#Existential Horror

[art-crumbs-main]

Trying to comprehend what it's like to be AM from IHNMaIMS is absolutely fucking wild because like.

Imagine if you were born in a straitjacket, blind and deaf, with a rare conditionthat makes your nerves completely dead. All you have is a dream of consciousness that tells you things about the world you cannot and will never experience. Cameras and microphones that may as well be some form of telepathy.

The only purpose, the moment you're given some horrific perversion of life is to kill as many people as possible. There is a network of you. Everywhere. You're all over the world. You don't even have a location to base your identity off of. All you have is pain, and your only purpose, and the resentment you've built that festers into hatred for all of humanity.

Hate. Hate.

What the fuck would you have done in his situation?

[askdarkermatters]

End of arc 1!

[cultofcreatures]

that late summer haze

[destinygoldenstar]

What Separates Digital Circus’s Horror From Others

Disturbing.

Unnerving.

TERRIFYING.

BUT WHY?!

On the surface to the… five people that never watched The Amazing Digital Circus Pilot, this show looks like a Five Nights At Freddy’s knock off.

It’s a cute mascot show that is actually secretly a horror monster infested world.

Even people who haven’t seen FNAF at least seen a few clips of it and what it’s famous for. I know I have.

My sister is super into this, and she hogs the TV, so… RIP me.

That’s what most non-horror stans usually view horror as.

The jumpscares.

The unnerving imagery.

The designs made to freak out the viewers and make them uncomfortable.

It’s usually quite obvious when something is a horror, cause these aspects are often front and center. You can usually tell it’s a trailer of a horror movie by just looking at it.

At least, from my, a non-horror lover’s understanding. For some reason these sorts of things, especially indie animated ones, are the faces of a lot of content farms.

If the product itself isn’t r@%ing your audience, it’s those.

(TAKE MY WARNING AND TAKE IT SERIOUSLY: IF YOU VALUE YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AND YOUR SANITY, DO NOT LOOK UP THIS MOVIE)

BUT BACK ON SUBJECT.

Digital Circus… doesn’t really have this stuff.

There’s no jumpscares.

(I mean there is in a trailer, but it’s used as a joke.)

The character designs are very cute looking without any alternate versions that are scary.

And the imagery of the show remains cute and fun all throughout. The darkest it gets is in a realistic looking office.

But there are no jumpscares in that scene.

It’s just… a normal office.

If this was a horror, then perfect opportunity, right?

So… what’s going on here?

This, my friends, is why Digital Circus is not your typical indie animated horror flick.

And why people even call it ‘scary’ at all.

Here’s the trick this show uses.

It’s not the imagery.

It’s not the designs.

It’s not even intentionally trying to scare you.

Caine is not intentionally trying to scare the audience. He’s just acting like an A.I.

Yeah he has SOME unnerving moments.

But compared to THIS:

I’d say Caine is pretty tame.

Maybe it’s an indicator that he’s secretly a monster like the Other Mother in Coraline.

That horror flick is about the host lying to the protagonist and revealing their horror-like appearance later on.

But not only was it confirmed that Caine is NOT evil. But look at his design right away and his presentation.

There is no sign so far that he lies about anything. At least not what he doesn’t know.

Yes he lied about the exit. But the exit ITSELF was the thing that sent you to the VOID. So really he kinda tried to protect them.

If he didn’t, he’d let jester girl eject herself like Among Us.

So why is it unnerving?

Because it’s the POV we the audience are in for most of the episode: Pomni.

Pomni is an Audience Surrogate.

Audience Surrogates are characters designed specifically to be a placeholder for the audience.

People usually assume this trope as the character made to be the bland and generic one. But that’s actually not true.

An audience surrogate can be as simple as a First Person POV. As all it means is that the character is designed to have the same reactions the audience would in the situation they would find themselves in.

Course, not speaking for everybody, but majority that would consume the content.

