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I’ve been recently trying to figure out why I keep harping on about the ROTTMNT! episode ‘Mind Meld.’ I mean, I’m not that obsessed with it, but I have reblogged/posted about it here and here , along with writing this story, which probably includes my least sympathetic depiction of Donnie, or any ninja turtle, to date. It makes me uncomfortable when I see people feeling sorry for Donnie during this episode, even though he’s just a goddamn cartoon character and none of this should really matter.
A lot of it comes from issues discussed in goldenspecter's amazing story, Mind Meld Part Deux , which uses the magic of fanfiction to fix a lot of the shit tangled up in that episode. And yet, it still bothers me.
Now, I think it might be because I...sorta kinda have experience with people using technology to try to “fix” a part of my brain that wasn’t actually broken.
a walk down memory lane
Okay, anybody ever hear of biofeedback? It’s a pretty well known, and actually very helpful in some cases, form of mind-body therapy. However, there have been some attempts to use it to “help” autistic kids, only it doesn’t really work. I should know, because when I was a kid I had biofeedback therapy meant to “help” me with my own autism.
It’s a kind of weird story, basically involving some guy my aunt met at a party (no, I don’t know how the hell he convinced her either) and her subsequent attempts to convince my parents to take me to this therapy. Frankly, they thought it was bullshit, but eventually took me there because they correctly assumed the process wouldn’t hurt me whether or not it worked.
I don’t remember a whole lot about it, to be honest. I know we had to go on a long fucking drive and that there were wires people put on my head. I don’t remember ever really knowing what in the fresh turkey hell was going on, although maybe I did at the time. I remember that I cried, but I cried a lot during my childhood due to a lot of random shit (my teenhood, too, but that’s a whole other story).
It wasn’t traumatizing, really. Nobody told me I was damaged or broken that I remember and biofeedback is an absolutely painless procedure. I was a lot luckier than many other autistic kids have been, that’s for sure. These days, my aunt and my parents are some of my strongest allies, as their knowledge of autism has grown and expanded, and they understood that there were better ways to help me with my issues.
And yet–it happened. It was a thing that happened. And that bugs me.
back to the show
The thing about ‘Mind Meld’ (and I’m not the first to mention the plot’s ableism) is that ROTTMNT!Donnie is trying to “help” his brothers. The inciting incident is that instead of helping Donnie with his goal, they’ve been distracted by their own, seeming irrational fixation to the exclusion of what he deems important (sound familiar?). As a result, he manipulates them into stepping into a machine that “changes” them, making them smarter and more rational--more like him.
Like my own experiences with being “helped,” this procedure is painless. Like my own experiences, the other turtles really have no control over the situation. But unlike my own experiences, the procedure works. And the change Donnie plans for is a lot more extreme than anything modern science could pull off.
Now, some people will probably explain this thoughtlessness on Donnie’s part by discussing how he himself is probably neurodivergent. And they might have a point--except in my experience, neurodivergence doesn’t really look like that. I’ll be honest, I have lashed out when I couldn’t make myself understood or didn’t understand how I couldn’t control events.
But there was no calculation there, no manipulation, not on the scale Donnie uses against his brothers. It’s a planned act with science (or at least cartoon science) behind it, and if Donnie’s behavior makes me think of anyone it makes me remember the biofeedback people.
lessons unlearned
And this isn’t even the first time he’s done this! In “Donnie’s Gifts,” Donnie uses his technology to psychologically and physically torture his brothers. There’s the helmet he uses on Raph, of course, and who could forget Leo’s shock collar? And there are fics that do an impressive job of highlighting how badly this could be misused.
(Although I feel that the author of one particular fic lets Donnie off way too easily, as well. It's implied that the problem isn’t that Donnie created the fucking collar in the first place and strapped it on Leo without explaining what it does, but rather that it was misused by someone outside the family, and his own protests otherwise are lumped in with the survivor's guilt everyone else is feeling. Donnie loves Leo, therefore he can’t actually hurt him, even in a situations where Donnie actually says that he has.
