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#3WD Answers
threewaysdivided · 2 months
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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.
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threewaysdivided · 2 years
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So, I've noticed that DP fans and authors have a sliding scale for Vlad. They vary from "haha look at poor little meow meow who fails at everything" to "Vlad is an absolute psycho and the Fenton parents are criminally negligent for allowing him near their kids". I'm very curious as to how you view Vlad and his relationship with Danny because that variance is so huge, and since it kind of slides between the two in canon as well.
Ah, Vlad.  Perpetual runner-up of Dracula lookalike contests, consistent bronze medallist in the race for most-culturally-relevant-Vladimir, and called by the internet everything from Psychopath to Meow Meow to I regretfully inform you Daddy.
One of the things that makes interpretations of Danny Phantom characters more fluid/variable than others is that (as you said) canon can be rather slide-y at times - something which lends itself to multiple quasi-canonical potential readings.  I think I’ve mentioned before that for me this means I have a bit of an annoying tendency to change my headcanons depending on what best facilitates a given story concept, rather than being wedded to One True Version™.
That said, Vlad is probably the major-character who I have the most consistent read on.
Vlad’s Character
When it comes to the question of whether Vlad is an entertainingly pathetic failure or a dangerously unhinged threat, I would say the answer is that he’s kind of both.
My core reading of Vlad is that he’s a narcissist.  He sees himself as exceptional/ superior, he has very little empathy for others, and he often treats other characters less as people and more as prizes to be won or as existing to support/ serve him.  His ghost powers probably exacerbated this, but since he behaves pretty similarly during Masters of All Time it’s likely that this is a part of his native personality.
Now, on its own this wouldn’t be a consignment to villainy - there can be narcissistic or egocentric hero characters (early MCU Tony Stark is like this, and it’s basically Neil’s whole bit in Class of the Titans) - but Vlad combines it with a bunch of significantly nastier traits.  He’s entitled, he can be extremely petty, he’s immature and he holds grudges to an irrational degree.  He also twists narratives; finding ways to position himself as the victim or somehow secretly the victor/ mastermind even when he loses.  Most of all, he’s controlling and part of that comes out as sadism - he enjoys the power that comes from hurting, inconveniencing, frustrating and generally making life miserable for others.
All of this means that Vlad can be incredibly dangerous toward people/ in situations where his self-concept is threatened, where he feels slighted or where he has been denied something he feels should be rightfully his.  That sadism combined with his lack of empathy, his manipulativeness, his capacity to hold petty grudges for potentially years and his ability for patient, premeditated planning has the potential to be terrifying.  At his worst, Vlad is a malignant narcissistic abuser with wealth and superpowers.
But on the other hand, it’s those same core traits that make Vlad kind of pathetic and even tragic.  Like many narcissistic antagonists (and IRL malignant narcissists) he creates a lot of his own suffering.  Someone else on this site put it well when they said that Vlad doesn’t care about people, he cares about the people-shaped objects he’s trying to stuff into the holes in his lonely, miserable existence.  Vlad had multiple opportunities to course-correct and build the kind of genuine, sincere relationships with Maddie, Jack, Danny and Danielle that deep down he seems to want, but he burned those bridges himself with bad choices and worse behaviour.  He has needs and desires, and on some level he has the capacity to change and choose better, but until he learns to care about people for their own sake and to treat others with consideration and respect he will always end up driving those things away.
Vlad’s strategic plans fall apart for similar reasons.  He’s unwilling to admit when he’s wrong or has been bested which means he doesn’t really change his opinions of people or adjust his strategies accordingly (Jack will always be “an idiot”, Danny will always be “an underperforming fool wasting his potential” etc), he doesn’t really pay attention to people unless he’s fixated on/ wants something from them, and because he sees his perspective as universal and/or doesn’t value empathy, his plans often have big gaping weak spots that people can easily exploit. 
There’s an almost classic-tragedy element to Vlad; his compassionless hubris is his hamartia and it walks him into nearly every reversal of fortune.
But also… yeah, watching him repeatedly trip over that ego and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is funny.  This is a character who never holds himself accountable or bothers to grow; at some point you run out of sympathy for the whiney middle-aged man who uses his tremendous wealth and power mostly to skulk around a big empty mansion while creeping on a married woman and her teenage son, and seeing him become a perpetual karmic butt-monkey of his own making can be very satisfying.
Vlad is both at once; simultaneously a potentially terrifying villain and a deeply pathetic little man living in a selfish mundane suffering of his own creation.  Forget The Fright Before Christmas, a holiday morality visit from Scrooge’s ghosts would have done Mister Masters a world of good.
My preferred use of Vlad
Okay so, despite everything I’ve managed to say above, I’m now going to cop to the fact that I… don’t find Vlad super compelling as a character.
Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s very useful as an antagonist and source of schemes that can be complex while still being beatable, but in isolation he just doesn’t have a lot going on under the hood for me at that deepest level. 
This might be coming from personal experience - I’ll spare you the details but there are some abusive malignant narcissists in my extended family and I’ve observed this kind of behaviour and its consequences in real life.  And the truth I’ve found is that once you strip all the layers back it’s depressingly simple.
I completely understand other people’s fascination: when you first encounter this kind of mindset, it can seem deeply compelling.  It feels like there has to be a reason, an answer, an explanation.  A lot of time can be spent searching for that; trying to puzzle out how a person could be like this, what kind of moral framework they must have, what internal justifications a sane and reasonable person could have that would possibly excuse doing something that seems so obviously wrong/ hurtful.  But deep down the answer is: they just don’t care.   There is no moral rationalisation because morality never factors into it.  They want, so they do and the only thing that will give them major pause is if it will have negative consequences for them personally.
In this regard Vlad for me sits more in the realm of Fire Lord Ozai, Batman’s Joker or YJS1’s Vandal Savage.  These characters aren’t super complex or compelling in isolation (there’s a reason people write feature-film-length analyses on Zuko and Azula but not Ozai himself).  They’re more like a force of nature and while you can definitely interrogate the specific context of their origins, their self-perception and get a lot of mileage from dissecting the ideology that they use to rationalise their actions to others (and how those arguments often don’t hold up to questioning) underneath all that grandiose posturing the evil they represent is eerily mundane and commonplace.  Just reactionary id and ego run rampant, detached from compassion and placed in a position to exert itself indiscriminately.  Power and control.  Want and do.
I think that’s part of why they’re striking - we expect some grand ideological philosophy to match the presentation and instead what we get is something small, hollow and pathetically human.  It feels unfair and unsatisfying and that’s because it so often is.
Because of this, I’m often more interested in stories that focus on other, more layered members of the cast and their struggles (it’s a bit weird how little involvement Vlad has in a lot of my favourite DP fics and fic premises).  When Vlad is present I usually prefer him to function more as an antagonistic force for other characters to struggle with than stories which try to justify his worldview or make him “relatable”.  Like I said above, Vlad at his worst is a controlling, manipulative, abusive stalker and that can make him a very effective villain in horror-thriller style character dramas.
Vlad and Danny
On a meta-level Vlad and Danny work well as character foils.  They share several surface-level flaws (both can be superficial, immature, judgemental, prone to grudge-holding and tempted to misuse their powers) and in some ways Vlad is a warning for what Danny could become were he to allow his power to go to his head and separate him from other people.  But at their cores (heh) there’s a fundamental difference to do with compassion and responsibility that sets them apart.  Vlad is an exceptional man with power and status but no empathy or accountability, and deep down, beneath all that performance he’s alone­ - still skulking around the fringes of the ghost zone, using threats, lower-power mooks and bribery when he needs someone to do his bidding.  And then there’s Danny, unexceptional by many metrics, who might feel stressed, lonely and overburdened at times but who genuinely cares and tries, and without even realising it has a lot of powerful allies who would rally to his aid as a result.
As for what they have in-story, I wouldn’t really call it a relationship.  They have a dynamic, but to me relationship implies some kind of mutual participation, and I don’t think Vlad sees or treats Danny as a person.  He doesn’t seem to care about Danny’s interests, feelings or needs: his fixation is mostly on shaping Danny into an heir/ apprentice of his own design, and getting yet more revenge on Jack by supplanting Jack as a father figure.  Danny is the son-shaped-object that Vlad is trying to shove into one of those holes, and once Danny makes it clear that he will never willingly submit to that, Vlad goes full supervillain.
From an audience perspective there is a tragic element to this, since we can see how much Danny would have benefited from having a genuinely supportive mentor, and how it might also have helped Vlad as a person… but Vlad burned that bridge himself.
In that regard I think it’s good that Danny doesn’t have any prior attachment to/ affection for Vlad or desire to please him.  Vlad isn’t a healthy person for Danny to be around, and it’s pretty obvious that Danny knows this and tries to minimise contact with him as much as possible (outside of the occasions when he gets stupid-teenager-brain and decides to poke the bear by pettily antagonising him).  I think that that’s really the best outcome; minimising a toxic person’s presence in his life so he can independently pursue things that are actually healthy and productive.  
Ultimately, Vlad is a grown man who makes his own choices, and he is not Danny’s responsibility.  Yes, it is admirable to extend understanding and respect to others but there is a limit on that and a relationship requires input from both people.  As they say, it takes two to tango; it’s not for one to be doing 100% of the work when the other is unwilling to sincerely engage or compromise with them.  And it is especially not the responsibility of a teenager to be playing that role for an adult (particularly an adult who routinely manipulates and threatens him). 
The biggest issue for Danny is that he can’t fully remove himself from Vlad.  Vlad has too much power and influence; as Masters he’s an important businessman (and at times political figure) with sway in Danny’s hometown, as Plasmius he’s a powerful ghost who can use those powers to bypass physical barriers (when he isn’t sending mooks to harass him), and as a person Vlad’s the kind of creepy stalker who will use his power, influence and resource-access to literally plant spyware in the Fenton family home.  But, most difficult to avoid, Vlad is also a close family friend of Danny’s parents from their college days and Danny frequently has to play nice with him for their sake.
And let’s talk about that last one.
Vlad and the Fenton Parents
The Fenton Parents have some the most divisive interpretations in fandom (short of Vlad himself and sometimes Sam).  Their presentation ping-pongs all over the shop and whether they read as “good but flawed” or “absolutely awful” really depends on how much you want to take things at face value, read into implications and/or recognise certain scenes as being purely hyperbolic Rule of Funny Nicktoon gags.  The only readings I would call a mischaracterisation are ones that paint them as actively disinterested, uncaring or malicious towards their kids - the fact that they do sincerely love their children despite their behaviour is part of what makes them compelling.
However, I want to talk about them because - while you can certainly make the case that they are “criminally negligent” in other ways - the fact that they don’t realise how bad Vlad is, or that he shouldn’t be allowed near Jazz or Danny isn’t one of them.  It’s actually pretty believable to me.
