You Are Edward Hyde, Seated At The Right Hand Of [the Father]. Made In The Image And Likeness Of [god].

Can we get into more Real Talk about Ford's low self-esteem, please?

He’s just

…

His automatic assumption is that everyone hates him.

His default method of making friends is trying his damnedest to impress them while simultaneously revealing little to no information about himself.

Because “trust no one” is just another way of saying “no one cares about you” (remember Dipper’s monologue at the end of episode 1? About how he was going to keep trusting Mabel because she cared about him?)

Because the poor kid got relentlessly bullied any time he tried to express himself or talk about his interests. (Remember show and tell? Remember Cathy Crenshaw?)

Because he’d rather disappear off the face of the fucking earth than deal with another betrayal, because the people he picks to be his friends always betray him and why wouldn’t they?

Because (@kryptonite-tie and I were just talking about this too) it’s so fucking easy to get on Ford’s good side but once you’ve Hurt Him then it’s nearly impossible to get away from his bad side because he immediately puts up walls because he doesn’t want to get hurt again

And yeah that’s not the healthiest way to go about things, and led to a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of unhealthy arguments between good friends (Stanley and Fiddleford, most notably) and led to a lot of grudge holding (Stan and Bill, most notably) but it’s kept him in some bizarre state of ‘safe’ and he can’t stop?

All Jheselbraum had to do was save Ford’s life and this earned her Ford calling her “the opposite of Bill”

All Dipper had to do was play a board game to become Ford’s friend. And Ford seriously doubted that Dipper would be at all understanding or kind if he told him about Bill.

And Bill?

All Bill had to do was show up and fucking say he was Ford’s friend.

I’m convinced that the reason Ford didn’t spend a whole lot of time with Mabel? Was because he thought she was too cool for him. Like, he thinks she’s way out of his friend league. He witnessed her becoming pen pals with a pizza delivery guy in 60 seconds, he knows she has multiple friends and has had multiple boyfriends at an age where Ford was still getting rocks thrown at his head and pelted with footballs. To Ford, Mabel is cooler than cool and couldn’t possibly want to spend time with him, of all people. And what he doesn’t realize is that Mabel doesn’t operate that way, of course she wants to spend time with him.

He is ready for death at all times and seems incapable of comprehending the idea that people might actually care about him with no ulterior motives whatsoever.

It takes him so damn long to realize that. He’s flabbergasted when Fiddleford forgives him, he’s awestruck when Dipper relates with him and continues to view him as a role model after learning the truth, he practically worships Jheselbraum, and Stan? By the finale, Stan is Ford’s entire world.

Cause it’s easy for people to make friends with Ford. It’s hard to keep his trust, and it’s hard to earn his forgiveness if he feels you’ve legitimately wronged him.

And he assumes that everyone else works the same way.

Like, he’s really forgiving of minor mistakes. He never blames people for shit that’s not their fault, or that he doesn’t think is their fault.

But if it is/if he does think it’s their fault? Good fucking luck mate.

And cause he views himself as a freak? He’s already made his Mistake. He doesn’t get another. He’s out of chances. So he tries desperately to make up for it by being perfect, a standard he holds literally no one else to.

(I think this might have started the rift between Ford and Stan: in ford’s mind, stan gets to make mistakes that he can’t. gets to make choices that he can’t. Stan can go with the flow, Ford has to run his decisions goals and dreams through a million filters before he makes them. He has to justify every action, for everything from stealing radioactive waste to getting to know his new family members we all know the ‘testing for portal radiation’ thing was a ruse so Ford could get to know the kids and soos. otherwise he would have done stan too. right down to whether or not he can take classes he actually enjoys in college, because he might have needed another one laterthat line in the journal where Ford berated himself for treating himself to an extra applied quantum phase theory instead of hyper advanced engineering and fifth dimensional calculus doesn’t sound like academic arrogance to me. it sounds like hell. it sounds like he’s punishing himself for doing something nice for himself. Not only that, but Ford ‘treating himself’ to such a class is the closest thing to self care we’ve yet to see from Ford what Ford doesn’t realize is that while Stan might not have to rationalize everything, he’s in the same boat, but his philosophy is different. His philosophy is Why try when everyone’s just going to say you’re not good enough. this is also counteracted by love from his family but that’s for another post.)

