#tales of the wild zeep

[divorcedfiddleford]

stanley pines really is one of the characters of all time. he's a gemini and an identical twin but knowing this is a major spoiler for the show. he punched a pterodactyl in the face. he wore groucho marx glasses to his b'nei mitzvah. he invented imposter syndrome. he's a massive jerk. he's transgender and a misogynist. he scares children for fun and actively seeks out reasons to fight them. he's from new jersey. his adhd and autism are battling to the death. he has a tattoo but he doesn't have a tattoo. he punched his brother in the face. he's been to jail in three different countries. he dropped out of high school only to spend 30 years teaching himself nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. he's divorced. he hired a gamer as a handyman 10 years ago and the gamer is kind of his son now. he lives off of brown meat, soda, liquor, bad puns, and cigars. he's a professional con artist. he's a terrible liar. he banished his brother to the nether realm for decades, but like, it was an accident. his dad kicked him out of home. he regularly commits massive tax fraud. he needs dentures by the age of 60. his niece will tell you he has a heart of gold. his nephew will say it's probably pyrite. he will hold on to a grudge until it kills him. no one can hate him more than he already hates himself. he saved the world by lying. he's bi and no one wants him, but that's okay because he gets sick of them all the morning after anyway. he's living out his dreams on a boat but realistically he's gonna get seasick and want to go home in less than a year. he killed the devil by punching him in the face. he's stealing your wallet right now

#tales of the wild zeep #putting some hot takes in here but they need to be said.

[jeekoftheweek]

these assholes look like wild zeep

#jeekoftheweek original #two point hospital #tales from wild zeep

[divorcedfiddleford]

people who say ford and bill's relationship was good "before the betrayal" blow my mind like as though it was a decision bill made years in to turn on ford and not literally his plan from the start. same with people who then ship them and are like "they're two consenting adults" like yeah im sure ford 100% consented to having his thoughts infiltrated and tampered with and he loved the emotional manipulation he wanted that actually he asked bill "hey can you drive away all the other people in my life who i love and also make my eye bleed a lot" and it was totally consensual. shut the fuck up

#sorry i saw a post that pissed me off so i had to draw cope #tales of the wild zeep #ask to tag

[divorcedfiddleford]

i hate him and that dumb ass toy

#tales of the wild zeep #not fucking tagging this

[divorcedfiddleford]

so funny to me when i say a character is trans and people are like "wait for real? like canonically???" yeah man didn't you watch the famous episode titled "[x character] is trans" they went on screen in front of the flag and announced it live to america

#tales of the wild zeep #they do the same thing when i say a character is gay or nd or disabled or anything at all #don't @ me. i just know things alright.

[divorcedfiddleford]

to round out my thoughts on all this i want to share a contender for my favorite wendy moment in the series, which ironically comes from one of my least favorite episodes. i just really like how stan and dipper are all excited (stan literally saying "we won" and "this is a victory") only for wendy to turn around and be legitimately and righteously upset. and then stan and dipper have to go home alone and think about the consequences of their actions. they don't actually win. all they did was break up a harmless teenage relationship for their own self interest. it's really refreshing compared to episodes like "the time traveler's pig" where, even though dipper doesn't get to spend the day with wendy, his insistence on controlling her love life goes largely unchallenged by the narrative, and robbie getting mocked at the end of the episode still nets dipper a small "win" and validates his intentions. and again, i just really like that wendy is so visibly and sincerely distraught. linda did a great job with her voice work here. it's definitely the strongest moment from an otherwise flimsy episode (in my opinion)

#gravity falls #tales of the wild zeep

[divorcedfiddleford]

anyway my headcanon is that ford put the giant satellite dish in his front yard so that he could pick up weird british new wave radio stations

#tales of the wild zeep #guy who asks the government agents accosting him for their mixtapes. guy who liked eurythmics BEFORE they were cool #i know he heard the 1981 radio single version of kate bush's 'sat in your lap' and went crazy

