But… they don’t have a human form. They’re just turtles who mutated.
I want to say I vaguely remember an episode of the OG cartoon where they got turned into humans.
Maybe so, but given that there’s no intrinsic human component to them, it’s about the same as saying their canonical cat form is Ragdoll. They were just adding a human representation arbitrarily.
Plus I would be surprised if they were Black in the OG cartoon. You know, on account of society and stuff.
Edit: poor choice of example breed.
I mean, okay? I feel like “human form” is pretty straightforward. Regardless of coding, the term “human form” doesn’t actually apply any more than “butterfly form” or “air fryer form” since they have no canonical history of ever having any intrinsic human identity as far as I know.
What was his catch phrase? Green teen soup? Sounds gross.
You’re taking it too literally. They don’t mean “if transformed from turtles to humans, those humans would have black skin.” What they are trying to say is that the turtles are coded as culturally black teenagers. The way they speak, act, their interaction with their social context and relationships, some phrases they use…
Imagine for a second you’re watching Naruto, but they just replaced the guy with a frog. He is no longer a human, but still would eat at same food, stil would use the same colloquialisms, would follow and respect (or break) the same social rules imposes by his Japanese/Asian background, etc. He’d still be Japanese, just in a frog body now.
“Human form” is a poor word choice, but what makes us human is not the way we look, it’s the culture we’re part of and how we relate to it.