Something to remember is that, as an audience observing a story from the outside, we often have a much more omniscient perspective than any of the characters within it.  Even when characters think they are “alone”, we are observing them through the fourth wall - we get to see What You Are in the Dark.  Fandom loves to joke about how obvious it is that Danny is Phantom or Clark Kent is Superman but that’s kind of forgetting that we get to see things from a Doylist perspective while all the actual characters are stuck being Watson.
Just from that viewpoint, it makes sense that Maddie and Jack aren’t aware of the true nature of Vlad’s character.  Maddie might recognise that Vlad is a creep toward her specifically (Jack meanwhile is cluelessly naïve and loyal to a fault) but most of Vlad’s worst moments take place outside of their awareness and he often behaves a lot better in their presence in order to keep them close.  Danny has seen much more of Vlad’s darker side and Jazz is aware of that through him, but since most of it is connected to Danny being Phantom they’re not exactly rushing to share.  From Maddie and Jack’s point of view, “Vladdie” is a dearly beloved college buddy who might be a bit eccentric and incel-adjacent but is otherwise mostly harmless.  And sure their kids might not like him but of course teenagers are going to complain about hanging out with their parents’ friends - they’re teenagers!  Plus, Danny and Jazz have frequently objected to other aspects of their parents’ lives, so it’s not like that would raise an immediate red flag on its own (let’s be real: even at their best, Maddie and Jack are not the most attentive parents).
So to me it’s pretty reasonable that they wouldn’t notice those initial signs.  And (speaking again from IRL experience) even assuming they did notice some of them it would make sense for them to not want to believe it.  It can be really hard for people to accept that someone they’ve known and respected for a long time has done something awful.  We want to give people in our lives the benefit of the doubt and that can lead us to make excuses for/ try to defend them in ways we wouldn’t for a stranger.  There’s also a level of fear and guilt that can get in the way.  If our judgement about one person turns out to have been that badly wrong, then we could be potentially wrong about everyone; suddenly the world is a lot less safe/ certain.  And then we have to face the question of how complicit we might have been by ignoring, excusing, or enabling their actions.  It’s not really surprising that even well-intentioned people can end up reflexively dismissing whistle-blowers and victims; it’s a self-protective impulse as much as anything else.
I think that’s why Danny’s “mutually assured destruction” threat is so effective.  If Maddie and Jack accept Danny being Phantom then they wouldn’t be able to deny what Vlad has done as Plasmius.  And, once they can’t deny that, they probably wouldn’t continue to accept Vlad as a friend.
And that’s another bridge that Vlad has burned himself.
What a cheese-head.
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threewaysdivided · 4 months
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for the ask game: 💥🤔📚
if we can only do one, your pick :)
(Fanfic writer ask game)
💥 What is one canon thing that you wish you could change?
I've talked about some other changes in a previous ask, but I think Danny Phantom could have been improved by either re-writing the episode Memory Blank or at the very least, cutting a couple of the jokes. The base-premise is potentially interesting but it was definitely one of the ones where the show did characters dirty for the sake of jokes.
If I had to leave it mostly as-is, I would at least want to ditch the two random insert jokes where Danny "remembers" using his powers to peep in the girl's locker room. Not only is the base joke a gross, sexist "boys will be boys" gag, it also just feels really jarring and almost out of character for Danny in particular. That's not to say that Danny isn't canonically chauvinistic in other ways at times, but this one doesn't jive with how he reacts to similar situations (and behaviors from Tucker) in other, more character-centric episodes. The abrupt musical punctuation feels more like a sudden insert of Fairly Odd Parents humour and I would say it's probably only there because this kind of "adorkable misogynist" punchline is a common staple in both Butch Hartman and Steve Marmel's comedy styles.
Ideally though, since the main purpose of the episode is to give Danny his marketable DP insignia, I would rather do a full re-write around all three trio members actively trying to design a logo for Phantom. Rather than doing Danny and Tucker dirty by making them into boring butt-monkeys who live empty lives without Sam (and doing Sam dirty by making her seem like a weird stalker who changes Danny's suit without his knowledge or consent) we could have had an episode that let the icon have actual symbolic meaning for the whole of "Team Phantom". It's sad that one if the most iconic symbols of the show ends up being tacked onto a character assassinating goof-story when there were so many ways it could have been great.
🤔 Would you ever want to write something canon if you got the opportunity?
Going to go with a soft no on this one.
For one thing, I believe the best stories happen when someone has a specific story to tell, and at the moment my Deathly Weapons fanfic is the main story I feel the need to make exist. As a mystery nerd, I guess I could maybe do a decent detective story involving Batman or Gotham, but on the other hand I don't think it would be the kind of story Modern DC wants to sell.
From a practical point of view, I also think the things and stories I find the most fascinating within the Danny Phantom fandom would probably be too tonally serious to "fit with the brand" of official canon material. (Although it has been awesome to see some of the Phandom olds getting ascended to the level of official canon creators with the AGiT comics!)
As for Young Justice Animated I think I'm one of several fans who wouldn't mind being tagged-in (or at least a fly on the wall) if DC/Warner Bros ever decided to give it the Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood treatment, kick Greg Weisman's Whedon-worshipping incel ass out the door and let some of the prominent staff who were dropped after Season 1 have a do-over to continue the story they were actually setting up. I think there was a lot of potential in that initial cast, and there were some really cool character-centric standalone episodes that could have come from things like digging into Artemis and Jade having a diegetic connection to Alice In Wonderland while living in the same city as Jervis "Mad Hatter" Tech. But as it stands, I found Weisman's multi-season vandalisation of his colleagues' work to be so egregious that I ended up blocking both the main series tag and his name for the sake of my blood pressure. Look, even when he's not writing like the kind of man who probably fantasises about impregnating his colleague's daughter, the Nostalgia-Critic-level incompetence at basic narrative coherence is just exhausting.
📚 Is there a fanfic or fanfic writer you recommend?
Many!
For today's tasting, I would like to recommend Developmental Milestones and the broader Cor Et Cerebrum series by @audreycritter. Actually, let's just make that a general rec' for all Audreycritter's DC stuff.
I really like their interpretations of the Batfam and Superfam. They do such a good job of capturing the humanity of these characters in their non-cape moments, and I love their approach to dialogue. I think it speaks volumes to the strength of their character-writing that, despite not being a reader who generally goes in for Original Characters, I have become deeply obsessed with their on-call OC Batdoctor Kiran "Dev" Devabhaktuni. He is indeed the light of my life. Developmental Milestones is Dev's focus story but plenty of others put the focus on the canon DC roster if you prefer.
Go enjoy seeing Bruce get yelled at by a deeply affronted, potty-mouthed British Doctor with a heart of gold, though he'll stringently deny it.
Thanks for playing!
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threewaysdivided · 1 year
Note
Hi!
Okay, first of all. I LOVE your blog (particularly you Danny Phantom tags). I didn't know this Phandom exist until about a month ago? and I've been having a blast here.
That's and there this one thing. Do you know anything about Duck shaped candle in the Phandom? It's a Fanon thing, right?
I found them in some stories (usually DC x DP fic that have people summoning Phantom) and I just think it's really cute.
Hi, and welcome to the Phandom!
I'm glad you're having fun on my tumblr 💚 A lot of the content in my Danny Phantom tag is reblogged from other users who make excellent stuff (fanfic, art, meta etc) so I heartily recommend checking out the blogs of the original posters to find more things you might like.
Now, as for your duck-shaped conundrum, I think I can give you an answer. It is purely a fanon thing, coming from the DC Comics crossover (DP x DC) space. Specifically, I believe it originates with this story from @noir-renard:
If You Give a Bat a Burger Gen (non-romantic) | Case-fic | Currently updating Strange things are going on in Gotham: A series of crimes linked only by a sentence uttered. A drug that no one seems to be selling, but lots of people are taking. An old enemy reborn, or someone pretending to be him. Graffiti that can't be photographed by normal means. Bartenders disappearing without a trace. John Constantine is also there. Danny wants nothing to do with any of it. He just wants to sell burgers and survive. Actually, he'd like to go home again, but since that isn't possible, he'll stick with burgers. Gotham's vigilante's have other plans. This is why Danny doesn't do favors.
Detouring away from the ducks for a moment, this is a very good elseworld-style crossover fanfic. It has a more traditional spirits-magic-hauntings-psychopomps take on Danny Phantom lore than canon and they use it to create a really cool urban-fantasy mystery setting for the characters. (If you've encountered the Ben Aaronovitch Rivers of London novels, this has a similar general vibe and aesthetic).
Our duck-candle friend first appears in Chapter 1 of IYGaBaB, where a reluctant Danny has it very insistently gifted to him by an amateur occultist, and is then quick to re-gift it to an injured Red Hood. As of the most recent published chapter, the duck-candle is floating in a bowl of water on Jason's nightstand and the rest of the Batfam are giving it little hats. Apparently the candle wards away spirits if burned but no-one wants to light Dr Quack on fire just yet.
Fandom being fandom, people latched onto it as a cute and funny concept, and so began the proliferation of the Red Duck Candle through the DP x DC community.
(This kind of wide-spread fanon lore is not at all unusual for the DP fandom, where a good 50% or more of the most widely accepted concepts are fan-creations at any given time. Ghost Obsessions? Danny as King? Summoning Rituals? Liminality? Ghost Hunger? Ghost Nip? Wes? All fanon.)
As for where the recent boom in DP x DC content came from, I'm not sure. DP x Other Superhero crossovers have had a fandom for a long time (I started writing my own DP x DC crossover fanfic back in 2015, when Teen Titans Animated, Miraculous Ladybug, the Early MCU and the original run of Young Justice Animated episodes were dominating), but it's really ramped up in the last year. I know there are a couple of popular prompt blogs and apparently a DPxDC-focused discord running at the movement, but as for which came first (the duck or the egg, one might say) I have no idea.
Either way, hope you have fun!
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threewaysdivided · 5 months
Note
trick or treat!
(send a "trick-or-treat" ask to get a snack, a prank or a cursed fact)
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Have my favourite recipe for chocolate chip zucchini muffins!
You will need:
Oven
Muffin tins (makes 24 regular sized muffins) + lining papers
Mixing bowl
Spoon/spatula
Measuring cup(s)
Box grater
Knife
Food processor or immersion blender
Ingredients
2-3 large zucchini, washed
2 large eggs
2 blocks (approx 300g/ 10.58 Oz) milk or medium-dark chocolate
1 cup (250 mL/ 8.45 Fl Oz) rolled oats
3/4 cup (188 mL/ 6.35 Fl Oz) wholemeal flour
2/3 cup (166 mL/ 5.61 Fl Oz) brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 cup (125 mL/ 4.23 Fl Oz) cocoa powder
1/3 cup (83 mL/ 2.8 Fl Oz) buttermilk (or regular milk)
1/4 cup (62.5 mL/ 2.11 Fl Oz) vegetable oil
1 1/2 tbsp white vinegar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp fine instant coffee (or espresso) powder
1/2 tsp salt
Method
Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F). Line muffin tins with patty papers.
