#that its the snakeskin or dead skin cells or whatever analogy you want thats a natural biproduct of being alive

[redrobin-detective]

Now that I’m a little less out of my mind delirious I can talk about the theory on ectoplasm, ghosts and their formation that I wrote out at 3am and it’s miraculously not total malarkey. 

So basically, energy can be neither created nor destroyed just merely changes forms, yeah? That principle holds here but in most energy transactions some energy is lost (usually in the form of heat or whatever). I proposed that ectoplasm is some of that lost energy but, moreover, it’s anti-life. If all living things were a body, ectoplasm is the dead skin cells left behind. Anything living sheds a sort of energy, the energy of purpose and memory and emotion all these immaterial elements that make up life

This ectoplasm doesn’t really have material form since its more like the psychic aftermath created by the energy of living things. After billion of years of living things, there’s a LOT of ectoplasm being created, so much so that it naturally slipped into the cracks on the universe and formed the Ghost Zone. Anything that goes from living to not ends up there, like a stick being pulled downstream. 

So, living thing dies and you have a soul without a body in the Zone. Most would ‘move on’ and dissolve to become part of the atmosphere of the Zone (if you’re religious you could also say the GZ is like a purgatory where they decide to stay or go and from there would go onto their afterlife of choice.) Souls do not like being without bodies and, strong ones with will and motivation, can take the ambient ectoplasm of the Zone and craft a sort of body to house them. This is a traditional ghost as we know it, about half of all Zone residents. The rest are formed from the Zone having never been properly alive but gaining form from the psychic leftovers of the living, these are usually based on strong ideas and concepts from the real world. If they’re powerful enough, they can gain their own sentience. 

So ghosts are souls holding themselves together, literally, through sheer force of will. They need the ectoplasm to exist, to sustain their body. I imagine a lot would remain in the zone and create their own afterlife there as they contemplate why they couldn’t move on. Some can go to the human world but either can’t or don’t wish to interact, these are most of your haunted areas where there’s something but they’re nothing more than shadow and cant do anything. The ghosts that we see in canon, who are very solid and able to interact in the human world, need to find sustainable ectoplasm outside the Zone. Remember how I said ectoplasm is the slough of living things? Making the living to exert more of their liveliness through emotions or memory triggers produces ectoplasm they can use. Fear, the human desire to stay alive, is a powerful and easy source of ectoplasm which is why a lot of ghosts are out to frighten people. Ectoplasm sustains their form but their obsession, what keeps them from moving on, motivates them so usually their method of gathering ectoplasm/fulfilling obsession overlap. 

I also vaguely was thinking about how ghosts are inherently different from the living thing they came from. Think of it this way, electric passes differently through solid objects vs liquids. The energy of a soul responds differently in a physical body vice an ectoplasm body. It doesn’t automatically make them evil or whatever, it just means they will be changed from their previous self (that’s not even factoring in the traumatizing nature of death on a soul). Ghosts react to things in a way that humans just might not understand and vice versa. 

#danny phantom theories #I know not all of these ideas are unique #but this all started from the weird train of thought that ectoplasm was created as the slough of life #that its the snakeskin or dead skin cells or whatever analogy you want thats a natural biproduct of being alive #that nonphysical psychic energy leftover #idk I'm still kind of workshopping it but I think its kind of interesting #not sure what to do with it haha #not bad for 3am when I think I was getting near the hallucination part of sleep deprivation