#GraysonBrothers!AU

[cinnademon]

Lately @threewaysdivided 's OlderBrotherDanny!AU has been occupying the majority of my brain space so I've just had to draw a few somethings for it 🥰🥰

We've been volleying ideas and headcanons back and forth about this AU and we've come to a consensus about a few significant features:

With the exception of his eyes and nose, Danny is the spitting-image of John Grayson while Dick has mostly inherited Mary's facial features

Danny and John share the Grayson family tradition of Big Bushy Brows™️

Since 3WD and I are big fans of the Danny-Has-Very-Light-Blue-Eyes train, @threewaysdivided has come up with an awesome headcanon that Danny's unusual light eye color is a weird recessive trait that pops up every few generations in the Grayson family

The reason that Danny was adopted out at birth is that he was born premature and with congenital defects that would have made it unsafe for him to be part of the troupe, least of all a traveling circus

I have to say, drawing baby Danny with his little messy mohawk has given me a lot more joy than I expected it to, I can't stop looking at it 🥺 I love looking at Brother!AUs, they never fail to make me reach for the Kleenex.

If you guys want, share some of your favorite Brother!AU headcanons in the tags or notes! All these juicy new headcanons are making me itch to draw them ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[threewaysdivided]

💖👻🧠 (is this too many??)

Not at all!

Fanfic Ask Game

👻 What is one WIP you think you may never pick back up?

Funnily enough, I don't have any of these! The closest thing is my bird painting, which has been languishing as a result of my moving house twice and just not having the time or table space.

I know myself well enough to be aware of my tendency towards completionist over-commitment to stuff. I tend to hang back on actually starting projects that need more than a couple of weeks unless I'm ready to actually see them through. WIP-projects mostly stay in my head or as...

🧠 What’s an idea you have that you can’t quite call a WIP yet?

There's actually couple of these in a fairly developed state that have stayed bunked in my brain either because I didn't feel like spending the time to turn them into prose with all the connective tissue, or because they work in that liminal dream-sequence brain-space where I can blend from one scene to the next and hop in and out of flashbacks for context but I would have no idea how to structure them as an actual story that makes coherent sense to someone else.

A run-down:

YJxDP Brother's AU story concept #1, building on this starting point. Dick finds out from Jack Haley that he has an older brother, only to discover that Fentonworks is gone and the trail is completely cold. Meanwhile Wally finds himself getting drawn into the life of a new classmate at Keystone High, who seems to be estranged from his family, is perpetually tired and a bit standoffish... and who looks an awful lot like an older Dick Grayson at first glance (but that has to be a coincidence, right? Because Dick doesn't have any living family.) First impressions can be misleading and the more Wally looks the less certain he is that they're related but the more he notices other things. Most importantly: that this is a person who needs help and maybe a friend.

YJxDP Brother's AU story concept #2, would completely not work in writing as it would fully rewrite both canons but basically exploring the concept of "what if they DID grow up in the circus together and somehow got separated, lost contact and then reunited as heroes", going into the loss, hurt, anger, distance and misunderstandings that would come from being suddenly split apart from your only remaining family with no warning. In which Dick is sitting on the kind of vicious anger that only a deeply hurt child can, Danny has been drowning in the guilt of a broken promise for five years and a certain someone has been interfering with the mail because the timeline needed both Robin and Phantom. A lot of shouting and crying ensues. The other reason I probably won't write this one is that it turns Danny into a distinctly different character to his canon counterpart.

Danny Phantom AU where the Fentons are not malicious but are also not very good as parents due to hyperfocus on their work. Jazz leaves to try and make a safer place where she can eventually petition to get custody of Danny. Meanwhile Danny - in attempt to be "part of the family" - volunteers to participate in some tests with ectoplasm that make him increasingly unwell and eventually into a halfa whose ghost form is shaped by his parents anti-ghost rhetoric and is mostly used by them as an anti-ghost countermeasure. Even though Danny is the same person in both forms he and "Hunter" aren't treated that way, and he ends up feeling as though "Hunter" needs to conform their ideas about about ghosts (not feeling emotion, not feeling physical sensation etc) - which is not a good thing for him and inadvertently makes him a lot of enemies among the ghosts that come to Amity Park. After struggling with that on his own for a while, he eventually leaves to be with Jazz and has to slowly learn how manage being a halfa, and to unlearn most of the things he's internalised about both ghosts and himself with the help of Jazz and some ghostly allies he stumbles into finding.

💖 What do you like most about your own writing?