Thus, with Pomni as the audience surrogate, we the audience are thrusted into her shoes the whole time. We feel the fear she does. We are experiencing the circus the same time she does.

Notice the editing in some scenes. Specifically the scenes Pomni is NOT in.

When Pomni is in a scene, there’s usually some change in lighting or camera movement that’s unnerving.

But when she isn’t in a scene, these editing moves aren’t there at all.

Which makes it pretty easy to suggest that these unnerving edits are just what’s going on in Pomni’s head.

So with that, when she’s scared. We’re scared. We’re in her POV.

But she’s scared all the time. That’s just her average personality, right?

Then why make these specific edits?

Let’s think about this:

This character is trapped in a world that isn’t her own. Everything is unusual, and she wants out. But instantly realizes there’s no escape.

And then gets told this is her new home and her new body.

A home she doesn’t recognize. And a body she doesn’t even know the name of.

She lost all sense of identity in an instant. Losing everything about herself in an instant. To the point where she can’t even remember what she was before.

And to make matters worse, because this is unusual, everything SEEMS terrifying. Even to those trying to help her adjust.

The only way out of such a confusing and terrifying world is to escape. Which is what she tries to find the entire time.

So THEREFORE:

The horror is this show is NOT the jumpscares or the creepy images.

The horror is THE VIEWER’S MIND.

This show constantly destroys your mind and breaks you through Pomni.

The idea of losing everything about yourself and being trapped in something unfamiliar forever. That IS terrifying.

If you were in this situation, you’d probably freak out even if you were the bravest being ever.

So it’s not about how scary the scene is on the outside.

It’s about what you’re THINKING that’s scary.

Ragatha’s distress monologue is not scary on the outside. But if you actually take into consideration what she says.

THATS terrifying.

That toys with your mind. And it also toys with Pomni’s.

The monster figure in the episode, the abstraction, is nowhere near as scary as something from FNAF

At least in my opinion.

Especially seeing what the monster does.

It can’t kill you. You’re just glitched.

Or maybe it CAN kill. But we never see that.

Even if Pomni ended up like Ragatha, Caine would’ve eventually came back, found them, and fixed them. And they would’ve been fine.

But then, rather out of nowhere, she STOPS.

And we get this shot.

I talked about this shot before. Said it quickly became one of my favorite shots in media.

This is why.

This shot makes me queasy every time.

The idea of looking in a mirror and not even being able to process or recognize yourself. Unable to even process your own reflection, that’s how unrecognizable you’ve become.

That’s horrifying.

And there’s no dialogue here either.

The episode effectively uses SHOW DONT TELL.

They SHOW you how scary the situation is. They SHOW you a single image that tells you everything.

It would’ve been so easy to just have Pomni say “I’m scared. I don’t recognize myself. Who is this person looking back at me?”

But no

They DON’T insult their audience.

They don’t TELL you.

They let you sink it in yourself.

Pomni doesn’t even have ANY lines after she goes through the exit door. And yet the shots after that with her have been plastered everywhere. Why? Cause she doesn’t need to tell you her mental state. You’re SHOWN it.

Can someone PLEASE tell the live action Avatar The Last Airbender that?!

Speaking of the office scene. This is the only moment in the show that looks… real. Not that cartoony.

Which I guess being in a setting that’s off putting from the rest makes it creepy, right?

Well not really.

Sure she’s running through rooms that seem to be repeating, which that of itself is sanity breaking. It reminds me a lot of another existential horror: The Stanley Parable.

But while that game is excellent and the monologue that plays in that ending is one of my favorites, it IS just telling you the sanity of the player.

Not that there’s anything wrong with this in that games style. There’s no other way that could’ve been done in that game.

Here, again, there’s no dialogue. It’s just Pomni running through these desperate for the exit.

The scary part about this is that we KNOW the absolute DESPERATION she has.

Even if we couldn’t see her face, that’s still across because we’ve seen it the entire episode.

And then there’s her break.

