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callipraxia · 6 months ago

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Even Further Interview Analysis - On the Portrayal of "Otherness."

Maybe fourth fifth sixth time will be the charm when it comes to attempts to communicate what I'm thinking about this topic, post-Hirsch interview. I'm drawing from several quotes here that don't immediately link together at all, but trust me, folks. If you want to, of course. The full transcript of the interview, conducted and generously shared by @fordtato and @hkthatgffan, can, as always, be found here. The three previous interview-related pieces of content I've written can be found in their own section here on the handy-dandy directory post on the dreamwidth archive of my less ephemeral blog posts.

For some variety, we're going with a quote from one of the Interviewers, a Hirsch quote I only made a joke about in my original post, and...uh, one of the same quotes from Hirsch from my last post. I...have a lot of thoughts, I guess. At the same time. In no order that can be translated into the English language very exactly. Anyway....

[Hana]"...with Ford in particular, with all of the content in the journal about him feeling “strange, on the outskirts of society, not understood,” it resonates so much with LGBTQ+ fans. Everyone I know who’s a big Ford fan is from some part of the LGBTQ+ community. There’s lines in there about romance baffling him, and stuff like that, where we’re like, we get it, we understand it, it makes sense, it resonates. Regardless of whether or not this was intentionally planned when you wrote it, how do you feel about Ford being interpreted as a bit of a queer icon for so many in the fandom?" -------------------- [Alex Hirsch] "When you do a clone story, the point of a clone story, in my mind, is a character seeing themselves in a different light, right?" -------------------- [Alex Hirsch] "I think that Bill was trying to find Ford, but I think- I always think of Bill as like, this guy who has, like - you know, he’s stirring the pot of soup that is the Ford plan, and he’s got like 900 pots of soup across the universe of different things he’s working on, and at any given moment, he’s so cocksure that it’s all gonna work his way eventually. Bill’s a trillion years old, so it’s like, Ford disappearing for thirty years is like- [snaps fingers] is like somebody saying they’re ghosting you and then texting you the next weekend, you know what I mean?"

This...thing will be divided into three parts: The Part Where Calli Talks About Sex and Gender and Neurodivergency, The Part Where Calli Talks About Mental Disorders, Addiction, and Fiddleford McGucket, and then, last but not least, The Part Where Calli Talks About Different Approaches To Writing Aliens. These do not, however, each correspond to one quote, and there will be some overlap here and there, so bear with me, if you will. There's also a stronger element of "reader response" in here than there was in the "Ford Plan" essay - there's still a good amount of canon analysis, but I do talk a bit about my own reactions to things and compare my writing process to Mr. Hirsch's toward the end, so I completely understand why those parts might fail to interest people. That said...let's begin.

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I. The Part Where Calli Talks About Sex and Gender and Neurodivergency TW for mentions of toxic masculinity, possibly homophobic aspects of queer-coding, domestic abuse, and my view that Bill is so close to being a sexual assaulter that his, er, anatomical limitations are a moot point.

There's a certain irony to Ford's status as a queer icon that I don't think I've ever seen pointed out before. I'm basically writing a book about this, actually (sort of - long story), but since I have no idea if that will ever go anywhere, I'll talk about it a bit here anyway. It's how, in a story where one of the threads is Dipper sorting out what it means to be a man, it strikes me enormously that his personal idol ends up almost personifying Traditional, Slightly Unhealthy Masculinity, at least at first glance.

Ford's first major action on-screen is, of course, picking up J1, so that we can see his hands...and then he hauls off and punches someone in the face. I wrote a 10,000 word essay (readable here) about Ford's anger issues and how they interact with his sense of self; the reason I wrote it was because of the revelation that Ford's actually a lot more casually violent in his limited screentime than Stan is. I won't go over all that ground again, but the second thing we ever learn about Ford is that he can and will shoot first, basically. And possibly literally, since he's carrying a massive gun throughout the scene and the very next episode establishes that he keeps at least one firearm (or...shooty-weapon of some sort, anyway) concealed on on his person at probably all times, considering he had it on him for game night with his nephew. Based on the weird mix of manual weapons and (if Stan was telling the truth, anyway) firearms in the Mystery Shack and in the Bunker, it seems entirely possible that he's been a bit of a weapons aficionado for a long time, well before he started walking the multiverse. As for afterward, well...afterward, the man sets his head on fire for a laugh, swings around with his magnet gun like the illegitimate love-child of Magneto and the Amazing Spider-Man, and I read a degree of awe in Dipper's statement that the aftermath of Weirdmageddon was the only time he'd ever seen Ford cry...in the whole month he's known the man. Given how few contexts he's had to reasonably see Ford have much a reason to cry in, I assume the remark was made just to underline the severity of the situation: Ford is this tough, stoic space cowboy who just went through days of torture at the hands of a mad god without breaking, so you know it's Serious Business if he's crying. Manly men like him just don't do that, do they?

