Danny commits to the Bit a bit too hard...
So! For the first few weeks after his accident, whenever Danny would try to help the people of Amity Park, he would be treated as a Villain.
No matter if he had just defeated the Big Bad of the Week or saved a Cat from a tree, everybody in town only saw him as a Monster or Villain to he feared and hunted down. Danny was really getting sick of trying to get them on his side, until Sam made a suggestion.
"Why not just...play into it?" She said, barely looking up from painting her nails.
It was just an offhand suggestion, but it stuck with Danny. Why shouldn't he lean into it? The people of Amity Park already saw Ghosts as Evil, and they already assumed he was in cahoots with the Ghosts attacking the town. Why shouldn't he just...play into it?
So he does just that.
From that day on, whenever Phantom was spotted he would dramatically monologue about his Evil Plans, or claim that another Rogues attack on the City was his own act of terror.
Box Ghost destroys the towns Warehouses? It was on his orders.
Ember mind controls masses of Teenagers? All part of his Plans somehow.
Every Adult in Town is kidnapped by Young Blood? Danny gave them over to a friend as a Gift.
He crafts an identity for himself as the most Vile and Horrible Ghost that has ever attacked the City, using his own infamy to cement his legend even more firmly. The town only sees a Monsterous Villain, who has eveded capture near effortlessly for months on end, who constantly attacks their City and gets away with it.
Of course he still needs an excuse for how his plans keep getting stopped, and he gets it when his girlfriend Valerie becomes the Red Huntress. Before that, he just claimed infighting or the Fentons getting lucky, but Valerie becoming the Town's Hero meant he had a plausible excuse for how he kept getting "Foiled".
Val was suspicious, because she was not as involved as Phantom painted her to be, but in the end she had no proof of him faking his defeats. And she couldn't come up with any explanations for why he would do that in the first place. I mean, who would fake being a Supervillain? It had to he something else.
This did come back to bite him a while later, when the Justice League decided that enough was enough, and dispatched Justice League Dark to recruit Red Huntress and help Deal with him.
Coincidentally, that was the same day Pariah Dark attacked the Mortal Realm and sucked Amity Park into the Ghost Zone.
And honestly? Danny had spent over a Year proclaiming himself as a Villain who commanded Ghosts to attack the Human Realm, and he had heard about the Right of Conquest being Absolute in the Ghost Zone, so why not make it official? Why not overthrow the Ghost King, become the Ghost King, and cement his identity as a Villain while also forbidding Ghosts from entering the Human Realm without his permission?
He may have gotten a bit carried away and forgotten that the Villain thing was a disguise...but hey! He was still preventing Ghost Attacks! ...mostly. That's got to count for something right?
He may have let the Bit run a bit too far...
...
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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