other all the way off the ground to stop them from putting their whole arm into scalding steam. Unfortunately for them, the buns were cold by the time they stopped trying to one up each other lol

Leo, for all that he might have the braincell occasionally, is absolutely dumbass enough to throw that out the window when faced with a perceived challenge. He’s drank tea straight after it’s boiled, “careful it’s hot” is a slight against his reputation! (which is nonexistent. His brothers worry for his taste buds)

Leo would be an absolute nightmare in card games. Boy loves magic, messing with people, and winning games no matter how many enemies he makes in the process. God forbid he ever touch a monopoly board, the Hamatos would tear each other apart lol

My older brother loves card and board games a lot, and I thought with Leo’s bits of canon characterization he would like them too! My brother and I play Spirit Island and Gloomhaven whenever we can, and it’s super fun to raise the difficulty to insane levels and still manage to beat the odds with insanely lucky card plays right when it’s down to the wire. I bet Splinter played games with them as a good way for the turtles to learn teamwork and strategy!

Rip my Halloween candy though. I was never the best at games…

Dramatic idiots lol

There is nothing worse than having to lift up the cushions of a childhood couch to find the remote, not knowing what disgusting horrors lie dormant amongst the crumbs and candy wrappers. I avoided sitting where my dad does on the sofa because, for all I love him, the man devours snacks like a wood chipper and I don’t want to even know how crumby those seams are.

Donnie has a gas mask because he absolutely does not want his nose anywhere near a cushion that so many peoples butts have been on. What are they watching? Idk maybe slime tutorials cause they’re both definitely theatre kids lol

Angst? Who’s she, I don’t know her :)

So backstory to this is that my roommate and best friend got a beanbag the size of a bed and it was sitting in the middle of our apartment for a while. It was extremely comfortable and I would curl up to sleep in it, but because it was so big I’d sink into the center and people wouldn’t know where I was lol. It was nice though, cause The Bean was big enough to share!

It’s nice to snuggle with friends or siblings! I love how Rise wrote the brothers to be more physically affectionate

A little doodle of Donnie at the drafting table!

I have a lot of memories of long nights at art school hunched over one of these, working on some project or another.

Taco Crimes

Donnie would absolutely blow a fuse if someone ruined their books with how sacred he was to that mint condition comic, and I’m sure Mikey thinks cooking is an art. Cross either of them and it’s hell to pay!

I read a lot of book series that had been handed down to me by my siblings, but you could really tell whose they were before based on their condition. One sibling left foodstains and dog ears, another left spine breaks and ripped paperbacks, and the final would threaten my life if I so much as dented a page. Such is life with shared things

I guess you could say those books were well loved, for better or for worse lol

Part 4!

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A thoughtful gift that both of them can enjoy! Even if it can be a little awkward sometimes when the people you live have such different personalities, it makes it all the sweeter when you find ways to connect with them.

We don’t get to see a lot of Raph and Donnie interacting, so I wanted to draw a comic of them! It’s a shame we never got the detective noir episode with them, it would have been so fun

Part 3

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And he missed the mark. Sometimes something that works well for one person doesn’t really fit right for another. Where Donnie feels more comfortable categorizing and ordering things into understandable data, Raph feels more relaxed when he can step away from mountains of text or numbers and simply be.

Perhaps there is a way to meet in the middle?

Part 2

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Information overload might not have been the best course of action when trying to fix that same issue…

Part 1

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Donnie loves to make stuff for his family, and he’s got the perfect thing for Raph! There’s some kind of saying about gifts and horses though…