"it's my house too, Piper. i sits where i wants." 🍇

Ah don’t apologize!! I love, love, love this, you’re so big-brained, I agree 100%. You pointing out that Henry’s “stunted as an adult” because his own identity is so tied up in service is right on target, and something explored in a lot of Batfamily fics to great effect; I don’t think Henry Danger is quite as expansive or poignant as the DCU lol, but it takes a lot of cues from the Batman-Robin dynamic—probably Dick and Jason, most directly. The intersection of ego and intrusion with civic duty makes for overworked, moralistic children become jaded and stunted adults. If all you are is the labor you provide in relation to your maker, the only way to commit meaningful labor is to break away and remake yourself. There’s a suspense and gleeful disappointment in the fact that troubled children who grow into troubled adults rarely make themselves into something that their maker (their father, their agent, their god) would approve of, if not for the sake of ego alone. I think in his weakest moments Ray believes he’s a benevolent god wearing human skin, and at his best he knows he is disconnected from those around him but doesn’t have the awareness to properly mourn. There’s not enough grief in him. Most of that goes to Henry.

I think there’s something really sick and sweet and sad about making someone in your image, because the question of legacy is no longer about linear impact but the pain of impression—something I’ve mentioned in a few of my little comics, or fic comments, is how Ray’s relationship to Henry is canonically ambiguous. I feel it’s because he’s so many (and too many) things to him: pseudo-father figure, best friend, coworker and employer, mentor and rival, celebrity and ideological guide. He can’t be all of those things to him at once, not well, because there’s no good way to be someone’s best friend AND employer, a stranger and the kernel of consciousness. What is he is to Henry is too much, and that proximity can’t result in anything other than disillusionment. Of course his life was uprooted, of course life can’t exist in technicolor, of course we grow up and realize that those we revered aren’t gods, but people made of flesh that ages and rots like everyone else’s. Henry can’t go to college!! Henry can’t connect with his peers in a conventional way, Henry’s own friends become embedded in this life and ultimately fail to escape it!! It all ends and begins with Ray and the peculiarities of Swellview that have enabled this strange dynamic to begin with. It is too much to expect someone to make peace with it.