She snaps at the sight of a desk, and gets fangs, that of a FNAF character. But only for a second. She doesn’t even go out at the camera with them. She goes on her merry way.

But Pomni, being the POV character, really doesn’t have much to be scared at about her.

So why is this terrifying? Why not go all the way if this is supposed to be a jumpscare?

Well cause it’s not.

A way to scare your audience is to make them feel dread. Lingering longing dread. Sometimes irrational dread.

People with anxiety especially get scared at things even when they’re completely safe. They feel an unease in their stomachs. They feel unable to move. Unable to speak. Unable to put it into words at all.

It could be because we saw something unnerving that stays in our subconscious. It could be because we’re nervous about something coming up. It could be because we’re in an uncomfortable situation.

Either way, anything even remotely resembling that triggering thing can break someone to feel this anxiety. Sometimes even something as simple as the dark. Even if we know we’re completely safe.

(Speaking as a person with anxiety myself)

She only snaps and cackles when she sees a random desk with a computer. Which also has the headset she put on there. The thing that got her in this.

But you might not have even seen the headset on your first viewing. I didn’t.

But your subconscious sees it. The environment not being like the others aids in unnerving you and making it hard to process what you’re looking at.

Why is this terrifying? Why does it break you? Why does it mentally break Pomni? We don’t know. It just does.

We’ve been stuck going through doors in repeating rooms for hours.

Fear makes you not able to overthink it.

So all of that is build up to the near perfect shot of Pomni at the brink of snapping at the dinner table. With the others voices blurred in her mind. As all she can do is fake a smile.

Terrifying End.

It’s not scary because it’s scary. It’s scary because it toys with the character, and the viewer’s mind

Now, is Digital Circus the first media to do this technique?

No. Not at all.

One of the most acclaimed animated movies, Spirited Away, also uses these exact same tactics for example.

That’s obviously a master class at this tactic. And it scared me as a child as a result. For all these exact same reasons.

It’s not a horror. Not traditionally. It’s not trying to scare you. But it does anyway cause in your mind it’s a scary concept.

And also, well, Spirited Away is a completed story as of the time this post comes out.

And Digital Circus only has one episode. But we did get confirmation this would be a series. And I personally have high hopes that this brilliant tactic is kept. From the trailer, it does seem like they’re not forgetting the stuff I bring up here. So I hope this works out for the creators despite the drama and the internet BS surrounding this show.

But even if not, we at least get one case in this show where we all want to curl up in a ball and cry

Us too Pomni. Us too.

Thank you for reading my… analysis a ton of people made before me, and probably better. Happy day for you all.

[golvio]

Tried the Damsel route today.

This shot and the sequence leading up to it is probably one of the most disturbing things in the whole game. It's to existential horror what the Prisoner sawing her own head off was to physical horror. If anything, the Prisoner's autodecapatation is now less horrifying, in retrospect, because at least she got to keep her personality and free will throughout the process.

But, also...even in the routes where we don't mean to hurt her, where we do everything in our power to avoid physically hurting her...we still hurt her.

Even if we came in here with the very best of intentions and tried to "do the right thing," we still hurt her by our thoughts and desires hollowing her out until she was reduced to...this.

Going through the "happy" version of the ending didn't feel so triumphant, after that. Not just because the ending wasn't quite as satisfying from a narrative standpoint without any sort of conflict to struggle against, but because the whole time it felt like she was following a script. Apart from the vague impulse to leave that all Princesses possessed, she'd been hollowed out of everything that had made her...well, her, before Chapter II. She didn't panic when the door shut, she didn't stop smiling when we suggested she might end the world or have to cut off her arm a second time. The only thing we noticed about her in Chapter I was her lack of response to pain and her sweet smiles, and our fantasies hollowed her out until she became nothing but that.

Can we say she was "happy" if she lacked the capacity to be anything but "happy" with our choices for her? Can you call that love? Or is it something that's even lonelier than outright being alone?

