valerie is the most interesting and most developed character in the entire show. she's morally gray (badum tss). she was a popular girl. she learned that her friends weren't really her friends when her dad lost his job and they dropped her. she first appeared in episode 2 but didn't become a main character until episode 10. she's being used and manipulated by a middle aged white man. she has to work at a shitty fast food restaurant to get money for college. she's 14. she wants to destroy ghosts, but then learns the man who gave her her ghost-hunting equipment is a ghost himself. she's both a villain and a love interest. she was given magical powers by an old man for no good reason.
I really think that Danny & Vlad should be extremely wary of telling anyone the exact way they became half ghost, not just because of all the emotional turmoil that came with the event, but also because of just how dangerously repeatable the process is.
You literally just have to be standing in the portal/within the blast radius of the portal to get turned into a halfa. The process is demonstrably repeatable given both Vlad's existence & the fact that Danny actually goes through it again during the series.
(side note, is that why the hole for the portal is so deep? Because they saw how far the blast from the portal fans out with the proto-portal & made it sunken into the wall as a safety measure?)
Personally, as much as I love the casual How I Died explanation from Danny, I think he'd be very careful not to actually tell people how straight-forward the accident actually was.
The average joe might have trouble getting a portal, but like. The fentons are thrilled to show off their tech to anyone who asks, and their security system is spotty at best. breaking in & turning off the portal would be the hardest part.
and that's with the average person! Someone with power, like members of the GIW? Oh it'd be far, far too easy.
compared to the other hero's in YJ how do you think Phantom stands up power wise. like Future Danny ripped the world apart and i know in some fanfiction that it is used as an indicator that he is high up there, but i'm interested in your thoughts.
This is an interesting question nonnie!
I generally agree with the idea that Phantom is in the upper-tier of crossover superhero powers, but I do have more specific thoughts so let’s break it down:
Danny’s power level
Just looking at the variety and strength of ghost-powers that Phantom displays in his show, I would put him in the higher rankings of most heroes when it comes to raw ability. I alluded to this in my main DP x YJ Deathly Weapons fanfic, but to me Phantom shows signs of a pretty common power-scaling differential that happens when a solo-protagonist hero gets transplanted into an ensemble setting. Within his own setting, Phantom had to be (or become) powerful enough to solve most problems/ fights all by himself – and some of those ghosts he ended up facing towards the end of his canon were impressively strong. By comparison ensemble heroes are generally less-powerful because working as a collective means they don’t have the same need for aggressive self-sufficiency and also so that no one character upstages or outmodes the rest of the group from a writing perspective.
There’s also the nature of ghost powers. Phantom needed to develop the raw strength to fill the role of solo combat heavy-hitter, but his base powers are versatile to the point of unsettling. He has to physically fight against other ghosts because they have (and to some extent are immune to) the same abilities as him, but in a fight against other species he could potentially avoid, manipulate or exhaust an opponent with strategic use of invisibility/ intangibility/ overshadowing.
The back of Dinah’s neck prickled. With flight to mask footsteps and intangibility rendering them undetectable by touch… Nonthreatening as Phantom generally appeared, she was starting to understand why his kind had developed such an unsettling reputation. The idea that a ghost could be present at any time - eavesdropping, spying, interfering - without any of them being the wiser was… disquieting to say the least.
- Deathly Weapons, Chapter 17: Assessment
On top of that, he seems to be in a similar boat to Superman when it comes to physical weaknesses – he doesn’t have that many, and they’re often quite specific or hard-to-find. The most easily-exploitable one is that Danny can run out of power, be slowly starved of ectoplasm or be knocked unconscious; all of which would forcibly revert him back to his weaker human state. After that, he’s vulnerable to certain magics and ghostly-artefacts, which are more likely to be accessible to various DC/ Marvel heroes (although they might not know exactly which spells/items will be most effective or why). Beyond those two, most of his weaknesses need to be specifically known about and actively sought out – anti-ecto-technology is obtainable but not mainstream, blood blossoms naturally repel/hurt ghosts but they seem to be rare in nature (or even extinct in the modern day) and then assuming you acknowledge Phantom Planet there’s ectoranium which is basically ghost-Kryptonite in rarity (and possibly even the same mineral in DP x DC settings depending on the crossover). Much like with Superman, the most reliable ways to take down Phantom require actively knowing what he is and having prepared accordingly.
