Software Decay💿

G.I.W headcanons:

No one in Amity Park respects or trusts the GIW.

Civilians hate the GIW because they’re expensive, destructive and believe that they’re above the law and more qualified than anyone else.

For example, when it comes to payment and property damage.

Phantom and the Red Huntress work for free and don’t usually cause much property damage and what does get damaged can easily be covered by Amity Park exclusive “ghost insurance”.

The Fentons are loud and can be destructive sometimes, but they’re efficient, work at a very low price and are fully willing to pay for any damage not covered by ghost insurance. Plus they sell anti-ghost equipment at a low price and are more than willing to give tips on what to do if you’re the victim of an attack.

Ghost hunters from out of town are a mixed bag, because most aren’t equipped with actual equipment, instead bringing things made to communicate with the ghost and/or ward it off for some time (Spirit boxes to translate ghost speech, incenses and rituals to interact with them). Plus most out of town “ghost hunters” don’t even believe in ghosts and are usually just using the job as a way of conning money out of superstitious people. Prices can also range wildly. But those that take the job seriously can still be useful if an area is currently being haunted because they can still identify what exactly is haunting it and what you should do.

if your house contains a spirit the out of town ghost hunter could get it to identify itself or leave if it’s a weaker ghost, otherwise call the Fentons.

If it’s a ghost animal, treat it differently than a sentient ghost. Ghost animals are usually less dangerous than a sentient ghost but it’s still a wild animal. They can be dealt with easily and cheaply using incenses and Fenton gadgets that’ll make it leave the area or return to the zone. If it’s a large and/or dangerous creature, call the Fentons and tell them it’s a animalistic ghost.

If it’s a natural portal don’t bother calling the Fentons because natural portals cannot be closed or contained, don’t worry about it being that dangerous though, because natural portals are one way trips from the ghost zone to earth and can’t be seen or crossed from the human side unless you’re a full ghost. Just set up some incenses and charms so any ghosts that come though leave your house quickly or at least act respectfully while they’re here.

If it’s a collapsed portal, call the Fentons immediately and inform them of the situation. Natural portals that have collapsed may not be able to bring ghosts to the human realm, but for about a week after the full collapse, the area the portal occupied will produce high energy ectoplasm (H.E.E) that is extremely toxic and gives off an an astronomical amount of ectoplasmic radiation. Being in close proximity for too long can cause lasting health effects including ecto-acne. H.E.E such a powerful material that it’s used to power the Fenton portal. The Fentons are the most qualified people in Amity when it comes to dealing with the stuff. The GIW isn’t even allowed to do anything in this situation by both Amity Park and federal law. Just let the Fentons and possibly a hazardous material removal team deal with the stuff and stay with a friend or in a hotel for a day or two until they declare your house safe.

The GIW don’t care about public or private property and are loud, destructive and once again, believe that they are above the law and common decency. They also preform “mandatory sweeps” around the entire block of wherever they’re called in, raiding houses that they believe to have ghosts inside, ripping up lawns and damaging roads with their massive trucks and destroying public property either by accident or because a ghost was spotted nearby. They will also refuse to pay for any damages done and will secretly charge whoever called them with prices in the hundreds despite the fact that the propaganda posters advertising the GIW never mention a price.

Law enforcement in Amity hates the GIW because they get in the way of them trying to do their jobs, especially if someone has died. Multiple reports detail the GIW stepping in during cases involving sudden disappearances or murders and informing officers that the case is government business before removing all traces of said case’s existence. Multiple high ranking members of the GIW have been asked about this sort of thing and every single one of them claims that these cases “involved or resulted in the creation of an ecto-entity” making the case GIW business. It’s very obvious that the GIW uses these cases to locate and identify recently formed ghosts, but so far, no ghost related to a recent disappearance or murder has appeared and the GIWs meddling makes it impossible for actual law enforcement to figure out the causes of these crimes, meaning that murders and unexplained disappearances go unsolved.

The GIW also gives itself the authority to imprison and interrogate anyone that is believed to be involved with ghosts. In fact, for a while, the GIW made multiple attempts to arrest the Fentons and other ghost hunters because they fit this description. Some amendments were added to the anti-ecto law to exclude ghost hunters and ectobiologists (someone who studies ghosts for scientific purposes) to prevent this. This doesn’t mean they won’t try to push the Fentons and other ghost hunters around however.

