You Can't Punch a Ghost
opens Danny Fenton getting mad at Vlad for yet another one of his stalker moments. During the fight, Danny accidentally ends up falling through a portal into a world where most people have superpowers. Now Danny has to hide his half-ghost nature while fighting villains and trying to figure out a way home.
You Can't Punch a Ghost includes examples of:
- All for Nothing: All For One panics and sends Danny to the moon when his attempt to steal the halfa's nonexistent Quirk backfires on him, nearly killing himself, but all it does is delay Danny for a few days instead of killing him like he'd hoped.
- Combo Platter Powers: One of the things that people in the MHA universe notice about Phantom is how many abilities he has compared to a normal Quirk.
- Dramatic Irony: When All For One sends Danny to the moon in a panic after his attempt to steal the young halfa's abilities backfires on him, he assumes that Danny is dead. Danny, who doesn't need to breath as a ghost, is not only fine, having instinctively transformed into his Phantom form, but actually happy to be on the moon before he remembers that Bakugo is still in trouble, given his obsession with space.
- An Ice Person: Danny's official "Quirk" is his ice powers, which he calls "Phantom Ice". Interestingly, unlike normal Quirk-produced ice, it only melts when Danny wants it to do so, much to Momo's shock when she fails to melt it in a spar, and is cold but not enough to harm.
- Internal Reveal: In Chapter 13, 1-A learns the truth about Danny.
- No-Sell: Not only is All For One unable to steal Danny's powers, but something within him fights back, spooking the villain so much that he nearly kills himself by teleporting Danny to the moon in a desperate attempt to get him as far away as possible.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: When Aizawa tells Danny that they thought that the League had killed him, his "you can't kill what's already dead" response has shades of this.
- Space Master: Danny is a burgeoning one, meant to balance out Clockwork as Master of Time. So far, the main sign of this is his burgeoning portal powers.
- Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: Danny is trans here, and not only did his Phantom form always reflect who he was inside, but over time his human form changed to become physically male as well.
- Symbiotic Possession: After Danny returns from the Moon, he overshadows All Might and channels his remaining energy into the remnants of One For All in him, allowing him to regain his strength temporarily but not controlling him.
- Trapped in Another World: Danny ends up thrown through a natural portal during a fight with Vlad and trapped in the My Hero Academia world as a result.
- Wrong Context Magic: Zig-zagged with Quirks and Danny's ghost powers. While Danny's ectoplasmic biology gives him far more powers than is normal for a single Quirk, Aizawa's Erasure Quirk can still nullify them (though notably not forcing him out of Phantom form in the process), and Monoma can copy his powers, though issues with the Required Secondary Powers for Danny's ice abilities cause him some trouble. Given that Danny's ghost sense apparently reacts to One For All's vestiges, and how Dark Shadow recognizes Danny as the ghost king, it seems that it's less like Danny's ghost powers are like a Quirk and more like (at least some) Quirks are at least partially ghostly in origin somehow. Later, All For One unable to steal his abilities.
