#phandom discourse

[lexosaurus]

Okay but for real though jokes aside, I genuinely do not care about what people ship, and I don't think people should be being harassed over what they ship. Assuming everybody is tagging everything correctly, I'm in favor of just block/filter/mute and move on. What other people do is really none of my goddamn business. I actually have my own business where I spot while you lift weights but the catch is that I don't help you when things start to go south, I just encourage you to fight for your life cause that's where the real motivation is 😤🤙

[am-i-a-boy-or-a-crybaby]

Thoughts from a queer Midwestern teen in love about the DnP Vday video

When I was 13 I shipped Dan and Phil. Hard. Even though they were already out when I found them and I knew Dan’s story, I was too young to truly understand the fear and anxiety he felt surrounding his identity. I never will understand fully even now, but at nearly nineteen years old, I feel it.

I heard about the video from a Pinterest comment. I didn’t know much about it except that it “proved phan” which I highly doubted would be any different from the loosely strung together proof I had seen. Seeing as that loose proof was really all I needed anyway, I decided to watch the video even though I didn’t really believe it would change much.

It did.

The video is jarringly personal and even at the time, having never really dated anyone, I could tell that something was wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this and not just because it was “the forbidden video”. No, there was something in the visible relaxation in Phil’s voice, yet the nervousness in his “I love you”s that tipped me off.

I closed the video.

Over the next years the video would live in the back of my head. I couldn’t make it leave.

Throughout high school I watched as the world around me turned violent. There was grace for a child who “didn’t know what they were doing”, but not for a senior who “should know better”.

Being gay started to scare me. Finding out I was trans was even scarier.

At 17 I fell in love with a boy just like me who had been my friend for years. Since we got together there has been an understanding not to share too much to strangers. To post each other as vaguely as possible online. In private we are intertwined and the love in our eyes is visible, but when we are out there is nothing more than a small shoulder bump and a smaller smile.

We are still together as I turn nineteen. We are scared. We are surrounded in a land locked state painted red. While I live in a blue county, next year he won’t be so lucky and I will become his favorite secret. A friend to most, a lover to a quiet few.

I rewatched the video. In some ways I wish I didn’t, but I knew I needed to. I understood the video in a different light. I felt a fraction of the horror and embarrassment they must have felt when YouTube glitched, making it public. Tears streamed down my face as Phil described a relationship not that far from my own. Two men, deeply in love, scared for their lives.

I lay in my bed and wonder how they would feel about the video now. In 2025 they brazenly joke about their love and their intimate lives, revealing bits and pieces to us, their fans. Not because we deserve it or because they feel like they have to, but because they’ve begun to take control of their lives. I believe that some small part of them feels that by showing us how to unlearn fear, some scared queer couple will feel just a little less mortified by love, a little less terrified to be seen, and a little more like a cheesy valentines card.

[fruity-hub-blog]

This started off as tags but, you know what? It's important to the Phandom as a whole because this is a problem with Phandom that we should look at critically.

(Under the cut for length)

First off, the above poster is absolutely right. From what I have seen in my deep dives of Phandom history, this is how the tru phan/anti phan war started.

This is why I am so sus of anyone who says "Oh I love my dissection but people who ship X are real freaks. News flash, we are all freaks! our favorite tag is dissection! I recently saw someone call Danielle x Valerie "pedophile adjacent" and my brother in christ, I was horrified. A two year age gap was being called that when five years previous, our biggest issue with the ship was what the hell to call it.

Don't do butch hartman's job for him. Full stop. As a phandom we are insulated against a lot of the newer waves of nonsense because we are so damn old. BUT as a phandom we should also stay alert for the nonsense coming in and practice good fandom practices such as identifying squicks and avoiding them. As well as YKINMKATO (kinktomato) also known as your kink is not my kink and that's okay

You don't like a ship? Awesome, blacklist it, don't make it a moral crusade. Yes this applies to all ships. (And I'm going to go there) EVEN ships like pomp pep. Because that's the one area I see consistently people allowing for just the most lukewarm takes. Not to mention I've seen SEVERAL people chased out of the phandom not even for drawing pomp pep but people drawing badger cereal (platonic) and people interpret as pomp pep and then send hate mail to the creators over.

This attitude sucks, and it has chased some amazing people out of our phandom.

And revolutionary thought, even if someone is engaging in a ship like pomp pep, it's okay. You don't have to like it, or even see it! Just move on and don't bully people over it.

Because consistently. Every year while doing the truce, I always get a few people who like ships that the Phandom has decided are problematic, and every year, I have had to do extensive deep dives into the blogs they get paired with to make sure they won't get attacked for their requests.

As a Phandom, we need to do better.

