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He'd been taking a moment to himself, hanging out on the bleachers after school, when he'd heard the A-Listers talking about superheroes.
Specifically, they were laughing at Dash as Dash tried to convince them that Batman, and all Gotham heroes associated with him, were vampires that were a part of a coven and secretly running that city.
Wes, ever nosy, spoke up.
Wes should not have spoke up.
"Batman isn't a vampire, you idiot, he's a billionaire playing hero."
Now all of Amity Park is convinced that Bat-affiliated heroes are vampires, and they're spreading that curse-backed "knowledge" to the world via any social media outlet they can find.
Wes ignores it, at first. It isn't a big deal, just some stupid conspiracy theory.
Then news reports start popping up of people trying to attack anyone Bat-affiliated with wooden stakes, or holy water, or in some memorable stories; hollowpoint bullets they'd altered to hold holy water.
Now it's a problem.
Now he's created accounts on all social media platforms, blew his allowance on ads to spread his brand, and runs the most adamant conspiracy channels on practically everything, shouting that Batman and his associated are vampires.
Because if he says it, then no one will believe it.
He just has to spread this version of the curse far enough that it starts to undo the other one.
Naturally, with so many curses being flung around, the JLD take notice.
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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ive seen alot of ficlets or prompts associate danny with crows cuz they're associated with death and all that but what about vultures?
like- Vultures are scavengers that eat the flesh of dead bodies. They're recognized as symbols of death around the world! they could create twice the chaos instead of crows:
gotham city wakes up one day to find itself infested with vultures, no one knows where they came from but they seem to crowd around a blue-eyed, black-hair child... oh no, someone hid him from bruce wayne and the joker.