Of course, along with all this testosterone poisoning, we also did always see plenty of evidence that Ford wasn't actually a talking sci-fi cardboard cut-out of the Marlboro Man. For one thing, there's the way he introduces himself verbally, once he's past the whole fistfight phase of events: "Greetings!...I like this kid! She's weird!" I suspect he started making his way toward also being something of an icon in the neurodivergent communities at about that exact moment. The moment also had the effect of reminding us: this potentially intimidating figure in black with a gigantic gun who can beat Stan in a fight is also, after all, also the Author of the Journals. We don't know much about the Author, but we do know that he was a scientist so brilliant that McGucket, a genius in his own right, accepted a place as his assistant. Hard to be that without also being something of a nerd, right? We also know that he's a very talented artist, and that he writes in oddly-structured sentences, and also that he writes in cursive - maybe that was just something I noticed, since I also write in cursive and occasionally oddly-structured sentences, but it was endearing and relatable to me, anyway. Most importantly, we also know that he apparently finds the unusual as cool as Dipper, our protagonist, does. In other words, we are reminded that, dramatic entrance notwithstanding, he's one of us, and as Hana noted...a lot of us ain't exactly Models of the Elusive, So-Called 'Norm,' are we? This is only emphasized as time goes on, given his enthusiasm for DD&MD and how we soon learn he is significantly more complex than he might have seemed at a glance - aside from being severely flawed, fully aware of it, and riddled with guilt, he also quotes poetry at what it seems safe to assume was one of the lower points in his life, an action shortly followed by philosophical reflections on the nature of heroism. It's also established that, in the sharpest departure of all from the Traditional Masculinity tropes, he didn't have a female partner before his long exile and isn't still griping about that fact to this day. In the America of his youth, just being a single man in his thirties who had never had a girlfriend, or even just didn't complain loudly about not having a girlfriend in between relationships, was the kind of behavior that could make the government suspect you were both gay and/therefore a Communist, especially if you were someone high-profile enough to be working on science with an enormous grant not all that long after the Space Race. Plus...look, the idea of a domestic abuse victim being shipped with their abuser is...not something I'm all that comfortable with, but I get where people get the idea from, and while Bill is definitely not a man, he does use the same pronouns as one. I can imagine people imagining it as a gay-adjacent ship even before the Journal came out and all but explicitly labelled Ford as One of Us when 'us' is defined as the Not-Straights as well as one of the Not-Neurotypicals. It's possible, as I said in my first interview overview, to use the Journal to build a case for Ford's heterosexuality, but the balance of evidence seems to tilt toward the idea that he's Something Else, even if it's not all that specific about what, probably to some extent because there's good reasons why Ford himself might not know, or at least not know the words to apply to the situation. That, however, is material for the post I'm thinking of putting out, like, the day before the new book comes out in July or something. Here, we're discussing not so much sexuality per se as the experience of Otherness.

As I mentioned briefly in the previous paragraph, the LGBTQ+ community isn't the only one which has taken Ford to its heart. Members of the neurodivergent communities - autistic people in particular - have also related strongly to Ford; in fact, this is actually the primary reason why I related to the guy so much. I'm asexual, so I'm in the Not-Straight Club, but for various reasons, my feelings of alienation began long before I noticed that I still thought kissing sounded vaguely unpleasant while others my age had revised their elementary school opinions on the subject. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of feeling that I was...off to the side, somehow, whenever other people were around. I was just an observer, never quite understanding what I saw, always reading like mad to try to figure out how people worked and apparently coming up with some...odd...ideas in the process before high school, which was when I started running across words in classes that seemed to describe the world as it appeared from my point of view. I wouldn't be diagnosed formally with any of my several DSM-V entries until many, many years later, but there was a profound relief in knowing that there even maybe was an explanation better than just "u a freak, lol." Having those words, and with them some sense of history and community, made it all seem more natural, not less so. This is similar to how a lot of people have said they feel about finding out that there's a word for being gay or trans or otherwise queer in some way, and there was some relief tied up in that, too, when I eventually found out that there's a whole world of other aces as well as other people otherwise wired like I am, but it was less of an issue for me, and therefore not what I first "clicked" with Ford over, even though I kind of read him as some kind of ace as well. Instead, for me, it was over how I related to the feeling of being the one person in the room whose occupational interests didn't align with everyone else's - of being the kid who could never quite get it right at Show and Tell. Over knowing what it's like to have your classmates nearly put you in the hospital when you hadn't done anything to them. Over how even the things your family says to make you feel better just underline how you're Different, how you're not really part of the circle even with your own parents. And yes - over having developed a certain amount of bitterness and distrust and general unfriendliness toward the 'normal' world over time. That's definitely a place where there's the potential for the portrayal of Otherness to become...an issue. Another such place is when we get to the matter of Bill.

Bill is presented as a highly alien being, but there's a lot of ways in which he's all too human. Far too many of the ways in which he's all too human happen to be ways that strongly imply that if he had a human body, he'd be one of the not-charmers we used to see getting interviewed and then arrested on To Catch A Predator. And he uses male pronouns in English, appears with accessories which allow big dramatic gestures, has a high-pitched, whiny voice, is a relentless sadist, and is most frequently shipped with human males. All taken together, if one looks at Bill through the lens of queer coding, he can come across as something not dissimilar to the stereotype of the Depraved Homosexual, a homophobic stereotype used to imply that gay people, and especially gay men, are inherently villainous and dangerous...and that's even before we get to the Penthouse scene, where Bill makes his entrance singing a love song to someone he's abused for years who, at that particular moment, he also has on a short leash. Literally.

