#also he does become friends(?) with ember. but its like she's an awful influence to him

[nonbinaryphantom]

sorry i got attached to my roleswap au danny he’s so cringefail he needs to be studied under a microscope

[monotype-on-phantom]

This might be a bit unusual for this blog, but I am going to do an analysis…of an object. That staff is one of the most interesting tools/weapons in the entire show, and they didn’t even bother to give it a name. I’ll just call it “the staff,” since that’s all Freakshow calls it, but yeah.

Like I said, this is out of the ordinary, so it might get messy, but I’ll do my best.

Despite only ever appearing in one episode, I’d say the staff is easily one of the most powerful objects we see in the show. In terms of what it’s able to do, how easy it is to use, and how strong its affects are, it’s pretty ridiculous.

One thing I found really interesting (and kind of scary) about it is that it’s capable of working through pretty much any filter. It has an effect on Danny regardless of what form he’s in and where he sees it. Two times he sees the staff in human form on a screen, and here he just spots it on a billboard for a second. Every time, it manages to take control of him briefly, and when Freakshow gives an order, Danny follows it to the best of his understanding. Seeing it on Tucker’s PDA was enough to drag him to Circus Gothica.

Honestly, that’s probably what Freakshow had in mind, which was why he was broadcasting himself all over the place. He’d come to Amity Park specifically for Danny, and it was much easier to put up advertisements and such and wait for Danny to come to him than it was to track him down.

Speaking of which…yeah. Freakshow came to Amity Park specifically to target Danny and make him one of his minions. We don’t know if Freakshow knew beforehand that he was half human, but I seriously doubt that even matters to him. He was willing to go as far as to kill Sam to keep her quiet, and he’s probably been doing this for awhile. Abducting a child and keeping him as his own personal mind slave for an indefinite amount of time probably wouldn’t bother him in the slightest.

And that brings me to another point. I mentioned in a previous post that, to me, this staff is one of the creepiest forms of brainwashing/mind control that the show has ever had, and I brought up Ember and overshadowing as other examples. Thanks to my sister and a few lovely followers, I’ve finally been able to pin down what, exactly, it is I find so creepy about this staff.

To start with, Ember might be powerful and have a strong influence, but that’s all it is. Influence. She can manipulate people to an extent and get them to feel certain things or give her certain attention because of her music, but the trance is pretty easily broken, and the person is still mostly there, and we even see in Danny’s case that he remembers everything from when he was under Ember’s spell.

There’s also the fact that, comparatively, Ember’s motives aren’t quite as malicious. She’s still one of the more malicious ghosts Danny has to deal with, but she’s still a teenager and a ghost. Her goals boil down to teenage rebellion and getting people to love her and her music. From a moral standpoint among ghosts, she’s not really doing anything wrong. She’s just trying to fulfill her obsession, and if nobody tries to bother her, she won’t really hurt anyone. Even though she says “you’ll all be my slaves!”, all the effect her music has over people is just…turning them into her obsessed fans. They’re still technically able to live their own lives along with that. Ember’s just at the forefront of their thoughts.

With overshadowing, that’s also not necessarily wrong by the standard of ghost morals, and most ghosts don’t necessarily mean harm to the person they’re overshadowing. They just need a body for one reason or another.

Which is basically where the difference lies. The way my sister put it, it’s “mind over body.”

When a person is overshadowed, they lose control of their body. That’s still very scary and disturbing, of course, but when you’re talking to an overshadowed person, you’re talking to the ghost overshadowing them. Everything they do is actually the ghost acting through them. The person’s mind is kind of shoved back while the ghost takes control. There might be some lingering feelings or thoughts, but a ghost can’t force a person to feel, think, or believe something. The only thing they have power over is the physical body. As a result, everybody knows you’re not really to blame for whatever a ghost does in your body. After all, that wasn’t you. It was the ghost.

The staff doesn’t work like that.

Freakshow isn’t there at every moment telling his minions exactly what to do. He isn’t physically controlling them. This is actual, literal mind control. The staff gets into the ghosts’ minds, overwrites their wills and personalities, and tells them what to do. How they do this or that is still technically up to them, as they’re only receiving orders and following them. The details don’t need to be specified. They can figure that out themselves, as long as it falls in line with their orders.

Danny, for example, kind of takes charge of the group. He takes shots at the other ghosts if they’re not moving fast enough for him, and he takes care of the police when they show up, while the others don’t care. He even usually carries the lightest loads.

Is this Danny? No, obviously not, but these aren’t things Freakshow specifically ordered him to do, either. That’s all the effect of the staff and what Freakshow had told him to do. Basically, it’s the personality Danny gained based on those orders.

That leaves a lot more room for self-doubt and even guilt than something like overshadowing or Ember’s spells. When you’re overshadowed, you didn’t make any decisions. You didn’t do anything wrong. That was all the ghost. With Ember’s spells, she can’t necessarily force you to do something completely against your will. All she can do is plant suggestions and interests, and you decide what to do from there. She can’t, say, make you attempt to murder your best friend without any remorse whatsoever.

After the staff is smashed and Danny’s freed from its control, he mentions that his memory’s fuzzy, but he’s still aware he did bad things. There are lingering feelings and memories of doing awful things and being unable to stop, but it’s harder to completely blame someone else because it’s not like everything you did was the result of a direct order.

In the hands of someone like Freakshow, that sort of power is even more terrifying. His ancestors apparently only used it to entertain people. While it’s still disturbing to think of ghosts being mind slaves to these people for generations, it’s not like they were doing anything considered criminal. If the Fentons are any example, humans don’t typically consider ghosts sentient beings with thoughts and feelings of their own, anyway. They’re wrong, but there’s a lot less ill will.

Freakshow is a grown, human man who has shown that he views ghosts on the same level as himself mentally. He has no obsessions or different natures to hide behind, and as a human, his natural moral code is that of a human. Despite that, he’s still willing to murder, steal, and mentally control anyone he has to, whether they’re ghost, human, adult, or child.

After all, Freakshow specifically came to Amity Park to kidnap a child and enslave him, mind and body, to do whatever he wanted.

With someone like that holding the staff, as mentioned before, the result is that someone like Danny could actually attempt to murder his friend without feeling any guilt.

Then the staff ends up in Danny’s hands, which is understandably confusing as hell for him. He’s still under the control of the staff, but he’s suddenly not being told what to do by an outside source anymore. His mindset’s technically the same, but without Freakshow feeding him orders for him to base his thoughts and feelings around.

To top that off, everyone around him is telling him something different, and he can’t take any time to think and figure things out.

Technically, Danny’s under his own mind control, which is tough because that leads to a loop of being controlled and being the one in control, and the conflict of that leaves him confused and acting pretty much on his own impulses. When Sam tries to offer him an ultimatum after he told everyone to be quiet and stop putting pressure on him, he got frustrated, so the ghosts all advanced on her until she fell off the train.

Likewise, when he hears his best friend screaming as she falls to her death, his instinct tells him he has to fly down and save her.

Sam glow

Danny’s still very much under the control of the staff at this point. He doesn’t become completely aware of his surroundings until the crystal ball shatters on the ground. So, in a sense, Danny’s gut instinct told him “oh right! That is my friend whom I love, and she is going to die if something is not done!”, so his own order to himself was “go save her.”

Complicated, I know, but that seems to be how the staff works.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to break out of the staff’s control without breaking the staff itself, but Danny’s the only one seen doing that. And this post has gone on long enough, so I’ll talk about that in a separate post.