Thinking about the birth imagery and pregnancy horror themes in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. How they’re going on opposite directions.

Frankenstein desiring to “birth” through unnatural ways out of spite, out of a need to prove a point. Jekyll being forced to continuously “birth” and simultaneously ”be birthed” as the aftermath of a choice which was to indeed birth the separation of good and evil.

Frankenstein creating an unnatural person, designed and expected to be perfect, through an unnatural conception with no pregnancy. Jekyll becoming an unnatural person that was never conceived, unwittingly made perfectly monstrous, through a process that is described as painful, something being ejected from his subconscious like a womb.

Frankenstein makes the perfect male body which is described as “wrong-looking”, Jekyll gives himself a “wrong”-looking male body which comes with a “wrong” mind to pair.

Creation = pregnancy and birth. Mad scientists are often characterized as fathers, being mostly men- but they’re still being the mother or taking such a role since the creation on itself is their doing- as life, or a distortion of it, or a perversión of its laws, an impossible thing is what they make.

And what more perverted an impossible -in the eyes of cishet society- than a male pregnancy?

One man wants pregnancy, dreams of it- wishes to attain it even though he knows it is impossible and suffers the consequence when a “pregnancy” with no woman ends badly, because he just wishes so; the other fears becoming pregnant, comparing the distress he suffers as he transforms as the “horror of childbirth”, as if he knew, as if he knew what it is like or felt it could be possible after all. Bodies. “Perfect” bodies, “wrong” bodies, pregnancies that end badly, men being metaphorically pregnant. I don’t know what it all could mean, frankly.

I don’t know.

“Stevenson’s story is one which chronicles Jekyll’s self inflicted and protracted destruction of his body and mind in an attempt to rid his life of internal conflict.” Pg 235

Dr. Jekyll studying for his 20+ college degrees circa 18xx

I don't even hate Fiddlestan as a ship itself, but my opinion of it is definitely soured by the way fans of the ship treat Ford. Like, what the hell do you mean by "Stan would treat Fiddleford better," like no the fuck he would not??

In the original novella, we only "see" three characters die. One is Hastie Lanyon, whose death isn't gruesome and startling like Carew's, but that meets an arguably violent end.

While Carew draws the ire of Hyde through simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time, being cordial to the wrong person, being, Lanyon rather doesn't. Instead, it is his act of loyalty towards Jekyll, the man he hasn't talked to in a decade and calls him a pedant when he isn't listening, what kills him. Once again good deeds are punished with death. The difference, though, doesn't just reside in the fact that Hyde never once needs to put a finger on Lanyon to kill him, but the fact that it is a deeply personal loss- on both sides.

Jekyll-as-Hyde correctly assesses that Lanyon will help a friend in need. He himself says that Lanyon would gladly sacrifice his right arm to save him in body and mind, and with those words he convinces him to come to the rescue via bringing Hyde the serum's ingredients from the cabinet, now forbidden to him. And Lanyon is a good man. He's sensible enough to bring a gun with himself, he's kind enough to help Jekyll even though he believes he's finally lost it -and he's not entirely wrong-, and he's open-minded enough to not only chalk up his supernatural hatred of Hyde to a silly personal bias rather than dismiss him as "deformed", but to also fight against it and be nice to him.

No, Lanyon doesn't meet his violent end through physical violence. All he does is fall into Hyde's trap and give in to curiosity. And that's how, in his narration, Chapter 9, we learn what really killed him in Chapter 6, weeks after the events transpired. His mysterious "disease", the thing eating up at him, is the revelation. One of his closest friends -despite it all- has placed his trust upon him, and his reward is to see him at his pettiest, his cruelest, his worst. To learn that his friend was a monster, all along. No. That he turned into one, on his own volition. The choice was his. And now that he's realized it was a dark path to walk, he can't un-walk it. He can't stop, even if he wanted to, cursing himself with a monstrousness that fights back at any attempt at a fix and yet needs to be fixed to save its skin.

There is no "normal" to recover. Jekyll had always carried with him the elements of his destruction- his arrogance and his bile. The revelation that Hyde never really existed destroys Lanyon's static and material worldview, smashing the orderly world he lives in to bits. The revelation that Hyde was created for a specific purpose, and what it was, destroys Lanyon's view of Jekyll as an eccentric but harmless man, a good person with misguided opinions and fanciful theories.

