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The Show: Danny Phantom
A long time ago, in a town called Amity Park, there was a fourteen year old boy named Danny Fenton. He had parents who mostly loved him and two best friends and a sister who cared for him possibly more than anyone else. He also had a secret: he was half ghost. That very same year, his parents had completed work on a portal between the dimensions of the living and the dead — a ghost portal. When it didn’t quite work, his parents gave up, and Danny took a look inside. He found the On button in the depths of the machine. The portal opened on top of him.
Whether he lived or died is completely up for debate, but the result was miraculous. He could transform between living and dead, and he learned to use the powers that death granted him — invisibility, weightlessness, intangibility, and ectoplasmic energy — to protect his loved ones and his town from the malevolent ghosts that began coming through the portal he had opened.
He also had a godfather. Vlad Masters had been best friends with Danny’s parents when they were in college. The three were beginning their investigations into ghosts and the power of ectoplasm. Together they built a prototype ghost portal that malfunctioned horribly in Vlad’s face. He was thoroughly irradiated with ectoplasmic energy, and was rushed to the hospital for what it did to his skin and the illness that followed. He remained hospitalized for years, and in that time, Danny’s parents did not see him once. They had no idea that Vlad was slowly developing a ghostliness, just like Danny’s twenty years in the future. Vlad grew to hate Danny’s father for abandoning him, but his secret love for Danny’s mother only grew. Danny’s parents knew none of this. All they recalled were fond memories of their best friend, Vlad Masters, who they named godfather of their children.
When he was fourteen, Danny met Vlad for the first time, and their dual secrets were revealed to each other. Delighted to have found someone like him, Vlad insisted that Danny denounce his father and join him. Danny refused, and the two came to hate each other bitterly and fought often.
Episode: The Ultimate Enemy
In his fourteenth year, a bizarre series of events resulted in Danny’s parents, sister, and best friends dying in an explosion that, with a great stretch of the imagination, could be construed as Danny’s fault. Orphaned and alone and wracked with guilt, Danny was put into the care of his godfather, Vlad. Both, suffering similar loss, were too despondent to fight.
Danny was mortally depressed and desperate to stop feeling. He requested for Vlad to perform a completely experimental procedure on him which was designed to separate his ghost half and his human half. He hoped that doing so would alleviate his grief.
The experiment was a success. The ghost that used to be half of Danny Fenton was enraged. The boy that used to be half of Danny Fenton cowered. The ghost, in the violent throes of his birth, killed his human counterpart in cold blood. Then he turned his sights on Vlad.
The ghost stole the device used for the experiment and forcibly performed the same on Vlad. It was another success. The man who used to be half of Vlad Masters fled. The ghost of Danny Fenton then viciously attacked the ghost that used to be half of Vlad Masters. He subdued him, and assimilated him.
Thus the phantom was born of two halved souls in violence and rage. He was a being with the memories and grief of two broken people, and he was alone.
Nobody but the dead had known Danny's secret, and the living had always been ungrateful for his heroism, so despite looking so much like Danny, there was no one to recognize the phantom as someone who might be a friend. The other ghosts attacked him on sight. The living chased him down and made him a pariah, so he fought back. When he tried for kindness he was spat on, so he tried torment more often, and that gave him reliable results. He was seen. In a fight, he wasn't quite so alone.
As he grew stronger, Amity Park became hostile to him. The town built its defenses and trained ghost hunters to keep him at bay. When it became too inconvenient a place to be, the phantom struck out for other cities to torment, although he could not bear to leave his hometown forever.
Over ten years, the phantom grew stronger and more bitter. He reigned terror on his world and the ghost world alike. Eventually, he fell under the eye of the noblest and most powerful of ghosts whose job it was to maintain balance. They saw him as a threat that must be destroyed — although by then, he was strong enough that subduing him was not a sure thing.
These ghosts went to the Clockwork, the Ghost of Time, who sent assassins back into the phantom's past — when he was a boy named Danny Fenton, just fourteen — to end him before he could become a threat to all humanity and ghostkind.
The phantom caught wind of this. He stole one of Clockwork's amulets and traveled back in time to ensure that his creation went as it had originally played out. Young Danny had always been scrappy, but when push came to shove and he was confronted with the horror of his future self, he overcame everything and defeated the phantom, locking him in a ghost thermos — a containment device — and entrusted him to Clockwork to keep as a prisoner.
Graphic Novel: A Glitch in Time
Two years later, the phantom escaped. Unhinged from the timestream, he no longer cared about ensuring his creation. He no longer cared about most things. All he cared about was destroying Danny Fenton, who imprisoned him, who left him to rot, who had everything that was torn away from the phantom so many years ago. It wasn’t fair. The phantom would destroy him.
And he tried. He razed half a city in his attempt. Faced with such an enemy, Danny and Vlad were finally able to put aside the past and worked together to subdue the phantom once more. They succeeded, helped by the fact that, untethered from time, the phantom’s body was beginning to destabilize. He had lost everything once, twice, and now he was about to lose even himself.
Brought to his knees, bound and defeated, Danny and Vlad faced him one last time. The two of them knew what the phantom had suffered, and so they chose mercy. They would give the phantom a second chance.
Vlad offered himself as a temporary vessel to preserve the phantom while he was transported to a safe place where Vlad — who had once cloned Danny in a botched ploy — had an extra clone that had never seen the light of day. This body was given to the phantom as a gift and an apology and a second chance at life.
Clockwork erased the destruction the phantom had wrought, resetting the timeline so no one knew the secrets of Danny Fenton or Vlad Masters except the select few who were closest to them.
And here our story begins.