This is not an exaggeration. Every time I see anything where Danny Phantom is the 'Ancient of Space' (Which I maintain should be 'Master of Space' given that Clockwork's title is 'Master of Time') I see the same things. He has a body that looks like it is made of the night sky or is dotted in galaxies, he can eat/make stars and planets, he has absurd destructive power, et cetra. But that's not 'Space', that is 'Celestial Bodies'.
Space is more than just planets and stars; it is DISTANCE and DIRECTION and DENSITY and more!
A Danny Phantom who is the Ancient of Space should be able to do more than just throw around energy blasts or look cool. He should be able to pull of Gojo-type shit and more! Compressing matter, altering the distance something has to travel, distorting the placement of things and energy, warping the path something travels and yet having it still act as if it is moving in a straight line!
You could shoot Danny with a laser and it would look like it is standing still because he warped space so that a centimeter is a billion light-years. Danny could take a step forward and travel a thousand miles. Flicking his finger to his side could result in you feeling the impact from the opposite direction upside your head. He could look up at the sky and see EVERYTHING that is happening on the planet/in the galaxy/across the universe AT ONCE if he wanted to!
Being the Ancient of Space means he commands and manipulates SPACE ITSELF, not just large celestial objects!
Stop making Ancient of Space Danny just a sparkly shadow creature who can punch stuff really hard! Make him the fucking GOD that the fandom has made the title of Ancient equivalent to!
Time and Space. One could not exist without the other. Two brothers, born of the universe’s existence at the same time. Neither more powerful than the other, but both with different skill sets. The two watched over the universe for millennia without issue.
Then came the Observants.
Beings nearly as old as Time and Space themselves. Except they were arrogant and prideful. They believed that Time and Space should not watch because it was their job. Their job to Observe, but never intervene. But Time and Space did not listen. They knew for the good of all reality, sometimes you had to intervene. This led to the first skirmish between Time, Space and the Observants.
Things only continued to get worse over the next few thousand years. The relationship between Time and Space strengthened in their resolve against the Observants. The Observants were clever, though, and knew they couldn’t defeat the brothers alone. So they plotted, and waited for the perfect opportunity.
Time was clever while Space was cunning. Together, they were unstoppable. Apart, they were vulnerable. The Observants took this opportunity and struck down Space. But Time was clever. He knew this would happen from the beginning, but he also knew that this was meant to happen. In all timelines, Space would be struck down.
But Time could not exist without Space. The Observants thought they knew all, but they knew nothing. In the chaos, Time saved his brother and hid him inside of the timeline and waited for the day he would be reborn. The day that his brother would come back from the dead, risen anew and much, much more powerful than he was before.
For now, all Clockwork could do was watch Danny Fenton and guide his brother towards his destiny.
tl;dr a theory/headcanon on why halfas are so powerful
I AM USING MARIE KONDO STANDARDS: IF CANON DOES NOT SPARK JOY, I THROW IT OUT!
Alive and dead; that is the thing that sets halfas apart. And honestly, why would that make them more powerful? If anything, being half-human should make them weaker, unable to take more hits without dire consequences.
However, I propose this:
1) Halfas are so powerful because the human side of them allows them to change.
Ghosts are by nature set in their ways. Their identity will always orbit around the person who they were when they die and to try and be someone else is just as damaging to a ghost as being unable to do their Obsession. It's feasible for a short while, but an extended period will hurt them.
This means that powers that are locked behind being compatible identity-wise will forever be out of their reach. An electricity core ghost trying to learn to make fire? Forget it! A shadow core ghost attempting to learn temporal manipulation? Ridiculous!
But halfas' identities are still changing! They can grow and become someone else outside of who they were when they died. And like all living persons, they can shove themselves into being someone they are not with a lot less damage than a ghost.
So a halfa like Vlad, who has a fire core, pulling on the manic energy and restlessness of a lightning core long enough to make ectoplasmic lighting is on the table. The sheer amount of different powers that Danny learns is a by-product of this.
2) Halfas can rely on their human half to do things that full ghosts cannot do, the most powerful of which is the Ghostly Wail.
Remembering their death is one of the worst things a ghost can do. They are after all creatures that spawned from the dying wish of a person to stay alive just a little longer, please! Ectoplasm is highly sensitive to emotions and they are made of it, so remembering your death is basically going through it again, pain included.