Did the writers intend for Bill to come across as The Dangerous Gay? I...like to think not, but as Hirsch himself admits in both the discussion of Grenda and to an extent the discussion of the intent behind Ford's alienation - the world was radically different back then, so that you could end up unthinkingly writing certain things then that you know would never fly today, and which you wouldn't even try to make fly today, not least because now you know better than you knew back then. To his credit - well, the thing he specifically apologized for wasn't my apology to accept, as I am exceedingly cisgendered, but I do feel he handled having that brought up about as gracefully as possible. As far as Bill goes, though...maybe you could convince me he wasn't deliberately portrayed as a gay pervert specifically, but I'm not sure there's an argument which could persuade me to buy the idea that Bill wasn't intentionally, or at least knowingly, portrayed as some form of pervert, especially in season 2 and the Journal. The first time I read the Journal, after a steady progress of growing more and more uncomfortable with the overt psychological, financial, spiritual, and physical abuse, I threw the thing at one point in Ford's first section while exclaiming, "what in the sam-hell?!" - which, for me, is the equivalent of much stronger profanity, because I usually swear like Fiddleford, if I must add any embellishments to my expressions of disapproval at all. That was how overtly rape-like I found the post-betrayal possession plotline in the Journal. Okay, so, Bill doesn't have a penis. Cool. I don't care. He's still shown (repeatedly, even) to take sadistic pleasure from robbing others of their physical agency, of reducing them to helpless objects which he can treat however he pleases. Even once he loses the ability to do this to Ford completely, he goes out of his way to overcompensate for it: when we first see the two interact in "The Last Mabelcorn," Bill introduces himself by warping Ford's dreamscape into his own image before he proceeds to box Ford in even further, surrounding him with copies of Bill's self and also getting into his personal space and touching his mental representation of himself, to Ford's obvious consternation. And then we get to Weirdmageddon, where first he turns Ford into his backscratcher, and then the next time we see them, the scene is played almost like a literal attempt at seduction - though, of course, with nasty little details like the "literally on a leash" and "the sofa is alive" bits, just to keep Ford off-balance, so that he reacts instead of thinking. It's possible that they also, to some extent, to play into the depiction of another Other category often associated with Bill, though I don't tend to personally share this view. in a...questionable way. This topic is the portrayal of mental illness as Other.

The Part Where Calli Talks About Mental Disorders, Addiction, and Fiddleford McGucket TW for, well, discussion of mental illness, addiction, and how both Fiddleford and my grandfather had those issues.

I suppose we all see the issues that touch us personally first, so let's just jump straight into it and speak of probably the first thing in Gravity Falls that made me uncomfortable. That thing was Fiddleford McGucket.

"Legend of the Gobblewonker" is a great episode, but I'll be honest: the whole bit with McGucket at the beginning of the episode made me cringe the first time I saw it, and it kinda makes me cringe whenever I rewatch it to this day. There's just not much getting around it: McGucket looks and sounds like a caricature of people from the same part of the world as me. The way the other characters regard McGucket makes me self-conscious (well, moreso than usual) about the way I sound when I talk, and I kinda want to kick Blubbs a little every time I see the episode. Or maybe even say something exceedingly unkind to him about how he's a fine one to make comments about other people's mental capacity when he's dating Deputy Durland. Not something I'd actually do, of course, because it's not Durland's fault that he is like he is, but dang, do I want to put Blubbs in his place in that scene sometimes. It then gets even less comfortable for me once I consider that McGucket is also portrayed as a caricature of people with dementia, severe mental illness, or both in that scene, and it becomes more uncomfortable because when I combine that with everything else about McGucket, it starts feeling an awful lot like the butt of the joke is someone with an uncanny resemblance to one of my real-life grandfathers. And then came the twist of the episode, and that...actually opened up a whole 'nother can of worms for me, because to me, the way McGucket acts at the end of "Gobblewonker" and during some asides in "Society of the Blind Eye" makes me think that he is, essentially, faking insanity in order to manipulate people in the "present" times of the show. And that's...not the same issue, exactly, as him being written as an insulting caricature, but it's kinda uncomfortable, too.