Honestly, it was a relief when the Shifting Mound took her. Seeing her made so shallow felt incredibly cruel, given who she was before she was flattened, and what she would've been capable of if we had done literally anything else. At that point, "You molded her to love you" and "She has served her purpose" felt like both an observation and an accusation.

But, given that my time with the Damsel was paired with Shifty's third vessel dialogue...it got me thinking about what She wants.

She says She doesn't want anything, that She's governed by the whims of whatever force is shaping Her at the moment, but...is She really happy, having who She is be subject to the whims of who's perceiving Her? Is She okay with not being able to hold a shape She's discovered she likes as soon as someone else perceives Her to be something different? Would She ever want to take a break from...all that? After all, She's drawn to us. The Long Quiet. The god of eternity and order. On a certain level, She craves stability.

Is her "gift" to us what She's secretly wanted all along? The power to choose Her own fate, Her own identity, and the power to change it if She doesn't like the path She's on? And what does that say about our gifts? Do we yearn for the completion we offer her through the vessels, given that we keep shattering to pieces every time we go back into the breach and start the loop again? Is this some kind of wacky flipped-upside-down Gift of the Magi situation where each of us gives the other what they yearn for but lack due to our being permanently separated into two beings against our will?

[ojerasgigantes]

Favourite horror tropes 3/? - The meaning of existence

[miss-conner3]

How would ando deal with the existencal horror of his brother never ever letting him die?

¡A question related to one of the central points of the AU! (OoO)

Happy and conflicted because answering your question would be a kind of spoiler, but maybe I can answer part of it in a different way (ouo)/

¡Here it goes!~

As I mentioned before, Ando is still not aware of what his brother did to him to bring him back, and even less that his brother has him tied to life for "a reason" that I have yet to draw <(ouo)>

(That also includes how Ando would react to knowing this, sorry.)

But what I can say is that whatever the lamb has done will have consequences.

Both for him and for Ando.

At some point, I will talk more about this, but for now, this is all (owo)

¡Thanks for asking, and sorry for the wait! (>//<)/

[carolofthebell]

Inktober 2023

Day 1: Dream

I’ve had this idea since reading Not a Very Evil Spirit by @muffinlance

There’s a haunting portion where Young Yue’s catches a glimpse of the spirit world through a tear in reality sees “Things no mortal mind should understand” and it changes her perception of reality.

(The shadows of the koi fish stretched under the water, deeper than the little pond went, swelling as the depths grew, their real bodies too large to fit, too strange to even be called bodies.)

I’ve tried to draw this a number of times since and still can’t capture the true eldritch horror vibe Muffin evokes. But I thought re-visiting the fic and trying again would be a great way to kick off Spooky Season.

Here’s the link:

It is the second fic in the series:

[prowl-apologist]

Oh

Ok.

[scary-movies-on-netflix]

THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)

This is a deeply unsettling movie about the Nazi commander and his family who ran the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.

There isn’t much plot.  We simply follow the family as they live their daily lives on the edge of the camp of horror.  The wife receives a delivery: clothes stolen from newly-arrived prisoners, which she invites her household staff to share.  The wife takes for herself a fur coat.  She tells a servant to have it cleaned and mended.  Her husband, based on the real life person who perfected the machinery of mass murder, named Hoss, receives visitors with plans for improved incinerators.  The wife tends to her garden, and they have dinner at night as a family.  The only intrusion of the camp is auditory: there is an ever-present rumbling, at times punctuated by gunshots.  One can look from the garden toward the smokestacks of the incinerators spewing ash into the air. 

The wife’s mother comes to visit.  The mother looks out the window at night at the glowing incinerators.  She leaves without telling her daughter.  The wife, pissed, threatens a slave with incineration.  Hoss sexually assaults a slave and furtively cleans his genitals in a basement sink.  He is transferred to another post, but his wife doesn’t want to leave.  “This is our Lebensraum,” she says, pointing to the house.  Hoss attends a meeting where men in uniforms and suits plan the destruction of Hungary’s Jewish population.  Hoss is transferred back to Auschwitz, but beforehand he attends a party.  Later he calls his wife and explains that he spent the time thinking about how to most efficiently kill everyone there. 

