Our Lives As Teenage Weirdos
is a Danny Phantom and My Life as a Teenage Robot crossover where weirdness with the portal strands Danny in Tremorton. It can also be found on Archive of Our Own here.
Our Lives As Teenage Weirdos contains examples of:
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Dr. Wakeman initially flatly denies Danny could possibly be a ghost, and even after accepting that it's true has difficulty admitting it.
- Big Bad: Technus. Although far from harmless in his home dimension, with access to the advanced technology of Tremorton, he promises to become exponentially more threatening than he usually is.
- Commonality Connection: Danny and Jenny spend the latter's first night in Tremorton bonding over how much overlap their lives have (a Big Bad that keeps trying to pull a We Can Rule Together on them, bullies, weird cousins, being heroes with bad publicity, etc.).
- Despair Event Horizon: Danny comes very close to crossing it on the revelation he will be spending a few months in Tremorton at least while Dr. Wakeman builds him a way home, leaving his friends and family behind to worry about him and leaving him no way out of telling them about him being Phantom. Talking to a sympathetic Jenny helps to pull him back from the brink.
- Geeky Turn-On: Technus describes the Cluster drones he finds and attempts to resurrect as his army as "sexy". One hopes he never discovers the drones' erstwhile leader.
- Grass is Greener: Danny and Jenny with each other's Secret Identity (or lack thereof in Jenny's case): Danny envies the fact that Jenny can be open about being a superhero, bitterly noting how his social life is in the can because of his secret, whilst Jenny envies the fact that Danny has a form of refuge from the rigors of the superhero life, whilst she's stuck dealing with citizens who near constanly remind her that she'll never truely fit in, and are one small slight away from trying to have her exiled into space.
- How Is That Even Possible?: Somehow Jane plays a tuba and XJ-5 a trumpet, despite neither of them having lungs, as Jenny points out. Danny just chalks it up to interdimensional shenanigans.
- Insistent Terminology: When he sees that Nora is having a hard time reconciling the idea of ghosts being real, Danny suggests she take a page from his parents' book and call them 'ectoplasmic entities'.
- Irony: One of Danny's biggest fears is being dissected by his parents to figure out how ghosts work. Nora reveals that since Danny is a human-ghost hybrid, dissecting him would achieve no useful breakthroughs because he isn't ghost enough, being instead, as Nora puts it, "a human with extras".
- It's a Long Story: Defied - Danny uses the trope name when mentioning why Skulker wants to capture and skin him, but then notes that the reasoning is actually very simple: Skulker is a hunter and Danny is a rare prize.
- Large Ham: Technus is outright called a ham by Danny.
- Layman's Terms:Maddie: We’ve got to block off the lab, sweetie! There’s a huge, unprecedented electrical storm about to pass through the area of the Ghost Zone our portal is located in! Our projections show it’s going to cause widespread ectoplasmic disruption at unheard-of frequencies!
Jazz: What does that even mean?!
Jack: It's going to do spooky nonsense to the portal! - Let's You and Him Fight: Danny's arrival in Tremorton causes some property damage and panic on the part of the townsfolk. This causes Jenny to believe that he's attacking on purpose and go after him, not believing him when he tries telling the truth. It finally gets cleared up after a pillar nearly falls on some civilians and Danny stops it.
- Like a Duck Takes to Water: Of all the ghosts that could follow Danny to Tremorton, it has to Technus, whose mastery of technology allows him to thrive in a world filled with robots and aliens.
- Logical Weakness: Technus needs to be able to understand how a piece of technology works before he can fully control it. While his innate abilities and knowledge clearly help him a lot there, the Cluster drones he finds in the Tremorton junkyard are too advanced for him to immediately dominate.
- Meaningful Rename: Shortly after accidentally waking them, Danny asks the XJ sisters if they’d ever want names like Jenny has. After some debate, XJ-6 becomes Hexy (partially as a Shout-Out to ReBoot) and XJ-8 becomes Jane via the same process as XJ-9 becomes Jenny.
- Never My Fault: Technus blames Danny for tech companies with dangerous projects leaving Amity even though both Danny and the audience can clearly tell that it's because they don't want to deal with Technus' schemes.
- No-Sell: Danny tries to punch Jenny. The keyword being tries.
- Not So Above It All: For all the Arbitrary Skepticism Nora Wakeman shows toward ghosts and the possibility that they have an attached science, she's hooked the minute Danny present a sample of ectoplasm for her to study.
- Odd Friendship: Danny and XJ-6, later Hexy, bond more or less immediately, to the point the usually surly Hexy exclaims cheerfully she wants to keep him. They’re later seen playing video games together.
- Outside-Context Problem: Jenny is used to fighting aliens, robots, and alien robots. An actual ghost, as opposed to an alien with spectral traits like Misty, is something she's never encountered before. Danny similarly has fought robots due to Technus, but a sapient one is a surprise for him.
- Opening Shout-Out: Jenny mentions that she has the strength of "a million and seventy men". Danny lampshades how specific it is.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Danny views Jenny as this. He notably keeps forgetting she's a robot and instinctively treats her as a person, to her delight.
- Ship Tease: Both Danny and Jenny regard the other as a kindred spirit, glad to finally have someone who can truly understand their lives and struggles. Also, Jenny quite enjoys the fact that Danny treats her like a person, rather than a robot.
- Shooting Superman: During their fight, Danny attempts to punch Jenny, who, reminder, is made out of metal. All Danny gets out of it is a hurt hand.
- Simple Solution Won't Work: When Nora mentions that she'd need a sample of ectoplasm in order to get started on a ghost portal to get Danny home, Danny offers to produce a sample from himself, but Nora turns him down; since he's less of a ghost and more of a 'human with extras', any ectoplasm he could produce could be too impure/mutated for her to use. Fortunately, Danny brought some Fenton-Tech with him, which is all powered by ectoplasm.
- Trapped in Another World: A weird reaction with the Fenton portal gets Danny sucked into Tremorton for at least a couple of months.
- Vague Age: Jenny doesn't know how old her mom is, and started wondering about it after finding out that Nora has a de-aging machine.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: One of the main things that endears Danny to Jenny is that he treats her as a person first, a robot second. This also extends to her sisters: he's appalled that they spend most of their time in storage, and starts giving them proper names.
- Wrong Context Magic: Danny's ectoplasm-based powers are completely unlike anything Jenny has ever seen before, as they seem to completely violate thermodynamics.