Tricking me into complimenting myself, how very dare you! (Affectionate.)

I think it's probably best said in this quote from C.S. Lewis:

I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.

That's a pretty good summary actually. I started writing Deathly Weapons because I noticed these consistent gaps in the DP x DC (mostly DPYJ or DPTT) fanfic collections at the time, where certain ideas or opportunities weren't getting used and I really wanted to see them.

Specifically some stuff that I like and/or am looking forward to doing:

Causality - I try to make it so that things have a solid in-universe reason to happen. It's totally not necessary for fanfic (its perfectly fine if a story is just an excuse to put your blorbos into interesting positions) but I like to make things feel a little bit more grounded. Especially when it comes to missions in fanfic, often times I kind of found myself wondering why the Team's covert squad was being deployed on certain missions rather than other heroes - it's just one of those things that I like to have an answer for in my own stuff.

Fair-play mysteries - I'm writing for myself but I'm also writing the story that I wish Baby 3WD could have found, and part of that is I think readers like to feel clever, not stupid. I love leaving little hints that point to stuff that's going to come up later (for example, in Chapter 18 I tried to foreshadow Nano being tied up in the cupboard behind the boss before the Team even knew a hostage was missing from the main room) - I feel terribly witty while doing it and I super love hearing when people notice. Two people left comments speculating about some character stuff that's going to go down in Equilibrium and someone else already DMed me with a correct guess at part of the final twist and I love all of you. It's fun to give people the chance to realise what's coming before the characters do.

Character specificity - this is probably more of an upcoming thing than a current-chapters thing, but I really enjoy digging into the specifics of characterisation, character motivations and character relationships. And especially when it comes to grief arcs. I don't know how successfully I'm going to pull off Flashpoints, Combustion and Equilibrium but if I can get even some of the character stuff to work, I'll be happy.

Descriptions - settings are fun and I like describing them, especially when they also set scenes and build mood. I feel like its a part of writing that doesn't see as much love in fic (again, totally fair, we're here for the blorbos) but I love doing it. The oil rig setpiece was fun, I liked giving Wayne Manor a sense of its own personality, and I'm really looking forward to stuff like the jungle setting in In the Mists, the mountains in Rituals, the night sky scenes in Enemy Lines and a lot of gentle flavour descriptions wrapping through Equilibrium.

This was fun! Thanks for playing!

[threewaysdivided]

💭 + 🧠? I'm greedy lol.

Nothing wrong with a little Greed in moderation!

Fanfic Ask Game

💭 What is a headcanon you have about your own work?

My headcanons are often fairly bland so have three to satisfy your hunger:

One that has made it into Deathly Weapons: Danny preferentially writes in cursive (Chapter 14).

One that has not yet appeared but is planned to: The ghosts of Pandora's Necropolis have a distant connection to Themyscera.

One that appeared in an early draft but alas was not to be: In certain corners of the internet, a hacker going under the handle fryertuck is quite renowned. No-one knows they're a teenager.

🧠 What’s an idea you have that you can’t quite call a WIP yet?

I've talked about a few here (and am happy to talk more about them) but as we are in the mood to indulge, let's go a few more:

Another DPxYJ Brother AU where the Fenton's find out Danny's secret but instead interpret it as Phantom having murdered their son and taken his place. When Dick comes looking, their information sets Robin on the hunt for the "ghost imposter who killed his brother" armed with the very worst of their anti-ectoplasmic rhetoric.

Yet another DPxYJ siblings thing, this time running on the concept of "what if Danielle was about Dick's biological age and the whole team met her before anybody knew Dick had an older brother". No real plot for this one, just intrigue vibes and confusion over a ghost-fighting parkour-proficient stranger who looks weirdly like a female clone of Robin.

Surprise curveball with a My Hero Academia concept from back when I was deeper in that fandom. I liked the idea of a quirkless Izuku picking up on how busted their hero system is and deciding to take the support path to try and reform things from within, bumping into his canon Class 1A counterparts along the way. Also featuring a fight scene concept where Deku manages to one-up Bakugo in a spar using his analytical skills to identify that (based on the implicit quirks-are-biology rules of early canon) Bakugo's elbows and shoulders should be vulnerable points due to the repeated jarring from using his quirk. In which Deku is allowed to get a little mad at the injustice of the system, as a treat.

Hope this satiates for now. Thanks for playing!

[threewaysdivided]

Why is Danny always the younger brother?