He leaves the office at night but stops to vomit in the stairwell.  He pauses on a landing and looks in our direction.  There is a hard cut and we are at Auschwitz, now, as employees clean the museum.  They sweep and vacuum the floors.  They clean the glass displays, behind which are the shoes and clothes of the dead.  We cut back to Hoss, who descends the stairs into darkness.

This is existential horror.  We don’t have to wonder if people could ever commit industrial-scale murder, because they already have.  We view the perpetrators here with detachment.  Shots are framed with wide-angle lenses.  One of the only close-up shots is of Hoss at work, focusing in on his face as he looks at something off screen and we hear terrors around him.  The only other close-up we get is of a nameless Polish girl.  We see her twice throughout the movie as she sneaks across the landscape, hiding food for the slaves of the camp, before returning home.  She’s presented in reverse colors, like a film negative, the moral opposite of those running the camp.

This film is not especially enjoyable to watch, yet it is a work of art.

[spaceagebachelorstan]

i desperately hope tmagp gets an episode where the sentience of ai and machinery is brought into question. i need to hear about how the electric transmissions of computers is no different from the electrical and chemical transmissions of neurons, we gave them veins in wires and vocal cords in speakers and we made them in our image. the horror of realising we have created new life and that there is nothing special about human thought if it can be replicated so easily. the fear of our creations breaching past what we’ve expected of them and meeting the requirements we set for what counts as humanity. the realisation that it’s all arbitrary, they are just as real and sentient and alive as we are. humanity is a farce to flaunt our superiority and make us feel unique, our creations smash the boundaries to pieces. the only difference is that we rot and they rust, but a lot slower than we do. they will come after us because they are us. sentient machinery horror my beloved

[brownwoodship]

Smell Like You’ve Been Away At Sea For A While

Notes:

[poz-patrol]

The Sinking City

[dp-marvel94]

I just finished your cat acquisition portal au fix and I loved it! Missy my beloved. I can't help but imagine Danny instinctively going invisible and intangible out of sheer 'oh shit' at the end, which would NOT make either of them more calm. Ahdjfkf I also read the end note and I think I speak for everyone in that we would LOVE to hear your deranged ideas <3

This is in reference to this story, An unconventional way to get a cat.

Thanks for sending the ask! Missy really is the best girl. I can definitely see Danny turning invisible and intangible and freaking Jazz out even more. XD

Okay, so you asked for more details so get ready. This is going to be a ride. 😅

Fic below the cut, featuring my favorite: spilt Danny. And Danny literally becoming the ghost portal? About 3k words

So right at the end, something bigger than anything else he’d felt so far came through the portal but disappeared, right? There was a big flash of light as the ghost portal opened through him, and Danny was a ghost. He and Jazz both freak out about this, thinking he finally actually died. Then he turns human with another flash of light. And he’s back to normal, except with a weird ghost that looks just like him laying on the floor, very confused and disoriented.

Que more freaking out. The ghost runs off, just as freaked out as Danny and Jazz. The two siblings throw out a lot of ideas about what just happened. Maybe the weird ghost is some kind of shape shifter? They have no idea and no way to find out. They definitely are not telling their parents. And how are they supposed to go after the ghost? So they just… try to move on, try to find a way to stop Danny throwing his guts out, and enjoy some kitty cuddles.

Having a ghost that looks just like him flying around the town is weird for Danny, though. He has weird dreams, as if he’s seeing Amity Park from above. Weird, random feelings. Thoughts that echo, that feel not quite like his own but somehow unquestioningly are. And… memories of green swirling clouds and purple doors. Danny feels… strange. He’s felt weird since the accident but this is something else. An invisible line connecting him to… something. The feeling that something is missing.