I will give Gravity Falls this: it does a decent job of sympathetically portraying characters who are clearly not mentally well or neurotypical all the time. Dipper and Mabel are all too familiar to those of us who grew up with unacknowledged stuff going on, and you'd have to try pretty hard to write Stan more like someone with ADHD and moderate depression, not to mention some compulsive behaviors. Ford's mental breakdown in 1981 is also played completely straight with little to no effort to inject any humor into it, even though he falls into the category of "visibly 'crazy'" toward the end of it. We know very little about Dipper and Mabel's background, but the troubled circumstances in which Soos and the Stan Twins grew up are also handled fairly realistically and sympathetically. Notably, however, while Ford acknowledges he came close to "losing [his] sanity" in the past, none of the Pines family ever acknowledges that there might be something "wrong" with them in the present - that is a label reserved for others, mainly Bill and Fiddleford, with a side of every member of the Gleeful family and a sprinkling of Pacifica to taste. This makes it a tad awkward that all of them originate as villains of one or another caliber...and yes, I did mean to include Fiddleford there. Watch "Legend of the Gobblewonker" with the assumption you've never seen anything else about the character and listen to what Fiddleford says after his robot is wrecked, and then put it together with the nature of the problem Fiddleford was trying to solve. Fiddleford wasn't just looking for attention - he was specifically trying to convince the people that there was a dangerous monster in the lake. Later in the episode, when Soos and the Mystery Twins have the bad luck to get too close, he also plays the role to the hilt, seriously endangering their lives before he's stopped by a quirk of geology. The outlines of his plan become obvious from there: if the robotic nature of the Gobblewonker hadn't been revealed, then either the stories of what happened to Soos' boat (or, in the worst-case scenario, the dead bodies of its occupants) would have seemingly confirmed Fiddleford's ravings about a dangerous beast that destroys watercraft living in the lake. At that point, Fiddleford would have gotten validation, sure...but even more importantly, fishing season, whether officially or unofficially, would have gotten cancelled as a result of his shenanigans, despite the effect this would have on the local economy, which is why I tend to think he went with the 'lake monster' strategy in the first place. It seems to me that his reasoning ran something like, “if Tate's excuse for refusing to interact is that I frighten the customers, the obvious solution is to create a situation where there are no customers in a way that can't be traced back to me.” And if someone has to take significant property damage, or even get actually hurt, to make that happen, well....

So yeah. Swap him out with someone doing absurd things for the sake of his love life instead of because of his desire to induce his son to speak to him and it's pretty classic villain behavior. This is underlined by Fiddleford's own descriptions of his other stunts: the pterodactyl-bot he built in response to his divorce was "homicidal," and his next project is apparently going to be a death ray. In the Journal entry which corresponds to the episode, Dipper is still clearly wary of him. Anyone who didn't know how the story was going to end could easily buy this episode as an indicator that Fiddleford would at least sporadically be a threat, perhaps along the lines of Gideon - who, incidentally, Fiddleford is more than happy to work with at the end of the season, even though building the Gideon-Bot would have necessarily given him some insight into Gideon's predilection for illegal mass surveillance operations. In every other appearance he makes in season one, though, Fiddleford merely acts out a parody of psychosis, with his two bouts of conflict-enablement at the beginning and end of the season merely bracketing the act; once we learn about the essential falseness of his act in "Society of the Blind Eye," the brackets become underlines that reinforce what the episode shows us retroactively. "Society of the Blind Eye" shows a man who perhaps, based on his reaction to the image of the Blind Eye, has PTSD or something similar, but except for his moment of panic after he sees the Eye in the Journal, he is clearly shown to be in full command of his faculties throughout the episode. It happens twice, in fact, in his first scene of the episode: after throwing up an almighty clamor, he stops carrying on about Lee and Nate vandalizing his home once he thinks he is out of earshot of others and mumbles that they did indeed "get [him] good." A moment later, he spots his "visitors" and then slips right back into character, yammering about his hourly arguments with his own reflection...at least until Dipper flatly tells him to drop the act, and he does. Instantly. Without hesitation. He no more thought that his reflection was some other hillbilly watching him bathe than I did. The implication in "Blind Eye" is a bit pitiable - that he pretends to be the happily deranged Ol' Man McGucket character to cover up his loneliness and lack of self-esteem - but it's still him faking insanity, which is...not good behavior, at least. He ends up being a cringy stereotype of people from my part of the world and from my social background (my father was born as poor as it sounds like Fiddleford was in a state which shares a bit of border with Tennessee), and he also seems to be someone who is exaggerating the symptoms of his mental problems the way so many of us in Diagnosis Club are often accused of doing in real life. And he comes across as a bit of a pot shot at homeless people, sometimes, too. That's...a lot of issues for one dude to have, especially given his relatively minor role in the series proper.

Of course, the dirt-poor cackling hick stereotype...I'm not partial to it, but I don't actually really hold that one against the writers too much. Southerners make fun of ourselves all the time, after all, and the line between laughing with people and laughing at them is a treacherous boundary, one which everyone probably perceives a little differently, which is why it's always more comfortable to write about your own people. The way I 'read' the Folks Who Talk Like Me - that is, Fiddleford, Bud, Gideon, and kind of Farmer Sprott, I guess - in the series makes me generally feel that the writing staff was in fact laughing at us and not with us, but since I am not Jewish or Hispanic or even a man and yet presume to write from the points of view of the Stan Twins and Soos on a regular basis, I...don't reckon I'm quite standing in a glass house, but I'm close enough to doing so that it would probably be a bad idea for me to throw around any stones no matter how careful I try to be about that sort of thing, y'know? But the "Fiddleford crazy" narrative - that one kind of bothers me.

