Oh Well Whatever Nevermind

because he very clearly does not want to be one. there's multiple plot lines about him wishing he could get rid of his powers and live a normal life. he's constantly talking about wanting to have "a weekend free of ghosts!" "a camping trip free of ghosts!" etc etc. he seems pretty desperate to get away from it all. so it clearly doesn't give him a sense of purpose or anything. its like a chore to him.

in s3 we see that he doesn't even like the positive attention he gets from being a hero with him trying to avoid his fans. he doesn't take any enjoyment out of dash being excited to be around him when he's phantom. he used to like that paulina liked him, but pretty soon that became something that annoyed him as well.

he doesnt even like superheros. according to tucker in season 2 danny doesn't read a lot of comics, or at least not superhero comics, and the one we see dani reading in s2 looks more scifi than superhero.

he doesn't have any real drive or motivation for being a hero. no dead relative no moral code passed down from a mentor, literally nothing. he just is one. its like a fact of life.

so ive come up with a couple answers that i like.

Danny has a very strong sense of responsibility. This is probably the most canon accurate answer. If something bad happens to someone, and he feels like he has the ability to have prevented that disaster, he's going to blame himself for that disaster. We see this with Cujo causing Valerie's dad to lose his job. We also see it in the Spectra episode where Danny beats himself up for literally every mistake he makes. The interesting thing to me about Danny's strong sense of responsibility is that he's not really that nice of a guy. He can be really rude and dismissive even to the people he loves. And he doesn't seem super hung up on the morals of what he does. He has no problem overshadowing people, or using his powers for personal gain, or using them to humiliate Dash. Like he really doesn't have much of a moral compass beyond "I don't want people to die." But "I don't want people do die" pretty quickly spirals into "I need to be a non stop vigilante" when you have ghost powers and think that the bad actions of others are your fault if there was even a slim chance you could've stopped them and didn't try.

Danny consistently tries to do what is morally right the way that a tired teenager begrudgingly takes their dog on a walk. Life would be so much easier if he just left things alone. The town would probably be fine if he let things go for a day or two, we know that he thinks this as well because he's constantly saying stuff like "I don't want to care about ghost fighting this weekend." Surely he wouldn't even think about taking a break from his regular ghost fighting if he didn't think Amity Park could survive a couple days on it's own. But then the dog is looking at you and it looks so sad and restless and it would be so much happier if you took it on a walk. And you're tired and just want to scroll on your phone but you're not really doing anything this afternoon and it'll take like 30 minutes before the dog is tired out so you just do it anyway. That's kinda Danny with his ghost powers in my opinion. If that makes any sense.

In large part I feel like Sam and Tucker probably just told him to start fighting ghosts and he did. Hear me out on this but it's my personal head canon as to why he took up ghost fighting in the first place. While Danny doesn't have much of a desire to be a hero, Sam and Tucker totally do. Tucker loves superheros. Sam has strong morals. Both of them love things that are unusual and don't want their life to be boring. And Danny is usually pretty agreeable with whatever they want him to do. He really value's their opinion, even if sometimes he can be oblivious to how he's ignoring them/hurting their feelings. There's a ton of scenes in the show where, when faced with a moral dilemma, Sam and Tucker both have a strong opinion on what Danny should do and he just agrees with one of them. So I very much see a scenario where Danny, Sam, and Tucker have been learning about Danny's powers for a couple weeks, a ghost attack happens, and the two of them tell him to do something about it. So he does something about it. Because they're his friends. Danny can be kind of a passive protagonist sometimes which is another thing I find really interesting about him. His opinion is pretty easily swayed by the people around him. And it's shown as both a flaw and and a positive thing which is also really interesting to me. Because he can be swayed to do something bad but he can also be swayed to do something good. It's a cool trait to give a teenage character because obviously teenagers really care about their peers opinions of them. And we know that Danny really doesn't want to be seen as a loser, which is another thing that points to him kinda just going along with popular opinion. So basically I think Danny became a superhero because of peer pressure.