Love that while online fandom in general is having a weird meltdown about the morality of enjoying anything darker than sanitized fluff in fiction, the Danny Phantom fandom is still sitting in the corner 16 years after the show ended with a blankie and cocoa and their 10,000th deep-fanon supertorture cannibalism vivisection psychological horror fic

[philsdrivinglicence]

Has not escaped my notice they avoided dominos. boycott supporting kings. 🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉

[phwedding]

the fear a lot of people in the phandom seem to have that, if we as a community say or do enough things "wrong," things will "revert back to how they used to be" (aka dnp will close themselves off again or stop making content) is really odd to me. it essentially ignores all the personal growth they've both experienced in the last decade or so and instead imagines their current willingness to be more open as being hinged upon, and an effect of, the good behavior of their fans. i see no reason to assume that there's any such implicit system of bargaining for more openness in exchange for less invasiveness taking place between them and us -- they're just living their lives, and occasionally sharing parts of it with their audience, of their own volition. now, at a point when they're clearly very happy and comfortable irrespective of us, it doesn't make much sense to claim it's plausible that they might decide to go on hiatus again and end "dan and phil" for real this time and go back in the closet or whatever because some people said weird things about them online

[otamotone-dnp]

.

[squaloropera]

When Daniel Howell started opening up about how much he hates shipping culture surrounding his relationship with Phil, but I never did that shit even as a kid so I get to watch people getting shamed for their fucked up behaviour

[coolmaycroft]

I'll never get tired of the discourse surrounding Sam. At one point she was one of my faves from Danny phantom but over time I guess I realized that she's supposed to be a flawed character and also a sort of punching bag for alt-culture. Butch was a creative guy but after these years we can see how his beliefs bleed through his work and Sam is this sort of conflict between an acutally flawed character and a stereotype for counter-culture.

Most of the discourse stems from her attitude in Phantom Planet where she's constantly grilling Danny for giving up his powers. The episode saga pretty much puts Sam in the right because LTDR, privatization of the town's security. But at the same time the way it was written it really sounds like "I only liked you because you had powers" Normally this would be a really genius way of setting up conflict in the story but I'm not gonna give the writers that much credit because Phantom Planet really feels rushed.

[bonesandpoemsandflowers]

why is the phantom of the opera fandom space so toxic and full of discourse all the time while the true detective s1 fandom is fun and unapologetically horny about two middle aged dudes

i'm defecting <- person who has been fruitlessly attempting to get over phantom of the opera since she was 9 years old

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

phannie tumblr and phannie twitter hating each other is so funny bc it’s all the same people and we act like we’re completely separate societies. i really get and agree with the criticisms of phannie twt, all i wanted when i was on there was to be back here, AND at the end of the day, we’re all phannies—none of us are valid <3

(i’m down if anyone has thoughts on this that they want to share! i want to write essays upon essays about this phenomenon it’s SO interesting /gen)

[onfjre]

coby is know you mean well but i worry that this survey is gonna cause issues between phannie twt and phannie tumblr and i get scared cos i already feel like there’s a lot of tension between us all when i really wish there wouldn’t be like we’re all here for the same thing yknow

i understand that completely--but that's not the point of the survey at all! i just want to collect data on the dan and phil phandom as a whole and if i only post on twitter it would skew the demographic 😭 esp as some people only have tumblr!

if anything, i'm hoping this will counter cross-platform bias and offer new perspectives. if drama does arise i'll eat my words but i've tried my best to be as impartial as possible.

[dystopia-daily-trash-1]

Honestly disappointing how many phannie blogs I can go to their mains and see the last post they reblogged about asexuals was a rancid discourse exclus take from 2015-2017 and nothing supportive or kind since.

Which is a thing I still check for because I know discourse disappeared but there's still people who think like that. And it's something I especially check for in the phandom because I've seen how some of y'all talk about qprs (in general, not just in relation to dnp)

Listen I don't wanna start drama and I ain't gonna name names. But I'm disappointed that the supportive community I feel like I've found on the phandom only goes so far. And I figure I might as well slap a post on my phandom sideblog with searchable terms like "asexual" and "aromantic" and "queerplatonic" so phannies who do the same as me can come here and know I'm a friend, I'm aroace, and I'm sick of ace discourse ruining my life

[bewareofthenewphannie]

well this sucks but at least it doesn't suck more than expected

[jestbee]

Oh ew why are we doing blog award type shit again, didn't we outgrow this nonsense?

[chasing-stardust-22]

rolling up late to the conversation with a smoothie in my hand

...I hear the circus is back in town?

[thinking-emoji]

ooooh you make a very good point. i do wonder if the jokes had been about dan if they’d have been taken at face value like this. my honest feeling is maybe by some but definitely not 70% lmao

i think people took dan's "i'm vers" from big at face value, iirc - it's just objectively not as impactful of a label as "power bottom" lol

but i think you're right, i feel like we're more used to dan explicitly talking about his sexuality than phil so there's the additional steel chair attack of "we're talking about phil in bed now!" that knocked the phandom's braincell out