Place rolled oats in the jar of your food processor/immersion blender.
Grate your zucchini. Squeeze the juice out and set aside. Place the strained zucchinis into your mixing bowl.
Add the zucchini juice, oil and milk to the oats. Stir to combine. Allow to sit for 2-3 minutes so the oats can soak up some of the liquid.
Add the brown sugar, salt, vanilla and coffee powder to the grated zucchini. Stir to combine and allow to sit for 2-3 minutes to draw more moisture from the zucchini.
Add eggs to the zucchini mixture, beating through until completely combined.
Blend the oat mixture into a paste. Transfer oat mixture to the zucchini bowl, stirring through thoroughly.
Add vanilla and cocoa powder to the batter, stirring until completely combined.
Chop chocolate into chunks of your preferred size (for this recipe, I prefer small bits).
Add chocolate, flour, baking powder and baking soda to the batter. Stir until completely combined. (The batter should be quite thick - if your zucchinis were very large or watery, you may need to add a bit of extra flour).
Stir through vinegar to activate the baking soda.
Spoon batter into muffin tins.
Bake for 25-35 minutes, until springy to the touch and a toothpick comes out with moist crumbs clinging.
Cool completely on a wire rack before serving.
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threewaysdivided · 1 year
Note
So, in YJDW, Danny is still very much a solo-hero type. I imagine that's going to potentially cause some issues down the road, both with learning how to work as an equal with other supers and bonding with them since his own hero development is so different from the Team's. No mentor, the discomfort that the nature of his powers can cause, the mixed history he DOES have that's public knowledge, and the lack of real exposure to the rest of the superhero sphere of influence.
(Young Justice: Deathly Weapons)
So this is interesting because you're completely right; those are things that should complicate Danny's interactions (and potential integration) with established heroes and hero teams.
However, the specifics of Danny's circumstances and road to joining the Team in Deathly Weapons kind of alleviate or sidestep a lot of those potential issues. At cost of giving him a new catalogue of complexes to deal with but beggars can't be choosers.
I think we discussed a few of the particulars a while ago in this post thread with @doodly-doop, so I might gloss over some of those finer points here.
Suffice to say that, if it was a immediately-post-series Phantom, there's a lot of potential stumbling blocks to do with him already having ingrained instincts/ strategic impulses/ reflexes/ fighting styles that are specifically geared towards him being the lone powerhouse/ point guard/ tank in a group of otherwise Badass Normal support members. (Compare Superboy, who might be best suited to the specific role of tank/ threat management but who knows most of his teammates can take hits that would incapacitate regular humans). There's also potential for personality clashes given that Phantom is somewhat used to being the de facto leader in his own environment, and also the possibility for him to be carrying some resentment over being left un-mentored or having to deal with ghost problems entirely by himself if it becomes clear that the others knew something was happening in Amity but chose not to intervene.
If you want fic recs, Communication Issues (DP x YJ) by @nerdofspades is specifically about the resentment thing, and the solo-act-joins-team-operation issue is something that comes up in MirrorandImage's DP x TT fic Ghost of A Chance.
When it comes to Deathly Weapons, the details of the setup have kind of brushed aside some of those issues or reduced their severity. Danny's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad nine months of being a fugitive in between leaving Amity and finding Batman (which we will learn more about in coming chapters) has made him a lot more amenable to feedback and groupwork.
Rather than being fresh from overt frontline heroing he's spent almost a year in hiding; a time where he and the rest of Team Phantom had to work a lot more collaboratively, in situations where Danny was very conscious that the others' skills and connections were just as, if not more important than his powers (which at times were even a liability since they could potentially be tracked). Trying to pull a solo-act or otherwise splitting up the group is a really risky move when you're being hunted, and it curbed a lot of the impulses that might have led him to break ranks or otherwise deviate from a team plan without checking in first.
It's also worn down a lot of his pride in a few ways. First, simply traveling around America has made him much more conscious of how small scale he and Amity Park are, both geographically and in the grand scheme of heroism. It's something he thinks about in Chapter 15:
Everything here was too big for him - the manor, Gotham City, Batman and Robin, top-tier heroes... Sure, maybe back in Amity he'd been something special. Or at least, half of him might have been. But if months on the road had shown him anything it was that, in the eyes of the world, Amity Park was just another small, no-name town. Just like he was. Small-town. -Roads to Safe Places (Chapter 15)
There's also the fact that he's just... extremely tired. Being the de facto head of a group in a time of crisis is an exhausting level of responsibility, especially when you have no reliable fallbacks and prohibitively huge consequences for failure. In Chapter 8, Danny is very resistant to cooperating with Batman and Robin, but that's not pride that's survival mode: Danny and Co. endured the last nine months primarily by being aggressively self-reliant and not trusting other people. (There's also a little bit of grief and survivor's guilt in the mix: a sense that this is his torch to bear alone, and that it wouldn't be fair to pass the burden.)
Part of him desperately wanted somebody to step in, to take the load. But that wasn't how it worked. This was his mess. He couldn't just shove it off onto someone else because he wasn't up to the challenge. - Interference (Chapter 9)
Not only that but Team Phantom did not do well during their time on the run - they sacrificed a lot just to get out of Amity Park and were mostly met with more losses as they went - which Danny feels responsible for as the one who was supposed to be leading them. In some ways Phantom and his team went through their own nine-month equivalent to the Failsafe training exercise, and Danny walked away from it with a similar mindset:
I was desperate to be in charge. Not anymore. - Robin, YJS1 E17 Disordered
Once he accepts that he can safely take the help, the suggestion of being on a Team where Batman, Aqualad (and sometimes Robin) are ultimately the ones responsible for calling the shots is less likely to be met with a how dare you as much as an oh thank god.
On top of that, the Danny of Deathly Weapons has a touch of literal hero-worship going on. This Danny grew up with the cultural presence of heroes on Earth-16; from the history of the Justice Society, to living through the formation of the Justice League. By the time he had the accident that turned him into Phantom, Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash and Speedy would all have been publicly active as proteges for at least 6 months. And in the absence of a mentor of his own, well... I'm going to share a sneak-peak snippet from the CH21 draft:
Maybe it hit harder coming from other heroes.  From the kinds of people whose stories he’d looked to when he was first starting out - that some young, secret part of himself had fantasised might meet and understand him some day. - Equilibrium DRAFT (Chapter 21)
In combination, you might be able to see how the Danny of Deathly Weapons has been shifted just enough to the left of canon!Danny to play better with others. If anything, he's uncharacteristically passive and submissive in their first standalone mission due both to his unfamiliarity with the situation and stakes, and to all that baggage squashing him down. This is a Danny who has new raw patches exposed, but whose experiences have sanded away some of the edges that would otherwise have clashed with a teamwork setting.
It also helps that he's being placed on The Team specifically. Unlike say, the Teen Titans or Justice League, this is a covert squad that's doubling as a proving ground for starting proteges. Between Superboy, M'gann, Artemis and Zatanna they're pretty used to assimilating a mixed bag of powers and skills from members who don't have a lot of direct exposure to the rest of the superhero sphere. And because they're a covert squad whose main advantage lies in being unexpected and underestimated despite how often their plans seem to end in arson, they have their own motivation to stay as publicly invisible as they can manage, which not only lets Phantom operate with lower risk of being personally discovered, but also helps limit them and the League's potential exposure to ectophobic public sentiment.
That isn't to say that this Danny doesn't still carry some resentment or bitter feelings about how he's perceived and what he's been through (especially if someone whose name may or may not start with Kid and rhyme with Dash was to specifically antagonise him about it) but he comes to it with an additional nine months of perspective that make him more likely to respond to collaboration with a quiet sense of relief. At least once you can get past the defensive prickle and general awkwardness about accepting help.
This is all stuff I'm looking forward to elaborating on across the story and especially in the upcoming Flashpoints/ Combustion/ Equilibrium chapter set (CH19-21). It'll make more sense after those releases but hopefully this explains well enough for now.
Thanks for stopping by! 💜
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threewaysdivided · 2 years
Note
I just read that ask about Vlad that you did and was wondering if you had any thoughts about Jack and Maddie. They have clear love for there kids and when they know they are in danger they will drop everything for them, but they also don't notice when there is somthing wrong going on. Valerie would be another good one, though I think that she mostly framed around how whe is manipulated by others (like Vlad).
(the Vlad ask)
So, I have quite a few thoughts on Maddie and Jack, and they’re probably some of the most complex.
I’ve talked about this before but one of the quirks/ bugs/ features of Danny Phantom’s tumultuous production and at-times-contradictory canon is that there can be multiple disparate readings that are all somewhat supported.  And no more is this true than for the (nominally) good Doctors Fenton.
Let’s talk about the meta-side first because it’s kind of fascinating.
Issa Nicktoon
Sounds kind of dismissive to say it that way but I think it’s important to remember that Danny Phantom is an early 2000s TV7+ (i.e. “for kids”) Nicktoon and some artefacts of canon are clearly concessions to the medium.
As a formulaic episodic kids show, the Status Quo is God - characters rarely experience substantial change or ongoing arcs/ consequences and even episodic A-Plots tend to reset major developments by the end.  (I’ve talked about some of the problems it causes for Sam specifically here.)
Things like hyperbolic cartoonery and Aesops are also in play; characterisation and situations getting hyper-charged or hijacked by the Idiot Ball/ Jerk Ball/ Conflict Ball etc. in service of jokes or whatever “moral lesson” a given episode might decide to be about.  (It’s really not in-keeping for Danny to act like he did in Livin’ Large but the show wanted a “don’t be materialistic/ wealth isn’t everything” lesson so he got Jerk-Balled.)
There’s also stuff that mostly exists for narrative convenience, and that the producers either didn’t consider or actively try to avoid the implications of.  Maddie and Jack being as clueless as they are about their kids is at least partially a convenience to keep them out of the way.  The show doesn’t want to engage with the implications of ghosts being dead people, the implications of ghosts being sentient, or the fridge-logic/ fridge-horror ramifications of a bunch of its one-liners and contrivances.  It wants to be a fun hero comedy cartoon with a spooky twist and it absolutely doesn’t want you thinking about any of it too hard.
Because of that, you kind of have to be selective about when to read things ‘to the letter’ and when to read things ‘in spirit’.  Do you choose to take everything as having literally happened as depicted (even when those things could have terrible or story-breaking implications) or do you take the general impression from the whole and exclude specific outliers on the grounds that they only exist as a concession to the nature of the show?
