In Which I Characteristically Blither
Since my high school years I've been developing my Primordiverse AU, an extensive canon rewrite and crossover fanfiction project. It used to be called Retoldverse. Of all the five protagonists in it: Danny Fenton, Randy Cunningham, Jack Spicer, Jake Long, and Juniper Lee, only one of them truly hooked their claws into my very self-identity, personal self-perception, and mind-heart-soul so deeply that it became irremovable from what makes me, Me—Danny. He is my favorite of the bunch, always has been. I've put so much effort and emotion into telling his story that I've essentially become him (psychological origins, forged painstakingly over time). Hell, I even have him as my main soulbond F/O in selfshipping terms, which I used to wonder was weird or offputting. Nah! Who cares! I am him and I love him, separately but also not separately! Who fuckin' cares!!! My gay identity soup doesn't have to make sense!! It just has to exist within me! Bwahahahahaha—
…Before I devolve into maddened laughter any further.
I've mentioned in previous entries that developing his tale also helped me to crack open my own transgender egg, as Danny realizes in-universe that he is a transman at an early age (13). For me, it happened during my mid-20s (I'm 30 now). Something about letting myself settle "into his mindset" is that his insane resilience kind of…helps me keep myself together? "I've gone through worse things as Danny than anything that could go down right now." (On the other end of the spectrum, I often reprimand myself aloud that I feel his anxiety, anger, and pain way too much when I'm thinking of my own noemata of his life events—what I mean is, I get tense and stressed because "dammit, I'm thinking like my fictotype too much right now.") So being the Dan-Man is beneficial and detrimental in equal measure. Or is that unfair to say? The only negative bits are caused by how my own brain is wired, to be honest. I am a worrywart. I down-spiral sometimes and it is not pretty. Well, so does Danny, but far more quietly than I do.
IRL, I am extremely fidgety and verbal stim quite a lot, all the time. Literally all the time. I can't shut up and stay still. I despise this about myself. But Danny, after becoming a halfa in the Portal accident when he's 14yo, learns out of necessity over the next few years that being a strong, still-as-a-stone, silent listener type is much more optimal for his survival than being a hotheaded impulsive fool. Not that he ever was that to begin with (canon-cartoon-Danny certainly is a "dense and simple boy with a good heart who makes punny quips" trope), my Danny-self is incredibly OOC, I suppose, compared to the source show material. He is growing up far too fast and far too cruelly at times. So much shit is constantly happening to him during any given week, but he rarely complains, unlike canon-Danny. He doesn't whine about wanting to be a normie kid with a mundane life again. Why? I think, deep down inside him, he…just kind of…accepts it? As bland as that possibly sounds.
This is himself now. This is his Purpose now. He's not giving it up. He's more all right with not identifying as human anymore than canon-Danny is, although he recognizes that's part of what he is indeed, and the concept of being human is still important to him, but he is a halfa now. Not a ghost, not a human, but with traits of both. A whole new being. A liminal/limbo hybrid species, dead-and-alive simultaneously. BTW, I spelled the word "purpose" with a capital P because it references how all ghosts in-story of my worldbuilt AU are fueled by their individual Purpose for Existence inside their Core, which is the only true organ they possess; it acts as both a heart and brain at once.
I admire my AU Danny-self and Danny-F/O highly. How he endures and persists throughout all that is so beyond my bandwidth, but he does it, and he doesn't always win, but most the time he does. He picks himself up from the failures, failures that are often gruesome, hates himself for it, and then keeps going. And then there's the permanent fusion with his Ultimate Enemy alternate timeline self, who I refer to Dark Future Phantom in my fic's notes document on Ellipsus—DFP for short (in the canon TUE episode, kid-DFP fused with Vlad's Plasmius-self, but that didn't occur in my AU). Danny willingly chose to fuse with DFP when he was 18, and had been ascended for a year by then to the role Pariah Dark previously held, the Caretaker of the Infinite Realms (no, not the Ruler, not the Ghost King; Pariah was once a decent Caretaker who then became vastly corrupt and tyrannical in his desire to keep everyone "safe" as their autocratic overseer; Danny will never ever be like him). Clockwork (they/them) had been basically giving DFP psychotherapy for decades inside their own Clocktower abode ever since the TUE arc happened, bending time itself to give DFP all the years he needed to learn to be a little less of a selfish destroyer.
So once Clockwork thought it was possible enough, he proposed the idea of fusing to Danny, who agreed to it. The options were: DFP exists separately from him forever, or they become a single person. Why in the fuck would Danny say yes to combining minds with DFP?! You ask. Well, it's a little dark-ish, in honesty. One: he was sympathetic for DFP on a measure, because he could understand how he went insane and chose evil things under those circumstances. DFP is simply just another Danny who lost everything and decided to hell with the world over it. That does not erase his crimes. Seeing himself in DFP does not magically make this other-him a better person. But Danny knows he'd want a miraculous second chance like this to be with the people he lost if he were DFP, and that's precisely what DFP is asking for. Also, the second reason, left unspoken: the power-boost that fusion might grant. Danny is not a complete saint, no matter how his sister and two best friends insist he is in their eyes.
Anyway, my point in blurting all that out is that DFP is also Me. The resulting individual their fusion created is Me.