When Fanon Goes Wrong: The Sunshine Boys of Rise
Fandom and Fanon. Love it, hate it, stuck in between, we’ll be talking about the moments where fandom, fanon, and meta go more than a bit sideways. Today’s topic of choice: Raphael and Michaelangelo from Rise of the TMNT and the approach that fandom takes to them.
Rise, Raphael, and Michaelangelo: Canon and Fanon
Rise of the TMNT, shortened to Rise, is a revolutionary iteration of TMNT within the franchise. For its range of diversity, body types, and more, Rise was a lynchpin for people who were craving something new.
Especially when that newness, comes to the casting and characterizations of the characters, being the first one to cast two of the turtles as black-coded. Raphael in this iteration is a lot different from his previous incarnations, is the eldest brother taking on a more unabashedly tender, kind, and emotionally vulnerable approach to his personality, enjoying stuffed animals, etc. while Mikey continues his typecasted personality of the optimistic creative youngest sibling role.
Many people within the fandom have enjoyed the approach that Rise has taken to their characters and has been expressed within many ways, but the most common and most prevalent is referring to them within the terms of “UwU” and “Sunshine Boys” as a way to refer to the entirety of their characters.
The Thing About Uwuification and ‘Sunshine Boys’
Why do I personally despise it so much? Especially with fandom culture that preaches, ‘don’t like, don’t interact?’
Well, here’s the reason that isn’t ‘it’s everywhere I go’: It’s because they are both black-coded and is reductive to their character arcs but play out in two different aspects. One thing that canon does really well that FANON does not is that canon allowed the two boys to go through a full emotional arc that had some sort of resolution.
Mikey’s example of this is Hot Soup the Game where we see his struggle with being seen as independent and being babied by Raph and when he gets angry about it, he is angry. No one stifles him, no one tries to put a cork in the bottle of his anger. We get to see Mikey’s full emotional arc and he gets a resolution of his emotional struggles before he turns back to “normal.”
Raph’s on the other hand has a thinner line to cross. He’s big, muscly, and he’s the one with the temper, it would have been really easy for the team to have easily fallen into the “big, angry black teen stereotype” and they don’t. Again, they allow him to go through the full emotional arc of whatever he’s feeling and get a resolution of sorts. Prime short-term examples of this are, “Shell in a Cell,” “Pizza Puffs,” and arguably “Man v Sewer.” “Shell in a Cell” is the strongest example because we do see him get visibly angry about something he loves being turned into a shame/defrauded by someone who generally didn’t care about the importance of it to him and continued to do so, something he wouldn’t consider doing to any of his other siblings. Raph is angry, rightfully so, but he takes his anger out on objects around him, not necessarily the people around him. He is still allowed room to be angry and still allowed to be in character and most importantly, he gets that resolution in the end. The long-term example is the forest scene in “Anata wa Hitorijanai” for a cathartic emotional release that has been bottled up since the beginning of the show.
The fandom, contrary to Canon, doesn’t allow for this emotional resolution. More often than not they are denied it and when they act in an emotional manner that is atypical to their fanon casting, the fandom treats it as “OOC,” “not in their character” and even have the characters in fanworks call that behavior out. This in turn stifles the emotional response, the valid emotional response in Raph and Mikey.
This is worse for Raph because he's the responsible big brother, he stepped in as his brother's caretaker and second dad when his father could not and/or would not take care of the four anymore. It gets romanticized and is worse knowing Raph is a canonically black-coded character. It’s neglect on Splinter’s part and it’s unhealthy for Raph. The show clearly depicts it as detrimental to him. Raph doesn’t know how to trust others with responsibilities, he doesn’t feel like he has anyone to lean on for support, and he doesn’t know how to let his brothers be in charge of themselves when the stakes are on the lower end of the spectrum.
It stresses him out. It hurts him mentally. It’s happened multiple times.
It isn’t something to romanticize. It’s not cute nor is it quirky. Especially with black kids who are already raised to exist in a society to care not only for themselves but their family as well as other people’s(read: nonblack and white kids) feelings while constantly disregarding their own as well as their own needs. This is bad for both Raph AND Mikey, more so Raph, because their full justified emotional arc is robbed from them because of the “uwu soft boy” beam” and makes them be more considerate of other people’s feelings when narratively it makes no sense for them to be.
What is even more infuriating about this whole thing is how there are two entire episodes that discuss how being adultified and infantilized does harm to the boys and these two episodes heavily featured Raph and Mikey, who are black-coded, something that black children do suffer from. Raph’s is “Raph’s Ride Along,” focusing on the adultification and how it lead him to be arrested, assist in crime because no one would believe he was a child and not an adult criminal. Mikey’s being the infantilization, in “Hot Soup the Game,” and how we had these two episodes discussing how it was are bad to do, the fandom claiming they understood it and still do it.