I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago that my first impression of Fiddleford was that he's not dissimilar to what you would get if you wrote a somewhat unkind parody of my grandfather, who had severe bipolar disorder with psychotic features in his later years. To a degree, I still see Fiddleford that way even after it becomes apparent that he's not half as out of it as he pretends to be, and that's because when do we learn for sure that Fiddleford is sane, it's in the same episode that we learn about something else he has in common with my grandfather: that is, a history of addiction. They even both created the instruments of their own destruction: Fiddleford invented the memory gun which gradually eroded and scarred his brain to the point that there's a bit of an implication that he might not ever fully recover, and Pawpaw spent several decades as an alcoholic after making a decent chunk of his lifetime income bootlegging, a classic case of getting too high (or low, as the case might be) one one's own supply. In the "Blind Eye" tapes, we get the impression that Fiddleford also genuinely did descend into madness for at least a while in the year or so after the Portal Incident, and it's shown to be a direct effect not of trauma from his experiences with Ford and Bill, but of his chronic use of the memory gun. Mr. Hirsch even compares him to an alcoholic in the Interview, and while my grandfather was luckier, it's not at all surprising or unrealistic that Fiddleford's habit ends with him homeless, wifeless, friendless, cultless, and estranged from his only child. The McGuckets are as much of a tragedy as the Pines family in their own way, and you could easily write a decent neo-Southern Gothic about them alone...if, at least, you figured out what to do with Fiddleford post-breakdown a little less clumsily than the showrunners did.

There's a gap that doesn't make sense. Fiddleford in the "present day" is clearly far more rational than he was at the end of the Blind Eye tapes and is just playing up his former symptoms when he deems it useful so that he can avoid confronting his problems directly, but in the last Blind Eye tape, he was so out of it that he was speaking about Bill in tongues. What the heck happened? Is the implication that once he was kicked out of the Blind Eye, he just...automatically recovered enough to use his new reputation strategically for no reason other than lack of access to the gun, instead of seeking out other drugs? And then, when he ends up facing his demons by sheer accident at the end of the episode, he just...spontaneously finishes getting better instead of being even a little re-traumatized by the horrors floating back to the surface of his mind, or the sight of what he looked like as he fell apart back then? And then he is just effortlessly forgiven for everything by everybody? Bear in mind that he probably abandoned his son before he finished his mental collapse (it's possible that Fiddleford just stayed in Gravity Falls and started the Blind Eye because Emma-May had already initiated their divorce, but when he walked out on Ford, there's no evidence that there was anything at all preventing him from continuing to walk right on back to Palo Alto) and that it's canon that for a while, he was non-consensually wiping Ford's memory when he deemed it necessary. Since the memory gun is presented as Fiddleford's drug of choice, him secretly using it on someone else is...well, to put it extremely mildly, not cool, dude, not cool at all. And far from using the Journal to patch up this uncomfortable fact the way they tried to use the Journal patch up how equally uncool it was for Mabel to slip drugs into people's food, the writers actually used the thing to establish these events as canon shortly before having other characters begin singing Fiddleford's praises to the skies with no acknowledgment whatsoever that he, like his fellow older adult characters, is a messed up person who's done some seriously messed up stuff in his day. It also surprises me that I can't recall ever seeing a single person imply that Tate might have only "forgiven" Fiddleford in hopes of getting the money after the old man kicks the bucket. Where everyone else has a variety of fallout to their sins sooner or later, Fiddleford only pays on-screen for what he did to himself, not for how it affected other people, and the degree to which he even had to pay for that is glossed compared to what other members of the cast get. What makes him so special?

It's possible that, having played Fiddleford as nine kinds of potentially offensive stereotype throughout the series, the writers just decided to not go any further in the hopes that this would even up the tally sheet and sweep the issues with the character under the rug, so to speak. It's also possible that he and Tate are being shielded from exposure to the full fallout of the plot solely by their status as minor characters - I had to dig release-the-balrog levels of deep to construct any kind of canon-based personality for Tate for my fics, and though his role in the backstory is huge, Fiddleford's actual contributions to the story are fairly small. He doesn't even get to remember "wait, Stanford Pines is the Author, and his device leads to demon-land?!" before we find this out by other means. Redemption arcs, too, are one of the show's weaker points; this is most obvious with Gideon, who snaps out of what has appeared to be a near-delusion at the end of one speech near the very end of the show and is just readmitted into society without much comment, but the process of showing someone changing instead of just showing them changed is one the writers seemed to have struggled with a little in general. I think, though, that at least part of the reason why Fiddleford's redemption comes about a bit awkwardly is really just because of an inherent weakness of allegory: when you use a thing as a representation of something else, it's never going to fit perfectly. It will always have extra baggage and individual quirks that, once you look at it for a few minutes, start to undermine the message in some way.

Fiddleford may be genuinely mentally ill to some degree - aside from his apparent breakdown about the time he got kicked out of the Blind Eye, he's also fairly realistically portrayed in the Journal as anxious and possibly dealing with a "functionality-allowing" level of OCD - but he definitely isn't actually an alcoholic: he's a symbolic representation of an alcoholic. In "Society of the Blind Eye," Fiddleford is really just a means to an end, the vessel through which the show conveys one of the lowest-key "don't do drugs" messages ever written by showing that trying to cope with your problems by blacking them out will just make things worse for you in the long run. This fits in with how the writers intended to use Fiddleford in "Legend of the Gobblewonker," where I was supposed to come away with a message about being nice to my grandparents instead of with the impression that this man is as dangerous and unscrupulous as anyone or anything else in this town, and it fits in with the characters-as-tools approach to writing that Alex Hirsch mentions several times throughout the Interview (remember that thing? The thing I was originally talking about? Yeah...). It's obviously more successful than anything I've ever done, but my objection to that approach is that it causes the exact kind of snarls I've been talking about in this section here: when the character is a character, you play out the consequences of these things, but when the character is just a symbol for something else, you're likely going to end up with these dangling issues that create uncomfortable snarls the second you take a closer look at them. I'll continue to elaborate on this theme in my next part, where I talk about Dipper's clones and Bill and the Axolotl and other such non-human entities.