Based on those metrics, I want to place Phantom in the same power-band as Superman or the Martian Manhunter. I’d consider their powers to be equivalent incomparibles – it’s hard to stack their abilities side-by-side and say one is objectively better than the others. A no-holds-barred, knock-down drag-out fight between those three could get very nasty but it would be hard to confidently call a winner without knowing more about the external factors around them.
That said, I think the thing holding Danny back from being fully at that level is his experience: or rather his lack thereof. Danny hasn’t had much formal training (except maybe some basic self-defence instruction from Maddie/Jack) and he doesn’t have a proper mentor either. His personal experience mostly fits the narrow niche of direct open combat with other ghosts, mostly throughout Amity Park and surrounds (although occasionally in the Ghost Zone or further from town).
Phantom has enough raw power and innate talent as a strategic lateral-thinker to get by, but I think that hyperspecialisation and lack of guidance would leave him with a lot of blind-spots. His hand-to-hand is self-taught and probably missing a lot of best-practice basic techniques. He’s also never had an experienced third party to observe him in the field and offer suggestions on alternative approaches to using his powers/ keep him from developing bad habits. This is something Danny actually comments on in canon; he can take a long time to identify solutions (even obvious ones) that deviate too far from his default throw hands approach to fighting. His powers could be more effectively deployed as a precision-instrument but a lack of coaching means he tends to falls back on using them as a blunt hammer because that was the pattern that came naturally when he was first starting out, and no-one was around to keep that habit from ingraining.
The place where you can see this lack of experience hurting him the most is in his lack of soft-skills. Phantom didn’t have anyone to advise him on de-escalation, damage control, comforting civilians, interacting with authorities etc. Add in the naturally-frightening nature of many ghosts and it was easy for him to fall into a public perception of being “the town menace”. Danny is pretty decent at rallying both humans and ghosts (even erstwhile enemies) to his side in crisis situations but no-one has taught him how manage public relations outside of that. He says it himself: he needs a PR agent.
On the other hand, Phantom’s heroics have inadvertently earned him a decent amount of potential political pull in the Ghost Zone. He has enough positive rapport that some regular rogues will take his side or even actively seek him out for help in the right circumstances, and other more antagonistic ones have at least developed a degree of grudging respect. There are several powerful ghosts that either have direct debts of gratitude to him/his team (Princess Dorothea, Pandora) or who hold him in high esteem for re-sealing Pariah Dark (The Far Frozen). It’s possible that defeating Pariah might even have granted him a potential candidature/claim to an official position, and judging by the way the Observants and Clockwork pay attention to him, it seems that Phantom’s slow accumulation of power/influence isn’t going completely unnoticed. However, again, Danny doesn’t have the awareness, experience or training needed to leverage that effectively – heck, he’s not even doing it on purpose.
With all that taken into account, I think Phantom would rank very highly in terms of overall potential, but at his current level he’d be in the lower ranks of the A-tier. He could become a much more powerful figure with the right guidance but in his canonical state he’s underutilising or outright overlooking a lot of his most effective tools.
TUE Future/ “Dark Phantom”
The “Dark Phantom” presented in the TUE Bad-Future is interesting to me because while he’s a very powerful figure within that story, I don't think he’s a very good reflection of canon-Danny’s potential to do harm.
Gonna complain about The Ultimate Enemy for a bit:
I’ve tag-muttered about this before but I’m one of the Phandom members who finds The Ultimate Enemy to be a frustratingly weak episode. It has a potentially fascinating core premise (the “evil future/alternate self”) but the execution is so convoluted and driven by improbable contrivances that the whole ends up being far less than the sum of its parts.
One of the biggest problems is that, rather than being a straight future/alternate version of Danny, “Dark Phantom” is actually a hybrid of Phantom and Plasmius’ worse sides. He’s a distinct, separate entity which means he can’t work as an effective dark mirror to either of them. (Compare and contrast the Justice League episode A Better World in which the Justice Lords acted as a dark mirror of what the actual Justice League members could become if they chose to abandon their morals and compassion in favour of seizing control and instating a totalitarian system of draconian crime prevention.)
