Thinking About Alex’s Recent Interview And Its Confirmation Of How I View Stancest... Desperately Needing

Thinking about Alex’s recent interview and its confirmation of how I view Stancest... Desperately needing each other! Indeed!

I think what many people don’t get about Stan and Ford’s dynamic as children, or even as teenagers, is that, no matter what Stan and Ford think or say about it, they were not like Mabel and Dipper. That just highlights their lack of self-awareness, my poor dumbasses.

Here’s a more lengthy analysis for any friendly soul and fellow shipper who cares to read:

Mabel and Dipper have overall very different interests and hobbies and act separately on them. They have other friends and spend time with them—well, at least Mabel has Candy and Grenda, as the bubbly social butterfly she is; Dipper seems way more preoccupied with deciphering the mysteries of Journal 3 than anything else. As fraternal twins of different genders, no matter how alike they look (and despite Mabel’s joke of being “girl Dipper”), they still manage to retain pretty distinct identities. No issue here.

With Stan and Ford, things were very different. First of all, the absurd codependency. When asked about Shermie, Alex observed that a crucial part of their dynamic is that they only had each other. No younger or older brother to support them. From my own observations about their parents, that point is only driven further home.

Filbrick is, well, Filbrick. I don’t think I need to explain much here; every one of us has different interpretations and headcanons about him, but they seem to all agree on the common factor he wasn’t a good father—how much that can be justified by their time period or stretched to accommodate the most heartwrenching stangst is up for debate, just not a subject for this post.

Caryn is more complicated. I think there’s a big tendency to treat her as a good mom, something I particularly don’t agree with as I take a Watsonian approach—that is, she might not have been intended as a questionable mother, but a questionable mother is the woman we ended up with given the writers’ lack of thought about their side characters.

This is not to say she was a horrible person, not necessarily. I think Filbrick was definitely ‘worse’ than her, so to speak, at least in a more obvious way, and she has canonically demonstrated a modicum of care/affection towards Stan. According to her, Stan’s rambunctiousness can be attributed to an excess of “personality,” he’s her “little free spirit.” She was, most notably, one of the two people present at Stan’s funeral if the info on the new website is to be trusted. We see her smiling brightly in the picture of baby Stans included in TBoB, which hints at the fact she liked her kids.

(Interestingly enough, we have so little on her relationship with Ford. Wouldn’t it be ironic if Stan was her favorite child? Most irl people with siblings I’ve encountered seem to think there’s always a favorite.)

But the fact that she, as an adult, didn’t intervene when Stan was kicked out is simply, in my point of view, inexcusable. One could say she was momentarily paralyzed from an overwhelming fear of Filbrick, as a supposed victim herself, but a) that’s already entering headcanon domain, and b) I think that’s far from the truth and directly contradicting the comics, in which she looks quite comfortable in the company of Filbrick: kissing him on the cheek, comfortingly stroking his back... I don’t think Filbrick is meant to be seen as a monster, not in an exaggerated way. (He’s shown to be touched by Stan’s little stunt with the golden chain, too.) Just a really shitty father, in a common, boring, more nuanced, no less traumatizing, way.

To me, the most telling thing of all is the fact Stan calls for Ford to help him, not his own mother. Ford, his brother, same age as him, who was at the moment beyond furious with him and very unlikely to show any compassion. Ford, whose attempts to change Filbrick’s mind would more likely than not have been unsuccessful. Not Caryn, adult, who probably had much greater sway over Filbrick. They say a child’s first instinct is to call for their mama. Clearly not in this case!

I find it fascinating how easily, in the comics, baby Stan opens up to Ford about his feelings of inferiority towards Ford himself. The sheer vulnerability of that moment. The implicit, profound trust, especially coming from someone like Stan, packed to the gills with toxic masculinity. And the manner with which Ford gently comforts him, as if he were used to do so. As Stan, too, had been shown to do when Crampelter mocked Ford’s fingers. They were clearly accustomed to being each other’s emotional pillars, in the way kids who learned early on they can’t count with adults or lean on authority figures in their lives start building their own little safe space.

(The way I see it, they got along extremely well, for better or for worse. No sibling bickering. No fights. How could they? They were literally each other’s only friend. If anything, their first major fight was caused by lack of communication, among many other things; they repressed their frustrations with each other to a ridiculous point instead of simply externalizing them like you would expect of a normal sibling dynamic.)

Second of all, they were monozygotic aka identical twins, as strongly hinted in the show, comics, and books, and as confirmed by Alex on Twitter. They were both named Stan, they had the same face. I’ve read irl identical twins’ confessions about the nature of such a relationship re: identity issues and how people tend to treat you, and it’s often not pretty. In the Stan twins case, their sense of identity was beyond blurry, and it’s not difficult to see why. If you pay attention to the show or the comics, you’ll see many hints of this unhealthiness: the way they were both called to the principal’s office, the way Stan was called a dumber, sweatier version of Ford by Crampelter, the way they had already pretended to be each other before, not in their childhood but adolescence (Stan’s idea, according to hilarious extra material in the DVDs).

I find it adorable that Ford, in the comics, basically grounded himself for Stan! Filbrick had been very clear about grounding Stan, only, not both twins. But Ford stays with him as if he were grounded as well, as if he didn’t even have a choice. Where Stan was, there was Ford, not far behind.

(As an addition that occurred to me just later, after you guys have already started reblogging my post, is that baby Ford has demonstrated this tendency before, in a much more unhinged way, when he exclaims, “Oh my God! We killed the Sibling Brothers!” Ford, honey, if anyone had killed the Sibling Brothers, it would’ve been your brother, the person who shoved them in the first place. Not you.)

They were an unit. Inseparable. As simple as that.

Until they weren’t.

In the same interview, though, Alex added: they, quote unquote, “desperately need each other” as old men. And honestly? It can’t get more intense than that.