Does Jekyll ever learn of Lanyon's death? Does Utterson ever bring it up behind the scenes, out of the third-person narrator's scope? Will he ever know that his last crime was killing the man that saved his life?

Well... Ironically, Lanyon didn't really save Jekyll's life. He only extended it for a couple of months, prevented Hyde from being arrested and tried and executed for God knows how many crimes of indeterminate nature. After all, if his criminal record killed him of shock, or at least poured salt into the wound, it had to be gruesome. Thanks to Lanyon's intervention Hyde can return to the house as Jekyll and attempt at resuming a normal life, without success. Soon enough he transforms again, and runs out of salts, and is found dead on the floor with the vial he just emptied of cyanide still in his cold hand.

How do we define violence in a world in which body and mind are one? In the world of Jekyll and Hyde, thoughts and ideas are physical, real, tangible. Hyde is, ultimately, a concept, the sketch of a person disguising a fractured mind disguising a sad mad genius that desires to not desire. We can consider Lanyon one of Hyde's victims, but can we call Lanyon's death violent? I would say so. Like Carew, all he ever did, at least within the constraints of the story -a snapshot of a disjointed Gothic world-, was being kind to someone who didn't deserve it.

At the beginning of this post, I said there were three on-page deaths, three deaths we got to "see" in Stevenson's novella. The third death would be Jekyll's. And it is violent, as well- first his original identity dies, unable to be present, made physical, made real, by want of not being able to manifest itself, or rather, by want of not being able to not manifest Hyde's. In a sense, he's run out of opportunities to be "good". If Jekyll can no longer be Jekyll-as-Jekyll, and only has Jekyll-as-Hyde left, Jekyll no longer exists. As he puts it, he's forced to resume Hyde's personality for the last time- to put on a costume that has turned into himself. Hyde never existed as a person, and in the last eight days of his life he has to be, because Hyde is all he's got left of a person.

It's impossible to not think of a suicide, even a suicide by poison, as violent. But Jekyll's death is violent not just because he eventually goes through with his "promise" of sorts that he'll have to die to rid the world of Hyde (and so we have Hyde killing himself if only to not end up in the gallows, fullfilling his ultimate desire, because that's what he, as a concept, was designed to do). It is also violent because by the time he physically dies, he's long gone. He's committed enough violence against himself already, destroying his belongings and thinking of himself as either his oppressive father or his idiot son, depending on what body he's been thrown into at the time.

The horror of Jekyll and Hyde is the horror of the perversion of the intimate, on all levels. Your best friend is not who he claimed to be. Your body as an extension of yourself isn't to be trusted. Helping others gets you killed. Edward Hyde pollutes everything he touches- breaks into a homicidal rage at someone being polite at him, accidentally curses his savior with the decay of the soul, self harms in the most twisted way possible and dies two times, brings the worst in all those that look at him, brings terror into your house, ruins the night, and breaks the peace.

It is only logical that something -someone?- that ruins everything to its very core comes from within, and is ultimately the cause for three very twisted, and violent, forms of death.

I've only been in the Jekyll and Hyde fandom for a few months, but one thing I've noticed is that most of the people I've seen who dislike/hate the book often say that it's because "It had an amazing idea, but it's executed terribly," or something along those lines. And while I think it's totally okay for someone to hate/dislike any book or media for any reason or no reason at all, I never really understood what they meant by this because I personally think it was executed amazingly. I think it might be because of people just misunderstanding what the idea is, but I could be wrong. I'd love to read why people think the book was poorly executed, maybe I'd add in my thoughts to that as well

Guess who got csp ex :))))))

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

I love how there were (and are -_- ) ppl who interpret(ed) Stanford’s eagerness to sacrifice himself as him just wanting to Play the Hero™ like lmfao of course, bc that’s what someone with a lot of pride who wants the glory of being a savoir would do, be ready to lay down their life for everyone around them (and I do mean everyone, even fucking total strangers) at any given moment. Where they wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of the glory. Bc they’d be fucking dead. Ok. He’s not death seeking or being reckless with his own wellbeing for any other reason whatsoever, I’m sure.