The episode also tried to graft on a really mismatched moral of “don’t be a cheat”. Rather than being a lesson on choices/ values/ power/ responsibility, Dark Phantom almost ends up being an offhand biproduct of Danny getting caught cheating on a freshman/sophomore-year career-aptitude test. Instead of learning a lesson about himself/ his ideals/ his personal faults, Danny comes away from the episode with a cool new superpower after deciding not to cheat on the test after all. Not exactly satisfying.
That mismatch and the convoluted levels of moon-logic required to make it fit severely undermine the idea that this version of Dark Phantom is “inevitable”. There are too many steps that are too highly-specific and too easily-avoidable for the threat to feel real: Danny has to care enough about an early-highschool CAT to want to cheat, he has to somehow get the answers which he wasn’t intending to do in the canon timelineand only does as a result of Clockwork’s meddling, making it a self-fulfilling situation, he has to get caught using them, Mister Lancer has to hold the resulting parent-teacher meeting at Nasty Burger rather than a school office for some reason, the Nasty Burger Sauce has to 1. be dangerously explosive and 2. coincidentally explode while not only Danny’s parents but his friends and sister are inside, Danny has to be placed in Vlad’s custody rather than with his Aunt Alicia or closer family-friends, Danny has to ask Vlad to remove his Phantom-half and finally, Vlad himself has to agree to do it. Take away any of those steps and this version of Dark Phantom doesn’t happen. That’s not inevitable, it’s contrived.
But anyway, let’s look at Dark Phantom as his own entity:
One of the things that makes Dark Phantom much more potentially dangerous is that he combines Phantom’s raw power with Plasmius’ experience. Like I was saying before, one of Danny’s biggest handicaps is that he lacks training/guidance and tends to underutilise his most effective abilities. Vlad meanwhile has had years of relative freedom to practice and finesse a lower raw-power level; he’s much more skilled at advanced techniques like duplication and overshadowing (which he canonically used to force through his fortune-making business deals), as well as ecto-constructs. Plasmius is also a lot more tactical and manipulative in how he applies their common powers. Plus, the TUE version of Dark Phantom is a full-ghost, which means he doesn’t have a vulnerable mortal state that can be exploited as a weakness.
This is why I think it would be possible for TUE!Dark Phantom to successfully decimate other heroes in shared-universe crossover situations where ghosts aren’t common knowledge. He’d be an unexpected, unknown enemy that the heroes have no effective way to fight (outside of a few magic users). Combine that with many of the most powerful heroes being visible as public figures, and Dark Phantom having inherited Plasmius’ strategic/manipulative traits and it could be very easy for Dark Phantom to basically launch a premeditated paranormal blitzkrieg attack, using Plasmius’ skill with duplicates and overshadowing to subjugate any hero he couldn’t overwhelm with Phantom’s raw power level. It would also make sense that Amity Park would become one of the remaining bastions in any TUE-style future, since having advanced knowledge of ghostly abilities and access to anti-ecto technology would tilt the balance more evenly and allow them to at least keep the danger out.
Mentally, it’s also worth noting that Dark Phantom is a lot more dangerous than either Phantom or Plasmius. He’s basically the most toxic traits from both of them, removed from their more moderating/ compassionate instincts. Based on the canonical explanation given, TUE!Danny had Phantom forcibly removed in attempt to remove the pain/ rage/ grief he was feeling over the death of his family. This isn’t a model-hero-persona conceptualisation of Phantom a la Splitting Images; the TUE-version of his ghost half is a big ball of churning negative emotion. And what are some of Danny’s toxic traits when it comes to negative emotions: he lashes out, falls into self-blame and self-destructs. Then we add in Vlad’s toxic traits: he’s egocentric to the point of narcissism, he projects negative feelings/ blame onto others rather than accept responsibility for his own actions and he has a controlling/ sadistic streak.