Maddie and Jack’s Weird Fictional Niche
I also want to briefly touch on the unusual narrative space the Fentons occupy in the realm of hero-story-parents.
(For simplicity I’m going to take inspiration from OSP’s video and refer to the ‘secret’ side of the double-life that teen superhero/ urban fantasy protagonists interact with as the ‘fantastical world’.)
When it comes to stories with child/ teen heroes who have living parents, I feel like you can map most of them against 3 axes:
How aware are they of the fantastical world in general?
How aware are they of their kids’ activities in the fantastical world?
If they are involved in the fantastical world themselves, is it in a way that is supportive or antagonistic to their kids activities?
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It’s a pretty stock trope for these parents to be both ignorant of the fantastical world (or at least, no more aware than the average person) and unaware of their kids activities.  This is often done by putting these parents somewhere on the scale between too preoccupied/ overworked to notice what’s going on and actively uncaring/ neglectful/ abusive.  Again, it’s mostly a narrative convenience to explain how the kids can get up to so many unsupervised shenanigans while also having a stable homebase.
Rarer is seeing parents who are directly involved in the fantastical world without being aware of or interacting with their kid’s activities.  I think the most common version here is typically when the parents are studying some tangential aspect of the fantastical world while their kids fight villains/ have adventures somewhere else.
What’s weird about Maddie and Jack is that not only are they fully aware of the fantastical world (being the ones to open the portal), they’re also completely unaware of their kids’ presence in that world even though they’re active in the same areas, AND - most unusually - they are personally antagonistic to most of that world and Danny’s alter-ego in specific. 
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That’s pretty unique.  Typically you would expect that to be a villain archetype; a classic setup where the parents act as the main Bad Guys (or are working for the Big Bad) while their kids assume secret alter egos and enter the fantastical world in order to stop them. 
But that’s not what’s going on.  Despite qualifying as secondary antagonists, Maddie and Jack are never presented or treated as villains; they have no ‘evil scheme’ or agenda, they are not sadistic or exploitative.  The show frames them as likeable and relatable (if annoying).
And despite everything, both they and their kids sincerely love and want happiness/ success for each other.
The Fentons as Parents
To me, Maddie and Jack as parents embody the concept of and:  
Someone can love you and hurt you.
Someone can want the best for you and not understand who you are at all.
Someone can sincerely care about you and completely fail to recognise your needs.
Someone can want to support you and never be there when you need them most.
Someone can try their best and it can still not be anywhere near enough.
You can love someone and they can have hurt you in ways that might be unforgivable.
You can want to be with someone and they can be unhealthy for you to be around.
I think this is one of the places where Danny Phantom’s production being kind of a mess has allowed it to accidentally resonate with a rarely-depicted but very real emotional experience.
So, are they abusive and/or neglectful?
I want to be clear that abuse and/or neglect is in the impact, not the intent.  That isn’t to say intent is irrelevant (especially in fiction) but the most important thing is the effect.
And from that perspective…
Yeah, even with the most generous ‘in spirit’ reading Maddie and Jack are at the very least emotionally neglectful to their kids.  They are rarely present for their kids (definitely not consistently) and even when physically present they’re often mentally focussed elsewhere.  They rarely listen to Danny and Jazz; often talking over them, derailing conversations to be about ghosts and dismissing Danny and Jazz’s opinions on the topic when they try to participate by offering counterpoints.  While they don’t restrict their kid’s hobbies we rarely see them actively participate or encourage them on screen, and they often ignore Danny and Jazz’s attempts to express that they don’t want ghosts/ the supernatural being brought into all the family time they spend together.  It’s very easy to read Jazz’s interest in psychology as her at least partially trying to find the emotional guidance and framework that their parents are failing to provide, and to pass that on to Danny second-hand.
The Fenton household seems like it could be a very emotionally lonely and invalidating environment for a child to grow up in.  The thing with love is that it’s not just about feelings: it’s about actions, and (while Maddie and Jack no doubt feel and think that they love their kids unconditionally) what they have routinely shown Danny and Jazz is that - outside of emergencies - they will choose ghosts ahead of their children 90% of the time.
It’s also hard to ignore that - even in a generous reading - the Fenton parents probably do count as physically criminally negligent.  They have a laboratory in their basement where they deal with potentially biohazardous substances but there is no containment separating it from the rest of the house (it’s unclear if there’s even a door).  Danny’s chores include cleaning and equipment maintenance in the lab (some of which can be explosively dangerous) which he does without PPE or supervision.  The unsecured portal releases ghosts directly onto the premises, sending them up through the house on their way to terrorise the town.  Even outside the lab, the kids are at risk of being exposed to barely-tested stuff like Fenton-Foamer.  Maddie and Jack bring unsealed ectoplasmic samples and power sources to the breakfast table, sometimes storing them alongside or even using them to prepare the food their kids eat.  Danny only became Phantom (an event that either partly killed him or mutated him into some kind of hybrid) because a group of teenagers were allowed unsupervised access to a lab containing an un-signposted piece of malfunctioning equipment that was left connected to power.  (And sure, maybe the trio shouldn’t have snuck down there in the first place but “rely on a teenager to never do stupid things” should not be the sole safety precaution.)  None of that is good.
Taking a more strict ‘to the letter’ reading makes them seem much worse; at times crossing the line into ‘wilfully harmful’.  There’s a joke about how Jack has made most of the lab work Danny’s job because he’s too lazy to do it himself.  There’s the iron maiden thing, sometimes they lecture or scold Danny in a way that feels very not good, and then there was the whole bit about putting him in a spinner ‘to get the crazy out’ in The Fenton Menace.  It’s not invalid for people to argue that, based on a strict reading, the Fenton parents could be some form of abusive.
The Problem with Their Parenting
I think the core problem with the Fenton’s parenting can be summed up in this diagram:
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The surface level problem is obvious: Maddie and Jack prioritise their work over their kids way too much.  That isn’t to say that parents’ lives should be 100% about their kids but they should be swinging for a better balance.  At the very least they should be able to have more than a handful of conversations with their kids that don’t end in them making it all about ghosts.  It’s like they can’t compartmentalise.
However, it’s that top one that’s the real problem.  Maddie and Jack’s paranoid hatred/ fear/ distrust of all things ghostly is a consuming fixation.  I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s partially driving their obsession with their work.
That ectophobia also creates a very emotional unhealthy (and at times physically unsafe) environment for Jazz and especially Danny.  Like I said in the DP’s asexual fanbase post every part of their lives from their language to their behaviour is steeped in casual prejudice.  Not only is it psychologically harmful for Danny and Jazz to be internalising these beliefs, it’s yet another thing that makes their love feel less certain/ more conditional.
It’s also a super weird mindset for a pair of supposed scientists to have.
Ectophobia and Bad Science
Maddie and Jack are pretty textbook examples of the Fantastic Racism Trope; they have an irrational hatred for specific paranormal entities and some of the things they do could definitely be categorised as Van Helsing Hate Crimes.
However, while it makes sense for the routinely-terrorised townsfolk of Amity Park to be generally anti-ghost based on their experiences, it’s very strange for Maddie and Jack to also have this mindset (considering that they were the ones who chose to actively seek them out for ‘study’), and even weirder that they are the ones who most strongly spread that rhetoric to the community.
The Doctors Fenton are very unscientific in a lot of ways; they don’t use any form of the scientific method (hypothesise → test → repeat) when it comes to ghosts, and they seemingly went into the field with series of pre-set beliefs that they had formed before gathering any firsthand data.
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” -Sherlock Holmes
Not only that, but they’re very incurious about most ghostly things.  They seemingly aren’t interested in studying the behaviour of ghosts, their habits and interactions (ecto-ecology), or questioning why they might act a certain way.  Their approach seems to be more about hunting/capturing ghosts, taking them apart to see how they physically work and then using the remains to build new, more effective anti-ghost technology.
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From that perspective, it’s almost worth questioning whether their anti-ghost prejudice is actually serving a self-protective function: if it’s less about the belief and more about what it enables.  If ghosts are inherently evil, dangerous, non-sentient/ impulse-driven, incapable of feeling pain or emotions and only imitating these things as a manipulative defence/ predation strategy then it’s not morally wrong for Maddie and Jack to hunt them and subject them to inhumane experimentation.  That might explain why their rhetoric has internal inconsistencies (“non-sentient manipulator” is an oxymoron) and why they continue to cling to it and double-down even when faced with contradictory evidence.  So long as they believe it, they never have to feel guilt or question themselves.
Obviously the actual answer is that it’s a Nicktoon and Maddie and Jack ever significantly changing their beliefs/ behaviour is Forbidden by the Formula™ but we’re analysing from a Watsonian perspective right now so hush. 
It would be interesting to know how they might have come about this belief in the first place, since it doesn’t seem to be from firsthand data.  Maybe they’re working from bad anecdotes or folklore, biasing towards the idea of ghosts as evil.  Maybe they’re carrying a personal bias from an early firsthand encounter (perhaps in their college days) that left a terrible first impression.
Whatever the case, the fact that they keep holding onto this hypothesis and dismissing alternatives, rather than actually testing it against the mounting pile of obviously contradictory evidence, kind of shows how unwilling - or maybe unable - they are to consider that they could be wrong.
“one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective” -Stephen Fry
Narcissism vs Egocentrism
Something that strikes me is that Maddie, Jack and Vlad are in some ways extremely similar.  In the Vlad post, I said that one of the things that makes Vlad so dangerous is that he shows signs of malignant narcissism.  Similarly, I think the main thing that makes Maddie and Jack so unintentionally harmful is that they are supremely egocentric.
Egocentrism refers to someone's inability to understand that another person's view or opinion may be different than their own. …an egocentric person does not necessarily obsess over things like success, beauty, or status. They simply don't consider other people in their decision-making. -Verywell Mind
It’s more obvious in Jack because of his general social cluelessness; his opening line in the whole show is asking if insisting the kids want to hunt ghosts and then completely ignoring that all three say ‘no’; he brings up the ‘Hairy Chin’ nickname because he doesn’t see how that ‘funny memory’ might be embarrassing or hurtful.  Maddie is more socially savvy but there is also a benign condescension/ dismissiveness in her reaction towards views other than her own.  They are both more capable of compassion than Vlad but, like him, they show very little natural empathy. 
They both also tend to assume their perspective is universal/ correct, and/or not consider how their actions might affect other people.  It doesn’t seem to occur to them that maybe other people don’t want to talk about ghosts all the time.  They don’t consider how barging into the school and making a ruckus might impact their kids socially or hurt their relationship with the faculty.  They never develop perspective that maybe they should put aside their exhausting yearly Santa argument for the sake of a positive holiday experience with their kids, even though that argument never goes anywhere.  They don’t seem to include their kids in making family plans and just take it as read that Danny and Jazz will be totally on-board and satisfied with whatever they decide.