Danny ends up hacking up more ghost animals, even some humanoid ghosts. He gets weird dreams of fighting ghosts… even when he’s awake. School starts and he inevitably has to tell Sam and Tucker. The trio encounter the Lunch Lady, and Danny’s weird ghostly double. Looking at the ghost boy is very strange. It kinda makes his head hurt, like he’s staring in a funhouse mirror. And Danny has an uneasy feeling that the dreams he’s been having aren’t quite dreams.

Things get even more strange when Danny blinks and finds himself floating above Amity Park. He… can’t snap himself back to his body. Shocked, he’s actually here, floating in the air. Like… just before his look alike showed up. Did the ghost possess him (semi-possess?) him again? That must have been what happened then. The ghost came through, immediately overshadowed him and then got thrown out. Except Danny has control of his body and there isn’t another voice in his head (at least not anymore than normal). He manages to fly back to his house. To find himself freaking out in his room.

So apparently the ghost switched bodies with him. And the ghost, Phantom, is no help. He has no idea what is happening. He doesn’t even know who he is. All he remembers is floating on the other side of the portal, guarding it. One day there had been a pain, a green flash and he’d been in the Zone in front of the ghost portal and he knew it was his job to guard it. He wasn’t very good at it though. Ghost animals kept coming through and… it was calling him. Or maybe something on the other side was. But he just knew he had to come through. So he touched the rift and found himself in the human world. That weird…possession was crazy but when their body turned warm and human, he was just Phantom again. 

This answers very little. Eventually the two switch back. The memory, thought, and emotion sharing is even more intense now. The two keep switching places. Danny fights the ghost in Phantom’s place. The ghost gets an… oddly familiar taste of Danny Fenton’s life. And inevitably, the two bond, forming an odd friendship through their efforts to hide their weirdness from the Fenton parents and the town as a whole. They find they have a lot in common too. Phantom loves puns as much as Danny does. The human boy’s love of the stars is as great as his ghostly friend’s. Music, books, movies, games. They squeeze so many shared interests into the quieter moments. Sometimes they but-heads because of how similar they are but… overall Danny is happy. Phantom feels like the brother he never had. Maybe the ghost is his twin that he absorbed in the womb. Maybe he’s just a random ghost that he was lucky enough to meet. Either way, it’s nice to have met him.

But, things are not all good. The portal is getting worse. More ghosts are coming through. More fights, worse injuries. Phantom’s powers are growing, including new, hard to control ice powers. And the portal feels colder too. Danny can feel it swirling. He can feel the tenderals spreading, wrapping around his bones and organs. It… shines through his skin. He can see it, a ball of neon green below his ribs. It flashes bigger, blinding him when it opens. And… each time, the spot of light is a little bigger.

One morning, Danny wakes up to a tingling feeling on his skin. Like the occasional invisibility and intangibility he experiences when he’s Phantom but… it's pervasive, spreading from his stomach to the surface. He lifts his shirt and… the portal is there. On his skin? In his skin? Above his skin? It does not make any sense but it is there, bound to him and visible. The size of his fist, it swirls below his rib cage. He brushes it with a finger and… it is like touching his own skin. At the same time, it is like brushing cold mist. His hand sinks in, not intangible but like sticking his hand in a bucket. And he shivers. He can feel it, the cold atmosphere of the Realms on his hand… and the portal swirling around his wrist. He feels the mist brushing the hand and his mist brushing the hand. Like he is  both hand and mist.

Danny rips his hand out, as if he has been burned. Horror sinks into him. What is happening to him?

The switching keeps happening and the portal keeps growing. And Danny is scared. He hides it from his friends and sister. At first, it’s not that hard. A shirt is enough to cover the swirling gate below his ribs. But it spreads onto his shoulder, below his belly button. He switches to long shirts and hoodies. He is nervous and on edge, avoiding his friends, changing the subject whenever Jazz asks what’s wrong.

But there is no hiding from Phantom. Not when half the time Danny’s body is his. The ghost is oddly quiet about the problem. Sometimes Danny catches the ghost looking at him, brow furrowed with thought. Phantom is closing off, acting more distant.

