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They’re good influences :D

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He’s not freezing to death for no reason. He’s a normal boy. He’s just in one of those silly goofy moods where your body starts shutting down and shivery and crystallizing from the inside. That’s normal teen boy behavior, stop making him feel self conscious with all your judgmental bullcrap-

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I’m always hung up on the logic behind that stupid Spectra episode and came up with a bit of solution I’m happy with the other day

So uh

The whole ghost sickness hospital thing

But Spectra is liminal

Liminal to the degree that Valerie is Liminal. But backwards

Which is how she was able to do all that without just killing people dead

Her aura, for lack of a better-less waffley term, is a stabilizing agent here

It’s exactly like how

The fact that Amity is Danny’s haunt causes liminality down the line

With normal people it’s “just” less dangerous radiation, barring the odd unfortunate exception

But with a liminal around that has a core built for knowing the difference between real-world bits and ectoplasm, and all the importance of their composition there

There’s just an ecto signature / aura or whatever wrapping around these peoples bodily functions, like my body now, I’ll make sure you don’t die from your cells exploding on contact, idiot

That’s the sentiment I guess. I explained it a bit messy. I’ll compose this better eventually if I remember.

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I’m so unhealthily obsessed with doing narrative design for this show whenever I think about its existence for too long it occurs to me that I could be updating the blog I like about it instead of sitting on shit as usual. Will I get back to this thought? Hopefully. Maybe not tho. Maybe this is all anyone gets while I pretend I’ll get back to writing it out fr forever.

The first and second episodes, while not the earliest thing I’ve placed chronologically, do a really good job of introducing the shows main themes and characters, while establishing a bit of a pattern, immediately.

The whole thing with season one is covering a smaller scale story. The stakes are meant to be muddled. Danny becomes more secure in his position as protector of Amity Park, but he’s simultaneously maturing, something that is mainly seen through how he interacts with his friends. The trio is meant to functionally trauma bond over the course of this first season, hardships and shared secrets, leading to a halfway codependency; they become less friends of convenience and more friends of necessity. A bit of an it’s too late to bail so we should probably try harder to like each other situation.

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Danny is the most responsible and focused of the trio. This is not a good thing.

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Enby Tuckerrrrrrr

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Dannoversary moment.

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I love being on time for things and finishing stuff. I’m honestly so good at it.

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Eyes

Clockwork, as he most often went by, was very particular about some things.

For example, he’d once decided he’d wanted a child.

Not two children, one.

The issue of the matter is, fae have children in pairs: twins.

If they had the power, they would rend and mould a doll, a copy of some mortal child, all weight and wood, fit for reality. They would take this child to be and slip them in some other’s place to be raised and fed and loved, until they were real enough to return.

And while they waited for the child to find their way home, the parent or caretakers would raise the human child. Would teach them and love them as they lived and breathed Underhill. Until the Infinite Realms was them down to their core, as fae as anyone.

Clockwork could have done this too. He was more than powerful enough to create a child of his own, but he’d had his heart set. One child and only one.

And while it wasn’t uncommon for fae parents to end up keeping only one child, either because the constructed one wasn’t cared for enough and turned back to dead-wood, or because they didn’t care for fae and families they had never known, he couldn’t risk that.

For, Clockwork may have been a fae renowned, respected, even beloved by some, but he had been sworn to servitude; his name was known and used in one of the worst ways. The very order that had offered it to him—given him his power—used it against him.

The Observants claimed him more surely than any parent claimed their child. They claimed his gifts, they claimed his works, and Clockwork could see, they may even have claimed his children.

Clockwork had considered winning a child, taking only the one through some bargain made. But the issue still stood; even if his connection to the child was so loose as that.

But surely, they could not claim his son, not if Clockwork himself only had half of the boy. If they did not have the whole child, they did not have the child. It was as simple as that.

What power was half a name? What use was half a body? Half done was what Clockwork’s child would appear to be.

It might have been impossible, but he was powerful, and he would make it work.

So once, Clockwork decided he wanted a child. And once, the Ancient decided he would make that child.

So when enough eyes turned from him, when the timeline exploded with events extreme enough to hide something so monumental as his child’s conception, He carved the finest wood, down and down. He was meticulous, capturing a thousand perfections in the moments he didn’t let happen. He grew and shaped ferns atop the doll’s head, painting them a charcoal that had the consistency of silk. He filled the boy-to-be with beautiful things; wonder, love, a beating heart. Clockwork gave the thing that would be his child everything he had to offer, and soon that child began to breathe.

Clockwork bent down, and whispered a name into the baby’s ear, a name that only he would know, that he would keep, until the child could carry it alone.

This was how it went. He’d given the child his name. He’d carved the child a body and given it enough magic to live on its own for a time.

All that should have been left was, replacing the baby with it so it could grow into a life.

Instead, Clockwork cut out the doll’s wooden eyes, and in the place of one, slipped in an eye of white marble, and blue glass.

The other socket remained empty.

Only then did Clockwork let himself slip into the Fenton’s home.

The house was warded, but only enough to stop the weakest of sprites, only enough to make it discomforting to look into. Hardly a defense, but it would hopefully be enough to dissuade those that might hurt his son.

And there he was. Sleeping soundly in a crib was his boy.

And Clockwork whispered in the infant’s ear, the same name he had given the doll. The baby shook in his sleep, as though something vital had shifted everything inside him into a new position. The same name, the same power, the same person.

But of course, if that was all there was to it, surely more fae parents would have done the same.