But halfas are also made of flesh and blood. The brain can go through extremely traumatizing experiences and still keep functioning. Ghost-speak (or at least the version of ghost-speak analyzed by @sinorim-pisani in their linguistic anthropology post) is feeling made sound, radiated out by a ghost's core. The Ghostly Wail is a halfa screaming all of their emotions, their memories, the intrinsic experience of dying out for every ghost to hear.
Remembering death hurts for a ghost, badly enough that the Wail shoving the experience of dying right at them would End most ghosts on the spot. But halfas can remember their death, can face it without Ending, and can force other ghosts to re-live it through ghost-speak, even if it still hurts the halfa.
Those reasons are why halfas are in a league of their own.
Making an incomplete list of cool implications/affects/character moments shown in DP, starting midway through s1e2 b/c that's where i'm at atm :). Incomplete b/c i'm only adding things that I feel like adding. Bolded things = I thought were more interesting.
IF U SEE ANYTHING UR INTERESTED IN AND WANT TO YAP ABT IT IN THE COMMENTS I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR UR THOUGHTS
e2
9:10: Danny doesn't wake up from his ghost sense going off when Skulker crash-lands right next to him... (prob contradicted elsewhere in the series, but at least one canon moment of ghost sense not waking him up when Danny's asleep!)
Phantom can turn other things intangible while touching them (& using flight/strength/etc). We all know this but interesting thing to consider: what if he could only use so many powers (to affect another thing, or even j for himself) at a time? (Tho I j realized turning smth intangible would probably make the thing weightless 2 Danny... unless... u, fic/art/idea-maker, think otherwise 🤔).
Other ghosts can choose to be invisible to Danny too... (Skulker @ 12:04) I literally forgor abt that... He can ghost-sense that they're around, but this scene didn't show the sense being precise. He's also human in the scene so mayhaps this changes when he's in ghost mode?
Danny builds model rockets! (12:20)
Skulker is a fan of Tucker's pda b/c it's 'sleek & advanced' (14:52). I also forgor abt this... P sure he j keeps updating his tech so that dynamic doesn't last long at all.
Tucker has two PDA's, one of which he had 3 payments left on, the other of which he had 4. At least one got destroyed by Skulker. From a very brief internet search, it seems the price of a PDA (like a Palm device) ranged from ~$95-$350. If someone knows more abt these prices/their appeal to nerdy kids at the time, pls add info! It makes me wonder what Tucker's relationship to money was lol. My hc is that his parents gave him allowance that he saved up to start paying for them, and which he also uses to continue the payments... Maybe indicating he's super impulsive w/ buying tech? Or that he's so into it all that he wanted to experiment in ways that he could only do w/ two pda's?
Danny takes out his anger on the box ghost... Def an early s1 thing. This could be pushed in a fun dark direction }:-).
e3:
Danny gets out of ghost dragons grasp by going ghost and turning into a lil whisp of smoke... that also kindof looks like ELECTRICITY?! Personally ignoring this bc its a way for him to get out of lots of traps, but cool possibility :), esp w/ exploring his liminality, death, etc.
my god this boy is cheesy in a fight...
Have I mentioned that I love the ghost dragon transformation sequence? Versions of the dragon form that I'm obsessed with:
just appreciating this house add-on/lab(?) design again bc it's so fckn cool:
Also Paulina's dad threatening Danny with "I know where you live" reminds me that p much everyone knows where he lives... I wonder if ppl (bullies) have taken advantage of that. Or if everyone is too scared to mess with FentonWorks. What lore does the house itself have in the community? Are neighborhood kids afraid or intrigued when walking by? (Esp in this time b4 ghosts are a well-known phenomena 🤔).
tl;dr The Danny Phantom fandom is just obsessed with Found Family and I FALL FOR IT EVERY TIME
Hear me out, people, hear me out......
FRAIDS.
that's it that's the post.
jk jk that is absolutely not the post, because I have SO MANY THOUGHTS ABOUT FRAIDS. Danny Phantom lore at it's FINEST.
Strap in folks, it's about time for another (weirdly long??) DP word blast!
Now this could be the "found family trope" lover in me, but I freaking love the possibilities that exist when it comes to the concept of a ghost fraid. What I've read in fics is just *chef's kiss*. We have the mental links, the ectoplasm based threads that bind everyone together, the found family idea of course, and pleeeeenty of angst potential. But I wanna talk about the nitty gritty details.
