#I'd rather focus on exploring canon characterisations and personal dynamics over romance

[threewaysdivided]

How do you feel about Pink Astronaut. Personally I feel like Paulina deserved a little better than the writers gave her.

I'm 99% sure that's the ship name for Danny x Paulina, right?

(Which probably says a lot about my engagement with the shipping side of the Phandom 😅.)

TBH I don't have any strong thoughts or feelings about it either way.

In all cases I'm a very gen-focussed fan - my interests tend run more in the direction of character psychology, non-romantic platonic/ familial relationships, lore, mystery and theme. It's a personal thing but I just don't read romantic/sexual intent/attraction into character interactions unless they're explicitly framed/intended as such and the way much of the shipping community seems to do so goes completely over my head.

Which isn't to say that I avoid all ship-fics, or that there aren't a number of noncanon ships that I enjoy across different fandoms, but for the most part I favour genfic and when I do read shipfic they tend to be the stories that focus on personality, emotional chemistry and personal/emotional compatibility. And when it comes to thinking about "ships" myself I tend to lean more towards times when characters have canonically expressed that kind of interest, the reasons why they would be compatible/ find each other attractive, how they feel about it and what it says about them.

But back to Paulina:

I think you're right - as a character she (along with basically every human character outside of the main trio, the Fenton family and sometimes Valerie) suffers massively from underdevelopment because of the show's nature as for the most part an episodic kid's superhero-comedy with an ooky-spooky gimmick. Danny Phantom the show is a place where The Status Quo is God and the Rule of Funny/Cool/Drama supersedes everything, up to and including the characters and their consistency.

(You can even see this and the obviously conflicting visions of different parts of the creative team effect the main characters too. Danny suddenly carrying the Jerk Ball in service of a generic "don't be superficial/ materialism is bad" story in Livin' Large, how Tucker is basically learning the same lesson twice across What You Want and King Tuck, the multiple times where Sam's more abrasive negative traits are used as a source of plot/conflict but are never meaningfully addressed or developed because the writers want to keep using those traits for drama and eventually to use her character as the Morally Righteous Generic Love Interest Behind Danny's Heroism... et cetera et certera et cetera.)

Literally every character in DP is done a disservice by the show's writing and Paulina runs into the same problem. She's chained to the post of a very specific narrative function/ character archetype and never intentionally developed beyond what's needed to serve the Plot/ the Joke.

She's clearly written to be the Rich Plastic Mean Girl à la Regina George, and while there is a potentially very interesting character beneath that surface appearance - which we can see in places like Parental Bonding where she shows emotional intelligence by immediately clocking that Sam is actually jealous of Danny's attraction to her, and in her "if my skin is perfect, I'll be perfect" line from My Sister's Keeper which hints at some potentially significant appearance-based self-worth issues - the show itself basically only ever uses her "Pretty Girl" and "Popular A-Lister" status as a source of surface-level character drama for the trio and as a rare plot-convenient situational ally in dire circumstances. Her actions show a consistent characterisation but it's so rudimentary that it barely clears that archetype to become its own thing.

I think if Danny Phantom had taken more structural and tonal influence from Spiderman (or even something like Disney's Kim Possible) rather than Fairly Odd Parents - still keeping things mostly light-hearted but with some extra focus on character consistency and layering some ongoing character arcs over each season - there could have been a lot of potential to develop and flesh out Paulina as a narrative foil/ ongoing rival to Sam and her own character arc. It also could have added some more meaningful non-stereotypical female character dynamics, which are disappointingly but perhaps not surprisingly lacking from a "for boys" Nicktoon headed by a man who named himself "Butch". But as it is she unfortunately falls into that No Man's Land for me, where she isn't developed enough to have much deeper canon worth investigating and isn't really thematically/narratively significant enough that I'd want to develop her myself for story purposes.

As for the Pink Astronaut ship itself, all I can say is that, at least for me, canonically it... isn't really one. At least in terms of what I personally characterise as a 'relationship'. It's stuck at a very shallow level; Danny has a superficial surface-level infatuation with Paulina because she's pretty and popular, and Paulina looks down on "geeky dork loser" Danny Fenton while having a superficial surface-level infatuation with Danny Phantom as "the cute ghost-boy who rescued her". There's no real sense of actual personal chemistry based on them knowing, appreciating or even seemingly caring to know who the other is as a character. None of their "romantic" hijinks really involve them learning anything meaningful about each other or even having a proper conversation. Paulina "dates" Fenton purely to piss off Sam, then "Paulina" shows personal interest in Danny but it turns out to actually be Kitten trying to piss off Johnny, and when she does show interest in him after the reveal in Reality Trip it's kind of obvious that it's because she's interested in dating Phantom and his secret identity wouldn't have mattered either way. And meanwhile Danny spends most of his time either too busy with ghost stuff to properly pay attention to her as a person, or he never really shows any interest or understanding beyond his fantasies about how she's very conventionally pretty (which he finds attractive/desirable) and popular (which he wants to be).

So while there's a lot of potential for people to write that ship in terms of them being two very different characters from different backgrounds who come to learn about each other as people, come to appreciate each other on a personality level and develop an actual romantic/emotional connection based on that... within the show itself that surface level is sort of where it starts and ends.

And like I said, I'm not a shipper. Even with the bigger, more canonically-substantiated ships I look for the personalities moreso than the romance.

So I don't really have any strong thoughts or feelings about it either way.

Sorry if that's not a satisfying answer.

But I do agree: like most DP characters, Paulina Sanchez has a lot more character potential than the writing allowed her.