But I digress).
The point is that we can’t really trust anything Donnie is supposed to learn from this episode, because he didn’t learn anything from the last one. And yet, “Mind Meld” is centered around Donnie far more than “Donnie’s Gifts” ever were, giving us even less time to explore how his brothers are affected by the choices he makes for them.
rise of the teenage mutant ninja donnie
The subsequent episode is, on the whole, about Donnie’s experience, rather than that of his brothers. He slowly starts to regret this change, if only because of the ways it affects him and the way his brothers treat him, rather than out of concern for their own rights to their minds.
Admittedly, Donnie is punished by the narrative for his attempts to change his brothers, realizing how much he misses who they used to be and choosing to sacrifice his own interests to restore them. But at the same time, the parts of his “new” brothers that he finds so disturbing are lack of interest in social activities, focusing on their own projects, and attempts to mimic his behavior--all stuff that could possibly be seen as other stuff from the neurodivergent spectrum.
And once again, it’s up to Donnie to get back to “improving” his brothers. He needs to readjust them just that little bit more, by force if necessary, while they actively resist his attempts to do so.
At the end of the show, he seems to be the only one’s actually learned anything--although, as I’ve mentioned above, we can’t really trust whether he has. His brothers seem to have no memory of the incident whatsoever, reduced to props for Donnie’s character growth.
My parents and aunt have learned to accept my autism because they took advantage of new information, because they listen when I explain myself to them and put in the work to understand. And before they learned how to do that, they did what they did because they were worried for me; I can understand their motivations while also being grateful they’ve grown.
Donnie isn’t worried, he’s angry that his family won’t get along with what he wants, and he punishes them for it. He only expresses concern after he fucks with his brother’s heads and doesn’t like the results. He’s sorry because his quick fix didn’t work the way he wanted, because it doesn’t benefit him.
speaking of...
This actually isn’t the first time TMNT has discussed a character doing something like this to a family member. TMNT 2012 also has an episode in which a character uses cartoon science to manipulate the brain of someone they love, turning them into the kind of person they’re “supposed” to be, “helping” them to be what they consider better. They use experimental technology on this supposed loved one without their consent to affect their brain chemistry and only show something like remorse when it goes wrong.
Only, the character is Shredder. The person he uses it on is Karai (with Raph and the Mutanimals serving as guinea pigs). The procedure isn’t disguised as a cheerful Pizza Machine, it’s the goddamn brain worms.
It’s really fucking bad, and for all 2012′s flaws, they managed to frame it as really fucking bad. The procedure is shown as being physically painful, accompanied by disturbing physical changes, and the people affected are forced to fight the ones they love. The show is pretty shitty at acknowledging how traumatizing all this would actually be, but they do acknowledge that trying to mess with somebody’s head like that, even if you love them and only want to help them, is wrong.
ROTTMNT doesn’t do that. While Karai and Raph’s brainwashing is terrifying, Mind Meld treats the aftermath of Leon, Mikey, and Raph’s transformation as an opportunity for jokes. And yes, the procedure is painless, but it’s also a huge personality shift that receives no gravitas whatsoever.
When they are restored, instead of taking the opportunity to ask Donnie what the hell he was thinking, Raph asks for a dollar bill to stick up his nose. Despite the fact that they’re all crime-fighting heroes, they’re somehow incapable of advocating for themselves.
Unlike Karai or Raph, they aren’t given even an opportunity, successful or unsuccessful, to fight back (Karai’s final fight against Shredder was a fucking disgrace, but whatever, fan fiction is better). The aftermath of an objectively disturbing manipulation by someone they thought they could trust.