What is a Fraid, if not a subconsciously and artificially created link based on a ghost's heightened feelings of attachment, or ownership? Bear with me, I can explain; we'll use Danny and his Fraid as an example here. Typically, when introducing the idea that Danny is connected to his friends and Jazz and Dani via the concept of a "Fraid", fic authors use the image of threads created with ectoplasm to tell the reader that the group is connected together on a higher level. These threads are often a result of Danny unknowingly marking his people as his, and thereby telling the ghost world that messing with these people means messing with Phantom himself. To me, this sounds a lot like Danny is essentially layering his own ectoplasm onto his group so frequently, intensely, and even intently (despite his continued ignorance to what his ghostly side is doing), that his resulting Fraid essentially becomes a part of himself. The ectoplasmic threads are then a physical manifestation of Danny's ectoplasm as it exists in his friends.
But if this is the case, could a Fraid ever be created intentionally?
Let's lay out the apparent requirements to create a Fraid, based on the proposed example above. I'm postulating that, to create a Fraid, the ghost needs to 1) spend a sizable portion of time around the future fraid members, 2) feel strong feelings of possession, protection, obligation, or what have you, 3) maintain a large amount of affection for their persisted presence, and 4) feel safe enough around them to allow their ectoplasm to manifest like an aura, rather than keep it tightly inside and controlled. In Danny's case, all of these conditions are met by Sam, Tucker, Jazz, and Dani, and they are typically the ones you see being placed in Danny's Fraid. His parents aren't on that list, as they fail to meet condition 4, and possibly even condition 3 (which is not to say Danny doesn't feel affection towards his parents. He definitely loves them, but does he love them consistently, constantly, and in the same way as he does his friends?). While Danny is constantly choosing his friends (he chooses them day in, day out, after Sam convinces him to walk to his death, after Tucker makes a decision out of intense jealousy, after Dani hunts him, Danny is still choosing them), he isn't constantly choosing how he feels in their presence. That would be hard for anyone to do, let alone creatures whose entire being revolves around their emotional volatility. The idea of intentionally creating a Fraid is ruled out, based on the idea that, even for beings that run off emotional cognizance, feelings as vulnerable as those required for the process are difficult to create and maintain consciously.
Now how does Fraid creation actually work?
The way I've described it above, I'm going to claim that a Fraid is essentially the ghost version of a horcrux. Instead of the soul going into an object, the ghost is exposing other ghosts (or people, in Danny's case) to intense amounts of their ectoplasm (which could be argued to be their soul given form, I guess?) and the ectoplasm is then settling inside the other party, being absorbed into their core, or skin, and cementing that individual as a part of the ghost creating the Fraid. Since this kind of ectoplasm is primarily that of the ghost, it will invariably have ties to the emotions that ghost is experiencing, hence the idea mentioned above that there needs to be a prolonged feeling of relaxation and safety about the creatures in the pre-formed Fraid. This being the case, I like to think about how Fraids might function when they're made of other ghosts too, and whether or not those secondary ghosts can basically form a layer of Fraids (like one web of ectoplasm built on another web and on another etc with different ghosts being the center point....does that make sense?). Would a Fraid with mostly ghosts develop it's own impression of a core? Is there a threshold of ectoplasm needed to develop a power level in this case? That's some juicy theory building right there.
When Danny's Fraid comes onto the scene, it gets a bit wonky.
Most of the time, his Fraid is made up of two (or three if you're counting Dan) ghosts and three (sometimes liminal sometimes not) humans, and there's almost of bit of a power imbalance. I would say that both Danny and Dani end up establishing this group of people as their individual Fraids, but how do the three humans influence the ectoplasm connection? And how does the fact that Danny and Dani virtually share an ectoplasm signature influence it? (this isn't to say that they share a core or are the same people, I am a firm lover of ice core danny and water core dani, but Dani is a clone and a product of Danny's ectoplasm....do you think they have the same signature, or would Dani develop her own signature?)