The Fentons hate the GIW for of many, many reasons included but not limited to direct plagiarism of their scientific essays, multiple attempts to arrest them over tiny things that the GIW do not regulate and mass plagiarism of their gadgets and weapons.

The Fentons also hate how the GIW treats scientific research and the ghost zone itself.

The Fentons keep all of their research in the ops center and are more than happy to provide it if asked and actively want more people to be educated about ghosts. Their research is always kept up to date, and everything is meticulously covered. The Fentons want ectobiology to eventually be a subject that could be taught in a high school or college, mostly since when they were in college, their research was the first of its kind, often with nothing to go off of in terms of where to start or what to do and they ended up almost killing Vlad as a result.

Also, despite the “all ghosts are ectoplasmic copies of dead people and therefore are not and were never real people” stance, the Fentons are extremely against the idea of weaponizing ghosts and ectoplasm. You can’t control a ghost to do your bidding (freakshow is an exception, his staff was literally built by the ghost king and is therefore an outlier), You can’t create an ectoplasmic atom bomb (they tested if this was possible when they built the portal, you genuinely can’t) and any weapon that uses ectoplasm and works on human beings would be classified as either chemical warfare or biological warfare. They absolutely hate the idea of people using their research to wage wars.

The GIW on the other hand, keep all research a heavily kept secret and anything that is released or leaked is either outdated, details failed attempts at weaponization or is redacted to the point of absurdity.

The Fentons also disapprove of attempts to wage wars against, colonize, or damage large parts of the ghost zone. They understand that once the ghost enters the zone it has entered its natural habitat and home. Expeditions into the zone should not be used to capture or harm ghosts unless absolutely necessary. In the human realm they are entering our world with an actual motive (most ghosts need to be in the human realm to fulfill their obsessions), in the ghost zone you are invading their territory with no reason whatsoever, and due to the territorial nature of ghosts, showing too much hostility could trigger another Walker or even Pariah Dark level invasion. The Fenton’s may hate ghosts with every fibre of their being and want them destroyed, but they’re not idiots and they view what the GIW does as “swinging blindfolded at a hornet nest”.

The anti-ecto act details an ecto-entity as “An organism that relies on and/or creates ectoplasm and/or ectoplasmic radiation.” While ghosts, half-ghosts and plants native to the ghost zone fall under this jurisdiction, ghost portals, ectocontaminated objects, and devices powered by or made of ectoplasm don’t fit these requirements (mostly the “organism” part) and thus the GIW isn’t allowed to step in if it involves those things (For example, The GIW are not allowed to kick you out of your home and declare it a contaminated area if it contains a natural portal). The GIW likes to try and find loopholes around this.

Ectocontaminated creatures like Vlad and Danny in human form and anyone that’s been in an ectoplasm related accident do have ectoplasm as a permanent part of their bodies due to ectoplasm fusing with the cells in their bodies, but are actively excluded from the anti-ecto act because they’re still human beings, they’ve just got a tiny bit of ectoplasm in their bodies that cannot be removed. The GIW still treats ectocontaminated people like human beings because they’re forced to, but if a ghost is reported near where a person that’s been ectocontaminated lives, there’s a good chance they’ll bring that person into custody for “possible association with ecto-entities”. They do a similar thing to homeless people that are spotted near reported ghost locations.

Bringing people into custody for “possible association with ecto-entities” is basically the GIWs calling card, because “possible association with ecto-entities” is such a vague and difficult to disprove statement that just about anyone in all of Amity Park can fit that description and the GIW knows this. Anyone can and will be taken in from people that have witnessed a ghost fight to people that were briefly overshadowed to amateur ghost hunters and even to random people that have nothing to do with ghosts. Being taken in for “possible association with ecto-entities” is a popular meme around Amity Park, usually as a counterpart for sending someone to the gulag or Brazil.

The GIW may be partially government funded, but it has basically no governmental supervision and a good chunk of the GIW is self funded. They are extremely corrupt, breaking the anti-ecto laws amendments, several federal laws and most of the boundaries placed by the higher parts of the government whenever they deem appropriate. They aren’t even allowed to do half the things they do in Amity Park but get away with it because no one in Amity has the balls to stand up against them and even if they do, the government basically doesn’t care what some small government agency is doing in one tiny town in Illinois as long as they’re doing what they were sent there to do (research ghosts).

