Your 100% correct fart answer makes me think about what it would be like if they had only met today

man... the thing about trying to picture what dan and phil's relationship would be like if they met 15 years after they did is we really don't have any point of reference. i know i said with great certainty they would wait longer to fart in front of each other than they did back in the day (deeply unserious addition to an otherwise kinda sweet post here i'm sorry), but while i do think that's probably true just based on their age, we have no actual way of even remotely accurately speculating what things would be like if they met in 2025 because a dan and phil who haven't been deeply intertwined with each other for a decade and a half just... isn't dan and phil. they were so young when they met, and said meeting changed and formed their lives in nearly every way imaginable. there is just no way their personalities and general behaviour would be similar enough without all of that for us to picture what their early stages would be like in current day. i'm not saying they would be fundamentally different people obviously, but most of the aspects and quirks of their relationship that we admire, and that's made it last this long, come from years of working on it together, growing and learning alongside one another. ofc they'd probably have picked up some of these (non-specific to them) things along the way from other relationships, but although i don't actually believe in soulmates or anything like that, and i realise this is of course partly just the crazzzzy phannie in me, i do struggle to see either of them achieving anywhere near this level of connection with someone else. ok i've been interrupted like ten times writing this and i fear i lost the plot a long time ago lmao sorry, this probably doesn't make a lot of sense. i just... something something if dan and phil first met today those versions of them would be far enough removed from the ones we know that trying to picture how the relationship would go is near futile.

i suppose this is basically the premise of a fuckton of fics out there, and i think about this any time i read an au where they meet later in life, because authors tend to take very different approaches to their characterisation and you can definitely tell who's taken this into consideration and who hasn't. not that i think it's a bad thing to write dnp exactly as they are today even if their circumstances are different, it's fanfic you can do what you want and sometimes you do just want to read about the people you like exactly how you like them regardless of the story they're in, but i loooove when i can tell certain personality changes in a story are directly influenced by the fact that they weren't in each other's lives up until that point, it's so interesting to me

speaking of fanfic i guess, it's clear with dinok and other things dan has said that he's thought about all of this too, and god i would love to hear more about his opinions on it beyond just his sexuality and career, but i suppose that might be a bit too personal lol