I have, for the better part of like...several months, been working on this PMV like a man possessed and now it's done.
All my discussion about this is behind the cut for spoiler reasons but oh my god I am so so so so so happy. And relieved.
Overall the thought process behind this was really really simple: Akane sure has martyred three different men in her life (Aoi, Junpei, Sigma) and all for the Greater Good. I should explore that.
Aoi throws himself on the pyre willingly to save his sister. He is never seen again but I think about what his time during the Radical 6 pandemic was like and where he is during VLR and I weep.
Junpei would do anything for her, unwilling or not, and destroys himself until he has some other reason to live (in a timeline that is "worse" overall, which he has come to bitterly resent her for having that kind of mindset about).
Sigma is a bootstrap paradox whose entire involvement hinges on a 12/21/22/67 year old Akane seeing him doing/having done all these things and needing them to happen so that they can have happened. He's a Gordian Knot of time and free will and he has to be cruel to make things Correct and it kills him.
Sometimes in the PMV there's text I colored by grabbing from the image. Usually it's the word "dog" and it's colored for the person being talked about but I also do things like using Akane's purple when referring to fate, using the puppet string brown for talking about emotions, using the bright teal flash to talk about souls, and so on. It's a fun little detail for me.
Sigma has burn scars from the explosions. His right ear is ruined because tbef if he lost an eye to shrapnel (and his arms to the full explosion) he should also have burned the shit out of his face. That is my personal HC and I think it really solidified when I was doing this PMV.
Details you won't be able to see due to frame timing:
the sudoku shown is game-accurate
Junpei's eyebrows and eyelashes are still brown in his ZTD design because he's dying his hair
I hand drew the VLR timeline chart
see no evil (Sigma closes his eyes to the things he has to do to make a timeline that can be saved), hear no evil (Aoi, as a receiver, might have heard some of what Akane is transmitting and ough), and speak no evil (Junpei keeps his secrets close to his chest and so he keeps Akane's secrets too)
while the digital numbers in the second chorus look like SOS they're actually 505 (Akane, Zero, Junpei)
the dice in the next frame are meant to indicate Aoi, Akane, and Junpei (3, 6, 5)
I had the most fun with detailing The Chair(tm) (mindless details go brr) and the least fun drawing little Kanny on fire (it was a hard pose)
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Headmaster Dumbledore is sure that the ghosts of Hogwarts were hiding something. He’d be the first to admit that he’s nosy when it came to things like these, but he simply doesn’t have the time. Whatever that lingered these halls, he’s sure does not mean Hogwarts any harm. The ghosts would not protect it if it did.
Albus Dumbledore Hummer around a lemon drop as his quill scratched over endless parchment paper.
His wand glowed green for a brief second, an acknowledgement, and settled down into its current owner’s hold.
——
Danny Phantom hadn’t thought the castle he found during the summer months in this universe would be… so full of life. Not when there were ghosts, floating around like the castle were their own home.
Magic.
They were ghosts made of magic.
His core struggled, at first, to survive. Then, it took the magic and thrived.
He floated, invisible amongst the glittering candles beneath the imitated night sky, and watched students file in.
Quite different, from his own entrance.
He had floated into the tower, having felt a hint of resistance that he knew now were the castle wards. The ghosts, what he thought were ghosts before he realized ectoplasmic ghosts existed, stopped dead. Hah.
The shades dancing and whirling and conversing froze as he entered the tower. Life and death, and the beings that walked the line, stopped at the arrival of the One Who is the Line. The boy king wreathed in black and green glanced around.
“Hello. I’m Phantom.”
“The High King,” a ghost whispered. “Our king.”
“He’s an American?” Another one asked, scandalized. Danny, surrounded by those who he recognized as his, cracked the first smile he’s had in a while.
“Who cares? He’s…” The knight sunk to his knees, bowing with his ghostly sword in front of him.
The ghosts bowed. Danny floated in further. “Can you tell me where I am?”
“Of course.”
——
Now… he’s watching the children get Sorted. Weird, for a hat to decide your classmates, but whatever.
Harry Potter’s name is called, and the whispers broke out. He doesn’t know why, but Danny couldn’t ask the ghosts. They barely know the current headmaster, as the dead generally care only for their own times.
Danny decides to visit the lake octopus. Lake squid? Something like that. The mer people beneath the waters liked him, the last time he went. The Sorting is put out of Danny’s mind. He’s dead now, too. The only thing he cares about now is to explore the vast halls of Hogwarts and the occasional visit to the kitchen to steal some food for his living body.
