Penelope Spectra is the Ghost of Vanity and a recurring antagonist of Danny Phantom.
Biography[]
She disguised herself as a beautiful human woman and was enrolled as a psychiatrist and school counselor in Casper High, Danny's school. Yet, her true purpose was to drain happiness from the students to retain her youthful aspect. Knowing Danny's identity, she kept the temperature very low in her office, so that Danny would mistake the ghostly vapour that he exhales in presence of ghosts for the common vapour exhaled in cold temperatures, but in the end, courtesy of Danny's older sister Jazz, she was stripped of her powers and reduced to an old maid.
In "Doctors Disorders" she conspired with the Virus Bug Ghost to gain, Jazz's intelligence, Dash's strength, and Paulina's almost flawless skin, and then complete it with Danny's Ghost essence. but it was bungled when he placed the yucky tissue with his dad's obese essence which caused her form to be similar to Jack Fenton then into a snot monster who Danny managed to beat.
Appearance[]
In her true form, Spectra is a wispy black ghost, essentially a humanoid shadow with an advanced mind of her own. She has glowing red eyes, sharp teeth, claws and wears purple lipstick. She has flaming spiky black "hair" and a ghostly tail. She lacks a distinct identity to her disguised human form.
In her human disguise, Spectra has fair skin, green eyes and red hair pointed in a U-shape with orange highlights. She wears purple lipstick and eyeshadow, circular purple earrings and black sunglasses. She wears a business suit consisting of a red suit jacket over a white long-sleeved shirt with a black necktie, a red mini skirt and red high heels.
In "Doctor's Disorders," Spectra creates her ideal "perfect body" for her ghost form to inhabit. This body is similar to her main human disguise (same hair, eyes, and makeup), but has paler skin, sharp teeth, triangular purple earrings and no glasses.
Her new outfit consists of a green necklace, a black V-neck crop-top with green trim on the sleeves, green arm-length gloves, black pants with green trim on the waist and green thigh-high high-heeled boots which have flame designs at the top.
Personality[]
Penelope Spectra is monstrously narcissistic, displaying a very strong need of being young and beautiful, going through unscrupulous means in order to keep her youthful appearance, and freaking out if she becomes old and/or ugly.
She might be one of the most sadistic ghosts ever encountered, along with her assistant Bertrand, as they happily feed on the misery of others and attempt to murder people (first Jazz, then all of the Casper High students) in order to accomplish their plans.
She’s smart and dissimulative, as she persuades many people to think that she’s really a counselor, and she presumably has remained much time in the human world feeding on the misery of students.
This also indicates her deep knowledge on psychology, as shown when she uses her falsely kind words to expose the teenagers to their deepest fears, leaving them in a state of depression that gradually worsens whenever they interact with her further. This suggests that in her lifetime, she either majored in psychology or had a doctorate in psychology.
Trivia[]
- Her last name is an obvious pun on the word specter.
- However, Mattel holds the name "Spectra Vondergeist" to a character in their "Monster High" doll franchise.
- Her need to feed on people's misery appear to be based from a "psychic vampires" that feeds exactly on it, instead of blood like a normal vampires. This goes along with the fact that her hairstyle seems to greatly resemble popular depiction of Count Dracula.
- If that's the case, she's the second ghost in the series that has vampire-like characteristics, after Vlad.
- In "The Fright Before Christmas", one can see two Spectras grabbing Christmas trees, one in her human appearance and one in her ghost form.
- Spectra reveals that Danny's main insecurity is his lack of confidence in his abilities as a superhero and as a person.
- Spectra is similar to Vicky from The Fairly OddParents!, another series created by Butch Hartman. Both have red hair and both enjoy causing misery in children and teenagers. Tara Strong, Penelope Spectra's voice actress, also voices Timmy Turner, the protagonist of The Fairly OddParents! who is one of Vicky's frequent victims.
- One way to consider Specra's origins is that she may not be a ghost, but rather an evil spirit manifested from the very concept of human misery, which would explain the unconventional jet-black shadowy appearance for her ghostly manifestation. After coming into existence and noticing the human world to have plenty of misery to go around and sustain her instead of whatever the ghost zone had to offer, psychology is merely something she observed and researched from afar until she knew enough to pass as a shrink on Earth and use that as her cover to generate all the misery she could ever want. And when she noticed her human form somehow needed the same level of misery to maintain its youthful complexion, that's when she effectively becoming a misery-vampire when the narcissism side of her own personality emerged to go with her very manifestation of misery.
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