No, he was not done.

Clockwork reached for Daniel, as they would call him, caressing his cheek, tracing his eye socket through too-human skin, and finally reaching in to painlessly take the eye.

And he put the bleeding, twitching thing in the doll’s remaining socket. Then he produced the other glass eye, slipping it in the place of the one he had taken from Daniel.

Not taken, he thought to himself. Just moved somewhere else.

And then Clockwork spoke his son’s true name in two halves. The first half the the baby in the crib. The second half to the doll in his arms.

And both bodies shifted, rousing. Four eyes simultaneously shifted over Clockwork in curiosity, but Daniel didn’t cry when woken by this stranger in the dark of night. No, he sighed and burbled, turning both his bodies, feeding on Clockwork’s magic and affections as the fae lingered.

The child did not seem the least bit bothered by his new appendages, hearts beating in sync, lungs expanding at the same rate. Two bodies, one child, one mind.

“Mine.” Clockwork breathed at his success. He exchanged the body in the crib, for the body in his arms. “My boy…” he claimed as he held Daniel’s human body.

And as Daniel settled in his arms while Daniel settled in the crib, Clockwork returned to his domain.

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Hope

The Ancient of Hope, they called her. Daughter of Ancients, they sang. World cleaver, they praised.

For she was made by all the Ancients of that time. She was made from their best parts, all gifted and a gift for all.

She would be called Pandora.

She saw the evils of the world, the dangers that would spread to weaker places, and she trapped them. She saw the way the veil between worlds, thinned in places, and she passed between worlds freely doing her duty.

She was a protector, a warrior, a guardian.

And she found herself settling in an fascinating space, a place of cults and magic, one of the thinnest spots the human realm had at the time. Nafplio, Hellens. It would be called Greece.

She learned their customs, and their language, and continued to every time she returned. And with each new appearance came new tales.

Her name had not yet been Pandora; so they had given her a hundred epithets, a hundred tales, and she would not have been able to tell you which were hers.

She came with her box, and she travelled far and wide, and she trapped every too-harsh thing in the world away. And every time she returned, she’d rest, and learn, and see.

She’d live. She’d love. But she was not always loved in turn.

Greece was not kind to women then.

They saw the warrior and thought her monstrous. They saw her lure their own into a realm of death, a temptress of Greek fire. They heard her stories and saw her box and thought, ‘she must have been made to punish us.’

They heard her admirers whisper of hope. ‘She must be evil’, they thought. A wild thing conjured to let loose evils upon them. ‘But humanity will alway have hope.’ They told themselves, slandering her name, and using her as a tool for their bigotry.

Still, Pandora locked away their evils, and smothered her ire, taking away deserving humans to spend their lives in paradise forever. A place that would keep the best of that culture. A place that would be a meeting place for humans and ghosts, until humans outside of the realm forgot it. A place they would call Elysium.

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Okay but, you can’t tell me Danny would dress up as anything that wasn’t a ghost. And the most inaccurate, low effort ghost at that. He will just throw a blanket over his head. There was never any other option.

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Idea that Fentonworks is haunted. Danny is the one haunting it. After a point living under that roof, was familiar enough for his ghost-half to clock that this is where he lives. The house is like an extension of his body, which can be scathing considering all the anti-ghost stuff in the walls, but it also means he can feel what room someone’s in, and make the lights flicker, and shake the floorboards.

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Restored/Abandoned

Ancients had followings once.

Massive, sprawling networks ever in their service. They cared little for things in the long run, but that is not to say they didn’t acknowledge their followers power, their devotion, their borderline obsession.

Some watched over their believers, sometime to keep them from harm, sometimes just to know them. Some picked favorites and kept them close, even in death. Some granted desires at a whim, showering gifts upon those they deemed worthy. Some spoke to their believers, in person, or through that offered connection.

But Ancients had duties. They had realms and domains that could keep them blind to the worlds for a time that would only seem reasonable to something so long-lived.

And in that time, devotion would fade. Proof would die, and believers along with it. Their followings would splinter, their stories would grow warped, until not even their name was consistent.

They would cease to be known.

And while this did not effect them so massively, it was a shame.

It was a loss.

Now that you know of orders lost, I need you to think of a boy.

I need you to think of Danny Fenton, of Phantom, of a child who had people close to deities as role models, a strange sense of humor, and just enough spare time on his hands.

Think of a boy that would correct the broken versions of Pandora’s myth, of a boy that would hear of Father Time and rave about a clock tower of the most intricate build, a boy who would set down grudges and tell of dreams more wild than even Amity’s waking world.

And remember, this was Amity Park. This was a place mundanely haunted, a place known for it’s mystique. So, people heard, and they considered it. A few even believed it.

Cults already existed in Amity Park. It was not hard for more to form when it was Phantom egging on their conspiracy.

And the Ancients heard, and they might have ignored. But, that child was theirs as far ghosts cared, and he had given them believers.

So, much in the way a parent might stick a hideous crayon drawing up on their fridge, Pandora and Clockwork reached out to their new followings.

And like a curious sibling, Nocturne was just entertained enough to humor Danny.

Pandora gave protection for every offering delivered, talked into the minds of her zealots, and appeared to them as she pleased.

Clockwork chose prophets, gave prophecies and future sight without any comprehensible reason.

Nocturne spirited away resting minds, hiding them away in a deeper sleep, with more powerful, happier dreams.

And as simply as that, Amity knew Ancients, and they would not forget for a long time yet.