The Part Where Calli Talks About Different Approaches To Writing Aliens. No real TWs here, but there are spoilers for some of my fanfics.

I made a joke about Mr. Hirsch's comment on clone stories in my original running commentary, but it really was a line that surprised me a little. This is because it never, ever would have occurred to me that the point of a clone story could be to see their "template" in a different light. Probably this is in part just due to other fiction I'm familiar with which deals with the clone idea in a lot more depth, but I do think it is also at least in part an effect of philosophy and/or habits of character creation.

The role of habit, of the tendency we all have to write things the way we always have done without thinking about it, cannot be underestimated. I come from a play-by-post roleplaying background; until GF and the idea for For Want of a Jailbreak slammed into my life like a freight train in 2021, my game was also the context of all of the creative writing I’d done for the past twenty years. Creating a character who exists solely to play a role in someone else’s story therefore just sounds odd to me, considering I have sunk hundreds of thousands of words and the majority (a slim majority, but still) of my life to date into something where literally everyone is the main character of their own story while simultaneously playing a supporting role in two or three or seven other characters’ stories. If you recognize this format, it’s because it’s not entirely dissimilar to how the plots, such as they are, of American soap operas work. Characters may start out as just adjuncts to the plots of established cast members, but if they gain any traction at all, they’re quickly going to start developing their own storylines, just like Tracey and Quattro did after I tried to put them in FWJB Part II to create a specific conflict. They created the desired conflict, all right, but they also created fifteen others and somehow ended up being absolutely essential to the thematic unity of the piece – it doesn’t work without them, even though I never intended for them to contribute to any themes. I didn’t even intend for the series to have any themes; I had absolutely no plans to explore ideas in this fun little AU I’d cooked up. The themes just arose from the characters instead of me manipulating the characters to prove a theme.

This approach does, admittedly, have its compensations, or at least compensates for one of my greatest creative weaknesses: I suspect I would have gotten bored and/or never figured out how to end Part III if I’d had a Message in mind when I started talking. I’m not a terribly organized person, and if I try to get organized, I have so much fun making plans that I never get around to actually doing anything. My imagination also, though, to put it mildly, is rather weak in areas where Mr. Hirsch’s seems to be quite strong. This is probably no small part of why I find analyzing what he says about his writing style so interesting, really, and after doing so for a while, I think I’ve found an essential difference. It’s that he seems to generally know what he wants to say and then just says it instead of waiting to see what he ends up with, and he doesn’t spend an awful lot of time worrying about all those grey areas on the fringes that complicate the message. The first half of that sentence is a strength; the second half is...more complicated.

One of the perks of knowing what you want to say and saying it boldly, without worrying too much about all the finer shades of grey around the edges, is (or at least, I imagine it is) that it makes writing symbolically much easier for authors like Mr. Hirsch than it is for authors like me. Things are rarely symbolic in my universes; I can write you a twenty-page essay about [insert symbol] from [insert famous novel] if you give me two days and a source of pressure, but that’s because I am really good at participating in English lit classes, not because I really feel the symbolism. Symbols just aren’t what I think in – I’ll never forget reading about how zombie stories are apparently often written in times when people are anxious about immigration and that vampires represent fear of the Gay, because I’d never been more baffled in my life. It just failed to compute. If people wanted to write xenophobic and homophobic rants – or so I wondered as I read what the undead were apparently supposed to really be about – then why didn’t they just...do that, so the rest of us could avoid them and get on with wondering “but no – what if everybody at the cemetery did just pop up one night? How would we really respond to that?” A few years ago, in one of my Charlotte Bronte moods, I wrote 48 poems on post-it notes at work and then revised them all into a Mead composition book, and not one of them means anything. Half of them are descriptions of actual events, with minimal commentary. They’re poetic in form, but they aren’t really poetry because I’m not really a poet. Mr. Hirsch’s work is not (generally, though some of it is) poetic in form, but the imagination behind it is a poet’s. Therefore, he could write “Double Dipper” and use the clones to make a point without proceeding to get into all those side issues that go with the kind of clone story I’m more familiar with, such as personhood and legal rights and all that kinda stuff. The clones to Mr. Hirsch are symbolic representations of introspection, not characters; it’s debatable, really, the degree to which anyone in Gravity Falls should be considered a true character outside of the Pines family, because even though the show uses the town’s name as its title, it isn’t actually about the town of Gravity Falls: everything else in the setting exists solely to tell the one family’s story, and that’s that. It's tidy and compact, like a poem.

I, as established, am more of a “spend ten years cross-hatching tiny different areas with subtly different pencil points to create a greyscale drawing” person (metaphorically – I like metaphors much better than symbols), but I have to admit – there is something attractive about the idea of drawing in broad, bold lines like that. Attractive and a little frightening. Part of the reason it’s frightening is because, of course, overlooking those details means someone is going to get angry with you sooner or later. Unfortunately, that's also part of the reason why it has a certain appeal. It's when you write like that, after all, saying things without fifteen qualifying statements tacked on at the end or a lot of deep dives into the minds of the characters, that you create room for audience engagement and therefore create an intellectual property that can, in theory, outlive its first audience and attain a lasting degree of success.