Shredder is, in the end, very much punished for his attempts to control Karai. The fact that he loves her or that her behavior is distracting him from his goals doesn’t excuse his behavior, and it shouldn’t. He refuses to change in a way that isn’t selfish, and so he’s punished. Donnie, on the other hand, despite the selfish nature of both his actions and his attempts to correct them, seems to get off scot free for no other reason than because he’s...Donnie.
when all else fails, blame the writers
Look, despite how it might seem, this is not an anti-Donnie piece. Why? Because Donnie is a fictional character, and attacking him does nothing for anyone. I like the little shithead despite myself and he’d gone full evil in turning his brothers into zombie slaves, I might not mind so much.
The rottmnt writers are, on the other hand, very fucking real. And they made a deliberate choice when they took a story about being “fixed” to fit the mold, filled it with jokes, and centered it around a person doing the “fixing” instead of the people being fixed.
I’m not going to tell you when the biofeedback thing happened, but it wasn’t in the fucking 1950s, that’s for sure. My parents are doctors who didn’t know what “ableism” was until I, a nondoctor, casually mentioned it and had to explain it to them. Autism Speaks is still a thing. Important conversations are being had right now and how we represent shit like our relatives’ right to mess with our heads--based on how it affects us, not them--matters.
It matters to me. When I look up “autism and biofeedback” and the first thing that comes up is a site slinging biofeedback’s ability to “help” autistic kids, it makes me doubt. A part of me wonders if I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, blurring fiction with reality, fixating too much on meaningless shit. And that’s wrong.
It was wrong that my family, and who knows how many others, were encouraged to waste time, energy, and money on this procedure instead of focusing on stuff that would actually help me. It was wrong for equipment and expertise that should have been used to help people who actually benefit from biofeedback to be used on me, someone who didn’t need it. It’s wrong that I have to live the knowledge that the biofeedback, even if they mean me no harm, believed the best way to help me live my life was to stick wires on my head instead of letting me express my wants and needs in my own way It’s wrong that they’re not the only ones who think like that, or think worse.
And it was so wrong for the ROTTMNT to take all this and turn it into a story about character growth for the person responsible, instead of giving the Donnie’s brothers an opportunity to respond to their mistreatment. If your character needs to see the people they love radically altered and experimented on before they can love them, that’s not a heroic character. Write them that way if you want, but fucking acknowledge it.
This isn’t a clearly defined issue, like murder or assault, that people automatically know is bad. The way the episode frames it, viewers might not fully understand how bad all this “fixing” shit get can get--if my parents had been as determined to make me play along with what they wanted as Donnie was for his brothers, my childhood could have been a whole lot worse.
ROTTMNT brought a lot of important issues into play here and then blew it. They weren’t malicious, but they were thoughtless, and stuff like that should be called out the same as malicious behavior, or it won’t change.
let’s be real
I’m not saying that what I experienced was anything like the shit Donnie pulled or that Donnie is like anyone in my life. I’m just saying, episodes like this have a bit more to do with real issues affecting real people than you might think, and if I’m not careful I could end up as one of those people.
ROTTMNT fucked up with “Mind Meld” in a lot of ways with real-life implications, and it’s okay for me to be bothered by that. It’s okay for me to be mad about it, even.
It’s okay for me to be grateful when other people call this out, in fiction or nonfiction, and it’s okay to write stuff about it on my own. It’s okay for me to use platforms like these to vent and work out my thoughts about it, even if I get negligible attention.
It’s okay for me to spend way too much time analyzing all this shit because it is relevant to my past, present, and future. And it’s okay for me to want--no, demand--that the content creators who come next do better.
It’s okay to say, again and again, that no one has a right to “help” me with a scientific procedure without my full knowledge and consent, no matter how much they love me. It’s okay to be relieved that the people in my life understand this now and it’s okay to be mad when others talk about this stuff in fiction or nonfiction without fully considering the implications.
I am not here to be fixed, I am here to be understood.
TLDR: ROTTMNT’s “Mind Meld” disturbs me because it uses science, however painless, to “fix” people with neurodivergent tendencies, and this reminds me of both my own experiences and the dangers of ableist misrepresentation.