Why Does The GF Fandom Seem To Hate On Ford For Being Abused And Manipulated By Bill More Than They Hate

assigning gravity falls characters fnaf 1 animatronics

mabel is chica. she's a party girl, she loves confetti, and who else would be the one carrying around a cupcake sidekick?

stan is freddy. leader of the group, not as active, but will b-line it to you if you lose power

dipper is bonnie. blue and purple, matches with chica, teleports because he's anxious about being seen moving

fiddleford is foxy. it's possible to forget he's there, but he's unpredictable and you need to keep an eye on him without keeping too close an eye on him. he scurries REAL quick

ford is golden freddy because

he doesn't exist. it's just a hallucination, sherm. it's me, it's not me, don't pay him any mind. look away. look anywhere else. pretend he isn't there cause he isn't. just focus on your job

Thinking about how Jekyll keeps a picture of his father on his desk, then proceeds to mention how "Hyde" had destroyed it when confined to his office 🤨

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.

Decided to do my annual Jekyll and Hyde reread and only now chose to look up the story of Damon and Pythius that Lanyon mentions. I'm in shambles.

Basically, Pythius was sentenced to death for conspiring against the tyrant king of Syracuse, and he requested to see his family one last time before his execution. Damon offered himself to take Pythius' stead as a hostage, and the king said that if Pythius did not return within a specific time, Damon would be executed instead. The king fully believed that Pythias wouldn't return and would leave Damon to die, but Pythias swam his ass to shore after he was thrown overboard by pirates to ensure he made it back to Syracuse in time. The king was so impressed by Pythias' fidelity and Damon's trust that he pardoned both of them.

Their relationship is like the Good Ending to Lanyon and Jekyll's. Even after being separated by differing scientific opinions, Lanyon continued showing an interest in Jekyll's wellbeing. He agrees to help Jekyll get the ingredients for the potion despite having no idea what it's for, only knowing his friend was in significant distress. Even with distance between them, Jekyll knows he can depend on Lanyon to help him. Pythias and Jekyll are also uncannily similar: Pythias challenged a tyrant, and Jekyll challenged God. Where Pythias/Damon and Jekyll/Lanyon differ, however, is that this implicit trust leads to Jekyll and Lanyon's downfall-- not just of their relationship, but of themselves.

I will never get over how tragic their relationship was (whether you see it as romantic or platonic). Both of them (and Utterson) loved and trusted each other so much it's sickening. I will never get over these old men who were supposed to live and die together.

low lays the devil in me

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

you are edward hyde, seated at the right hand of [the father]. made in the image and likeness of [god]. you could have been an angel, but goodness is not a thing you know. that’s not your fault. that was something you were stripped of, or, something stripped away from [god] when he tore himself to shreds to make you. you are a shred. you are pumped full of original sin and you hate and you hate and you hate and you hate. [god] hates you. he hates himself. goodness is not a thing to take for granted. likeness can only make you so whole. you are edward hyde. you are not good, and you will never be whole

im too lazy to find the image but i feel like that tiktok screenshot of someone pouring a shot and saying "i wasn't gonna drink tonight but man... im missing ___ like a mf" and i really feel like this about stanford pines i miss him

do people care about stanford like i do i miss him it is 3 am and i am not immune to sitting up in my bed right now and analyzing his character once again because i love his writing that much he makes me sick

on a meta level I think the hyde-as-addiction reading of strange case is about the mistake in thinking of addiction as a matter of purely recreative vs purely medicinal use.

the potion jekyll uses to change his appearance -and with it his identity and the roles assigned to it- is designed as medicinal (a potential cure for cognitive incongruence), then used recreatively, then its use becomes medicinal as jekyll loses the balance of his psyche and therefore control over his body. hyde was never devised to be anything other than a clever chemical disguise… but by the end of jekyll’s narration he has become what he is, soon to be all he can ever be for the rest of his life, which will end soon (“thank god”, Jekyll says). and so as the mask becomes the real face, recreative use becomes medicinal.

But! was it ever recreative at all? doesn’t jekyll suffer due to his hypocrisy, the flaw he had to make the foundation of his personality in order to sustain his position in society? doesn’t he say he was ashamed to do things other men would openly do, doesn’t he imply the evil he’s capable of started as barely nothing and later escalated into murder as he loses sight of his original goal?

Didnt he want to cure incongruence, lift a weight from the soul via disassociation, and fail there, as the closest thing he gets to that is simply putting a mask on his psyche, so to speak?

Oh, and speaking of masks- doesn’t hyde have to put on a mask to leave the laboratory? doesn’t he have to pretend to still be jekyll -even when that part of him is functionally dead- in order to survive? isn’t one of the last things he does before dying setting a teapot on the fire? in pretending to be hyde, jekyll becomes hyde, but in pretending to be jekyll, hyde becomes jekyll- so, recreational use was never such, and mask becomes face, face becomes mask, but thing is. the mask or the face never existed at all. there was never a “become”, there’s only “is”, there’s only “appears to be”.

I don’t know to what point Stevenson wanted to say this, but I do know he struggled with cocaine addiction as he wrote the novella. but I find it interesting that the same way jekyll’s constantly shifting narration cements that there is no Jekyll or Hyde, only a bizarre Jekyll-Hyde continuum, it also cements that his metaphorical and literal drug use (of the potion; of evil; of the Hyde persona) can’t be solely described as recreational or medicinal. Such matters, like the human psyche, are too complex to be described in binary terms.

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.

What we can’t woobify, we vilify. What we can’t vilify, we diagnose. And sometimes, in the Gravity Falls fandom, we do all three.