TUE’s Dark Phantom is the worst possible combination of an emotionally devastated teenager and an emotionally immature adult. He’s a ball of pain and rage that blames the world for that pain, lashes out at it, feels worse for doing so and then blames the world for making him feel worse because he doesn’t have the emotional capacity to accept that he’s the one causing it. Grief is love persevering but the feelings of love, connection and guilt that contextualise his pain were left in the human shells that remained of Danny and Vlad. It’s possible that the Dark Phantom presented in TUE might not have the capacity to feel positive emotions or compassion. He was never meant to exist as his own entity – he was an attempt to destroy Daniel Fenton’s negative emotions which went horribly wrong. In some ways it seems like his reign of terror could be an angrier version of Dracula’s scheme from Netflix’s Castlevania or Haliax’s goal from the Kingkiller Chronicles – a drawn-out suicide note from an undead being who’s been dead inside for much longer, destroying whatever peace/happiness he encounters in revenge for being denied it himself, until such time as he either attains catharsis or finally ends the pain by destroying reality and himself along with it. That’s the final thing that makes TUE’s Dark Phantom more dangerous than either Phantom or Plasmius – he has nothing to lose and no “better nature” or personal dreams that other heroes could try to appeal to.
So yeah, the TUE version of Dark Phantom could absolutely rip the world and other heroes apart, but I don’t think he’s a particularly good reflection of Danny’s capabilities in terms of either powers or personality. There’s too much Vlad in the mix, and even then he represents such a narrow and extreme edge-case for each of their personalities that it’s barely representative at all. At best he’s a warning for what these kinds of powers could be capable of in the wrong hands.
Meta-question: What is “power” in narrative?
Alright, now that I’ve (hopefully) answered the question, let’s finish with a self-indulgent thought exercise for extra credit.
There’s an anecdote which I’ve heard attributed to the Stan Lee, in which a fan apparently asked him “who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk?” To which Stan apparently replied, “whoever the writer wants.”
While it can be fun to make tier-lists and try to rank how strong different heroes/villains/creatures are based on the rules of their respective universes, I think it can also be helpful to consider that– like all things in storytelling – power is a narrative device. It’s a tool that the character(s) and storyteller(s) can use to create and solve problems.
A character can be extremely physically strong/ skilled/ knowledgeable/ influential in a specific area but how much narrative power they have depends on how well their abilities allow them to influence or resolve story problems. And, as the omnipotent god(s) of the narrative, the storyteller(s) can choose whether to confront them with challenges that play to their existing strengths, or that force them to find other solutions. What’s the best way to kill a vampire?
This is actually part of what makes Lex Luthor such an effective Superman villain. Objectively most versions of Lex are just A Guy™ – on a physical level he doesn’t have anything close to Kal El’s Kryptonian strength or superpowers. But he feels like a serious threat because he often comes after Superman in ways that Clark can’t easily steamroll with that brute strength. Lex uses manipulation, money, influence, connections, politics, public opinion; Superman can’t physically fight him without playing into Luthor’s plans, and trying to face him in those other fields requires tools that Clark wasn’t handed as part of his Kryptonian heritage. An invading alien army is objectively a bigger physical threat to Earth, but a competent Lex Luthor scheme feels more dangerous because – while we feel confident that Superman can beat down a legion of monsters – when it comes to the question of whether he can outwit Luthor, the outcome is a lot less certain.
Situational disempowerment is another of the ways a narrative can reign in an otherwise “overpowered” character: placing them in circumstances where they either aren’t given many opportunities to showcase their best strengths, or are kept from using them because the drawbacks/ risks/ consequences of using their abilities makes their power(s) a liability. I’ve mentioned it before, but this is actually one of the tricks I’m personally using to keep Phantom’s massive powerset balanced against the other proteges in Deathly Weapons. It’s also something I’ve been struggling with when it comes to Conner’s place in that story since the stealth-mission plot structure doesn’t allow as much room to highlight his core powers and personal strengths.
Stories can create additional stakes for powerful characters by giving them emotional arcs which their powers can’t resolve. For a published example, consider the series One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100. Despite how high-ranked Saitama and Mob are within the power-scaling of their respective stories, those powers don’t kill the emotional stakes because the things they actually want/ need can only be gained through self-improvement or making connections in ways separate from their powers (and in some regards their power level actively gets in the way of that). This is also something I’m doing with Danny’s main grief arc in DW.