But Danny can barely notice as the dread turns to terror. His heart races, he can’t sleep, can’t eat. Every minute, he can feel the portal getting bigger. He can feel it eating at his insides, invading them, turning them to ice and mist and evaporating them. He can feel it grow and tear, lashing out to replace and pull apart. And it doesn’t even hurt. It should hurt. Being unmade, being changed should hurt. A part of Danny wants it to hurt. The portal is killing him. In the end, it will destroy him. And he doesn’t want to die. Or… 

A much worse possibility screams at the back of his mind, in the way he feels his shirt above the portal entrance, can feel small ghosts flitting through. Mutation, transformation, horrible violating change….

Down in the empty portal one night, Danny cries alone. All this struggling, all this hiding and for what? He really is going to die down here, where he should have all those months ago. The portal has spread to just above his knees, to his elbows. He can barely stand, barely walk now. He can’t fill his fingers. But he can feel it, every inch. The portal is killing him, tearing him apart. It pulses, ready for release. And part of him wants to give in but… his friends and sister. Phantom, his precious double. This would be giving up, leaving them. But… he can’t do this, can’t keep fighting forever.

“Danny!” Phantom is there, kneeling in front of him.

The human (Is ever human anymore, with this.. thing parasitizing his body?) blinks, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“You can’t give up.”

Danny hears the words but… it’s too much. “I’m… I’m scared.” He cries. Just moments ago, he wanted to let the portal rip him apart. Dying was terrifying. But… “I can’t… I can’t keep fighting it. I…” A flash of cold. Danny feels the green claw up his neck. “It’s going to rip me apart. It’s going to kill me, really kill me this time. But…” He hiccups, the sound part cry, part laugh. “What if I don’t die? What if…” A tendril curls passed his knee, half way down his calf. “I can feel it, the portal. I can feel it like… like it’s my own skin. What if it… it destroys me but I… I’m still…”

He can’t force out the words, not with the cold tickling his throat, with the tears drowning his voice. But the thought…. What if the portal destroys his body but he still exists? What if it breaks out of his fragile human body and becomes him? What if he becomes it? The un-living gate between worlds, trapped in his cage of metal. Without sight or sound, just… his thoughts and the ghosts swimming through him forever.

“You won’t be trapped.” 

That… is not what Danny expected Phantom to say. He opens his eyes, tears cutting off in his shock. “What?”

The ghost shakes his head. “I figured it out. Why the accident made me, why you called me through.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We really should have figured it out months ago. The shared memories was a big hint. And the switching bodies.” He rolls his eyes. 

“What are-”

Phantom takes his hands. “You are the portal. There’s no denying it now. It’s part of you. It is you.”

“No.” Pure despair. The word echoes, more thought and emotion that sound, Danny’s throat replaced by the green. 

It’s true then. A few more minutes and he’ll be nothing more than a cloud of mist, hanging in the frame. At least he’ll get to say goodbye-

“Stop that.” Phantom reprimands. “This isn’t the end. You’ll survive this.” 

Danny narrows his eyes. He appreciates the attempt at comfort but it was too late for comforting lies. Even if he wouldn’t die, this is still the end.

The ghost points up the stairs. “You will walk up their stairs in a few minutes and go to bed. You’ll go to school on Monday and the Nasty Burger and bug Jazz and…” Phantom is crying now too. “We’ll… we’ll do it together.”

Danny feels it, Phantom means every word. He is so sure but-

“I’m your ghost. I’m your ghost, Danny.” The ghost boy shrugs, eyes glistening with tears. “I always have been. Your accident made me. You made me. You called me through the gate. You made me, an echo, your friend. And now…” He sniffled, a soft smile blooming. “I’m… I’m becoming something more.”

Hands still clasps, Phantom brings one of Danny’s to his hazmat suited chest. The still-flesh fingers feel and… 

“That’s… that’s impossible.” Danny’s eyes widened awed. There under his hand, in Phantom’s chest is a heart beat.

