via @ovytia

Look, I am not a violent person. I am a Danny Phantom fan who will gladly, 100%, given the slightest opportunity will wake up from terminal exhaustion to go throw hands with Butch Hartman behind a Waffle House.

... Wait do the newer fans even know why?

... Wait. The newer fans probably don’t know why.

*deepbreath* OKAY SO.

It’s the mid-2000s and I’m living my best live as a Danny Phantom fan. The type of fan that’s absolutely having a lot of fun actively supporting the show as it airs, who found Butch Hartman’s Official Forum along with a couple of smaller Danny Phantom fan forums. Who read lots of fic on fanfiction.net as it was happening, as well as looking at the fanart on DeviantArt.

Remember that this was before AO3, before Tumblr, before Facebook.

The Butch Hartman forums were a main source of fandom content: We shared official media from ways to watch the show legally to early fan-run transcripts to art by Butch and others who worked on the show.

And. Heh. Remember: Danny Phantom premiered in 2004. Gay marriage wasn’t legal anywhere in the U.S. until over a month after the show premiered, and then it was only in Massachusetts. Remember that! The entirety of DP’s run ended in 2007, and we only got nationwide gay marriage in 2015.

I no longer have receipts, but by 2006, Butch Hartman, and the woman he’d chosen as an administrator for his forum, were both being extremely homophobic towards fans who had gay Danny Phantom ship.

I was legit friends with the admin at this point. Zcat6 was the username she went by, but I’ll call her Z. I had absolutely no direct contact with Butch Hartman himself, but I interacted with Z on a daily basis, and while she eventually proved to me that she was both an asshole and a liar, I had no reason to disbelieve that she was representing Butch’s opinions wrongly on his Official Forums, the ones linked to his Official Website and such, that he made Official Butch Hartman Announcements on.

Zcat6 was the admin of the Butch Hartman forums (BHF) as well as one of the main Danny Phantom centric fanrun forums, the Danny Phantom Online Forums (DPOF).

I was 17 years old when she made me a mod of the DPOF. My friend whom I’ll call AP, who was later revealed to be years younger than me, was also made a mod of the Butch Hartman forums the same year. (When it came out that AP was literally 14 years old, she and Z had a Discussion and AP was restricted to modding just the Role Play forum sections. Now that we’re both in our 30s, AP and I have literally had the conversation that we were both much to young for these responsibilities.) 

(ALSO NOTE: this was, in retrospect, a HELL of a red flag. Do NOT accept online responsibilities when you are literally unable to sign a legal document for yourself, folks.)

Anyway, fan behavior is fan behavior, and slash pairings are inevitable in fandom. In the early 2000s they were almost more inevitable than they are today! 

Heh. So. This is when BH and Z start showing their asses, with a policy that fans who post M/M fanworks of Danny Phantom characters would be banned from Butch Hartman’s forums. Z followed it up by also enforcing it on the DPOF, where I will remind you: Butch didn’t own the site or anything, that was all Z. (Note that F/F works would probably have gotten the same treatment and it was probably written in the policy that way, I no longer remember. But they were so much *less common* I genuinely do not remember encountering any in these years.)

Cue about 18 months of baby Chroma, under a fanname long abandoned in the wake of This BULLSHIT, arguing repeatedly with Z that, uh, hey, this wasn’t cool. Especially as Z turned it into her own fucking crusade, but that’s another... *phew* That’s another dump truck full of bullshit I don’t want to shovel out tonight.

Throughout all of this, by the way, Butch Hartman is very hands off with the running of his Forum, and trusts most of it to Z. I never actually discovered how Z got this job, btw, but she was more than willing to march to these orders.

Every single argument I had about this policy with Z ended with her saying that she was simply respecting Butch Hartman’s wishes for his characters.

Baby Chroma had learned of Death of the Author by this time, and had her early Feminist leanings honed by being a Tamora Pierce fan and her first fan forum being Sheroes Central (woot woot) and was like: “Okay but you have this exception for this person where they post all their queer stuff under an entirely different username than they use on the forums and don’t have the two associated with each other, why don’t you at least offer fans that option when you ban them?” (she never did)

Because, you see, another big part of the argument, for Z, was to Protect the Children - because it wasn’t *just* that you couldn’t post M/M fan content on the BHF or DPOF... if you posted any queer fanwork featuring Butch Hartman’s characters, anywhere on the internet associated with your username, you were in violation of the forum rules and could be (and often were) banned.

Remember how I said Z turned it into a crusade? yeah, the lady literally was on a witch hunt for these people. Again. Dump Truck. Bullshit. Not shoveling tonight.

I’m often disappointed in Baby Chroma for putting up with that bullshit for so long, to be honest. I don’t remember the forums name, but the other big DP forum of the day, that wasn’t run by Zcat6, did not have this poilcy and did not put up with Z’s BS, and while Baby Chroma didn’t click well with the people on it back then, I regret not defecting to it and having fun with them.

And well, when I found out that Butch Hartman was an evangelical christian type.... lets just say I wasn’t surprised, by that point.

So. I left the DPOF in early 2010, after the show ended, a somewhat traumatized mess, in retrospect, after literally all the modstaff got fed up with Z’s bullshit and quit at the same time and then were banned by Z within fifteen minutes for the next fifteen years, and I literally couldn’t look at any Danny Phantom fancontent for almost a decade due to, what in retrospect I know to be, literal PTSD symptoms.

And I was delighted to see, when I was able to come back to the Phandom, that the Queers had both taken over and were continuing to raise their middle fingers high in Hartman’s direction.

Because fuck you, Butch. Whatever you said to Z, whatever you did, you actively enabled her witchhunt, and her harm towards me and the other queer kids on those forums was REAL. You wanted to shove all of us back into the closet, to shame us into being normal kids.

I never got to see a Trans!Danny when I was an active fan the first time around, when I was in high school and college. I never got to see Gay!Danny or Bi!Danny or Poly!Danny. You robbed me of that, in ways I can’t get over.

Danny Phantom isn’t Butch Hartman’s anymore. It hasn’t been for years. It’s ours, and to give it back to him is a victory he doesn’t deserve.

Chroma, thanks so much for sharing this bit of DP history. I knew the forums were a bit of a shitshow but I didn't know just how much. It sounds like Z wanted to get in her Lord and Savior Butch Hartman's good graces and got a huge powertrip from it.

As a queer person myself, it's no wonder that so many of us resonated with the show (hiding from parents/society who could destroy you, being a "freak" etc). I'm sorry you went through everything, but we're glad to have you back in the fandom. There are so many wonderful art/fics/headcanons and it makes me so happy to be a part of it.