Final Conclusion time
In terms of physical strength and range of abilities, I think Phantom would be pretty near the top of the power-scale in most superhero crossovers. While the Dark Phantom presented in TUE might not be a particularly good reflection of Danny’s specific potential, a crossover version of the TUE timeline offers a pretty good litmus-test for how dangerous a strong ghost could be in a given universe: the combination of power level, ability range and highly-specific/ inaccessible weak-points poses a strong strategic threat.
On the other hand, physical strength isn’t the only strength. Phantom has a decent level of potential political sway as well, but he also lacks a lot of the soft skills and experience needed to make use of his toolset to its full ability.
Stepping back further, the answer to how powerful Danny is in a narrative sense is really just “however much the writer wants”. Phantom’s narrative power depends on the kind of story he’s in and the challenges placed around him – there are as many ways to situationally nerf our ghost-boy as make him OP, all without needing to alter his on-paper powers.
OKAY I’ve been seeing this make it’s rounds through TikTok and I wanted to give my two cents
So we know how Deadpool’s speech bubbles are yellowed on the inside instead of the typical-character white? Some people are attributing this to his horrible gasoline-and-gargled-rocks voice, to make the distinction that he’s, y’know, sickly
I THINK THIS IS BULLSHIT (sort of)
Okay stay with me, YES it IS that, but ALSO have we considered the fact that, hey, narration boxes (and editors notes for clarification) are also yellow??
Deadpool is speaking to the reader (that 4th-wall breaking rascal /pos) and a broader audience, not just the other characters!
LET ME JUST SAY that this shouldn’t really be news to people, it’s common sense and clever visual storytelling, but to claim it’s JUST because his voice is distinctive is just a sad, gross understatement of DP’s character and his audacious sass/4th wall breaking abilities
RAHH i just read both your tue danny / phantom / dan centric works, and how does it feel to be so correct and compelling and correct? more seriously - what about TUE / TUE Danny do you find most interesting to explore? do you have any characterization / headcanon that isn't necessarily canon compatible? and free space (please ramble about them as much as you want)
Sorry it's taken me so long to go through my inbox! I hope you don't mind the long text; TUE is one of my favorite episodes and Dan is a character that I find very fascinating.
Thank you for the kind words aahh! I don't often write so it means a lot that you liked my works. For context if anyone else is reading this, I wrote a couple IB fics about Dan/Phantom, and my thoughts about him, which I'll elaborate on here.
I have a lot of feelings about Dan, especially since he as a character is so tragic. It's strange to me that no one ever mentions the fact that when Vlad performed the removal of Danny's human half, it was Phantom that betrayed Vlad, not the other way around. I always thought that meant there was something wrong with Dan after the accident also. I delve into it a little in my fic, but I do have more thoughts about his attitude. It's interesting to me that the comic portrays his actions as being motivated by Vlad's self preservation and selfishness, and I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think it's more complicated than that. I personally believe his actions have a very complex motivation, more than just "Vlad is evil so fusing with him made Danny also evil".
It's difficult to deal with grief, and from the few scenes shown, it seems Dan dealt with it by shutting down. I also think he had a lot of conflicting feelings of grief and rage; Danny was the one who regularly defeated the ghosts, but he was also the one protecting them from the human ghost hunters, releasing the ghosts back into the GZ rather than allowing them to be taken for experimentation. I think it would anger him that his lenience towards the ghosts was taken advantage of, leading to the deaths of his friends and family. Vlad never showed an inclination towards abusing the ghosts, so this is what I believe caused him to do such uncharacteristically violent things like paralyze Johnny 13 from the waist down, permanently damage one of Box Ghost's eyes and one of his hands, and destroy Ember's vocal cords.