At times it’s like they borderline forget their kids but then believe they should/ act like they have a really close relationship with them when they do pay attention.  (They actually do this with Vlad as well - Jack treating him with the same overly-close college-roommate familiarity despite years of silence).  It’s almost a failure of object permanence; they disappear off into their own minds and come back expecting the other person to be exactly the same as when they left - like a reverse-weeping-angel who freezes whenever they’re not being looked at.  And when they do notice something is amiss (or someone gets upset with them) they often default to wondering what is wrong with the other person rather than considering whether they might have done something. 
None of this is to say that Maddie and Jack are malicious, or to suggest that they don’t like or care about their kids.  It’s more like they’re trapped in their own little bubble of being The Heroic Doctors Maddie and Jack Fenton, Genius Ghost-Hunters Extraordinaire and it completely walls them off from the reality of other people’s needs and feelings.  They simply don't consider other people in their decision-making and unfortunately their kids are part of the other people.  They do love Danny and Jazz.  They love them so much… when they remember that they exist.
And it’s worth noting that the behaviours and feelings we see from Danny and Jazz align pretty well to how dealing with egocentricity can affect people:
Low self-worth: feeling irrelevant, as if your opinions don't matter Self-doubt: questioning your own judgment or perception Confusion: wondering if the person recognizes their egocentric ways Sadness: feeling sorry for the person or sad for yourself after interacting with them Anger: frustration and anger over not feeling seen or heard Resentment: becoming bitter toward them for the ways they behave and how you feel after interactions Detachment: a desire to move away from the person as much as you can in order to protect your sense of self. -Verywell Mind
What to do?
I want to reprise the same idea I expressed in the Vlad post:  Maddie and Jack are not Danny and Jazz’s responsibility.  Functional relationships require participation from both parties.  And when it comes to relationships between children and adult parents/ mentors it is not the job of the child to assume primary responsibility for managing the relationship, their parents’ feelings or their parents’ lives.
As it stands, this relationship is not functional or healthy.  Something’s got to give.
Which is painful and complicated because they all do love each other. 
It’s that idea of and again:
You can love someone, you can want their affection, their approval, a positive relationship AND you can be in a position where continuing to stay and try for that will end up doing more harm than good.
I see things going one of two ways:
1. The relationship gives
The kids end up leaving - either cutting contact or at least pulling away. 
There are a bunch of things that could lead to this.  Maybe their parents don’t accept Danny when the truth comes out, and they have to flee.  Maybe Jazz moves out and offers for Danny to come and stay with her.  Maybe they just grow up, move away to have their own lives and rarely come home.
The best outcome here would be Danny and Jazz being able to reach a place where they feel safe (emotionally and physically), unconditionally loved and can start healing into a sense of confidence/comfortableness with themselves: whether that’s just with each other or as part of some kind of larger community/ found family group.
2. Maddie and Jack's behaviour gives
Here something would need to happen to shake Maddie and Jack out of their egocentrism, make them realise how much their ectophobic obsession has been hurting their kids and their relationship with them, and that they need to make a committed effort to change their behaviour if they want a hope of salvaging things.  The thing with love is that it’s not just about feelings: it’s about actions.
Considering how resistant and generally obtuse Maddie and Jack can be towards accepting things they don’t want to realise, this could require a quite drastic inciting incident (Danny being hurt, the kids deciding to leave), although it could also be a slow build of subtle things that eventually breaks the dam.
And I do want to stress that ‘change in behaviour’ bit. This kind of quasi-redemption-arc really needs to be about recognising why the behaviour was harmful and realising they want to be better.  If it’s primarily about absolving themselves of feeling bad or undoing undesirable consequences then it’s still egocentric; in which case there’s no guarantee that they wouldn’t backslide down the line, or slide into a near-identical behaviour that’s just superficially different enough to avoid the same criticism.  The main goal and reward of a redemption path is the character(s) on the path growing into better people.
As for actually reconciling, it would be up to Danny and Jazz to decide when and if they want to accept any prospective olive branches.  Forgiveness is admirable, but not owed.
Like I said, it’s messy and complicated.
Someone can love you and hurt you.
Someone can try their best and it can still not be anywhere near enough.
You can love someone and they can have hurt you in ways that might not be forgivable.
And, as parents, Maddie and Jack Fenton are - quite by accident - some of the most emotionally complex, realistically flawed and believably human characters in Danny Phantom’s canon.
#Danny Phantom#DP meta#Maddie Fenton#Jack Fenton#Maddie and Jack Fenton#The Fenton Parents#Scattered thoughts#thecatlounge#3WD Answers#Definitely some of the most divisive characters in DPs fandom#I think it’s the ‘And’-ness of them#That they are simultaneous capable of love and hurt#They are loving and caring but ‘loving and caring parents’ is not synonymous with ‘good parents’#the world is not divided into 'good people' and 'pure monsters'#I think there’s definitely some merit to fan-theories that Maddie and Jack might have some form of neurodivergence (perhaps ADHD or Autism)#That make them more prone to hyperfixating/ less attentive to others’ emotions/ less aware of social relationship decay#I think they had kids because they sincerely wanted children and to be a family#But maybe didn’t consider that their kids were inevitably going to become ‘other people’#I understand why some people might feel defensive about this take or reluctant to label them poorly#From person experience: I have an egocentric close relative#And it took me into my early 20s to realise#that just because someone loves you and tries for you#doesn’t mean their behaviour can’t still regularly cross a line into hurtful/ neglectful/ toxic#I am now in a low-contact relationship with them#And in some ways it CAN feel like giving up when you make that call#But sometimes you HAVE to make that call because there is no way to make them acknowledge or change their contribution to the problem#You cannot do the work of two people by yourself#Intent only goes so far#(I mean. We might distinguish Murder from Manslaughter. But at the end of the day. Someone is still dead either way.)
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threewaysdivided · 2 years
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I love deathly weapons and live for your writing updates. On that note, I do love Wally but I’m very excited to see him get what’s coming to him after messing with Danny.
(writing updates for WIP Chapter 19 of Deathly Weapons)
Awww thank you! 💜
I actually really really like Wally as well. He's a super expressive and responsive character, and it makes him very fun to write. I find the way he talks, thinks and engages with his environment and other characters to be inherently entertaining and charming. He's definitely produced some of my favourite bits of incidental prose/dialogue comedy in the story so far.
He's been coming off as a bit antagonistic and mean for the last few chapters but I promise it's not meant to bash him or make him look bad. He's just a flawed character - I like the complexity it gives him - and this is a situation where he's going to have to face some of those flaws. Speaking of which...
I am so excited to finally be on this chapter, you have no idea. I've been planning this one for ages - the bones of some of these scenes and conversations were plotted out while walking between classes back in the final year of my degree (i.e. yonks ago). I think I've come up with a pretty unique or at least, not very common way of solving this particular character problem and I am so keen to share and talk about it with everyone!
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threewaysdivided · 2 years
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💖👻🧠 (is this too many??)
Not at all!
Fanfic Ask Game
👻 What is one WIP you think you may never pick back up?
Funnily enough, I don't have any of these! The closest thing is my bird painting, which has been languishing as a result of my moving house twice and just not having the time or table space.
I know myself well enough to be aware of my tendency towards completionist over-commitment to stuff. I tend to hang back on actually starting projects that need more than a couple of weeks unless I'm ready to actually see them through. WIP-projects mostly stay in my head or as...
🧠 What’s an idea you have that you can’t quite call a WIP yet?
There's actually couple of these in a fairly developed state that have stayed bunked in my brain either because I didn't feel like spending the time to turn them into prose with all the connective tissue, or because they work in that liminal dream-sequence brain-space where I can blend from one scene to the next and hop in and out of flashbacks for context but I would have no idea how to structure them as an actual story that makes coherent sense to someone else.
A run-down:
YJxDP Brother's AU story concept #1, building on this starting point. Dick finds out from Jack Haley that he has an older brother, only to discover that Fentonworks is gone and the trail is completely cold. Meanwhile Wally finds himself getting drawn into the life of a new classmate at Keystone High, who seems to be estranged from his family, is perpetually tired and a bit standoffish... and who looks an awful lot like an older Dick Grayson at first glance (but that has to be a coincidence, right? Because Dick doesn't have any living family.) First impressions can be misleading and the more Wally looks the less certain he is that they're related but the more he notices other things. Most importantly: that this is a person who needs help and maybe a friend.
YJxDP Brother's AU story concept #2, would completely not work in writing as it would fully rewrite both canons but basically exploring the concept of "what if they DID grow up in the circus together and somehow got separated, lost contact and then reunited as heroes", going into the loss, hurt, anger, distance and misunderstandings that would come from being suddenly split apart from your only remaining family with no warning. In which Dick is sitting on the kind of vicious anger that only a deeply hurt child can, Danny has been drowning in the guilt of a broken promise for five years and a certain someone has been interfering with the mail because the timeline needed both Robin and Phantom. A lot of shouting and crying ensues. The other reason I probably won't write this one is that it turns Danny into a distinctly different character to his canon counterpart.
Danny Phantom AU where the Fentons are not malicious but are also not very good as parents due to hyperfocus on their work. Jazz leaves to try and make a safer place where she can eventually petition to get custody of Danny. Meanwhile Danny - in attempt to be "part of the family" - volunteers to participate in some tests with ectoplasm that make him increasingly unwell and eventually into a halfa whose ghost form is shaped by his parents anti-ghost rhetoric and is mostly used by them as an anti-ghost countermeasure. Even though Danny is the same person in both forms he and "Hunter" aren't treated that way, and he ends up feeling as though "Hunter" needs to conform their ideas about about ghosts (not feeling emotion, not feeling physical sensation etc) - which is not a good thing for him and inadvertently makes him a lot of enemies among the ghosts that come to Amity Park. After struggling with that on his own for a while, he eventually leaves to be with Jazz and has to slowly learn how manage being a halfa, and to unlearn most of the things he's internalised about both ghosts and himself with the help of Jazz and some ghostly allies he stumbles into finding.
💖 What do you like most about your own writing?
Tricking me into complimenting myself, how very dare you! (Affectionate.)
I think it's probably best said in this quote from C.S. Lewis:
I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.
That's a pretty good summary actually. I started writing Deathly Weapons because I noticed these consistent gaps in the DP x DC (mostly DPYJ or DPTT) fanfic collections at the time, where certain ideas or opportunities weren't getting used and I really wanted to see them.