And okay. This is my super crazy one based on the weird crazy Danny I have in my head. So this is basically all head canon take it or leave it. But Danny is like. Super obsessed with normalcy. It's the biggest difference between him and SamAndTucker. Sam loves to be unusual and go against the grain. While Tucker doesn't really like being seen as weird, being a technogeek is a huge part of his identity. But Danny consistently is described as exceptionally average by the people around him. Literally all he wants is for things to be normal. It's why he doesn't want to fight ghosts. It's why he doesn't want ghost powers. It's why he gets upset at his parents sometimes. I mean it makes perfect sense. His life is pretty crazy. He was alienated from his classmates before he even got a chance to take a swing at the social ladder because his parents are crazy ghost hunters. He grew up surrounded by ecto weapons and crazy experiments and a lab underneath his house. When you look at Danny, his interests and opinions and personality, he's really just an average guy. The only reason he's a social outcast is because weirdness just kind of clings to him, not because he himself is weird. And he'd really just like to maintain the status quo if at all possible. So what is normal when you die and become half ghost? Suddenly you're a teenager with superpowers. There's no real script you can follow when that happens. Except there is. Because even if no one like that exists in real life, there's plenty of examples of what a teenager who got caught in a horrible lab accident and ended up with superpowers should do. Even if Danny isn't a big fan of superheros, surely he can still use superhero backstories as a reference for what he's supposed to do here. He isn't thinking about what he wants to do with his powers the way Vlad did. He's just thinking "Okay. What is the thing you are supposed to do in this situation?" And according to most media, the answer is Become A Superhero. And so he became a superhero. This is why it feels so much like an inevitability that he's Phantom. Because to him it kind of is. To Danny, in my opinion, there's kind of a checklist in his mind titled How To Be A Perfectly Regular Teenage Boy. He likes video games. He likes junk food. He likes football. He likes pretty girls. And then that all kind of gets jumbled up with the introduction of superpowers. So now he has a new checklist in his head called How To Be A Perfectly Regular Teenage Boy With Superpowers. He saves people. He uses his powers to fight bad guys. He does the right thing. That's what you're supposed to do when something like this happens to you so that's what he does.

i feel so seen!!

I'm asexual. I figured that out not long after I first came across the term in high school. But figuring out my gender took a lot longer. I didn't really think about my gender identity for years, it wasn't until I was in college that I started trying to figure out what my gender was. That process took years.

I didn't really feel attached to my assigned gender, but I also didn't feel the gender dysphoria that trans people described. I didn't particularly feel like I was neither of those either. For a long time, I honestly didn't feel like any of the gender descriptions and identities I was coming across really fit. I just didn't care that much about what my actual gender was. Eventually I decided upon the agender label as that seemed the most apt. As the paper says, it's really hard to be truly without gender in this highly gendered world. Agender is a way of defining myself in a way that people who experience gender might be able to understand when "I'm just me." isn't really an acceptable answer to the "what's your gender?" question.

I don't mind being perceived as a gender, none of them are offensive to me. While I do like when I am perceived as male or at least not female, I think that more has to do with growing up female and not wanting to be pushed into traditional female roles and values than a connection or repulsion to any gender. I'm impossible to misgender because I frankly don't care.

Honestly, the biggest problem I have with my gender, is trying to define it to people. There's been a large push in recent years for asking people for their pronouns, or including pronouns in things like email signatures and surveys. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is a bad thing! This is very affirming for a lot of people. But it feels like I need to pick something that doesn't quite fit. At pride, for instance, there's always pronoun buttons. But they're all she/her, he/him, they/them, she/they, he/they, it/it, xe/xir, etc etc. And that's great. I'm always glad that there are a lot of options for people. But there's never any pins for any/all pronouns. I've never picked up a free pronoun pin at pride, despite always looking, because they all feel like picking what pronouns I don't want poeple to use and the answer is that I don't care. I fround an any/all pronoun pin once at a queer museum and I cried.

Don’t they know that murder is illegal? You just know there are a bunch of homicidal maniacs out there who love to read those stories. They write them, too, in between killing people. 

Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.

(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)

Something like Breaking Bad, for example, has low squiggability (that’s what I’m calling this quality). It’s tightly written, the characters are consistent, there’s little left to interpolate or extrapolate. Obviously, people DO write fanfic of Breaking Bad, but it still has a low squiggability score. Whereas something like Supernatural has a high squiggability score. Fantasy and science fiction often have high squiggability scores. This suggests squiggability could also be related to worldbuilding and potential for people to borrow a premise or setting.

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

The second search result had included the slur "ob*se" in the title of the article.

There are seriously people who tell me fat people aren't oppressed. Meanwhile, trying to find information about how to keep a fat person from drying in a car crash is met with links to products that make dirty money off of how society views my body.

Pelvic bones are strong and sturdy, and you're going to be MUCH less likely to injure internal organs and such when you suddenly slam into a nylon belt"

Text and photos by @thejacespace