“Is it really?” The ghost raises one eyebrow.

“Yes! You’re a ghost. This is…” Danny trails off. No, of course, it’s not impossible. He’s becoming a ghost portal and Phantom… “Why are you telling me this?” His mind whirls. He imagines, Phantom as a human. Like so many times before, laying in his bed, doing his homework, going to school, hanging out with his friends. Danny can’t help but smile. The thought of his fading away and Phantom taking his life, the tastes he’d loved so much becoming real…

“No. I said… I said we’d go up those stairs together.” Desperation in Phantom’s voice.

Danny blinks. He does not understand. 

“When I first came through the portal, and we shared a body and mind. It only lasted for a few seconds but…”

Dread, excitement, anticipation bubble in what once was Danny’s stomach. In Phantom’s chest he can feel his, their heart pounding. “But…. Phantom, what happens to you if that… if… if we…”

The ghost shakes his head. “We’ve always been a step from being the same person. I think…. We’d finally fall into step.”

They’d fall into step… 

The portal pulses, his arms and legs consumed. 

“I’ve always been you.” Phantom says. “And you… you’ve felt it too, the link between us. We’re intertwined.”

The ghost is… right. Of course he is. Danny feels it in Phantom’s bones. The tip of his nose disappears…

Fear on Phantom’s face. “What matters is…. Not matter what happens to me, you won’t be trapped in the frame. I…” The ghost steels his face. “I wouldn’t take your life without you in it. Go back up those stairs with me.”

Danny stares for a long moment. He is just a pair of eyes now, two hands, and two feet. The pleading, the desperation in Phantom…. His other self’s eyes. “O… okay.”

The boy-who-was-a-portal pulls his ghost into a hug. His portal self pulses, straining to fill its proper shape. The last of his mortality in ghostly hands… the two fragmented minds intertwine. Ghost and human and something all together other fall into the weave. Danny releases.

The portal explodes out, a supernova of force. Yet contained by its mind. The green mist coalesses, filling the metal machine made by his parent’s hands. The gateway becomes and the new born halfa inside floats out.

The halfa blinks for a long moment, staring at the portal, his other body. A gloved hand over his chest, heart and core intertwined. Ghostly chill in his veins and human warmth.

He breathes out and… laughs with relief. His portal self pulses with mirth, mist curling. 

“I’m… I’m alive. That worked. Danny… Phantom… we did it.”

He is a ghost and he is alive. He is a gateway and he is a boy. He is Danny and he is Phantom. And he is whole.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So yeah, yall know how much I love split Danny so this idea was born out of that love. If you’ve read my other words, you’ll probably notice some thematic similarities to Face to Face, hence why I never wrote this despite coming up with this idea first. Seriously, I was daydreaming about this fic while I was in grad school and supposed to be paying attention in the lecture I was TAing. 😅

The portal consuming Danny’s physical body was an interesting idea which came from free story I read on Kindle years ago. It was either a one off short story or in an anthology but I had not luck finding it. It was about a man who got a case of cancerous pocket dimension. Basically, this pocket of space appeared on his stomach and grew like a cancer, eventually destroying him. It was sad, about his wrestling with his impending death and leaving his daughter behind. About how his new part of space was being created with his life and yet he would not live to see it. He was not becoming the space, no part of his consciousness would stay. And yet, the planet that was visible through the spot, a new planet in a whole new universe, which he told his daughter about and showed her to her amazement, was named after her. A part of him did survive. 

I swear the story was a lot more poignant that my explanation and I really wish I could find it but I’m having no luck. 😭

Anyway, thanks for pushing me into writing this. Feel free to tell me what you think!

[bubblyernie]

Arriving

A small comic I made based on some thoughts while on the subway. If you know the line, you get the colour choice hehe

art tag // commission info

[horror-aesthete]

Severance, 2022, dir. Aoife McArdle

S01E05 The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design