#koiisure

here special for you -> my most recent clam writings. this is for my big long nhw fic, a very very first rough outline of the first time mal sees his apartment. i love you using living spaces as a way to get to know a character better. yes i gave him a fish tank. yes this was entirely self indulgent. dont ask me about nhw clarence's fish tank unless you want a wildly in depth conversation about hobby aquariums.

FUN FACT ABOUT ME that i think nobody ever would be able to guess considering the everything about me. danny phantom is. biggest source of inspiration in my life (*gasps of surprise*) so like. the fact that clarence is LITERALLY VOICED BY THE GUY WHO VOICED DANNY PHANTOM. thats huge for me yeah. and its like. a huge huge part of how i characterize clarence considering we get like 0 canon information on him (however. i have dissected his 37 seconds of canon dialogue so much i can point you to any one sentence and tell you how i got from point a to point b characterwise. i have basis in canon TRUST ME). i have that damn clip saved in the dead center of my desktop. im normal about him

anyway. anyway. koi i dont know if youve ever watched danny phantom but i think you should its great. its so fun its awesome. BASICALLY. the reason i bring this up. the way i picture clarence is like... what if an alternate universe danny grew up under the rules of the pd spirit world and without the support system he has in the original show. clarence is like. hes like danny but worse to me. hes like danny who was granted the title of ghost king at too young of an age and didnt have anyone to fall back on to tell him how to handle that so he handled it like a teenage boy (badly and irresponsibly) and just . continued to grow up that way. hes messy hes irresponsible he doesnt really CARE about his duty as the whisperer but at the same time... nobody else is gonna do it so he has to. the crown weighs heavy! its fucking exhausting! its either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it !!

a huge part of danny's early character in dp is being very new with his powers and figuring out how to use them, and often using them for petty selfish things like pranking his bully or cheating on a test. the thing with danny though is that he has his best friends and later older sister there to stop him from doing stupid shit and take better responsibility for his actions! clarence to me is like. what if that didnt happen. what if he kept being annoying and petty and using his powers selfishly and didnt see anything wrong with that ! i think being the whisperer grants him a sort of regality that makes him appear to anyone who doesnt know him as this ethereal powerful mysterious figure, and thats really good for intimidation and using his title to get what he wants, but i think as soon as anyone got to know him (cough. mal) he'd just kind of be like. a goofy kind of lazy teenage boy in a grown man's body. i think hes GOOD at his job and does have some sort of moral code about it, some sense of duty about it (especially when he gets older) but he doesnt think its fair that it all got shouldered on him when its not something he ever wanted . hes similar to william in that way <3

i really like leaving a lot of the amity stuff to be mystery partially because it will literally NEVER come up in the "canon timeline" or whatever since it all happened x number of years ago and partially because giving it an air of mystery makes it seem more myth/legend than anything concrete. which!! since its supposed to be the nhw equivalent of the spirit world i love the idea that its vague and mysterious and hard to comprehend that the Chaos Zone (colloquial name for the quarantine area around the city where they keep the trickster trapped) used to be like. a relatively peaceful idyllic city with only a small handful of capes and not a lot of action. that being said i do in fact have clam flavored brain worms which means i cannot help thinking about clarence and mal in so much detail that is SO unnecessary to the rest of the story other than serving to make what happened to them more tragic.

ANYWAY. all that being said that is my excuse for not having any solid ideas on mals trigger event. ive kind of played around with the idea that he's a case 53 (cauldron dropped him into the city mid-ghoul transformation and full of amnesia so he had. basically no identity before then and no idea where or who or what he was so he just kind of started breaking things) but honestly i havent thought abt it all that much bc its just not that important. either way. he started out as an unaffiliated rogue/villain. as ghoul, he was in his brute form like 90% of the time and behaved pretty much like a less cannibalistic venom. just kind of like. causing damage just because he can. really the ONLY two capes in amity at the time were Whisperer (clarence) and Afterlife (duck) (<< first duck mention btw!). Afterlife is a lot more apathetic to things like this (hes old. hes tired. hes survived WELL past the cape life expectancy but theres no real protocol for capes retiring because usually they just. die. so hes still here) and he really only responds to things he deems an emergency, and some rando causing property damage isnt enough to put ghoul on his radar. so that left Whisperer to deal with him. his powers are very nonviolent non-confrontational so his way of dealing with villains is to use his. basically tranquilizer powers to get them to stop doing whatever theyre doing (its a good thing amity is peaceful. this is NOT a. super great awesome offensive power and he can get very easily overwhelmed against more than one target). so he does this to Ghoul and since his he's a new cape and is not fully under control of his changer powers yet, his brute form drops as soon as hes calm and hes just. some sad disheveled looking guy.

