I Wonder What It Was Like For Jekyll To Grow Up Around A Man As Well-rounded As Utterson. You Have This

Why does the GF fandom seem to hate on Ford for being abused and manipulated by Bill more than they hate on the abuser (Bill) himself...

Pines Family + The Four Loves

Here’s to ten years of weird!

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”  — C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

low lays the devil in me

*if you tag as ship it's an insta-block. not what this is. thanks

The sheer number of posts blaming Ford for the way Filbrick treated Stan makes my eye twitch so. bad.

What a way to make it the child's responsibility for how their parents treat them and their siblings. Like, they know that Ford ALSO grew up in an abusive environment and was abused too, right?? Apparently not oml

Don't even get me started on the science fair incident. Like, he had every right to be mad, and it wasn't Ford that threw Stan out. Blaming a child for not standing up to their abusive parents for their sibling seems to be rampant in the Gravity Falls fandom these days

Seeing the tags "Ford Pines Is A Jerk" and "Bill Cipher Needs A Hug" in the same fic will never not be funny

hey guys i’m here to introduce my dishevelled and crazy wives

not over the fact that Jekyll only cries after having committed bloody murder but straight up dissociates after having traumatized Lanyon…

you see the thing about ford is that he doesn't necessarily believe he is better than everyone. he believes he has to be better than everyone. and the fact that he holds himself to such a ridiculously high standard is arrogant in the sense that obviously he wouldn't be holding himself to a higher standard if he didn't see himself as more capable, but it gets realized more often as self-loathing than self-aggrandizing.

notice how when ford pushes people away, his reasoning is almost always doubt that they genuinely want him around. he starts with "there's no way this person is actually just being nice and enjoying my company, they must want something, they must have ulterior motives," and then moves on to "they'll just drag me down anyway, i don't need them, i don't need anyone."

and how he makes excuses to spend time with his family. the cycloptopus. fixing the light. the apprenticeship. bill's funeral. clearing up the aftermath of weirdmageddon. if ford isolates himself because he thinks other people aren't worth his time, why does his behavior suggest it's the other way around? shouldn't he be prancing around like the other pineses should be grateful for his presence? why would someone who isolates himself out of a (real) belief in his own superiority feel the need to overcompensate like that?

it's like that post where it's like....he would fucking say that but he would say it as part of a façade that he obviously doesn't actually believe and you guys are interpreting it way too unironic and genuine. ford thinks the only options are that he's isolated either because he's above society Or he's isolated because he's unworthy to be included in society so of course he'd rather tell himself it's the first one.

the fact that hyde is short because jekyll didnt let him grow. that hyde is rail-thin and underdeveloped because jekyll never fed him. that hyde is unhealthily pale because jekyll never allowed for him to see the light.

jekyll spent all of his life shunning a side of himself that had he let it develop naturally would have become fully part of him. but he didn't because as an upper class man without a nobility background, it's his reputation what keeps him at the top.

what happens when you lock a part of yourself up, forever in darkness?

the darkness won't let you see how ugly it has gotten.

hyde is an entire lifetime's worth of all the evil jekyll could have gotten away with. the desires he has to keep locked. all the things he's done and later recalled in shame, like a vicious circle. hyde is this vicious circle, once again, only this time jekyll doesnt need to cover up after himself, because who could ever trace a straight line from the gentleman scientist to the monstrous gentleman?

and so, precisely because jekyll wants to live this contradictory life, he suffers a contratictory fate. he gets further and further away from humanity, but at the same time, he comes to embody that humanity in the most twisted ways. so, then, is hyde more or less human than he ever was?

does it matter? hyde is jekyll, anyway.

no wonder he was so hungry; he had been starving himself.

the book of bill all but spells out that ford's "ego" is a front he uses to overcompensate for a fucked-up smorgasbord of self-esteem issues and insecurities and people will still post shit like "ford is so inhumanly selfish he totally didn't even care about the apocalypse plot, he was only upset about bill's betrayal because it meant he wasn't as special and perfect as he thought"

but anyway to make a larger point here the problem with the interpretation that ford is just a horrible person is that it actually causes a lot of his actions to not make any sense.

like, why is he thinking "i'm sorry fiddleford" when he hasn't seen or heard from fiddleford in three decades? why does he invite stan to play d&d&md with him? in lost legends, why did he try so hard to help stan prove his innocence? in college, why did he immediately stand up for fiddleford, who was at this time a stranger to him? why did he try to make friends in gravity falls at first? why did he try to protect those kids from the krampus? why did he rage against the northwest family after finding out what they did?

multiple different interpretations of a story can be valid but like, the franchise canon has repeatedly shown that ford will be kind and principled in situations where he stands to gain absolutely nothing from it. if he really is so deeply selfish and egocentric that he would willingly and knowingly bring about an apocalypse just so he can be "special," WHY would he do that?

every "ford is a bad person" argument absolutely falls apart under scrutiny because of the sheer amount of cherry-picking and mental gymnastics you have to do to reach that conclusion.