Specifically some stuff that I like and/or am looking forward to doing:
Causality - I try to make it so that things have a solid in-universe reason to happen. It's totally not necessary for fanfic (its perfectly fine if a story is just an excuse to put your blorbos into interesting positions) but I like to make things feel a little bit more grounded. Especially when it comes to missions in fanfic, often times I kind of found myself wondering why the Team's covert squad was being deployed on certain missions rather than other heroes - it's just one of those things that I like to have an answer for in my own stuff.
Fair-play mysteries - I'm writing for myself but I'm also writing the story that I wish Baby 3WD could have found, and part of that is I think readers like to feel clever, not stupid. I love leaving little hints that point to stuff that's going to come up later (for example, in Chapter 18 I tried to foreshadow Nano being tied up in the cupboard behind the boss before the Team even knew a hostage was missing from the main room) - I feel terribly witty while doing it and I super love hearing when people notice. Two people left comments speculating about some character stuff that's going to go down in Equilibrium and someone else already DMed me with a correct guess at part of the final twist and I love all of you. It's fun to give people the chance to realise what's coming before the characters do.
Character specificity - this is probably more of an upcoming thing than a current-chapters thing, but I really enjoy digging into the specifics of characterisation, character motivations and character relationships. And especially when it comes to grief arcs. I don't know how successfully I'm going to pull off Flashpoints, Combustion and Equilibrium but if I can get even some of the character stuff to work, I'll be happy.
Descriptions - settings are fun and I like describing them, especially when they also set scenes and build mood. I feel like its a part of writing that doesn't see as much love in fic (again, totally fair, we're here for the blorbos) but I love doing it. The oil rig setpiece was fun, I liked giving Wayne Manor a sense of its own personality, and I'm really looking forward to stuff like the jungle setting in In the Mists, the mountains in Rituals, the night sky scenes in Enemy Lines and a lot of gentle flavour descriptions wrapping through Equilibrium.
This was fun! Thanks for playing!
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threewaysdivided · 9 months
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I just wanted to say: I love your art and especially your banner rn by talos! also your fic as well thank you for creating everything that you do for people, it’s awesome!
Second: what’s something that you’ve been chewing on lately, story wise? What character conflict, or plot point can you tell me about (that doesn’t spoil too much of course)? I wanna hear your thoughts about the characters you write and your head-cannons on them too! Just spit some word vomit at me!
Thank you! 
My current banner art is actually a crop of the first paired piece I ever did to go with my Deathly Weapons fic.  (Specifically Chapter 11, which I still have a soft spot for since it’s one of earliest chapters that really let me lean into scratching the thing-I-haven’t-seen-too-often-in-fanfic itch.) 
I recently got my hands on a discounted Wacom (my digital art process got tanked a few years ago when my poor art-compatible hybrid tablet-laptop was tragically taken from us by a cracked motherboard) so I’m looking forward to getting into a faster art workflow again and maybe putting some new pieces out more easily.  I’d like to do more comic art pieces for the Chapter 18 mission, and there’s a silly little concept drawing for the planned Mission 5 that might be new-blog-banner material if it turns out nicely.  We’ll have to see how that goes.
As for what I’ve been chewing on story-wise lately… I’ve sort of been all over the place.  I’m still on burnout recovery so I’ve been letting myself move non-sequentially, working on the bits my brain feels like focussing on rather than trying to force creativity where the juice isn’t flowing.   (One of the things about being my type of writing-nerd is that “self-indulgent” for me means a story with plenty of material to analyse, which is very fun as a reader but has created a lot of work for myself as the writer.  As mentioned in another post, I have a full-blown TV-show-style story-bible for this one.)
Recently, my authorial ping-pong-ing has been going into a fair bit of spoiler territory.  There are some chunks of the Act III endgame plan which are underdeveloped in the specifics of what the big-boss bad-guys’ plan is, whether I want to involve the Anti-Ecto Acts more, and the logistics of both the counter-strategy our heroes are planning to use and how to make its more action-heavy parts look cool in writing.  When I’m not doing that I’ve been focussing a lot on the upcoming Wally-centric chapters, which are a set I’ve been wanting to keep schtum about since there’s a small potential spoiler mixed in and I don’t want to risk giving the game up or pre-setting people’s expectations before they have a chance to blind read (even if a few people have already made some close guesses in the comments).  It puts me in a bit of an odd-spot right now because the chapters I’m drafting are an immediate spoiler, the later sections I’m working on are a major spoiler and there’s a good chance that a lot of the character stuff going on in the middle won’t make a whole lot of coherent sense without prior context because of how I like to layer foreshadowing/development.
That said, Wally-centric chapters mean Wally thoughts, and of those I have plenty to share:
First of all, I want to establish that I really do like Wally as a character.  The DW chapter set comprising Flashpoints through to Equilibrium is going to explore and develop some of his flaws and insecurities, which means he isn’t going to be looking his best, but it’s not meant to be a Ron The Death Eater situation.  He’s just a complex person, and taking him warts and all means sometimes you have to get up close and personal on the warts.
Something that I’m maybe a bit over-conscious of when reviewing my DW story notes is worrying about letting Wally slide into just being punching-bag joke-fodder.  Wally is quippy, irreverent, a little tactless and prone to being a bit of an impulsive goober who sometimes gets possessed by teenage boner-brain, which makes him easy to fall back on as a default source of incidental levity (whether cracking the joke or being the punchline).  Because I’m now writing an 8-character ensemble where most non-focal characters only get a few lines per conversation, it’s easy for characters to slide into being defined by their strongest surface level trait(s)… and something I worry about with Wally is that his availability as a source of jokes runs the risk of Flanderisation into a disposable Scrappy/ Flirty Comic Relief, which isn’t his character.  Wally is actually really important – not just for his scientific book-smarts but for his perceptiveness, earnestness and ability to function as one of the emotional barometers for the squad – so I always have it in the back of my mind to make sure I include enough moments that actually demonstrate those qualities and the other characters’ appreciation of them/ their friendship, so that it counterbalances the more light-hearted goofery.
I think he’s walking the same tightrope as Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender – yes, he tends to take the L more often than the others for comedy purposes and sometimes he gets stuck with supremely dumb side-plots for the sake of tonal balance, but to claim that it’s the entirety of his characterisation really misses the point by a wide mile.
On that note, I actually really like the decision YJ!Animated decided to go with in its first and only season (ahem) in giving Wally a normal and functional family background.  I know that’s not the typical background for his comics counterparts (and no shade on other fan-writers who want to write AUs exploring the abuse dynamic, those are really interesting stories) but I think it was a smart deviation for the purposes of a large ensemble, and offered a fair bit of potential for cast-balance.  It lets him serve an important role as the normal one – not only as an easy window into what the current lives of ordinary middle-class civilians look like (which is good because ordinary people are who our heroes are donning the masks to protect) but also as a touch-stone for the others, most of whom either come from different cultures or from very atypical backgrounds.  Even if we discount the Impure Atlantean with military training, the ostracised White Martian and the Half-Alien clone-weapon, the other members of this line-up are an orphaned circus acrobat adopted by a billionaire, a girl from a dangerously dysfunctional criminal household where she was forced to fight her sibling, and a fledgling sorceress raised by an overprotective single Dad.  The others might intellectually understand what a “normal” childhood and family look like but they don’t necessarily know it as intuitively and intimately as Wally does.  That normality gives Wally the potential to be a more stable foundation for the others, a source of emotional contrast and of a necessary wholesome mundanity.  That is a good thing for the Team to have.  I think it also speaks volumes to the heart of his character.  For this Wally, the Flash and heroism weren’t an escape from a bad personal situation.  His life was actually pretty comfy and privileged - he didn’t experience a brutal wakeup to the injustices of the world or some other personal call to action.  This is a Wally who opted into the game because he loves the players and sincerely believes in their values and mission.  And while that might mean he has a more romanticised idea of what heroism entails – and will probably face some rough shocks down the line as that rosy vision runs into those more brutal realities – it also means he brings a sincere hopefulness to the job that is less hardened than a lot of his roughed-up, pre-jaded peers.  Underneath the teen sarcasm and surface-level lancer/smart-guy traits, this Wally has as much power to be a stealth-Heart as any of his Flash!counterparts.
Something else I find interesting when using Wally is how a lot of his strengths and flaws feed into each other – and I think this alternate backstory is part of it.  For all of his good heart Wally can come off as insensitive, and I think some of that could be read as a product of living a more charmed life.  I think he’s susceptible to a thing that a lot of real people do – universalising their own personal experience as the default – and that while he is canonically a geek and somewhat genre-savvy about hero cliches, he’s a geek about in-universe media so he probably doesn’t think to apply those tropes to “real people” like himself or his colleagues.  While this Wally is a skeptic, he’s not a cynic, and I think he might forget how much of an outlier he is in a world where things like living parents and loving parents are often mutually exclusive.  He’s smart enough to connect dots but there’s a little blind-spot where he simply might not think to until one of the others jabs an elbow into his ribs, because his default view on humanity is in some ways a little kinder than typical due to that small but still significant amount of privilege.
At the same time, Wally is also someone who has probably run into (or watched his mentor run into) a lamp-post at high-speed at least once in his career.  He contains multitudes and among those multitudes is an endless capacity for some absolute Looney-Tunes nonsense, which the world is 100% better off for having.
I love him, your honour.
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threewaysdivided · 1 year
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Wally West: Ghost Agnostic
(Blorbo-tagging about Deathly Weapons on this post)
Inverse Shane Madej energy.
"Yes, you have evidence. No, I do not want to believe."
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threewaysdivided · 11 months
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Hi! I love your writing, I appreciate how much time and effort you put into it. It’s always worth it and makes rereading a pleasure!
For the ask game:
💥 What is one canon thing that you wish you could change?
💛 What is the most impactful lesson you’ve learned about writing?
Awww, thank you! 💜
I know I've said it before but one of the biggest complements people can pay is telling me you're re-visiting Deathly Weapons (or any of my other work). I love stories that have re-read value and details which reward people who want to come back for a second visit or just for being attentive on the first pass. I really wanted to put some of that ethos into DW and it's been super flattering to hear people say its been worth their time, or to point out little things and bits of foreshadowing that I peppered through for them to find. To me, the point of storytelling isn't to "win" - it's to play a beautiful game, and I'm really happy to see people playing along. It's fun!
Now, to your questions:
(Fanfic Writer Ask Game)
💥 What is one canon thing that you wish you could change?
