Hello!! Follow-up question re: Ghost King Vlad. "I want to stop." "WE CAN'T WE CAN'T" is gonna live in my mind rent free forever. Is it necessary for Vlad to keep both sides of himself intact? Can Ghost King Plasmius not exist without Masters?
[For reference, the Ghost King Plasmius ask.]
Vlad is an extremely anomalous Ghost Monarch, possessing a human part in addition to his spiritual self: the Crown and Ring only nourish the latter, making him extremely unbalanced.
His ghost, huge and aggressive, is considerably more capable of taking control of his flesh body, as well as detaching itself from it for long periods of time.
In reality, the ghost form can exist without its flesh body, but finds it extremely advantageous to have one due to the way in which ghosts are able to take advantage of the nourishment consumed by their "human" part.
The flesh body, on the other hand, is much more fragile: once it has undergone the process of spectrification, it cannot survive without the ectoplasm that holds it together, and if its ectoplasmic spirit were to abandon it, it would undergo a more or less rapid process of disintegration, based on the level of ectocontamination.
Vlad is so severely ectocontaminated that much of his flesh would fall off his bones within minutes if he decided to abandon his body and become a full-time spirit.
Ghost cells
In specters, under the microscope, one can find the presence of structures very similar to "ghost cells": this term, ironically, does not originate from the study of spirits, but is borrowed from human medicine.
In this case, it indicates the presence of cells that have undergone rapid necrosis (usually coagulative necrosis), but although they lack a nucleus, they still maintain their structures, shape, and tissue architecture intact.
For any animal this would translate into a cell that is effectively dead, albeit in a bizarre state of preservation, but this is where the situation takes a turn in the case of ghosts: the contamination by the ectoplasm actually permeates the cells one by one, maintaining their shape and functionality by completely replacing the nucleus, so that the ghost cells become "ghost" cells, with the shape of a living cell but held together only by the ectoplasm which also acts as a preservative, blocking the lysosomal enzymes from demolishing the enucleated cell.
""I want to stop." "WE CAN'T""
"I want to stop." "WE CAN'T.". What does this mean?
This has more to do with the Crown and the Ring (and also the Sword) than with the biology of specters.
Objects of power profoundly alter the way the spirits they bind think, which is why Ghost Monarchs are known for their lust for power and their uncontrollable and fiery tempers.
In the case of a specter (or, like the show calls them, "halfas"), objects of power will tend to manifest their influence on both the human and ghost forms, but much more so on the latter. This can give rise to what is called a "broken specter", a creature with a balance between its material and spiritual parts completely leaning towards the spiritual, in which the "ghost" is the one making the main decisions.
Normally, a specter has complete harmony between the two parts, being manifestations of the same person, but objects of power alter the behavior of the ghost part so profoundly that it creates a fracture within the same being, a sort of multiple personality, in which the angry, vengeful and greedy one prevails over the human one.
So, basically in that scene Vlad is begging his ghost part to stop this senseless path of blood and vengeance, but Plasmius can't stop, he's compelled by the Crown and the Ring, and now he decides.
They can't stop. They won't stop. Everyone must die.
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