ectoimp:

haikujitsu:

thickerthanectoplasm:

ectoimp:

Sooooo… the portal. Let talk about the portal a bit. Cause its one of the most interesting things in the show and its not discussed much.

First off how does one MAKE a portal. or rather, how does a human make one? A ghost like wulf or dark danny can use their powers to do it, and portals also happen naturally. But how to you force one open with machines. I would assume you need some ectoplasm to get it started…but where in the world did jack and maddie get ectoplasm before the portal was working. heck how did they even know there was a ghost world, instead of the more conventional “ghosts are just invisible and intangible wandering earth”. Jack says that he had never seen a ghost before seeing danny at the school in MM, so he cant have collected ectoplasm from a ghost.  Now I can see how electricity would be part of the equation because ghost activity is supposed to spike during things like thunderstorms. But it cant be that alone…

Ive heard some theories that you can get a working portal buy “catching” the portal made by a person who died and becoming a ghost. but if thats the case, maddie and jack couldnt have known this…unless they planned on murdering someone. So their design cant have been based around that. The proto-portal seemed to be a functional design, but that portal didnt have the long containment tube that the new design has, it was pretty much just the bit that is at the back of the version 2 portal. (ignoring the diet soda retcon, because the seemed added for laughs). So the design seems to work without killing someone (cause vlad was not IN the portal, it fired up before hitting him).

I think that jack might have at some point either have seen a natural portal, or head accounts of one. that would be where he got the idea for a portal, but i still cant figure out where he would have gotten some ectoplasm.

I dunno, what are you thoughts on the portal?

Dude yeah if something dies and crosses over into the ghost zone, what if the ghost portal like grabs the corners of the hole and tears it wider and holds it open?  I bet the Fentons thought they could just “punch through the veil” but perhaps the portal’s not quite that strong… it needed something to start the process, which would be Danny dying, and then the machine forced open the portal Danny created, which is what they have now.

Question is why did Danny survive?  Maybe because his portal to the ghost zone was disrupted it chucked his soul back into his body?

I tend to think of Danny more as a ghostly artifact, though, kinda like Dora’s amulet or something, which has ectoplasmic properties without actually being a ghost. *shrug*

*whips out SoaD excerpt*

They had never figured it out, not really. They had just assumed that it had been a matter of a loose wire, an unturned switch, a delay In sequencing. They were wrong.

It had taken that bridge—a literal link between life and death, a living being in the process of dying—to bridge the gap between the two dimensions. Danny had been the key to unlocking the Ghost Zone, whether he’d realized it at the time or not.

When she had first begun her research into the paranormal field, she had studied its history. Uncertain and superstitious as it had been, there was always a pattern when those old mediums had accessed the Ghost Zone. Death. Immediate and directly linked to the summoning or banishment. Animals, and at times, humans were struck down in these ancient, arcane rituals.

The act was said to bridge the gap, however instantaneously, between death and life and open the door between dimensions. It was the shift of energy from that of the living, brain patterns, to that of the dead, ectosignatures.

Maddie had dismissed the idea as brutal and archaic, determined to find a clean, modern, perpetual mode of access to the other dimension. She had even been proud of the fact. They were the first to do so successfully, after all.

In reality its creation had been dependent on that very same rule of passage into death. And Danny had taken the brunt of that sacrifice.

* * *

My personal headcanon is that the Fentons had to go to really remote areas to search out recurring natural portals and harvest what traces of ectoplasm they could find, then refine it into something usable. Which is why they’re able to doubt the existence of ghosts, probably part of the reason why it took them a couple of decades to build a second portal after the first one, and also why Mads is so comfortable with roughing it via machete. Once the portal was built they had a permanent, pure source of ectoplasm and these expeditions were no longer necessary.

I bet they had some pretty crazy/awesome “family vacations” when Jazz and Danny were younger tho.

omg i love this idea. Fenton family road trips, to collect ectoplasm sample. Im sure the kids would have gotten wrangled into do some work. I bet they had weird chores as kids…