#and i'm not sure if it was some teenager pulling a prank bc the thing outran a truck

[willowjay07]

Wrote another article for the wiki.

[ectoplasmbender]

Don't get me wrong, I think it's charming that Danny and his friends dick around so much with his powers!!! Any normal teenager probably would too. I'm glad that he gets to actually have fun, being a superhero shouldn't just be doom and gloom all the time. What I do think is weird is that the show has to do the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing which is fine and common in superhero stuff, but for some reason this is applied most heavily to rather arbitrary and harmless things that have little to do with the actual scope of his power.

Cheating on a test or pulling pranks is not so horrible in the grand scheme of things, but Danny gets relentlessly punished and lectured by the narrative for stuff like that (actions easily achieved by a teen with no superpowers btw, maybe Danny can pull more elaborate pranks or more easily cheat bc of his abilities, but any kid determined enough could get up to the same exact mischief just fine). Danny's whole family literally DIES bc he cheated on a test!!! That's his lesson, that he'll literally become an evil tyrannical monster and lose everything for daring to cheat. Or he gets his body taken over and stolen by Poindexter bc he had the audacity to pull some pranks on his cruel, long-time bully. It seems so harsh and scoldy, but the strangest thing is that the show doesn't seem that concerned with the potential consequences of his powers outside of this arbitrary normal teen mischief.

Sure, cheating means that he will become evil, okay...but he can do worse with his powers than just cheat! What about overshadowing? The ethics of that power in particular seems so messy and grey, but it's something usually just played for laughs. Who cares if Danny can take over ppl's bodies and make them do things against their will? Who cares if he can knock over buildings with no sweat? Who cares if he can become invisible or walk through walls and potentially violate any possible boundary around privacy? It's literally a gag in the show that he repeatedly enters the girl's locker room in this way, but it's never anything more than a joke. Idk all this is to say that I don't mind Danny being a dumbass kid and I actually wish the show would let him have a bit more fun without having to scold him for it to an unfair extent, I just wish that the show had done something more interesting and meaty with what it chose to present as ethical problems or moral lessons. I get it's a kid show so it doesn't need to be particularly deep, but as is it just all feels a touch meanspirited with how it goes about that kind of stuff

Danny Phantom is a strange show in a lot of ways but chief among them is the fact that it's soooo moralizing in that rly corny 2000s way where it wags its fingers at the audience to say things like "Cheating is bad! Bullying is bad!" and Danny has to be told to like not pull pranks or abandon his friends for more popular ones, but all of these lessons are so disproportionate to his extraordinary situation and the scope of his power. He has to constantly be scolded for acting like a normal 14 yr old human boy, but there's a shocking lack of attention on anything further than that. Like this is a show where Danny's whole family and his friends are killed in a timeline where he cheated on a high school test, but that same episode has him viewing a future version of himself ripping a city apart with an incredibly destructive inhuman ability, and his only reaction is essentially "oh wow cool, wonder when I'll get that power!!!"