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threewaysdivided · 2 years

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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! 💜

#young justice: deathly weapons #YJ:DW meta #Danny Phantom #Young Justice #DP Crossover #DC Crossover #YJ Crossover #DP x DC #DP x YJ #Flashpoints | Combustion | Equilibrium #I have Equilibrium 2 fifths written so I am very tempted to write this trio of chapters and drop them as a spaced set all at once #Kaiobeast #3WD answers

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