so clarence sees this guy who is just. so incredibly lost. whether thats because of case 53 amnesia or like. post-trigger, post-changer state disorientation, hes just. like. pathetic. hes not being a villain because hes evil hes just doing things because he doesnt know what else to do. so clarence, who is way too kindhearted for his own good, offers to help him. and mal, who has probably never given this sort of softness in his life. just immediately fucking melts into it. of course he accepts that offer he has nothing else to do! he doesnt really care about being a hero or a villain or anything like that (having a morality crisis is boring and a waste of time) but this man is literally glowing and offering him a hand to hold and a purpose and something other than just mindless destruction

so mal drops the name Ghoul and gets his changer powers better under control and properly develops his master powers instead of his brute powers and becomes what essentially ends up being Whisperer's sidekick under the new name Purgatory (which. i really made on a whim at the time but now that i have had time to think about it really has a lot of significance to his character and state of mind and it makes me SICK)

mal has a sort of hero worship crush on clarence like. thats His Hero. thats the guy who picked him up off the ground and helped him stand out of the kindness of his heart and they know each other out of costume now and even in his civilian life clarence is funny and laid back and so easy to talk to and. mal is not those things. god he is so down bad. relationship wise i will point to this convo which i still stand by

but i think like. both in and out of costume theyre kind of inseparable. mal is like. suuuper super protective over clarence to the point where its kind of an intimidation factor to other people. scary dog privilege or whatever. i like to refer to it as like... if clarence was a prince mal would be his loyal knight. if mal was an animal he would be a falcon (fast, sharp, dangerous, always returns to its master etc etc etc).

its also really important to me that clarence DOES NOT see their relationship like this at all he is so. oblivious. or if hes not oblivious he just doesnt do anything about it or puts it out of his mind or whatever. i think one of clarences big flaws is that hes almost too laid back about certain things that he maybe should care about a little more? big "itll be fine" in situations where things . PROBABLY will not be fine if he doesnt do something about it. so while he doesnt really purposefully encourage mals weird hero worship with him he also doesnt really do anything to dissuade it either. so thats how we get to. where we get to. with them. ouhghhh boy.

i already talked abt this pretty in depth in the other post but trickster appears, kills clarence in front of mal, and it just BREAKS something fundamental in him. once the trickster throws him out of the city i think the prt has to drag him away kicking and screaming because theres NO way he would willingly walk away from that (ESPECIALLY because... clarence's body is still there. he never got a proper funeral or burial or anything hes just.... there on the street or on the roof of a building like hes nothing). they probably put him in some kind of custody which he inevitably breaks out of and goes out on his own. i think he tries to go back to the city only to find the walls already in place and no way to get in without fighting a LOT of soldiers and ripping through a lot of anti-cape measures. which he is emotionally willing to do, but hes not stupid. he knows he needs backup. so he seeks out the worlds most dangerous most awful notorious capes ever. and thats how he ends up with the slaughterhouse 9! his eventual goal with them is to manipulate them into helping him get back into amity and kill the trickster. which is OBVIOUSLY not how things turn out, but thats his motivation at least.

when wraith ends up in the public eye with the new haven wards and his costume is sooooo so eerily close to the whisperer, mal kind of Leaves the s9 for a bit? hes still a member and everything, he doesnt actively quit or betray them or anything bc thats like asking to get killed, but he stops travelling with them in order to. whats the nicest way i can say this. research? the wards. specifically wraith. that little unhinged piece of his mind that snapped when clarence was killed gives him this horrible idea that wraith is just.. clarence reincarnated. its probably been close to 20ish years since the amity incident at this point, so the timing even lines up close enough for him to be convinced. so that starts his weird obsession with william, which eventually involves him nominating william as a potential candidate to join the s9 in the trials (william has a Complex about this) and other fucked up things like the tide fridge (<< our loving name for when mal kidnaps tide and keeps him in jars or whatever in the spirit world in canon etc)