Something I touched on in my fic too is that I believe Danny has a weird relationship with death, due to the fact that he managed to come back from it, and also due to the general existence of ghosts in his life. AGIT states that all ghosts are people who've died, as well as that some lose their humanity over time. Due to this, I have a belief/theory that Dan expected his friends, if not family, to come back, and when they didn't, he dealt with his loneliness through anger. In TUE, he acts like he doesn't care about any of them, but I think he actually cares too much. He is caustic and taunting towards them, his parents especially, because his anger at them for hurting him is compounded by his grief at their loss.
In addition, the interference of Clockwork probably also contributed to his anger; there are two timelines that exist, the one where Danny lost and the one where he didn't, and the only reason that he won was because of the interference of Time himself. I think this is a lot of what motivates Dan's actions in TUE; he's trying to prove to Danny that the timeline is "inevitable" because he's trying to prove it to himself. His loved ones have already died, and he's angry that this alternate Danny gets a second chance. The only moment of true vulnerability we see in him during TUE is when he realizes that Jazz, his Jazz from his timeline, had always known who he was. It's obvious that despite his efforts to seem unemotional about everything, all of his actions are due to his turbulent emotions, and this is even more evident in canon due of AGIT confirming that ghosts are beings of emotion.
I do think Vlad's emotional state also compounds with this, since Vlad as a character is more prone to hiding his hurts than Danny, which is a large part of what makes up Dan's personality. In addition, Vlad's character is largely driven by a desire for family and affection, but he responds to this insecurity with a need for control and self-aggrandizement. Vlad's goals throughout the show are to amass power, largely to prove himself to those he cares about - Danny and Maddie - as well as to spite those he hates - Jack. His feelings for Jack seem more complicated than that, however; he is upset at what he sees as a betrayal by someone he obviously cared about; the two of them were best friends and roommates before Maddie was in the picture.
I think both Danny and Vlad center a lot of themselves on the people they love, though it's more evident on Vlad's side, and Dan as a combination of them does as well. His tendency is often similar to "splitting" in BPD, where he responds to a perceived betrayal or personal weakness with volatility, which is something Vlad does as well, with Jack, Maddie in some ways and especially with Danny. Dan as well responds with hostility towards people he is attached to who he perceives as hurting him, something that is complicated by the fact that part of what he blames them for is the fact that they died. He is especially ruthless with people he sees as betraying him or his lenience, like Valerie and the ghost rogues gallery; this is also a combination of Vlad and Danny's personalities. Vlad's hatred tends to be more long-standing than Danny's but he also tends to be more methodical with his actions. Danny on the other hand responds to his own anger with immediate aggression, but lets go of slights relatively quickly. Dan, as the combination of the two, holds grudges for a long time, but tends to rely on brute force rather than long term plans like Vlad would have.
He also has a lot of self-loathing, which he projects onto Danny and Vlad from this timeline, Danny especially. As I mentioned earlier, a large factor in this is Clockwork's direct involvement in the current timeline, which superseded his. In addition, I think that Danny and Vlad's interpersonal dynamic might have fed into this; both of them can't bring themselves to permanently harm the other but they do both hold some level of resentment for the other, Danny more-so since Vlad has an attachment to him. Danny's hatred for Vlad especially seems to derive in part from his own fears about himself and his selfishness, and I think that influences the way Dan interacts with both of them.
TLDR: Dan's specific concoction of mental illness derives from both Vlad and Danny, which affects a lot about how he acts and feels. There's a lot to explore about his trauma and how that relates to his new place in the current timeline, and I have a lot of feelings about him. (He makes me sad!!)
The scene where Laura comes face to face with her past self is incredible for several reasons, but one of the ones that sticks out to me is that it is truly a marriage between powerful writing and poignant acting choices. As the audience, I think it's our instinct to watch it from the perspective of present day Laura, and to focus on her, but let's talk about past Laura for a moment.
The conscious decision not to have her fight back or defend herself at any point is an absolute masterclass in writing. The fact that she just stands there and takes it, never once getting angry at present day Laura or attempting to swing back, but instead insisting that she's a good person and repeatedly asking "why?", is such a delightfully subtle way of cluing us in that her self-loathing is very present even in 1949. It's why she has to keep lying to herself, and it proves what present day Laura said about her becoming such a master at deception that she's genuinely fooled herself.