Connecting this to my first question above (is a Fraid a product of a ghost's feelings of "ownership" or "possession"): if you like your humans liminal like I do, I'm going to take a chance and say that Sam, Tucker, and Jazz have developed juuuust enough of a ghost core or an ecto signature for the Fraid threads to stick to them, and that ghosts probably wouldn't be able to draw regular, non-liminal humans into their Fraid unbeknownst to them. Due to this, I believe the humans would be able to reflect the ectoplasm back to Danny, creating a stable loop that allows for the continuance of the Fraid connection. I don't necessarily think this alone would allow for a strong connection - they're human, however liminal they might be, and liminal humans don't have the same ectoplasm reserves as a ghost, nor do they have the amount of "soul-like" ectoplasm needed to cement themselves inside the other parties like Danny could ( remember the horcrux analogy?). But! But but but! If Danny and Dani share an ectoplasm signature, and a Fraid is essentially an emotional feedback loop given substance, then you have two times the ectoplasm signature being run through and reflected back to each of the Fraid members, essentially....eliminating the original weakness of their connection?? And therefore you end up with a fully formed and healthy Fraid system?? I think that's pretty neat, right?
Idk dude, is this too long? Is there a limit to how much I can talk about this? I don't think there is.
for the sake of digestibility I'm going to DEFINITELY be writing a part 2 for this!!
But think about these questions in the meantime, if you want:
Would a ghost that isn't the Fraid's formation point be able to reject or leave the Fraid system? How?
What would happen to the Fraid "head" so to speak, if their Fraid threads were severed or rejected, based on the theory that it's essentially a part of themselves implanted in another creature?
Are potential Fraid members aware of what's happening when a Fraid is in its preliminary stages?
Could Fraids be rare?
Am I projecting my feelings of isolation onto a cool kid's show?? Who knows! I feel a fanfic idea coming tho....
Y'all ever think about the fact that nothing in canon refutes the idea that anyone could replicate Danny's accident and turn themselves into a halfa
There's some fun phanon about Danny having built up a tolerance to ectoplasm from 14 years of exposure prior, but IIRC the only thing in canon keeping anyone else from doing it is a healthy dose of risk aversion and pain avoidance.
Is it a good idea to try it? Probably not. But Danny went through that process two (and a half) times with the same results and there's nothing to suggest that he has any exclusive trait(s) that made it work. So, hypothetically, anyone with the motivation and access to the portal could become a halfa.
I think about it a lot and it mostly makes me laugh because Danny's powers make him ~special~ but as far as we know the requirements for becoming a halfa are:
So I was recently reading Danny Phantom's Series Bible via ForeverPhantom's reblog (thank you, hannahmanderr, for originally posting it) and there's some really interesting facts and tidbits I came across. As is said b4, Danny was conceived of as having been called Phantom long before The Accident™, it was a nickname given to him by Sam and Tucker, a dig(?) on how his' being shy, timid saw him become, for lack of a better word, socially undetectable, invisible.
But only a few people know that Danny Phantom is actually Danny Fenton, the shy, average, quiet kid that sat in the back and tried to stay out of trouble. Because of his skittishness and shyness, his friends Tucker and Samantha started calling him “Danny Phantom”. They didn’t mean it to be hurtful… it was all in good fun. And after the accident, it didn’t bother him anymore. Because it ended up being more accurate than even they could have believed.
It also makes it seem that as a human/ghost hybrid Danny (in addition to all of the standard array of abilities specters have, to fly, to shed their solid forms and become intangible, etc) is indeed possessed of the ability to straight up, like, make portals/teleport(?), a la how Vlad in-canon can apparently do, and so cross in-between the realms at will. To be fair, that could just be a case of me reading too much into it, but the exact wording is as follows, that,
Danny received his powers through a scientific experiment gone awry... the dimensional barrier was damaged and Danny - who wasn’t even supposed to be in the lab at the time - was caught in the middle, and essentially trapped between the two worlds. The lab and the experiment were both badly damaged in the process… but Danny wasn’t. He was left with the amazing powers, and the ability to “crossover” from one world to the next at will.
What Do the Fentons Do? What Are Their A c t u a l J o b s?
The Bible works also to answer the question that's been nagging the Phandon for years, i.e., Exactly WTF are the Fentons' occupation? It states that Maddie operates as a theoretical physicist (her real name being Madison and not Madeline, apparently), with Jack in comparison being something of an adrenaline junkie and so working as a military test-pilot, his suit indeed being that of a test pilot, a crash dummy, I.e., his work uniform. Hell, it seems Jack being a test-pilot made it into the series canon, if the Danny Phantom Style Guide is anything to go by. It defines the family company specifically, FentonWorks, as a think-tank/research type company that consults when people are having problems with the paranormal.