(Thank the Ancients he found a house elf who knew what seasoning was.)
(Sometimes, Danny flew to where his home would have been and gets comfort food at the nearest town. He missed it, but he can’t go back.)
The ghosts know by now to call for Phantom should they need something (“I’m American,” he joked at the ghost. “We’re not big on kings. You can just call me Phantom.”)
——
The third year he’s there, Danny feels the effects of Clockwork’s power. When he investigates, it’s the red headed girl he once saw leaving the library, paper clutched in her hand.
She helped save one of his subjects, so he owes her. Plus, if she’s using Clockwork’s powers, this Hermione has potential.
And… she’s using it to study.
She reminds him of Jazz.
——
A wave of ice crackled and froze the fleeing rat and the feral wolf man.
“What?!” Harry screeched to a stop, eyes wide at the ghost child in front of him.
Danny turned, and landed gently on the ground. Snape snarled at him in suspicion. Danny allowed himself to become living again, black hair and blue eyes and tan skin replacing the white, green, black thing his dead form had.
“Who’re you?” The red-headed boy, Ron?, asked him through gritted teeth.
Danny smiled at them, dimples appearing. “A friend.”
Before the trio and co. could say anything, Danny whips his head around, palm coming up.
“Stop.” He orders. The creeping sense of cold and dread shuttered to a stop. “Go over there,” he said, and the dementors, hovering at the edge of his periphery obeyed. Danny turned back to the mildly terrified and flummoxed group.
“Let’s go. You’re all going to catch a cold, if you don’t move it. Especially you, scrawny and greasy.” He pointed at the godfather and Snape.
——
“Hey, Danny?”
“What, Harry?”
“Why’d you help us? I mean, you said you didn’t want to involve yourself in stuff like that.”
Danny hummed, wisped tail curling up against him as he soaked in the sun’s rays. “Because you reminded me of myself. And in the end, you died.”
“You literally brought me back,” Harry deadpanned, remembering the place between life and death, and how the angry Danny was when he stormed onto that train platform. The King had taken him by the scruff of his shirt collar like a particularly incensed mother cat, and dragged him off away from a puzzled Dumbledore.
“You were being stupid. You’re too young to die.”
“Like you?”
Danny snorted. “Nah. I didn’t have a choice.”
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My Coronabeth Dominant Twin manifesto is simple and it's as follows: there's no way the twins could have planned for Canaan House.
John requesting new Lyctors wasn't something anyone in the Houses would've expected to happen in their lifetimes with any meaningful probability. This means that when the Tridentarii started the double necromancer ruse, they expected to carry on for life. It was an arrangement that benefited Corona vastly more than Ianthe.
What Ianthe got out of it, as far as we know: Corona would rule Ida, which she isn't keen on (as per NtN). But it also meant that Ianthe signed up for a life in her sister's shadow, with everyone regarding Corona as the perfect heir and Ianthe as the lame spare. Worse, for Ianthe, everyone believed Corona was the better flesh magician (as per As Yet Unsent). There's a lot more in for Corona in this arrangement and a lifetime of mild humiliation for Ianthe. As we see during the reveal in GtN, she was just dying to tell anyone that SHE is the necromantic genius of the pair, actually.
On their relationship with Babs: in GtN, Gideon notices that Babs obeys Ianthe's orders over Corona's. She also notices that Corona looks shocked about this — to me, this means that it's NOT something Coronabeth is used to. Pre-Canaan House, they are equals in their ruse. At Canaan House, it becomes obvious that if Ianthe ascends she'll leave Corona in the dust, and their relationship has to change. I don't think the way they act around each other from Canaan House onwards is at all representative of their relationship back on the Third, and I don't think Babs deferring to Ianthe over Corona is something that has happened often before, if at all.
There's the bit where Corona routinely threatened suicide to get her way since they were teenagers. In NtN she's doing it to save Camilla's life, but she reminisces fondly about it like it was something she did often to get her way, like it was a fun mind game they played with each other.
You've also got Ianthe calling Corona a bimbo and insulting her and whatever, and me arguing that Corona pulled the few strings doesn't make Ianthe good but as things stand I'm much more inclined to believe that, before Ianthe attained Lyctorhood, Corona was the one in charge — and I’m also firmly convinced that she’s using BoE for her own ends, and we’ll see her Fuck Shit Up in AtN.
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