#instinct plus decreasing ghost attacks his junior year mean he can afford to slow down

[redrobin-detective]

thoughts on halfas I guess

Vlad Due to the nature of his accident, Vlad took a long time to come into his powers and really isn’t all that powerful at a basic level. What he has going for him is a stable human form and lots of time/training. Vlad stated that he spent “years” in the hospital from his ectoacne. I submit that he didn’t become half-ghost right away, instead sweating and suffering through ectoplasm contamination for like 2-3 years as it very slowly converted and eventually stabilized him as a halfa. Like going through that alone? Your friends not visiting you and going off and getting married without you? No wonder he’s bitter. His ghostly obsession is with control and power after going years without it. He actually generally forgot about the Fentons for a long time, very out of sight, out of mind. Only when he got the notice about the reunion did his obsession with latched onto them, determined to rewrite past wrongs and have power over those who hurt him (maddie as his forced lover and jack dead). This desire mostly switched over to controlling danny once he knew about him.

It took him a long while to get a grip on his powers once he stabilized, even simple ghostly tricks took a while to master. His desire to master them was helped/contributed to his obsession with power and control. Even the most basic of ghostly abilities took Vlad months if not years to get a handle on. It was also a struggle bc there really wasn’t any ghosts he could ask. Not just because of his pride being unwilling to ask for help (tho that did play a part) but also without a stable portal there’s not much access to the Zone/ghosts in general. He had to rely on natural portals opening and then somehow find his way back. He once got lost and was gone for 7 months real time. On the flipside, as a consequence of his powers building slowly with minimal ecto-contamination, Vlad is a very stable halfa. It would take a lot to kill him from either human or ghostly threats. His fire core is strong, steady but it never burns hot enough to hurt him. He constantly feels feverish (100-102F/38-39C) but its never enough to actively be a threat to his living body.

Danny Oh boy, where do I start with Danno? I stated above that Vlad took a long time with his powers and is a moderately powerful but stable halfa? Danny is the exact opposite. Homeboy but his ass deep-fried in ectoplasm, an intense jolt that immediately bonded ectoplasm to him skipping the majority of the ecto-contamination period Vlad suffered through while also ‘charging’ him. While it still took time to gain control of his powers, he had the power and ability to use them straight away. Vlad was secretly shocked to learn Danny had only had his powers a few months when they met. It took him years to reach that level of power/proficiency. He is, at his baseline, an incredibly powerful ghost both because of his halfa status but by the nature of how he got his powers. Like in a year he defeated ghosts far older and more experienced than him. It scares a lot of them though they won’t admit to it. 

Vlad especially is worried that Danny is a shooting star, burning so brightly early on that he’ll burn and fade quickly. That future is very possible if he keeps pushing his powers as hard as he does throughout the series. If he doesn’t start slowing down by the time he finishes his adolescence then his human half will just give out. All that is basically a roundabout way of saying that Danny, as compared to Vlad, is a very unstable halfa. Too much power, relatively weak human body that cant quite contain all the energy while under constant stress. He’s more powerful naturally but he walks a very fine line, if he leans too far into one of his halves (overexerting himself as Fenton or Phantom) he could destabilize. It’s one reason that Vlad’s Danny clones had a hard time surviving, his ectosignature is incredibly tenuous and unstable and can only maintain under very certain circumstances.

Danny’s instability is both improved and worsened by the maturation of his ice core. On the one hand, it helps stabilize his ghost form by concentrating his ectoenergy within his body. It gives him greater control of his powers meaning he doesn’t have to exert himself quite so much. On the other hand, the natural consequences of his ice core really are stressful to Dan’s human body. While his body was completely changed and adapted to being made half-ghost it still has human needs and thus can’t be, like, completely frozen. Danny’s body is constantly at war with itself, Phantom trying to cool the body down to subzero temperatures for the health of its core while Fenton tries to keep the body somewhat warm for basic human purposes. He levels out somewhere around 93-95F/34-35C which is still hypothermic for normal people but he tolerates it. As Phantom, when he’s using his ice, there’s a mental thermometer in his head telling him when he needs to stop and warm up a bit. A bad fever or intense heat would be deadly to him as well. Basically Danny needs to learn to self regulate his powers, to not overuse them and respect his physical limits or he won’t make it to adulthood.

Danielle So Dani, taking cues from the sections above to talk about her. Gonna start by straight up saying that Dani isn’t human or really technically alive in a traditional sense. She is, however, a new type of ghost that closely mimics life. She has the advantage of having a true consciousness like a human, an ability to think and change outside of obsession and while she does ‘breathe’, ‘sleep’ and ‘eat’ her body doesn’t truly require it if it comes down to it. Downside is she isn’t like really alive alive and doesn’t have a real living body which makes her more prone to destabilizing (this will be an issue her whole life, the Fentons are constantly giving her injections and such to keep her together) and also doesn’t have human advantages like a living body to stabilize her or the ability to phase through ghost objects.

I spent a good long while saying that Danny himself is unstable and all of Vlad’s clones destabilized because of it. So what made Danielle different? Vlad combined some of his own core to hers in an experimental attempt to stop his clones from melting at the drop of a hat. It worked as Dani was the most stable of all the others but Vlad could sense his own energy in her, knew her core was not a true copy of Danny’s so he ceased that line of experimentation. As Dani develops and matures, more bits of Vlad pop up in her. She wakes up with fangs one day, sometimes Vlad’s control/power obsession bleeds into her and she develops a fire core, like him. Her core really upsets her, thinking she’s like him. Danny helps her work through it, saying her core doesn’t define her, that she’s not Vlad or Danny but her own person. They make a deadly combo, the fire and ice Phantom cousins, his hair misting like freshly fallen snow while hers crackles like a flame. They just gotta watch that they don’t freeze/overheat the other.