[divorcedfiddleford]

i think the problems with how wendy is written in the show (see: misogyny) can be most succinctly summarized with the simple fact that she is the only character in the intro photograph to not have an episode which follows her point of view

#tales of the wild zeep #i might elaborate on this later but i just woke up so

[divorcedfiddleford]

ford pines is really cool and nice and awesome

#tales of the wild zeep

[divorcedfiddleford]

it is friday my dudes (little hearts added by @tazmiilly)

#sorryyyyyy for not posting ... please accept these as compensation #gravity falls #fiddleford mcgucket #artwork of the damned #tales of the wild zeep #ummmm ok context for the first one should be mostly self-explanatory #i purposefully left the person he's calling open to interpretation #however for the record i will say i am a 'fiddleford was divorced before he came to gravity falls' truther #but that does not mean he would never call back to cali to check in on his son or anything #so take that as you will #uhhhh everything else is pretty silly and doesnt require much explanation i dont think?? #i dont draw pre-college fidds a lot even though i literally have a whole backstory written for him LOLLLL #also i have a whole complex where when i draw a character pre-transition i feel embarrassed #sort of like i've walked in on them in the bathroom or something. like 'whoops sorry' and i politely look away #want to make it VERY CLEAR i dont think theres anything wrong or bad about drawing someone pre-transition!! #it's just a weird thing ive noticed about myself that i'm trying to deal with #and it literally only happens when i'm drawing. not when i'm writing

[divorcedfiddleford]

You made a post saying “it has been zero days since our last alex hirsch hates ford so much bullshit” and i know it was mostly hyperbole, but you have some really good takes that I would love to be elaborated on in terms of how ford is written

it really wasn't hyperbolic. over the years he's just really shown a lot of hatred towards this one character.

content warning: discussion of abuse

i want to start with this clip from the commentary which i think of as a microcosm for how the writers and especially alex think about ford.

transcript:

rob renzetti: i mean he [mcgucket] should've basically knocked ford out, and... and destroyed the... you know, tied him up, and, destroyed... and... alex hirsch, speaking over him: yeah he should've beat ford with a wrench and taken this thing apart piece by piece! he's the one who understood how to built [sic] it, but...

... so that seems like a pretty violent course of action. shall we unpack that?

ford is a character who's pretty explicitly written as a victim of abuse, and who now has c-ptsd as a direct result of the abuse he experienced. alex hirsch believes that ford deserved everything bad that happened to him, that it's ford's own fault, and that he also deserved worse things to happen to him. this is why, given every narrative chance, alex hirsch has piled more suffering onto ford's plate. the biggest example of this i can think of is in the journal, when he wrote that fiddleford was actively erasing ford's memory (despite this being a massive timeline contradiction which i still refuse to accept). because god forbid ford even have one remotely healthy relationship with somebody. that would be too good for him. ford was manipulated and lied to by bill, but alex repeatedly compares him to icarus, a teenager whose demise was the result of his own ignorance. this comparison is still so fucking offensive to me. the sun did not lie to icarus, did not guarantee icarus all of the happiness and success and sense of belonging which he had been denied all his life, did not actively shut out the voices of those around him who would try to help him.

alex in general has a very strange relationship with abuse. he seems to get really upset when people read his characters as victims of abuse. the strongest instance of this is actually not with ford, it's with pacifica - especially in the nwmm episode commentary. the episode says "pacifica's parents have conditioned her to respond to a bell" and alex says people got "the wrong idea" about it. like. dude. what the fuck. you wrote abuse. even if you didn't mean to, that's what you wrote. you can't say people got "the wrong idea" just because you didn't think about the subtext of what you were writing. anyway, back to ford: i believe this extends to him as well. alex wanted to write a character who's a foil to stan and who was a selfish unlikable victim of his own arrogance. however that's not what he wrote. he somehow seemingly accidentally wrote a really compelling and relatable awesome autistic guy who had to fight for every good thing he he ever had in his life only for it to be taken from him every single time. but alex can't let go of seeing ford as just "the opposite of stan". when he talks about "how someone as smart as ford could fall for bill's tricks", he refuses to realize he wrote a situation in which a man was being psychologically manipulated and tortured.

