#what the fuck is happening in dp why's there so much vivisection#not upset about it but I am intrigued
via @finch-the-foolish
So the thing you have to understand is in the show Danny's parents are mad scientists. And not only are they mad scientists, they're mad scientists set on studying ghosts. They don't think ghosts are people. They know ghosts experience pain and don't care, and regularly threaten to tear Phantom apart molecule by molecule:
^ said in front of Danny-their-son
And then these exchanges, following an identity reveal to the whole world. The reveal gets undone via reality hijinks later, but we still get this:
^ His sister Jazz gets it.
And you see in these screenshots something else really important: They do not know that their son Danny is the superhero ghost Danny Phantom.
They love him! Every time they learn he's Danny Phantom in the show, they decide loving him is more important than the fact that he's a ghost.
This whole dynamic opens up a whole beautiful rainbow of angst fics, doesn't it?
What if they kill Danny before ever realizing it's him? What if killing him is what reveals it's him? What if they capture him and vivisect him and he can't reveal himself to them the whole time? What if they get far enough that it kills the human part of him and he can never give them solid evidence what happened to their beloved son?
What if he tries revealing himself to them after he realizes what they're about to do, and they don't believe him?
Because there's the other direction you can take this. A lot of people in the phandom were queer teenagers in the aughts, when the question of 'will my parents accept me even though they hate what I am?' was a very personally relevant question.
Which means you get fics where Danny reveals himself, and his parents don't accept him.
Where not only do they hate ghosts more than they love him, but they start treating him like they treat any other ghost.
And that includes experimenting on him.
ANYWAY! That's not even the only set of characters in the show that are big on experimenting on ghosts! There's Vlad, who clones Danny and maybe island of doctor moreaus a bunch of animal ghosts together into monstrosities, and there's the GIW, a Men in Black parody. Naturally, they want to capture Danny and take him into a secret government lab for lots and lots of painful experiments.
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