What really drives the scene home, however, are Michelle's acting choices. The juxtaposition between present-day Laura, in all of her uninhibited grandeur, and 1949 Laura whose self-restraint is so palpable that it's almost a third person in the room, is sublime. The two Lauras aren't just styled differently, their respective physicalities are poles apart. They even speak differently, with Michelle not only changing the the volume, speed, and rhythm of her speech, but also her accent. Present day Laura leans into the Scottish burr, while 1949 Laura actively tones it down.
Realising that dannyversary, the dreaded dannypocalypse, my beloved danno-day, is ONCE AGAIN THE DAY BEFORE MY VERY IMPORTANT EXAM HOW CAN I LICE UNDER THIS CONDITIONS
Something I think the first two seasons of Danny Phantom did very well was showing a natural progression of Danny's distrust and fear of his parents. It's also one of the most tragic things in the show imo.
At first, Danny believes his parents' love is unconditional. Of course they would love him no matter what. He even says to Vlad in Bitter Reunions "My parents will accept me no matter what."
It makes sense, Danny had always known his parents were obsessive about ghosts but with no ghosts to interact with, he didn't realize just how strong their bias was. Plus, as neglectful as the Fentons can be, they've always loved their children. Sure, he's apprehensive about their reaction, else he would have told them immediately, but he isn't very concerned about the possibility they would hurt him.
As season 1 progresses, Danny starts to have doubts. The first really visceral reaction I can remember him having to his parents is in My Brother's Keeper. Their glee in talking about hunting down the ghost at Jazz's school and ripping it apart molecule by molecule visibly distresses him.
Then, his parents start actively hunting him. And after Public Enemies and Control Freaks, it becomes more complicated with his reputation as Phantom is tanked.
In season 2, the conflict between Danny and his parents only escalates. I'm not going to list every instance, but there are numerous moments in season 2 where Danny reacts in fear, sadness, or anger to his parents' words and actions. I feel like Maddie and Jack also pull even further away from their kids this season too, which doesn't help. When they do express concern over his wellbeing, their help is often very misguided (like in Phantom Menace). But unlike season 1 we don't see them lament over how their kids are pulling away, they've become very focused on their ghost hunting.
In Reality Trip we get explicit confirmation that Danny is afraid of his parents hurting him if they found out what he was.
Sam: "Where are your parents?"
Danny: "Probably looking for me, or a scalpel to dissect me with."
and
Tucker: "We should contact your parents."
Danny: "And tell them what? I'm sorry I've been lying to you and please don't rip me apart molecule by molecule."
And really can you blame him? His parents have given no indication they would accept him as a ghost. He has been shot at, threatened, and insulted by his parents. Plus even if it was in an alternate universe, it's hard to forget Maddie strapping him down to a lab table and threatening him. This kid has major trauma that is not really touched on at all in the show.
I also find Jazz's reaction to Danny's secret interesting. She says its Danny's secret to tell, but it's putting him in danger not to tell them. Not once does she suggest telling their parents. Which really makes me believe Jazz isn't confident they would accept him either, and that she thinks it's safer to keep it from their parents.
In Reality Trip, Maddie and Jack do accept Danny, and Danny erases their memories. Which leads to a weird limbo in season 3. No longer are the Fentons portrayed as a real threat to Danny, in fact they barely interact with him as Phantom in this season. There's a lot of dynamics that suffer in S3, but it really feels like its just treading water. The only real highlight I can think of is the family bonding in Girl's Night Out. It makes me wish they'd let Jack and Maddie keep their memories and played out how this would impact their family dynamic. Or at the very least, have Danny reach out and try to make a truce with them and work on having them accept Phantom. Anything really would be preferable to what we got in S3.
And the reveal in Reality Trip was much more satisfying than the reveal in Phantom Planet, as Maddie and Jack are actually made to confront how they treated Danny and why he didn't trust them.
This is a kid's cartoon show, so at the end of the day, Jack and Maddie were always going to accept Danny. But in my opinion, the show was successful (until it wasn't) in playing up the horror of the situation and the fear that your parents will reject you for who you are.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how it plays out in the graphic novels.