In my consumption of a truly unhealthy amount of fanfiction, I’ve read my way through most of the YJ x DP offerings on Fanfiction.net and AO3.  Among them I’ve noticed the common presence of a particular story trope: Danny Fenton being the long-lost biological twin/younger brother of (almost always season 1) Dick Grayson, adopted by the Fentons after the accident that took the Grayson parents’ lives.

Now the sibling thing by itself is actually pretty interesting.  Beyond family dynamics and themes making for interesting stories, there’s certainly enough evidence to make a decent argument in favour.  Danny and Dick are both portrayed as slim and short-ish (within the bounds of their shows’ drastically different art styles), have dark hair and blue eyes, use wordplay-based humour,  seem to favour flying/aerial techniques and there are some similarities in the way Kaufman and McCartney voice the characters (especially their laughs).  Danny having Grayson DNA even fits with things like the DP creators’ statements that no-one else would have survived the portal accident, and Jack’s ever-so-slight favouritism of Jazz.

However, where almost all of these stories stumble for me is the near-universal use of Danny as younger brother or twin to S1!Dick, which... doesn’t make much sense logistics or story-wise.

Disclaimer: this is mostly for people like me, who prefer reading and/or writing pseudo-canonical/ canon-compliant fics.  There’s nothing wrong with liking or playing the trope as-is if canon accuracy isn’t a big drawcard for you.

This starts falling apart as early as their ages.  Danny and Dick are among the only characters to have their ages explicitly stated in the canon of their respective shows: Danny is “just 14″ when he gets his powers, and Dick is “a 13-year-old kid” in S1, with his birthday on December 1st in the companion comics.  Even if they were twins, Danny Phantom’s story would have to begin just after YJS1 according to this timeframe.  To make Danny the same age or younger than S1!Dick you’d need to de-age or age-up a significant chunk of at least one cast, which would have ripple-effects on its plot.

But even assuming that someone does manage to flex the timelines well, having Danny be younger still raises a slew of questions:  

Why were the Fentons in Gotham for Haley’s performance in the first place?  

Why would Bruce Wayne not just adopt both boys?  (And if the Fentons somehow took Danny with them before he could, isn’t that basically kidnapping?)  

How does knowing he was adopted change Danny’s relationship with his family/ Sam & Tucker/ Amity Park at large?

If Dick’s used to being the older brother, why is he so comfortable playing “little brother” to the Team?

Why wasn’t Danny affected or motivated by his parents’ deaths similar to how Dick was inspired to become Robin?  

Have the two boys kept in contact since?  (If not - why not?)  Are either aware of each other’s identity?  How does this affect the plots of their shows?

Now some fics do attempt to answer some of these questions (especially the last point) but in a lot of them it’s just hand-waved.  Which is frustrating considering that the sibling trope is the whole set up for many of these stories.

To me there seems to be a pretty obvious solution:

Why not make Danny the older brother?

This fixes a lot of the logic and timeline problems with the “younger/twin” set-up.  Danny being born into the Grayson family but then adopted out to the Fentons before Dick came along would explain how the boys might not know about each other until the story starts.  It also avoids the contrivance of the Fentons being in Gotham and just happening to adopt one of a pair - Haley’s circus could have been travelling near Amity Park around the time Danny was put up for adoption.  Bruce wouldn’t need to know about him, as Batman only gets involved 9+ years later when Dick and his parents make their ill-fated trip.  Danny himself might not even know he was adopted depending on if/when Maddie and Jack decide (or remember) to say anything.  It also explains Maddie’s baby pictures of Danny in DP canon.

Basically, having Danny be the older brother allows the story to be completely canon-compliant with both shows until the fanfic plot starts.

It also makes it easier to explain why Danny was adopted out.  Maybe the circus hit a long financial rough patch right after he was conceived and they couldn’t afford to raise a child.  Maybe Danny was born with mild medical problem that would make it risky to travel/perform and Mary and John decided it was better to adopt him out to a normal family than force him to grow up in an world he could never fully be part of.  Having the Grayson parents regret needing to give their eldest away would also explain why they wouldn’t mention him to Dick.

Heck, seeing as Jack Haley would definitely know another Grayson exists and Dick goes back to the circus during Performance (Ep24), there’s even a natural starting point for a long-lost-older-brother fic built into the YJ canon.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on the matter.  What I find really weird is that no-one seems to have played the trope in this form, despite how common these sibling-stories are in DP x YJ (and other DC) crossovers.  

I’d be interested to see how it goes if anyone happens to find or write something along these lines.