I finished rereading A Glitch in Time, so one theory before Fair Game.
When I first got the book I had sorta questioned Dark Danny (I'm not calling him Phantom. fight me)
And his... sudden emotional enhancements. I get the whole "Ghosts as a manifestation of human emotion" angle the author was going for, but compared to The Ultimate Enemy it did seem kinda sudden considering he was pure evil for the entire length of that Episode. But I've come to some new conclusions
He came from both Danny and Vlad's traumas. Just because it's their dead halves wouldn't necessarily make him all bad, we've seen moral Ghosts in the show
I feel like both merging with Clockwork and LITERAL FUCKING EVAPORATING.... did something to him. It brought out something. Long... lost... within Dark Dan.
He could NOT keep it together and was pretty much on the edge of existence, far past death.
This... probably already makes sense to the bigger fans of this book but it took a bit for me to get. Helps that I didn't have Season 3's filler polluting my mind this time hehe.
Also. I noticed someone on reddit blaming the "ghosts as a manifestation of emotions" thing on "Nickelodeon not letting them be dead because they like Butch Hartman"
They're still dead people. Just existing to manifest something as a temporary deteriorating spirit. That's probably why they're in the Ghost Zone instead of a more conventional afterlife (something that isn't Super Hell)
Though I do wonder what this days about those Ice Dogs from Infinite Realms. At first I thought "The Ghost Zone has some monsters in it as an extra form of torment" to make sense of the strange non-ghostly ghosts in Season 3, but recently I've been seeing them more as an ancient civilization. Either one could work but I don't see how they would manifest an EMOTION per say. They're moreso a pack of wise guardians.
Who's emotions is TECHNUS feeding off of?
Ain't no way SKULLKER has trauma
Young Blood is just an autistic child who wasn't loved by his parents probably
It'll be nice to finally unblock all the Phandom tags