Since I write for two fandoms, let's do both:
So, with Danny Phantom the thing I've come to realise is that, as a story, it is objectively quite busted... but the way in which it is busted means that all those kind-of-broken pieces lean into each other. The show exists in a fandom-Goldilocks-zone balanced on a razor wire, and it's hard to remove or change any one of those interlinked elements without risking a chain reaction that would topple it right off. (For example: just changing the art-style could substantially change the visual impact of the ghosts, which could cause a major aesthetic tone-shift, which in turn could shift the story emphasis and how the jokes land, which would impact how the audience connects to the characters and so on. Simply trying to "ground" the show in a more internally consistent reality would mean acknowledging implications that the current tone has to ignore in order to not be horrifying.) This is one of the reason why I increasingly feel like a sequel, elseworld or spiritual-successor-type story would have a higher likelihood of succeeding than a direct reboot. If I had to make one simple change, I would want to surgically remove the episodes Livin' Large and Phantom Planet from the canon since to me they add very little by way of story/ character/ lore development and come at a huge opportunity cost in how they either shut down more interesting potential stories or require the characters to act against their established characterisation in frustrating ways. Alternatively I think I would have liked to have the later seasons animated in the looser, more squash-and-stretch-y style of the early episodes since that approach got more dynamic posing and expressive face-acting from the character designs.
For Young Justice, the one simple thing I would want to do - and you could probably see this coming - is just take the name Young Justice off the front of Invasion, Outsiders and Phantoms. I feel like that would make things less frustrating and more creatively honest. It's pretty well-accepted at this point that the "five year timeskip" (and substantial behind-the-scenes production-staff-change it served to mask) basically resulted in an entirely different show - and the thing which makes that new show so unsatisfying/ disappointing/ infuriating to so many people is how it frequently contradicts (and is often outright antithetical to) the themes, character motivations and character agency established by the original season. Plus, Season 1 makes a really poor foundation for that new show since - outside of a handful of reveals in the last 20-40 minutes - none of the setup it provides gets carried through, and the changes are so big that you can't reconcile them without fundamentally breaking things. To me, both entities would be better for the separation. People can like Invasion, Outsiders and Phantoms but we should let that story stand on its own strengths and merits rather than being judged by the standards, expectations and narrative promises of a show that it is clearly not interested in being. And we should let the people who were interested in what Young Justice Season 1 was potentially setting up have the possibility space to imagine where that original production team might have taken things had they been able to stay on. Plus, pour one out for the poor fans of the unrelated Young Justice Comics: it's challenging enough for two separate franchises to share a title/ fandom tag when both are reasonably stable but when one is secretly four increasingly noisy shows which have been forced to cohabit the same trenchcoat and at times seem to actively hate each other... that has to be a lot to deal with.
💛 What is the most impactful lesson you’ve learned about writing?
Honestly, getting into storytelling and learning about writing has taught me a lot about myself in general but I think the biggest thing is an appreciation for the time and decision-making that goes into quality story-crafting. Sure, a creator or production team might not anticipate how the final product comes together or how the audience responds to it, but the little individual details don't get there by accident. Homestuck references in Bluey's background art, LoTR references in The Dragon Prince, Goldfinger and JoJo's reference in Young Justice Season 1, the Rothko painting being deliberately hung upside-down in Glass Onion... someone made those choices; put them there either to support the narrative or just to reward people who were paying attention with a funny in-joke. Set/background design, art design, character design, digital modelling, prop-creation, lighting, blocking and framing, panel composition, storyboarding, animation, acting and voice-acting, choreography, scoring, sound design, pre-production, writing, outlining, structural editing, polish editing, cinematic editing... all of it takes time and effort.
It makes it all the more impressive when you can tell that a creator or team recognizes that there is an end-user at the conclusion of this process. That they are making this thing for someone; that they're going to ask an audience to spend time on the thing that they're making, and that if it's going to take time to make anyway then they might as well go the extra mile - both because they care about the story and to reward to audience for that investment.
Ultimately what we're trading is time - little bits of our lives, back and forward - and recognizing that that is a gift in both directions is something really special. I think, "I'm glad I spent my time on this" is the core thing you want people to walk away feeling about your art (even if they don't say it in those words).
It's why I'm so flattered when people say they're re-reading Deathly Weapons. Your time is valuable, and I'm glad that the time I put into building this story makes it one that's worth yours.
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threewaysdivided · 3 months
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awwww 😭😭😭😭
Did you write a review on the legendary teen Titans series? (Aka what young Justice could have become if they weren't overly ambitious)
What's your opinion on Paul Dini as a writer?
(Follow up to these two previous asks)
Sorry nonnie! 😅
It seems that we both tripped down a rabbit hole of doughnuts.
youtube
I assume you’re talking about the Teen Titans 2003 Animated TV Series?  In that case, you might be thinking of another user – I haven’t personally written any reviews for it.  I do have a lot of fond feelings towards the show, though; it was my first real introduction to DC Comics alongside the Justice League/ JLU animated series.  My Tumblr has a Teen Titans tag where I share art, meta etc. and I do have some thoughts about specific plots or narrative elements – you might also see me make occasional reference to it as an example on some posts in the writing advice tag.
Just for the sake of expectation management, I should explain that my Tumblr isn’t really a traditional “review blog”.  And yes, I know that probably sounds a bit crazy considering the frankly unhinged amount of YJ analysis I’ve written, especially since I’ve been blogging less about other stories in the last year. Burnout, what can you do? 
Really I’m more of a writing/ story-analysis blog.  Sometimes I might write a semi-review style post where I try to break down and articulate a particular technique/ element/ execution/ implication of a narrative in order to understand what it’s doing well or why something isn’t working.  As I said in the very first Frustrations with YJ essay, I think storytelling is fundamentally about communication and understanding.  I got into fandom as a fan-reader turned fan-writer (AO3 wink wink), and before that I worked as a casual English tutor.  I want to learn from the ways different narratives succeeded or failed at communicating their stories within the restrictions of their medium(s) so that I can better find, discuss and even tell stories myself. 
Because of that, I’m also a big proponent of the Death of the Author approach to media analysis.  Let me copy the definition over from that first essay real quick:
DEATH OF THE AUTHOR This theory posits that, because commercial art is created to be consumed, not just created, the audience’s interpretations of a work should be considered as just valid as the creator’s.  The work must stand on its own and creators cannot micro-manage their audience’s response to it. 1.  A creator’s intentions and biographical facts (political stances, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining the validity of an interpretation. 2.  Save for re-releases/reboots or new entries, the creator cannot and should not attempt to retroactively insert information or interpretations that were not present in the original text.
I generally don’t look too deeply into or follow the specific people behind (non-fan) works.  This isn’t always the case – if I like a specific author’s style I might look up their body of work to read more; some stories are clearly rooted in their creators’ specific opinions or experiences, which makes for interesting context; and sometimes I like to learn about the behind-the-scenes methods/techniques/production woes of a bringing a specific story to life – but mostly I put the priority on what I can learn from the final product.
As I’ve said before, commercial storytelling is the result of more than just one person.  Under the right conditions I think a rank amateur or complete hack could produce something amazing and, if faced with enough production headaches, a usually-excellent creator could end up outputting utter drek although I expect that drek would at least be creatively interesting.
The questions that interest me more are: what was this narrative trying to communicate?  what techniques were used/ creative choices were made?  how well did it succeed?  could a different approach have been used? and, what restrictions/limitations/priorities could have led to the final creative decisions?  To me, information on a creator’s circumstances provide context for narrative analysis.  Since I generally don’t know them I try not to postulate their actual intent too much, only the potential intent suggested by the story.
SO WHAT THE HECK WAS I DOING WITH YJ, THEN? What happened with Young Justice is actually an outlier for me in both regards because of how baffling flawed the series ended up being.  Back in the pre-revival days I paid a lot of attention to the textual canon of Season 1 because I had started writing a fanfic based on it and wanted to do the story justice (heh).  The result was I went into the later seasons with a lot more awareness of the canonical details and storytelling techniques – and (like I said in the final Invasion case-study) I ended up being blindsided by how instinctively bored and annoyed I became just a short way into an attempted Season 2 rewatch, despite the fact that I was actively trying to study it. 
The reason I kept coming back with more and more posts is that I never felt like I had successfully grasped or articulated why I had such a strong and unexpected negative reaction.  I think it’s a similar impulse to what Dan Olson cited as making the Nostalgia Critic’s Parody of The Wall so weirdly compelling: there's a confusing contradiction between the level of work required to implement the sheer amount of stuff that Young Justice tries to include, and the absolute thoughtlessness of how sloppily that stuff was actually executed. A multi-season, multimedia story like Young Justice is a long-term project: there are too many layers of production involved for the end result to be made in a brief flash of impulse or accident. It needs some sort of sustained creative motivation to drive it… but I could never find a coherent creative intent that would satisfyingly explain the decisions on display.  Never before or since have I seen such a promising launch be followed by sequels so fatally flawed as to strip away every component of the original’s creative identity.  There’s a reason I subtitled that masterpost A Massive Failure of Narrative.
This is also why I went after lead-showrunner Greg Weisman a bit, despite not usually doing that.  The choice to exclude (or consciously excise) over 70% of the critical narrative substance and sequester it away in non-textual social-media /ask-blog retcons means that you cannot escape engaging with Weisman when trying to engage with the later seasons at any level of depth.  As a Death of the Author proponent this ticked me off just on-its-face, but it also meant that he and those seasons are inseparably intertwined.  Regardless of whether it was a conscious choice arising from his sense of creative entitlement, or simply a case of narrative incompetence self-selecting for a primary audience with a high tolerance for media-illiteracy Nigerian Prince Email Scam-style, the end-result is the same: Weisman gouged holes his narrative and left it to suffocate while he sucked up all the oxygen in the room.   Then, later, as I encountered people from other fandoms whose narratives had been similarly decimated by Weisman, it became impossible to ignore how inseparable his personal flaws are from those narrative failures.  As I alluded to in the last ask, you can separate the original seven Harry Potter texts from their author: Joanne Rowling and her politics could evaporate tomorrow and it wouldn’t change people’s ability to enjoy the story as a standalone work (in fact, the absence of her modern politics might make some of the more unpalatable flaws easier to accept as honest oversights rather than ominous foreshadowing).  Meanwhile, Young Justice is such a disaster because the later seasons stop being about the original story and increasingly become about Greg: his failures at basic storytelling, his disinterested misunderstanding of his own characters, his weird fixations, his patterns of reactionary prejudice, casual double-standards, deeply disturbing attitudes about consent and power, and a self-righteous entitlement that resents being held accountable.  Unlike Harry Potter, you can’t put Young Justice S2+ in a bubble. The problem at the root of every other problem with Young Justice is that it doesn’t have an actual narrative... and in the absence of a coherent central narrative, the text itself has become the story of Greg Weisman's terrible creative choices. His self-indulgent proclivities pervade every step of the later seasons' broken theming, bad pacing, warped characterisation, contradictory lore, intra-textual hypocrisies, over-stuffed cast and weird fanservice: baked-in at a level that cannot be ignored or rationalised away.