Some years ago, I formed a theory about the Harry Potter books, and so far, nothing I’ve come across has contradicted it. That theory is that the series owes part of its success to its “dormitories based on personality” system and the way that encourages people to identify with “their” House, and that it owes most of the rest of its success to the ways in which it betrays its own ideals. From a very early point in the fandom, after all, there was a certain...tension over the places where the series said one thing but seemed to practice another one, to greater or lesser degrees. The books knock us about the head with the idea that individual choice is destiny, but sons always look uncannily like their fathers, somehow. I could write a whole essay about ways Book 7 takes every issue the series ever had, magnifies it, covers it in high-wattage lights, and then...just walks off, apparently having never noticed there was a problem at all, much less that the problem had just got worse. These contradictions grew sharper and sharper as the series went on, to the point where eventually, it became clear there was a real issue in the foundations of that IP rather than just a failure to think about the full implications of a few things, but I suspect there is something universal about successful properties in the broader idea, because all things which bold-strokes authors seem to never, or at least only minimally, think of and which people like me can’t stop thinking of? Those things make up the boundaries which define the spaces where fandoms grow. There’s a lot of books I’ve loved passionately in my life, but only a very few I’ve written about outside of school. The balance of good points and unpalatable implications cannot be anything other than precarious anywhere it occurs, but it’s on that razor’s edge that a certain kind of personality feels compelled to explore the areas that cause discomfort instead of doing what I did with, say, Divergent, which was “loudly express my displeasure to anyone who would listen after getting halfway through the second book before my distaste for the main character became so overwhelming that I couldn’t finish it.” I don’t think that Gravity Falls’ issues are as deep-rooted and insidious as the ones in Harry Potter, but there’s some issues just the same, and...well, here I am, aren’t I? How many words have I written about this one interview so far? The document I’m typing this in is using Times New Roman size 12 font and very narrow gaps between the lines, and these words are about halfway down the tenth page. I’ve written three reasonably competent novels set in this universe and a handful of short stories I wouldn’t be embarrassed to produce in an undergraduate fiction-writing class and also some fairly well-received canon essays. And in July I reckon Disney is, indeed, going to part me from yet more of my money, even though it’s a book about Bill when “Bill dies” is one of my very favorite moments in the whole series because I hate him. I also consider him one of the problematic issues of the franchise for – believe it or not – even more reasons than the ones I’ve already discussed in the first two body sections of this document, though he could be the ultimate expression of those as well.

I already discussed in part I why I find some aspects of his portrayal uncomfortable as far as it comes to sexuality, so I’ll not repeat that. As for part II, the reason I don’t take any particular offense to him on the mental health angle is that I don’t personally regard Bill as a depiction of a mentally ill character. He says he’s insane, but Bill says a lot of things and even the most honest of them are no more than half-truths. Bill cheerfully classifies himself as "insane," but like Fiddleford, he isn't, at least not by any definition of the term which is precise enough to be useful. Bill's behavior can come across like a bad dose of anti-social personality disorder with narcissistic and histrionic features, which is quite an unfortunate combination to have when he also is a sadist, but he knows right from wrong, as he proves by how quickly he goes from gloating to groveling once he’s trapped inside Stan's mind. He may not understand exactly why it works or how it would feel to have someone do it to him, but he understands perfectly well that he’s putting the emotional thumbscrews to Stan and Ford by attacking Dipper and Mabel, and he understands just as well that they are not in any mood to play games after they turn the tables on him. He also betrays a clear consciousness of guilt in the scene where Time Baby raids the Fearamid and he acts like a teenager who just had the cops called on his noisy party full of underaged drinking. He is not at all confused about why Time Baby and company want to rain on his parade or under any impressions that appear to be out of touch with reality. When he does things like present Dipper with a screaming head that he treats like a gift, I truly don't believe he's so "lol crazy," or even so alien that he doesn't understand that nobody would want that thing; I believe he does things like conjuring the head and the living sofa and whatnot because he understands humans and therefore knows they will disturb his victims, who will therefore be off-balance and who will therefore continue to react instead of think. This keeps them right where Bill wants them, in positions where he has the maximum advantage before he offers a deal. This is controlled, well-reasoned behavior, not the result of a lack of comprehension of what a human boy in the 21st century finds desirable or of what Ford might consider appealing interior design. Here’s the part where I get around to those aliens I mentioned in the section title, because while I can’t fathom liking him, I do think I would have loathed him less it if he had been a little more alien. As it is, though, he ends up compacting everything I dislike about humanity into one geometric figure and not, to my mind, doing much else.

