Me over here in my corner thinking about YJDW, and how absolutely ironically sad it would be if after all the huffing and puffing about ghosts and all the hell he gave Danny, that Wally himself came back as a ghost post-Endgame and only Danny could see and talk to him.
I need to rewatch the OG show again but for a happier alternative, what if Danny saved Wally from his original fate?
(Young Justice: Deathly Weapons)
It seems my primary creative contribution to fandom has been the creation of a bespoke, artisanal brain-corner in which people are compelled to sit and think about DW 😅. It’s nice to know that, while I may have sunk-cost-fallacy-ed myself into this hole, the rest of you are having fun climbing into it with me.
As for an Endgame!AU, that’s kind of complicated by DW’s… let’s say fraught relationship with canon. I really like YJ Season 1, but as everyone and their dog has been unable to escape me telling them I think lead-showrunner Greg Weisman is an appallingly bad storyteller (in fact I think he writes like a cowardly, exploitative incel) and under his “creative control” the later entries became an infuriating mess. Back when there were only two seasons in the mainline canon I used to cut Invasion a lot more slack – allowing it to coast on the uninformed and incorrect assumption that both entries came from the same creative team, and that the seeming disjointedness of Invasion’s narrative was the result of executive meddling or troubled production at a time when a lot of Cartoon Network’s PG animated shows were infamously being put through hell by the network.
However, after the disappointment of the “revival” I did a little bit more looking into things and realised that what I actually liked was the output of Season 1’s distinct production team – a team which included heavy input from experienced DC creatives like lead-directors Jay Oliva and Michael Chang (previously credited on the Teen Titans 2004 series, which was also praised for good character-storytelling). It became clear to me that there were actually two separate products: Season 1 (plus a couple of early tie-in comics by non-Weisman writers)… and everything else. Turns out that dropping your primary directors results in a directionless story, whodathunk?
Once I took off those rose-coloured glasses, I ran into the problem that it’s actually not possible to get from Season 1 to Invasion without fundamentally breaking the narrative in really unpleasant ways. Deathly Weapons has since become fully canon-divergent from that break-point. I want to pay respects to the arcs, themes and characterisation of the Oliva-Chang Season, which means Invasion wouldn’t reasonably happen in the DW!Verse. Ergo, no timeskips, no character-assassinations, and Wally never gets randomly knifed to “subvert the expectations” of viewers who might be familiar with a prominent Flash-storyline from another unconnected continuity. I’m not kidding: that is why Endgame ended the way it did, this is what Greg and Brandon think storytelling is, their opinions should not be trusted.
So in a way I guess that problem kind of solved itself.
But that’s not very satisfying, is it?
Looking back at my brainstorming notes from the before-times (when DW was planned with the loose possibility of connecting back into later canon), I had a post-Endgame future-fic idea which focussed more on Dick. The idea was for Dick to end up at Danny’s apartment while trying to cope with losing Wally. Once there I had a scene where he wanders aimlessly while Danny is out dealing with some unavoidable adult-life stuff, leading him to find some old photos of Tucker. The main scene was going to be Dick having a “conversation” with Tucker’s (metaphorical) spirit - speaking to the memory of his foster-brother’s late best friend about his own now-gone best friend, and asking Tucker to look out for Wally wherever they might be now.
I suppose that’s more where my style of angst lands for grief/death arcs. I like to focus on death arcs as a reflection of the character’s life – the specifics of their personality, the distinct impression their presence left on the people around them and how the unique hole they occupied aches without them. I’ve mentioned this before in the Jason-ask but my general thesis is that we are haunted by absences more than presences; we project ghosts in attempt to fill the hole(s) left when someone abruptly vanishes from our lives.
Because of that I tend to have very different story approaches for metaphorical ghosts (which explore the internal struggles of living characters coping with a loss) vs literal ghosts (actual tangible creatures who represent an external struggle). I know it sounds kind of ironic considering that I killed off about 70% of the core Danny Phantom cast for Deathly Weapons, but when I kill a character it’s usually so I can do a retrospective on the value of their life. So long as they’re mourned well, I don’t personally feel a need to bring most “dead” characters back.
That said, there is a lot of potential angst that could come from someone “becoming a ghost” with the way I’ve been headcanoning it to work in Deathly Weapons. In Chapter 16, Phantom mentions that ectoplasmic ghosts are formed when the impression of a dying person’s consciousness is preserved in ectoplasm and gives rise to a new entity. In a best-case scenario you get a complete translation of the same person to a new bio-medium, but in other cases you might get an incomplete or warped impression – missing some pieces and exaggerating others, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. This is how I like to explain the humanoid DP ghosts being so gimmicky and single-minded: they’re a flanderization built from only the strongest parts of their living personality at the moment of death. It’s also one of the reasons why Phantom and the others don’t rush to “well, they might be a ghost now” as an easy solution to characters dying or being presumed-dead. Sure, that character might not be entirely gone… but would the pieces that remain actually be them?
It’s a style of horror that isn’t especially my bag, but I think there’s a lot of potential angst mileage in that specific brand of “came back wrong” – leaving a ghost that is uncannily like you but is missing the specific memories or details needed to actually make you you. A familiar stranger – unable to be the person they were, having no say or fault in being what they are, but who everyone has to deal with anyway (especially if they retain enough memories to understand that they know you).
That said, there would be no situation in which Wally came back as complete ghost where he wouldn’t be completely pissy about it. Just, the indignity of it all, really.
Still, I think it’s worth considering that, while Wally is certainly giving Danny hell with where he is in the story right now (Mission 1 of Arc II at the time of this post), in any five-years-later post-DW scenario the two of them would be a lot more chill with each other.
While some of the YJ cast have ended up with relatively static planned personal arcs throughout DW (for clarity, a static arc is where a character doesn’t experience substantial personal change across a story – they may receive elaboration into their personality, history and/or develop new relationships with others but by the end they are still mostly the same person) I hope people can trust that Wally isn’t one of them. Him acting like a sulky, stinky jerkass right now isn’t because I’m planning on having him be The Sulky Stinky Jerkass™ for the entire story, but because he’s at the start of his major personal arc. His flaws are on full display at the moment because he’s going to have to confront those flaws, how they hurt him and others, and make the decision on whether (and how) to be better.
The loose timeline for DW’s planned story is that the main arc (right now comprising 11 planned missions) takes place over 6-ish months from the point where Phantom first joins the Team. Wally’s personal arc is planned to be part of that. Add an additional 4-and-a-half years on top of that and they would have had a lot of time to let the water settle under the bridge.
With that being said, we’re heading into the stormiest parts of the water at the moment. The interpersonal angst is going to get much worse before it gets better. Not somebody-dies level, but some people are going to hurt each other quite badly before the resolution and a LOT of yelling is going to happen.
Here’s a teaser for one of the worst lines :
“Better that than some green-wood who gets people hurt because he wanted to play hero!”
Yeah, things are going to get mean. It may be a different flavour than some expected but I am nonetheless intending to serve 4 chapters of angst, and more than one of the boys is going to get served a lot of crow to eat over that mess.
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