it goes back further, too. people repeatedly theorized that filbrick was... not a very good father, to say the least. on top of the very explicit and canon fact that he threw one of his children out on the street (seriously, there is no defense for this), people pointed out that stan would flinch at filbrick, that ford seemed upset by things filbrick said but dared not talk back, that filbrick was mad at stan not for hurting his brother, but for "costing the family potential millions". but alex can't have people seeing ford as sympathetic. ford can't have it bad like stan did. ford had to have everything and he lost it all because he sucks so much. so he wrote the graphic novel story where ford is filbrick's favorite child and filbrick also is not even a bad parent you guys he's just stoic. ignore the whole thing in dreamscaperers where stan perpetuates the abuse that filbrick did to him. ignore the fact that ford was shouting at stan and then completely shut up as soon as filbrick entered the room and did not say another word for the rest of the night. ignore all that because i just made up this story where he cries at a present from stan. filbrick loved his boys for sure you guys!!!

i'm not even touching on how alex repeatedly villainizes traits commonly associated with mental illness and neurodivergence. ford's hypervigilance becomes arrogance. his passion for knowledge means he's a know-it-all. his difficulty socializing and making friends means he's a misanthrope. his lingering resentment for the way he was raised means he hates his brother and is the worst human being to ever have lived. i could go on, go even further into how the finale reaffirms this, but i feel weird talking about this too much.

#help you unclogged the dam and it all came rushing out #it's been years #didn't know i still had all this in me #apologies for the lack of sources. i reference a lot of old interviews and tweets from 2016-2017 #i know insider was one of them but a lot of it was questions he'd be asked at convention panels and off-handed comments from the dvds #seconds before the clip i included alex says ford's great flaw is pride #as though it was his pride that led to the world ending #and not a millenium-old plan by a monster using advanced manipulation tactics supplemented with literal mind control #tales of the wild zeep #1009

[divorcedfiddleford]

ive bitched and moaned about various journal 3 retcons a lot in my time but ive gotta say to this day one of the things that bothers me the most was that they said fiddleford didn't know about bill At All

like girl what the fuck was this then ^ 🤨 fiddleford just vibing in the triangle shrine with no explanation and mad at ford for what? meditating? and what about all the eyeball imagery with the society of the blind eye? what about him knowing bill's name? what about "where are these ideas coming from? who are you working with?" hmmmm? and then they go and have him read ford's journals anyway so he can compile ford's work behind his back like are you telling me he just skipped over the pages with bill on them?? come on

#“oh but mcgucket was probably just zonked out of his gourd on memory gun” don't come into my house with that. #the memory gun retcons are the number one thing that still bother me about the book. LOL #sorry i felt like complaining tonight #tales of the wild zeep #gravity falls

[divorcedfiddleford]

at least four people have told me they didn't know this?? i thought it was common knowledge. spread to increase sample size

#tales of the wild zeep

[divorcedfiddleford]

strong contender for the best picture of ford

#goofy sci fi/fantasy boyyyy i love youuuuuu bleh #tales of the wild zeep #my favorite is probably him doing the raptor hands in tlm #yet this is the image i have saved to my desktop #maybe it has something to do with the guy i cropped out. idk

[divorcedfiddleford]

almost started crying thinking about how gay ford pines is

#tales of the wild zeep #it's not even 11 am

[divorcedfiddleford]

COMMENCING ROUND 1 of the ULTIMATE ADHD SHOWDOWN

we as a council must decide which of these characters has the most powerful adhd energy. 32 will enter but only one will leave with the prize... who will it be?

ROUND 1 VOTING WILL END SATURDAY 10/15 11PM EST! this isn’t formal or anything so this cutoff time is mostly just a placeholder; if people seem interested i will probably extend the voting period another day or so.

have fun!

#adhdestiny poll #tales of the wild zeep #i am NOT tagging 32 characters sorry #also i made this mostly just for fun so please dont take it too seriously