Ford, To The Most Anxious 12 Year Old In Gravity Falls And Perhaps The Entire Planet: You Simply Have

I'm in an excellent mood let's make more Book 2 textpost memes

Started rewatching Infinity Train recently, and something I find interesting about the fandom is that everyone seems to be taking the mirror world at face value? Like, for a setting where literally everything supernatural on the train is directly fabricated by the train, I see a surprisingly high number of fanworks that assume the chrome car just happens to be the intersection point to a total-third-party mirror dimension.

In a lot of ways, I like Lake’s story more if she and the four other reflections popped into being with 13+ years of fabricated memories the split second Tulip set foot in the car. It plays wonderfully into her overall identity crisis and it dovetails nicely with how Mace seems to be acting more as a mouthpiece for the train during episode 8. 

It also would play nicely with the vague frustration Lake has whenever Jesse tries to wheedle information about the Mirror world out of her- the train never intended its worldbuilding to stand up to prolonged scrutiny, It didn’t expect any human to be engaging with the set piece for more than like a minute. 

Didn't Petra say she's a nervous crafter in s1ep6?😂

Now I posted this, I'm going back to sleep...

Honestly tho

Lake: I'm really glad "fight me" has replaced "sue me" because I don't have money but I do have fists and I'm always angry

I texted her it and she reacted with a question mark. I didn't really expect anything different

Watching Gravity Falls with siblings is great.

"I didn't think it was possible to be a worse guardian than Stan, but at least he has some idea of child endangerment." - my sister when Ford brought Dipper to the alien ship.

"That's not up to him, that's up to his parents." - my sister on Ford's apprenticeship offer.

"Is she about to get Bill'd?" - my brother when Mabel is in the forest.

"This show took a turn." - my sister in the episode thats name is like Xqthfqx or something.

"It takes a special kind of brain to come up with this." - my brother on the same episode as the previous quote.

We need to talk more about the redstone aunts. Get the redstone geniuses of their individual times, Ellegaard, Harper and Xara in a lab together (with Olivia shadowing and also spontaneously combusting from the fangirling) and there will be things invented no one has ever seen before in mcsm. Be prepared for a speedrun of multiple-back-to-back technological revolutions and also intergalactic space travel in like a month. That or the three of them would end up killing each other and the planet at large first (mad geniuses are notoriously bad at getting along with other self-proclaimed geniuses). It's a match made in either the Aether or the Nether.

~~~

Here's the finished version . . . honestly not my favorite, but it's okay.

#i really do think that people are able to distance themselves from bill’s actions because he’s not human#the book of bill#

you just made my point so much more succinctly than I did lol

I have a theory.

This is going to be a long post, but I don't know how to do the "read more" thing, sorry.

Bear with me for a minute. So I realized recently that I don't actually see that much Mabel or Ford hate, it's mostly stuff I hear from other people. (What I see is generally more subtle, like I read a fic that was good, but Ford took responsibility for Filbrick kicking Stan out. What was he supposed to do? He's 17 too! I also saw someone say the apocalypse wasn't Mabel's fault, it was Ford's. I'd just like to say that it was Bill's fault and Ford was manipulated into building that portal.)

But I do see a lot of Billford. It keeps on showing up in my suggested communities and the "For You" thing, despite The Book Of Bill portraying it as a very manipulative, horrifically abusive relationship. (When I say relationship, I don't necessarily mean romantic. It could have been a completely platonic horrifically abusive relationship.) And I have to wonder if, because Bill is a triangle, we let him get away with things we wouldn't if he were a human and/or doing these things directly to Ford.

Say that there was a movie. In it, there are two human men. Their relationship is clearly built on manipulation, and when the manipulated realizes that he's being manipulated, he tries to leave. The manipulator proceeds to torture him. You see this onscreen and it's horrible. The manipulator drives a nail through this guy's hand, shoves spiders down his throat, humiliates him . . .

Would people ship these two characters? This is the main fandom I'm in, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably not. (I'd like to say that I don't have a problem with people who write them as together . . . as long as it's portrayed as the abusive relationship it actually WAS and not a good relationship.)

All of those were actual things that happened in The Book of Bill. I didn't even mention the psychological torture (He makes Ford forget his OWN NAME) and forced sleep deprivation.

But Bill is a triangle. Bill isn't doing these things directly to Ford. He's doing them while in Ford's body, which is arguably possibly more horrific than if Bill was a separate person doing these things to him, but it's not something that could happen in real life.

But in this analysis of Ford: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58698496/chapters/158032750 when speaking of the torture Ford endured during Weirdmageddon, Callipraxia mentions that the fact that people can't electrocute others "takes at least some of the realism and therefore some of the horror out of the situation." (I apologize if this quote is incorrect, I couldn't find the part where she says this in this quite long work.)

And that makes me wonder if, again because Bill is a triangle and the things he does are literally impossible, it makes people less inclined to see his relationship with Ford as abusive when I have read two separate analyses (one of them is the one referred to above) that straight up say "This reads like a domestic abuse situation." One of them (the one NOT linked above, I'll look for it later) says that Bill hits every. Single. Criteria. For an abuser.

Even before Ford learned what Bill was really there to do, their relationship wasn't good. Bill doesn't show up for months and when Ford asks him where he's been, Bill responds by basically gaslighting him and making him doubt McGucket.

And there's one more thing I noticed. I wasn't in the GF fandom when the show was airing, but I'm pretty sure Billdip didn't become a popular ship until after Sock Puppet Opera, much the same as Billford wasn't so popular until TBOB. It's a pattern of "Bill abuses someone, then gets shipped with that someone." It's quite disturbing.

I know people are going to ship what they're going to ship, but Bill x Pines family members really shouldn't be so popular imo.

Tl;dr: If Bill were a human and you saw him torturing Ford, would you still ship them?

I'm pretty sure I forgot some of what I was going to say, so I might edit this later or reblog it with the extra information.

I do want to say that I do NOT support being rude, sending hate comments or death threats to people who do ship this. Don't do that. Just wanted to say, just in case.

I also want to say that though I put "anti Billford" and "anti Billdip" in the tags, I'm pretty sure I'm not an anti, though I haven't been able to fully figure out what the term means.

Another addendum: I am NOT qualified to be talking about abuse.

This is just a theory.

So I mentioned to my family that I was reading for another fandom and they were wondering which one. I chose not to tell them because I have a fondness for making people guess things instead of outright telling them . . . uh, it might also just be anxiety about words. Anyway, so I gave them a couple clues and they were guessing. And I was pretty sure they'd stumble upon the correct fandom given the clues and what they were guessing, and I knew if I hesitated before answering they'd think it was that one.

So they were guessing, and I was finding all this greatly amusing and going "nope" and then they guessed "Ben 10" and I hesitated, which made them all think I was reading Ben 10 fanfic. This was hilarious to me, because I was actually reading . . .

. . . ha, did you really think I was going to tell you what fandom it was?? Nope lol! Suffer!

Okay, so maybe this story isn't as funny to anyone else as it is to me. But I was having fun. So. Yeah. There's the story.

If I disappear from updating my fics just assume I’ve picked up a new fandom and have been reading 1 million fics of it. And probably written at least one work anonymously for it. I actually have a story that I personally find hilarious about this new fandom (new for me, it’s like two decades old lol) that I’ll reblog this post with. But not right now because I don’t feel like it.