#askjacky

yeah. not only does the fandom tend to deflect Stan's flaws and pretend they're no big deal in comparison to Ford's (as if that makes any sense lmao), but they also tend to focus more on his suffering over Ford's and act as if his pain was more valid or even plain worse than his. which is stupid. pain olympics doesn't a good discussion make. i focus a lot on Ford's pain in my fics because of the oversaturation of fics focusing on Stan's pain, honestly.

it's tiring to see everyone fawn solely on Stan. It's getting a little better in that regard but... not as better as i want it to be haha.

Why don't i show you?

.

"I love you, Grunkle Ford!" Mabel exclaims with delight as the bus peels away, "It's so good to see you again!"

"I love you too!" Dipper joins in before the words sink in properly, "We're both happy to be back to see you and Stan!"

i think he says the words "I love you" at birthdays and when they meet up all together for the summer and in his goodbyes when they go home, during really scary and hard moments when he isn't sure of the outcome, after being comforted or comforting another, and other such times.

mostly anything to do with ego. ford doesn't actually think he's all that great. but he thinks he has to be great or he's nothing but a six-fingered freak. there's a difference. otherwise he's just a man with terrible self-worth issues trying to parade as something more than what he truly thinks of himself.

also that he doesn't care about family at all. he has difficulties in his relationships, especially with his twin, but there's just too much evidence that says he cares about his family to say he doesn't. it is annoying when people say that kind of stuff.

You're so very welcome, anon.

I really wish i knew how to articulate just how disappointed i am in how this fandom views Ford. There's so many things they just get wrong and i wish they could see Ford for who he really is, not that fanon bullshit they think he is. I really hate how he gets treated like he's uniquely flawed in the face of the other characters in the show, as if everyone else is perfect or completely justifiable or whatever when that can't be further from the truth.

they think we have to list his flaws every time we praise him or just say how much we love him. that we have to hold him accountable for his flaws and mistakes, as if he's a fucking real person and not a fictional character who does stuff that pushes the story forward. it's okay to acknowledge that characters are flawed, but it's like saying that the sky is blue. no yeah duh they're flawed. we don't need to confess their flaws like we're part of some catholic church or whatever. they're flawed and they make mistakes but that's not the fucking end of the world.

i just think this fandom needs a lot more perspective than it has right now. Ford is a good person and he's trying to do his best with what he knows and sometimes he messes up and hurts people, but he's trying. He feels his guilt so deeply that he has 'I'm sorry, Fiddleford' running through his head all the time and he carries that photo of him and Stan on their little boat through everything.

He tries and he tries and he tries so hard to stop Bill's plan to end the world and when his deeply held trust issues from everyone in his life abandoning him and hurting him so deeply - purposely and not - make things that much harder and everything backfires on him, he tries and he tries and he tries to end it and keep the equation from Bill and wishes he could sacrifice himself to save everyone but he just couldn't and he had to let Stan do it for him. which was the hardest thing for him to do. Not because of pride or ego, but because he loved Stan so much and he'd been denying that to himself until he had to let him go and it hurt and he wanted to make everything better with him and Stan because he loved him that much but he was gone.

And you look at all that trying he does at every turn and how everything slaps him in the face and wrings him out like an old rag and you try to say that he deserved worse and all i can say is i don't think you understand what you watched or read. he isn't gonna get better by torture, the worst part of his life was right before the portal incident when bill was psychologically and physically torturing him and instead of that making him better, he was thoughtless with Stan because he was in his own pain and his own pressure to stop the apocalypse too much to see how much Stan was hurting too. he was being crushed by the weight of the world and what he'd let Bill do but that didn't make him better. it made him say that Stan had never done anything of worth and his errand was the only thing that would give him that and that was mean. He got better when he felt Stan's love for him in the sacrifice he gave for him and his family. he got better when the kids showed him love between twins that goes deeper than codependency and gave their own love to him. he got better when he got the chance to offer Stan that trip on the boat and Stan accepted and they got the chance to support each other the way they hadn't been able to in years and in better circumstances.

Ford is a good person. He makes mistakes and he suffers for them and yet he still ends up getting the support he needs to improve and be even better than he already was. His family loves him so much and that's all he really needed to get out of the hole he'd been stuck in by the abusers in his life. He is forgiven for the worst of it and i just wish the fandom could see why. i wish the fandom could see that people need support and love before they can truly make a change. I wish Ford wasn't such a controversial character when all he did was make mistakes and try to make up for them even when he went about it in less than ideal ways. he's a character and he's written incredibly human in a way that feels intensely relatable to many people, including myself.

So to put that all together, you get “Breaking his standard manner of speech, Ford (sometimes) reacts in a frank manner to other characters.” Generally this happens (when he's perhaps trying to make) a joke.