While a character like Bill has to have a good grasp of human psychology and an ability to imitate it in order to manipulate his victims, one of my issues with Bill is how I never really got the sense of how Other he is. We’re told that he’s Other in ways that aren’t just versions of villain stereotypes, but we’re not really (in my opinion, mind you) shown it. From even the limited amounts we know about Bill and the GF Multiverse, we can deduce logically that he probably does have incomprehensible numbers of plans going at once, and that he can somehow process them all at the same time when even the slightest attempt to do the same would probably drive one of us to madness or force our heads to collapse into black holes, but emotionally, I don't ever feel it, and so it’s relegated to something Alex has to remind us of, because Bill ended up too human for the thought to flow naturally, somehow. Hopefully we'll get some good dirt in July, but for now, Bill is an alien, but he doesn’t quite feel like one. He doesn’t feel like something with answers, like something above us, like something older than the galaxy. He feels more like a human being than some of the actual human beings do. He feels like...well...to quote Ford, “the scam artist he is.”

To be clear, though, I’m not bashing the writers here: for one thing, writing alien intelligences without stumbling into insulting some category of people by pure accident is hard. Most writers are human, and the less like you something is, the harder it is to imagine the world from that entity’s point of view. For another thing, too - no matter what else Bill is, he's also one of the most effective representatives of evil I’ve seen in fiction in a very long time, and since he is a central villain in a high-stakes story, that means he succeeded in the most important part of what he was there to do. The writers had the guts to follow through with making him a virtual singularity of unpleasant traits without softening him up around the edges along the way or even giving him the excuse of an alien's incomprehension of why what he is doing is bad, and they had the skill to write him as pure, unabashed evil in a way that nevertheless acknowledges how complicated people’s motives for dabbling in the Dark Arts can be. He is a symbol even I can work with: I find it believable that he could get a lot of people to do the wrong thing for the right reason, because his alienness just makes him generalizable, a sort of talking abstract concept, like a sentient but bodiless force of evil that looks a little different to everyone who looks at it. Most people who do evil things, after all, are not born declaiming the “now, gods, stand up for bastards!” speech from King Lear: there’s something we can, with a greater or lesser degrees of effort, understand about many people's reasons for stepping onto the slippery slope even if we still firmly denounce the act of taking that step. Bill also seems to start small, at least on the surface, in what he asks of his marks, so that it feels like: oh, surely I can be just a little selfish just this once, and it won’t hurt anyone, and probably no-one will ever even find out about it – that’s the routine he runs on Dipper in “Sock Opera.” Or he uses those groomer traits of his to slowly skew your view on normality and/or morality, so that perhaps you’re Ford, and view stealing nuclear waste as a “public service” after he whispers in your ear for long enough. I can understand how he managed to get by so long before he resorted to the inelegant tactic of using people's family members as hostages to get his way; although evil and unappealing in himself, he has the skills to present what looks like an appealing deal to others a lot of the time. It's a sign of an intellectual maturity in the show's composition that we see Bill, most of the time, as less of the mad god and more of the guy you don't want to do business with, really, but who you know you might well end up needing to do business with - as the manifestation of all the little compromises everyone makes, which for some ultimately spiral out of control. And while he is annoying, even that can work in his favor under the right circumstances, because he’s the kind of annoying that makes at least some people (ie, me) want to put him in his place. I think I’m sensible enough to realize I couldn’t really outsmart him, but I dang sure would want to try. He can get an emotional reaction from anyone, and generally the one he wants at that. He’s a brilliant creation, really, and an accomplishment for a creator to be proud of regardless of whatever else he is.

The Part Where Calli Tries To Draw Some Conclusions

In the beginning, five tries to get this far ago, I had no idea what, if any, coherent point I might end up with. I didn’t even really expect to end up with one. I just had reactions to what I read in the transcript, and I knew that if I wrote about them, I’d get a clearer idea why I was reacting and maybe some new insights into something I love, ie, the show. I was not looking to write an essay about how Gravity Falls is Problematic in its portrayal of the Other, and I was not looking to write an essay to defend it from such charges. I was just writing to figure out what exactly it was I thought about the issue. Now, here at the end, here’s what I think I’ve written:

1. There are some ways in which some of the depiction of Otherness in Gravity Falls are indeed potentially problematic. 2. These issues are not, on the whole, crit fails. Every work has its flaws, and, as usual, the ones left in GF just highlight the excellence of the rest of the final product even more. 3. Commercially successful writers and fan writers may, in part, be distinguished by the approaches taken to character selection and usage; we're also symbiotic organisms, where we get improved quality of life and they get fans who stick around and spend money for a really long time. 4. I...may have figured out how to get rich? Pretty sure I can't use it, but I think it just might work for someone with the skills. Let me know if you're the one who pulls it off, somewhere out there.

There's a lot more I could have said here - and, in fact, a lot more I did say in one draft or another. Sometimes I ended up cutting passages when I got to the end of them and realized I no longer agreed with my original premise, and sometimes I gave up on a point as so convoluted that it would have made it difficult to get back to the main point afterward. In several places, there's ideas that feel important, but I can't quite pull them out of the air yet. But here's where I think I'm going to wrap this one up for now.

#gravity falls #gravity falls characters #gravity falls analysis #ford pines #fiddleford mcgucket #bill cipher #writing #writer problems #tw: mental health #tw: abuse #tw addiction #essay #gravity falls essays #essays #my essays #somehow turned a TV show into a poem I guess?#also I just realized I don't fundamentally understand symbolism and now my whole life is a lie #but it's cool

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