It makes me empathise a lot with how Hbomberguy said he felt on discovering the recent James Somerton stuff: it’s not fun to stumble down a rabbit hole of learning that a prominent figure in one of your communities is sucking up air via association with work from their less-credited colleagues, then using that air to present themselves as an ally, dominate the narrative and delegitimise valid criticism, all while spreading their own prejudiced agendas, refusing to change their behaviour and continuing to profit.  That’s why I felt the need to explicitly point out some of the clearer patterns of reactionary bigotry and hypocritical non-apologies in Weisman’s work – I wanted to make sure the evidence was at least available somewhere outside of Weisman’s carefully-filtered reputation-protecting PR statements.  People put pieces of their lives into communicating something that will hopefully be worth the pieces of life their audiences invest in return -  I find the idea of someone exploiting that trust for gain to be deeply disgusting.
Now, with that exceptionally-overlong context provided: Paul Dini. 
The disappointing but predictable answer is that I don’t really have an opinion on him as a writer.  Having looked up his credits, I recognise a lot of works that I personally enjoyed (including the cancelled-after-one-season Tower Prep).
I really like Batman: The Animated Series, both for the human element it brought to heroism and the tone it set for the following DCAU (colloquially Timm-verse) generation of animated series.  Justice League was one of my first introductions to the main DC roster, so that set a lot of my core understanding of their characters.  I find Harley Quinn, especially her early B:TAS/ DCAU story-iterations, to be compelling in a way that’s equal parts fun and tragic.  There are some parts of the DCAU that I find a bit silly (a couple of background ‘ships that make me go whaa?) but I think I was really lucky to grow up during a time when the DCAU and second-order series inspired by its tone and storytelling ethos (e.g. Teen Titans 2003) was the childhood DC experience for kids my age.
That said, I don’t know enough about the story behind the works in Dini’s credits to feel confident in speaking about him as a writer.  Just looking at his resume, he certainly seems like a passionate and prolific creator who did a lot of very influential work.  At the same time, however, I don’t know how much of that was Dini himself, how much was his frequent co-creator, Bruce Timm, and how much his works may have been adulterated by the influence of other, less-visible members of the production and editorial teams who worked alongside him.  It can be convenient to elevate one or two prominent members to Great Man status as an easy shorthand for discussing works they’ve been involved with, but that can come with the risk of crediting or platforming the wrong people through mis-attribution or just plain projection. 
I’ve learned my lesson on blind-lionisation after being thoroughly let down by all the Weisman nonsense, the same way others have learned from being let down by creators they previously idolised (Supergeekmike did a really good video covering this which also includes discussions of Death of the Author and Authorial Intent).  Without doing proper research into and comparisons of Dini’s work, I wouldn’t feel confident making an assertion about his personal skills as a creator.  I greatly enjoy many of the stories he’s been credited on, and can recognise the influence those stories had in shaping a generation of DC fans (and writers)… but while I’m happy to talk about the writing of those stories, it feels a little irresponsible of me to talk to the character or intent of a real person without knowing more about them.  I’m not making that mistake again.
In the meantime though, I do want to talk more about actual writing.  I’ve been taking it easier this year lockdown and job burnouts finally caught up to me and it suuucks, man but I'm hoping to pick back up in 2024.  I want to finally get back to working on my main fanfic so I can share the companion meta without spoiling people.  I have thoughts about some possible meta-textual metaphors in Across the Spider-verse.  I might do a case-study piece exploring why the years-long timeskip in Arcane Season 1 worked really well while others haven’t.  And there’s an ask about a canon-divergent-post-Season-1 Young Justice episode premise that’s been burning a hole in my inbox for at least 5 months now.
So yeah.  More writing breakdowns to come.  In the meantime, I previously wrote a Frustrations With analysis of how My Hero Academia’s story struggled following the Hideout Raid Arc if you’d like to check that one out.  There’s also this big compilation of links to my Young Justice and Danny Phantom meta (plus recommendations for fanfics and other stories), and you can check out the writing advice tag for general storytelling discussions.
Hopefully that makes up for the drought of Teen Titans content!
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threewaysdivided · 4 months
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(same anon that asked about YJ Phantoms) I'd love to read a critic on Harry Potter one day because you'd have a lot of interesting things to say.
(follow up from this ask)
Good to hear from you again nonnie!
I’m very flattered that you’d like to hear my comments on Harry Potter but… I don’t think I’d have a lot to add? 😅  I wrote most of my Young Justice meta-analyses because I’d noticed some specific structural and writing patterns that weren’t being discussed in the wider fandom critiques, and I wanted to change that.  (A lot of people were pointing to the time-skips and specific characterisation issues but not many seemed to be touching on Thematic Contradiction, Scope Management or the Side Quest problem, for example.)  Meanwhile, Harry Potter has been dissected to the moon and back with a fine tooth comb – there isn’t much I could say that hasn’t already been said better, more eloquently and in more detail elsewhere.
If you put the Harry Potter books in a bubble, my takes are actually pretty mild.  The books were important to me.  I was a 90s kid who read alongside releases throughout primary school.  I was a pretty big Potter-head at the time - I was daydreaming Potter fanfiction before I even knew what fanfic was.  I think it certainly had an influence on my modern taste in literature; there’s a reason I gravitate towards fantasy and mystery as my comfort genres (I’m currently having quite a bit of fun with The Dresden Files). 
On a technical level, Joanne Rowling was a decent writer.  I think she’s strongest at emotional and character-writing, and she kept a consistent theme of love/grief/family/loss going throughout the series.  Her use of mystery as a secondary structure to add pull makes the stories engaging and satisfying to “solve” on re-read.  Her prose and dialogue was quite snappy – it flows and reads well, and there are some very quintessentially British-humour lines that made me smile each time.
Where she was weakest, in my opinion, was sociological storytelling and worldbuilding.  There are some unquestioned biases and blind-spots in her writing (especially around stuff like the house-elves, the goblins, certain character descriptions and how she treats the status quo).   I generally agree with the sentiment that her worldbuilding wasn’t necessarily the most original – not as derivative as Eragon (which I also liked) could be in places, but nothing especially new – although that’s more of a subjective note than a great artistic sin, and Harry Potter was a good execution of that well-trodden ground.  There are definitely times when you can tell she was figuring things out as she went – some of her dates don’t line up and there are a few moments in early books where characters break “laws of magic” that she would later retcon-in (Mrs Weasley shouldn’t have been able to make sauce pour out of her wand in Book 2 according to the Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration introduced in Book 7 and, based on the rules introduced in Book 6, Hagrid shouldn’t have been able to disapparate away from the station platform when Harry wasn’t looking in Book 1).  And of course, the infamous “vanishing poop” tweet.  In a bubble, pretty average, for-their-time 1990s fumbles from a debut children’s fiction author.  Flawed but in a mostly harmless, kind of charming way. 
I’m also pretty iffy on the movie adaptations, which have been generally… okay.  They showcased some good practical effects work and cinematography, but I never really felt they captured the magic (pun intended) or nuance that I enjoyed, due to the cuts and changes needed to fit the screentime.  That’s kind of my general vibe with a lot of adaptations, though – with a few exceptions I generally prefer to experience stories in their original intended medium.
However, we do also have to take the books out of their bubble and discuss the context of Rowling’s current politics.  I think it is not appropriate for people to try and erase her authorship of the books, or the way her largely open and accepting stance towards fan-content (in comparison to more litigious predecessors and contemporaries) contributed to the current state of modern fandom.  Their popularity and widespread influence makes them an important cultural touchstone and point of reference for their time period, and I think we do a disservice by pretending them away or acting like there’s nothing to be learned from their success just because we disagree with the author now. 
That being said, however, in the present Joanne Rowling is using the clout and funding she receives from the Harry Potter franchise to push policies and rhetoric that actively make life harder and more dangerous for transgender people (and has dragged in the neurodivergent community as a rhetorical device).  She has also expressed that she considers support for Harry Potter to be tacit endorsement of those politics.  Unlike past problematic-but-influential authors like Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Rowling is alive, politically active and benefiting from fandom engagement - and so the relationship between her work, her work’s fans and her current politics has tangible impact on real people.  I think it is up to every fan to decide how they personally want to navigate that difficult and at-times painful environment.
Personally, my decision (and this is just my decision) for handling that has been to pull away from Harry Potter as both a franchise and a fandom until such time as Joanne either revaluates her stance on transgender people, retires from public politics, passes away (provided she doesn’t will ongoing profits to anti-trans causes), or her books become public domain.  I still have the books I was gifted in the 90s, but there is a reason I generally haven’t shared or promoted Harry Potter content (even fandom stuff) to my blog for a few years.  Hopefully that will one day change, but until/unless that happens, I probably won’t be doing that kind of deep dive.
Instead, here are some videos that I found particularly interesting when thinking about the writing, implications and adaptations of the series:
Just Write: Construction of Mysteries in Harry Potter | Fantastic Beasts: Revisiting Mystery Construction
Quinn Curio: What Went Weird With Ron in Adaptation | Does Draco Need Redemption? | Why Does Slytherin Still Exist?
Pop Culture Detective: Newt Scamander and Empathetic Masculinity
Dominic Noble: Lost In Adaptation – The Harry Potter-athon [Playlist]
And here are a couple on Rowling’s current politics:
ContraPoints: JK Rowling and the Sociopolitical History of Transphobia | The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling
SuperGeekMike: How Creators Become Their Villains
Dominic Noble: A Harry Potter Fanboy's Response To J.K. Rowling
If you’re looking for other fantasy book recommendations I would heartily suggest Tamora Pierce.  Specifically the Song of the Lioness series (4 books), its sequel Protector of the Small (also 4 books) and the unrelated the Circle of Magic universe (2 sets of 4 books plus an epilogue and 2 side-stories).  Pierce writes to roughly the same reading-level as Rowling, and her books are a mix of magic, character- and mystery-driven. I would say she’s overall stronger at original magic systems and worldbuilding.  She also has her own interesting relationship to fandom (being a former fan-writer herself) and a feminist streak, with books that focus on young heroines without being dominated by romances.   They can be a bit hard to find in print these days but if you can they’re well worth your time.
For sassy British kids and urban fantasy, also consider Jonathon Stroud’s Lockwood & Co (recently adapted to a Netflix series) and his slightly-older Bartimaeus Sequence.  Again really fun worldbuilding, snappy prose and dialogue, and a generally good romp.  Lockwood is a ghost-hunting story and Bartimaeus uses demon summonings as its core worldbuilding conceit so if you like a little more horror in your fantasy then these will be a good time for you.
Hopefully that makes up for yet another doughnut! 🍩
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