Much of the fandom tend to characterize Ford to be super serious but you can tell he has a certain brand of silliness and humor. Not sure if that's the writers' intentions but that seem to recur also in J3. He can also be quite impulsive and curious, at least from the flashbacks we see in ATOTS. Tl;dr to say: Ford is a lawful character but its by his own set of laws and principles

yeah, of course that's also a mischaracterization of Ford that's out there. i just didn't feel like writing every single one i see (my motivation to answer some of these asks about gravity falls is starting to wane in general and i have to push myself sometimes to write stuff out)(has something to do with my hyperfixation fading a little)

but i will say that I hate fics that make him super serious and unable to make jokes of his own. he's such a silly guy when he's not under serious duress that shakes it out of him. he'll go with mabel's whims (like when he wore witch hats with her to the bill statue) and make puns in his journals (he's gourd-geous, anyone?), and the speech patterns that Gin mentioned in that post of his that you linked aren't fully formal or serious like people think they are.

I do sympathize with Shifty somewhat, mostly for that thirty years trapped thing.

But also what people sometimes fail to realize is that Ford didn't know Shifty had higher intelligence during the early stages of his research into him. And that his attempts at keeping his journals from Shifty was purely for safety reasons. There are so many dangerous anomalies he'd drawn in those journals and he didn't want Shifty to use forms that could harm him or Fiddleford. Which is like... the most reasonable thing Ford could've done as a precautionary measure tbh. he's terrible with lab safety but he's still got some caution in his skull hehe.

Hell if someone wants to harp on Shifty's poor treatment, Mr. Fiddleford "let's freeze it right out of the egg" McGucket is right there, haha. i mean, the whole point of getting Shifty was to test the cryogenic chambers but Ford was the one who became reluctant to go through with it when confronted, so... idk, make of that what you will.

Ford clearly cared for Shifty in a way, even though his methods of caring ultimately felt more like one would treat a particularly interesting exotic pet. He had no way of really knowing of Shifty's intelligence until he started speaking and making plans for its escape.

But by then, Shifty had already attacked Fiddleford and pretended to be him in order to get a hold of the journals and potentially escape. Which would be a very terrifying encounter that Ford would want to prevent as best he could. And the only real way to guarantee that without killing him would be to lock him up. It is sad when you consider how Shifty must've felt, and i don't blame people for feeling bad for him, but i can't honestly say that Ford was in the wrong for taking those measures once Shifty hurt his friend like that. Shifty could do similar shit to other people in town and that would not be good. He doesn't know Shifty's real intentions after all.

About the thirty years thing, it would be very difficult for Ford to rectify that while he's in the multiverse, ngl. he had other shit that was higher priority, especially after the betrayal, and Shifty just got forgotten until Ford couldn't possibly do anything to help.

not really.

I think, while it has its flaws (*cough* theraprism *cough*), it was good at being clear that what Ford went through with Bill was abuse. It had Bill do literal playbook abuser shit, like love-bombing and ghosting to keep Ford desperate and isolating him from his meager support system in Fiddleford and plenty more i don't have time to mention. Granted, most of this was also in Journal 3 but it was made very obvious in TBoB. Slap you in the face kind of obvious. Kinda crazy some people still missed it, honestly. It was very validating to see it as it was all along, as i know some in this fandom agree.

it also does better at completing Ford's arc than Journal 3 does, in my opinion. It shows that his family loves him for him and just thinks of Bill as the pathetic loser he is rather than the shameful experience Ford thought them reading the book was going to be. I've always felt off about Journal 3's kinda bleak ending with Ford debasing himself like Stan would ever stand for that shit and i love that TBoB gives him more love from Stan and the kids, even through the pain.

I don't really care much about the BIll shit in most of the book myself but i get that it's mostly just trying to set up for the journal pages and the ending so i don't mind them being there. it makes sense that Bill would spend a whole book talking about himself and his achievements as the self-centered bastard he is. i just wonder if we're gonna get a book that has nothing to do with him to give everyone a break, like a sea grunks journal or something. that would be nice.

My only gripe is really with the fandom's takeaway from it. Mostly those who saw the abuse Bill put Ford through and decided to ignore it all in favor of shipping nonsense. it's one thing to interpret their past relationship as romantic, it's quite another to erase/dismiss abuse just because you think they're 'toxic yaoi uwu'. It's very uncomfortable to pretend that Bill returning to Ford's life post-Weirdmageddon isn't a horror nightmare scenario where Ford's probably in hell and Bill's making it worse in the only way he knows how and is instead a scenario where Ford has to 'forgive' Bill for shit he ain't gonna be fucking sorry for and worse, get back with him.

It's just... frustrating. Doesn't mean i feel like it shouldn't have been published, though i wish the surge in popularity it wrought either didn't happen as big as it did or this fandom didn't be this fandom about everything. but i digress.