i used to be so good at writing strong, thoroughly-researched, thoroughly-edited essays.
as a kid in hs, my teacher literally came up to me, holding my 40 page essay on the intersection of the European witch hunts and capitalism/exploitation/gender roles (it was supposed to be 7 pages...whoops) and went like "this is literally a master's-degree level thesis. what are you doing?? you could literally use this as your final dissertation in a master's program, what the fuck."
NOW??? NOW?? you'd think I'd be oh so skilled. but alas. i can barely piece together two ideas. adhd skill-regression is so so real. im SOBBING
Atlanteans keep summoning Phantom.
They don't mean to, but now he has a very different look.
Apparently the summoning ritual for the High Prince of the Infinite Realms was leaked (he's pretty sure it was Johnny and Kitty), and teenage Atlanteans are like any other teenager; absolutely willing to peer pressure their friends into doing stupid creepy shit.
He keeps appearing underwater, and it's super uncomfortable to take that moment to remind himself to stop breathing so he doesn't accidentally inhale a lungful of water.
Easy solution; he's already got two forms, and one of them is pretty malleable. As a ghost, it's not like he needs to use his legs anyways.
So he changes it.
It's got glittering white scales, glowing green freckles, claws, and a betta-fish-like tail with glowing neon ridges. He calls it his mer-sona, and makes sure to call it that before Tucker can beat him to it.
Now whenever he gets summoned, he just sticks to that form.
Poison Ivy is hired to revive an extinct flower. It's good money and the flower has no adverse effects on the environment so she's more than happy to take the job.
She thinks everything is good and continues to grow these flowers for her client. Until a child shows up in her greenhouse and informs her that the flowers she's been providing are actually going to a branch of the government and are being used to destroy the a different realm.
The government has been tricking her into destroying the environment, earthly or not. Soon they'd learn exactly why Poison Ivy is feared.
Tim is the first to find out the Red Hood’s identity and from then on sticks to Jason during patrol like glue (much to Jason’s chagrin, dammit, it would feel wrong to beat up Robin when he’s that starry eyed…)
Cue: PANIC from the rest of the Batfamily, who still think Hood is a forty-something year old crime lord and now assume they’re dating.
Good reveal au, where after learning phantom's identity and realizing the atrocities that the GIW have committed (or alternatively, ethical science au, where they find out the GIW plagarized them), the fenton parents decided to create the 'ultimate ghost-ending weapon' and sell it to the agents.
They go absolutely overboard, describing to the agents in meticulous detail how it evaporates any ghost it hits near-instantly and describing it quite ruthlessly in the blueprints, and soon the GIW have raplaced all their main weapons with the new gun.
Except it doesn't actually kill ghosts. It's the Fenton Bazooka. You know, the one that creates a portable portal to suck the ghost back into the ghost zone? What they actually did was retool it slightly to make it look more grusome than it actually is. They even added a beacon in Phantom's Keep, which all Fenton Bazookas will target when they open a portal, so the ghosts are always delivered to the keep.
From there, Phantom stationed an emergency medical team at the keep to treat the many injured and ragged ghosts that the GIW 'destroyed,' and to explain what just happened.
What they didn't anticipate was that now that the GIW have a mass-produced weapon that they believed would effectively eradicate ghosts, they would go on the offensive. They have a number of cities they've been monitoring but didn't want to get involved in without better tools.
One of those cities is Gotham.
And the Bats are ectocontaminated enough to register as ghosts.
Batman witnessed several of his children get evaporated by green energy weapons within mere moments of each other. He's absolutely gutted. Devastated. They didn’t even stand a chance.
He'll get his revenge, and it's frighteningly easy to track the weapon to private subcontractors. The Doctors Fenton, in Illinois. Their research calls for the genocide of all ghost kind, and apparently, that war started by killing his own children.
His children will not die in vain.
He gets to Amity Park and finds the Engineer's Nightmare of a building that is Fentonworks, but that night, before he can hack through the security and break in, one of the windows opens.
It's one of his kids that he had watched evaporate before his very eyes. They give him a silent signal of one of their identifying security codes and gesture for him to come inside.
Is it a trap? A prank in poor taste? Utterly genuine?
He goes through the window.
All of his dead kids are there, wearing borrowed pajamas and only their dominoes to conceal their identities. Daniel Fenton (son of the Fentons, this is his bedroom, has voiced a few arguments against his parent's views, but still an unknown) is among the crowd of teens and young adults, twirling on an office chair and obnoxiously sipping a capri sun.
"First thing you need to know, Bats," Daniel says after finishing his drink, "is that my parents are absolutely NOT genocidal ectophobic scumbags, and that is the reason why your kids are still alive."
I fear that "fire bending didn't come easy to zuko" and "zuko isn't a prodigy" (both true) has somehow snowballed into "zuko is a bad or at best average fire bender".... which simply isn't true, especially by the end of book 3