The GIW technically aren’t even supposed to be fighting ghosts. They were founded with the intention of RESEARCHING ghosts as nonviolently as possible. It’s the Ghost INVESTIGATION Ward, not the Ghost DESTRUCTION Ward. Both the federal government and the GIW themselves ignore this.

The extremely wealthy are usually able to bribe the GIW into leaving them or certain areas of Amity Park alone and/or make them turn a blind eye to ghostly activity. People that do this include (in descending order):

Vlad and all of his companies.

Axion Labs.

A small family in the extremely high class area of Amity known as the Mclains.

Most large companies that just want the GIW out of their way.

The Mansons on rare occasions.

Freakshow and circus gothica. Not anymore.

Some others.

For the first few months of the GIW being in Amity Park, they were completely unregulated with a massive budget and literally did whatever they wanted just by saying it was “government business”. They didn’t even need to play the “possible association with ecto-entities” card, because they’d just take anyone in for no reason other than “government business”.

That was, until they got sued.

To make a very long story short, the Fentons sued the GIW for plagiarizing their research, plagiarizing their weapons and selling them as their own and the multiple attempts the GIW made at arresting them over “direct association with ecto-entities” (ie: all of their research) “direct summoning of ecto-entities” (ie: the portal) and “harbouring ecto-entities” (ie: having an ectocontaminated person (ie: Danny) living with them). Most of the GIWs unregulated actions in Amity were brought up and the GIW were found guilty of scientific misconduct, plagiarism, abuse of power, dozens of accounts of unlawful arrest, embezzlement, discrimination of all kinds and many other crimes.

In the end the GIW was completely restructured, received several massive cuts to its budget and had multiple restrictions put on to try and regulate them, the anti-ecto law had multiple amendments added to make sure that it only effects ghosts and the GIW was banned from ever using Fenton research, gadgets, weaponry and basically everything with the word Fenton on it. This ban includes the creation of ghost portals.

Eventually the GIW was mostly unregulated again but even now, they mostly won’t mess with the Fentons or their research, because the Fentons are some of the only people with the courage needed to stand up to them and the evidence needed to put the GIW in hot water, and if the GIW end up with another incident like the “Fenton vs Ghost Investigation Ward lawsuit” they could all be in serious trouble.

The GIW has a list of “high value targets” that are either extremely dangerous, have evaded capture for a very long time or both. The list (in descending order of importance) includes:

Spectra (extremely dangerous and impossible to capture, ATTACK ON SIGHT)

Technus (messes with all of their equipment, has managed to delete thousands of documents of research and has released a large amount of ghosts from their facilities)

Phantom (difficult to capture, plus most of the GIW is still salty about not being able to collect that bounty)

Johnny 13 (a whole bunch of factors make him extremely difficult to capture)

Youngblood (impossible for anyone except children to see him and his guardian is extremely protective and dangerous)

Ember Mclain (can appear extremely human and is therefore extremely difficult to spot, along with having the ability to hypnotize agents into letting her go. Also constant requests and a couple million dollars from the living Mclains state that if captured, she is to be brought to them instead of to a GIW facility)

All ghosts have some level of respect for Phantom. Weaker ghosts view the Red Huntress as a genuine threat that should be taken seriously, while stronger ghosts view her as a ghost hunter thats far out of her league but still shouldn’t be underestimated. All ghosts view the Fentons as serious threats that are not to be messed with, but also won’t hesitate to fight them if it means saving another ghost that’s been captured. Every single ghost, with exceptions made for ghosts like Spectra, Aragon, The Fright Knight and the ancients, shit themselves at the mere mention of the GIW. If you get captured by them, it’s over. No hope of destabilizing and reforming in your lair because the GIW will use devices to keep you stable as they experiment on you. And they WILL experiment on you. Dissections, Vivisections (it counts as a vivisection if the ghost is conscious during the process), imprisonment in cells that Walker would consider crimes against humanity and just straight up, cold blooded torture of all kinds. The few things anyone, human or ghost, knows about what goes on behind the closed doors of a GIW facility mostly comes from ghosts that managed to destabilize themselves and reform in their lairs, and most of the ghosts that come back from a GIW facility come back with massive changes to their forms that they can’t remove and will often refuse to enter the human realm ever again, obsession be dammed.

Software Decay💿

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G.I.W headcanons: