#i don't know if i'm getting my point across. interpret however you want but i feel like some people dont realize | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bambi-kinos · 9 months ago

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I just came across your analysis of However Absurd and thought it was lovely. I'm curious, as someone who thinks John and Paul had some kind of romantic or sexual relationship, what is your take on The Lovers That Never Were? Is he using the word "lovers" to mean "partners"? I have always interpreted it to mean that Paul knows there was something there but it never happened. Every time I start to be convinced that they were together in some way I think of this song and the devastating way Paul sings it in the demo and the heartbreaking fact that he still felt it that intensely 13 years after John's death.

Oh wow thank you! The server had a lot of fun discussing that, if it's good it's because I had a little help from my friends heheh (─‿‿─) ♡

I ended up writing a massive novel in response to all this so I hope you enjoy reading it heheh. For server members, I've pulled some quotes from my previous Discord essays on this topic so you'll see some stuff that you've read.

tl;dr - I don't think "The Lovers That Never Were" contradicts the secret relationship theory at all! I think it compliments it very well actually.

In order to get into All That, I will outline how I perceive what their relationship was built on and how they reacted to it. I should note that I don't consider this definitive. It's important to remember that we all have unique interpretations of John and Paul because of our experiences and our personal POVs. There is no single answer until Paul decides to tell us what happened and/or Sean publishes John's diaries (written and audio). Until that happens, we are all forced to look at the same material and draw our own conclusions which will naturally be shaped through our personal perceptions. Some of us are older and are much closer to the original culture that John and Paul were raised in; some of us are younger and grew up in a much more LGBT+ positive environment. This naturally has an impact on how we interpret John and Paul's relationship.

I say this because I know my POV on John and Paul is a bit different from everyone else's. I'm a historian by training but part of being a historian is the understanding that you will never fully understand the events as they happened because your personal viewpoint and inherent bias is simply too strong. But that's okay because this is a part of humanity that we all share, yeah? With that understanding LET'S GO!

Paul My view on Paul is that he's always understood that he's different from other men. I doubt he could put a name to it until very recently. Paul has synesthesia, he's bisexual, he connects to music in a savant-like way, he's neurodivergent which is why he takes criticism so hard, and all of that would still be true even if he didn't have left over emotional issues from his mother dying the way she did + his fraught relationship with his father.

Keep in mind that circumstantial evidence points to the idea that Paul orchestrated the meeting at the fête! He realized he had a mutual friend with John in Ivan (who is to say that he did not meet Ivan at a QM performance and had that mental realization there?) He went through Hot Girl Summer before and after the fête, wanting to be fucking fit so that he wasn't embarrassed to meet John! I did the same thing when I had a crush as a teenager!

So with all that in mind, imagine this: you're Paul McCartney. You met John Lennon barely a year after Mary died. You turned 15 on June 18th, 1957 and met John at the fête on July 6, 1957. At some undetermined point before this garden party you saw a beautiful boy on the bus and began riding it obsessively hoping the Teddie boy would get on it. You followed him to the chippie and stood in line behind him…allegedly because you thought "oh wow he looks so cool." Marky Mark thinks (and I agree) that you may have even followed John to at least one Quarry Man show before the fête. Is this 'normal' behavior? Or is this the unhinged behavior of a teenager with a massive crush? The kind that comes about when you see a cute boy with red hair, and red is the color you associate with happiness, and then you find out that he plays guitar just like you and you follow him around until you see one of his performances and he's so good he knocks you back and then someone says "hi Paul, I didn't know you liked music!" behind you. And you realize that it's your friend and that you can meet the boy you have a crush on through this friend. You just need to lose weight and grow your hair out first.

When did Paul first see John, anyway? Before he turned 15 I'd wager.

I submit the idea that Paul has been in love John Lennon for his entire life. It will be 67 years of love when this July 6th rolls around. John was making a name for himself, he was known around town as "that Lennon." A minor celebrity like we’ve all had in our hometowns. Paul loved music. Before the internet you would go to the town square to hear a band.

Paul did that. Saw John. Pursued him with intent. When John went to Gambier Terrace to be with Stuart, Paul made a nuisance of himself showing up at their parties and playing the proto-version of "Michelle" in front of the girls…and John.

I love you, I love you, I love you That's all I want to say Until I find a way I will say the only words I know that You'll understand

I don't think that a 15 year old Paul McCartney would explicitly label his feelings for John as 'love' or a 'crush' but I do think that's what happened. When you're a teenager, a crush can express itself in many different ways. I used to have a big crush on a girl who was a volleyball player at my junior high school…that expressed itself as intense admiration. I even told one of my friends that I thought she was 'really cool.' It wasn't until later that I realized that I had a crush on her.

But I think that Paul has always known that he's 'different' and that he wasn't like other boys while growing up. Part of his touchiness about his looks comes from being bullied but I also think that he's a lot more self aware than he pretends to be. I think he realized relatively fast how he felt about John (maybe once John picked up with Stuart and Cynthia at art college.) I think he carried that with him for years hence his anguished response to being jilted in Hamburg and how furious he was at John for running off to Spain with Brian. He didn't realize it immediately but once it sticks to you then it fucking sticks. I think that Paul has done a lot internal wrestling with being a bisexual man and what that means for him and that he has been wrestling with it for decades. I think he was fully in the grip of that wrestling as he and John's friendship began growing and Paul realized what was happening to him. He does enjoy women but I also think that he felt it was necessary to pursue them heavily as a young man to camouflage himself.

I don't think a day has gone by since 1957 where Paul has not known what he was. What exactly that means for him…is up for interpretation. That's where the gray area is. But IMO Paul has almost always known that he's sexually attracted to other men and that John woke this in him. The big question for Paul is what he should do about it.

John There's been a lot written about John and his sexuality that I won't rehash here but truthfully I think John was in a similar place to Paul in knowing that he's always had a sexual preference for other men. John was a lot less comfortable about it though. Having unprotected sex with his girlfriends was, IMO, John trying to subconsciously engineer a situation that would "fix" him via an accidental pregnancy necessitating a marriage.

Of course that didn't do anything because it never does. John still felt chemistry with Paul when they met at the fête, with that quote about them "circling each other like cats." IMO John felt something immediately -- it's not entirely clear what -- though I don't think it "love at first sight" like with Paul. IMO their friendship, while still rooted in that chemistry, developed very naturally for John and he got to enjoy a platonic relationship with Paul before he put it all together. I say this because John saw Paul as a kid, not a peer, and that this endured for their lives in Liverpool pre-Hamburg. I struggle to imagine John or Paul deliberately inciting sexual or romantic contact during that time period aside from the group wank sessions (which were really trolling sessions from John.) Like, when Julia died, John went out and sought peers at art college like Cynthia and Stuart, other students his age. John and Paul bonded over losing their mothers and Paul has that quote about pranking people with the "oh yeah…my mum's dead thanks <3" bit but it also seems like John didn't want to be around that all the time. He lost his Uncle George and then his mother, he was starting to think that he was a death-curse on men in his family and that he brought suffering with him. He wanted to be away from that so he took a vacation from music to get a chance of scenery. Which meant putting Paul in a place of competition with Stuart and Cyn but I don't think John was thinking of that initially (though he exploited the situation later.)

Then Hamburg happens and they run wild. I have an entire meta about this that you can read here but I genuinely think John did not see Paul as a full fledged adult and potential sexual partner until they were in Hamburg in the red light district. I think that something happened there that we don't know about, that it's tied up in Stuart deciding to be with Astrid, John jilting Paul, Paul saying "fuck you I'm done" and getting a job at the coil winding factory in Liverpool after being deported, John tracking Paul down and spending weeks (probably) groveling and then giving Paul an ultimatum to come back to the Beatles. All of that screams 'I just realized I'm in love with my best friend and I'm freaking the fuck out' to me lmao.

John and Paul Of course something else changed after that too and John and Paul ended up becoming so close that even the Liverpool squares around them noticed. I think that whatever was going in their relationship, it started here. In the place where John and Paul were equally distraught with each other, the future of the band was uncertain, and Paul wanted a sign of commitment from John so that he didn't feel like he wasted years of his life. And of course John always felt compelled to be the man Paul wanted him to be so he treated Paul to a vacation in Paris which was so life affirming for them that it stayed with them for the rest of their lives. IMO the Paris vacation was explicitly romantic for them.

I think a switch flipped in 1961 and they went from "messing around" to "there's something there." It erupted in Paris and they showed each other more understanding and care then they expected from each other. John did sexy pin up poses for Paul in a bed that they shared; John remembers how the French held each other in their arms and just kissed each other, lovingly; Paul felt that he discovered the answer and that all those big name philosophers had nothing on the self realization he came to inside himself. Paul even took a photo of John that high lighted his package! Thanks to @louiselux for pointing this one out:

The thing was all the kissing and the holding that was going on in Paris. And it was so romantic, just to be there and see them, even though I was twenty-one and sort of not romantic. But I really loved it, the way the people would just stand under a tree kissing; and they weren’t mauling at each other, they were just kissing. — John Lennon, Playboy interview 1980

“We were like Paris existentialists. Jean-Paul Sartre had nothing on us. Sod ‘em all - I could write a novel… It was all inside me. I could do anything now.”

Paul McCartney, Anthology

Something happened in Paris and it wasn't just them getting haircuts and John buying Paul milkshakes. There was commitment there. And then the spell comes over them again when they return in January 1964:

The first night, John and Paul stayed in their suite, listening to records and reading fan mail. George, who had been signed for 100 pounds a day by the Daily Express to write of his experiences in Paris, went to a nightclub in the Place Pigalle.

Back in the City of Light, John and Paul slept till three o'clock in the afternoon. That much everybody agreed on.

Quote by Vincent Mulchrone from Daily Mail: George Harrison was astir early, but John Lennon and Paul McCartney slumbered on until frantic photographers forced them at lens point into the Champs-Élysées.

Derek Taylor (a British journalist) wanted to know why the Beatles slept so much. "My office wants to know what they're doing in Paris, so they'd better be doing something."

Love Me Do by Michael Braun

But I know what you're thinking. "What the hell does this all have to do with these two songs?"

And my reply is to keep a few things in mind:

Paul takes criticism and slights incredibly hard, possibly overreacting in some places and letting them overwhelm him mentally.

He never got over Barcelona, he never stopped resenting Stuart and Brian, he never got over John pulling the rug out from under him regarding the order of their names in the song credits. He contemplated committing suicide by smothering himself while he was in Scotland recovering from John leaving him.

John Lennon had a baby with a woman in the middle of all this. Julian Lennon was born April 8, 1963, conceived in July 1962, less than a year after Paris.

However Absurd & The Lovers That Never Were I listened to "However Absurd" and "The Lovers That Never Were" in that order. My immediate reaction is that these are both the same kind of song: they are both expressing sadness and frustration with John. This is a common theme with Paul's post-1980 John songs. What I find interesting is that they depict different though related gripes regarding John. In "However Absurd" Paul is expressing his longing for a cottagecore fantasy romance with John and then expressing frustration at John mocking him for it:

Ears twitch, like a dog Breaking eggs in a dish Do not mock me when I say This is not a lie

But in "The Lovers That Never Were" Paul expresses a different gripe: frustration that John won't commit to him and "anticipating" the break up that he secretly knew was coming ever since 1963 when John abandoned him and his own son to play patty-cake with Brian in Spain:

I hang patiently on every word you send Will we ever be much more than just friends? As for you, you sit there playing this game You keep me waiting

When all of the clocks have run down All over the world We'll be the lovers that never were

For as long as the sun shines in somebody's eyes I believe in you baby, so don't tell me lies For as long as the trees throw down blossoms and leaves I know there will be a parade of unpainted dreams

And I know dear, how much it's going to hurt If you still refuse to get your hands dirty So you, you must tell me something… I love you Say goodbye or anything

All of the clocks have run down Time's at an end If we can't be lovers we'll never be friends

John's penchant for disregarding Paul's feelings and even weaponizing them against Paul; the dashing of Paul's cottagecore dreams that were made and solidified in Paris; the fact that John, no matter what his intentions, could not get his shit together and commit to Paul no matter what he may have felt. These two songs are not contradictory to one another. Paul's idea of "commitment" looks very much like what he had with Linda and John in 1967: sharing a home, sharing a bed, being together every day, preferably somewhere green and remote. Exclusivity. Remember that Paul deliberately sabotaged his relationship with Jane Asher by nailing a woman in their bed when Jane came home, knowing perfectly well that he was breaking their exclusivity agreement.

That IMO, is what makes someone a lover and not just a friend you have sex with and secretly pine for. No cheating, or at least your agreed version of it. No disrespecting the relationship. Continuously being together. What did John do instead of this?

I think that Paul started out his "relationship" with John carrying high hopes and then watched them crumble to dust, over and over, because John simply did not take him seriously. He got Cynthia pregnant, he ran around on Paul with Brian, he had the nerve to flip out on Jane Asher when Paul brought her around when he was the one who couldn't stay faithful to Cynthia.

My hot take is that these songs demonstrate that Paul simply could not imagine John ever truly committing to him and treating him as a true partner. The homophobia and yes ~society~ is in there too but Paul was happy to flout this when it came to just about anyone else, traipsing all over France with Fraser and Mal. The difference is that he flat out didn't trust John. Being jilted for Stuart in Hamburg loomed too big in his head. Cynthia and Julian loomed too big in his head. Brian and Barcelona, realizing that John would happily betray whatever agreements or understandings he had with Paul simply to screw Paul out of a deal, loomed too big in his head. I think in particular its Barcelona that made Paul think John didn't value any of their professed ideals. John broke Paul's heart years before Yoko came along.

He didn't trust John. Fatalism is easier than taking control of your own life sometimes, and in Paul's mind there was no reason to believe John was genuine. Like, Paul knew John very well! He had very good reason to think that John was simply not serious about him. And John, no matter what his intentions were, proved that correct over and over and over and over.

So ultimately, I think that's what these songs are about. The melodies don't necessarily reflect this when I listened to them but I think that "The Lovers That Never Were" in particular is juxtaposing bitter wink-and-nod lyrics with an oddly perky tune. It's Paul laughing at himself for ever thinking John was willing to commit. He's mocking himself because while he allowed himself to get swept up in the dream of a possible genuine relationship with John, he knew deep down that it would go the way it did. That John would find a reason to get tired of him and abandon him. And then when Yoko came along, that's exactly what John did. Paul fatalistically accepted that the time had come and John met Paul's low expectations of him.

The Weight I don't think John and Paul necessarily planned to have a secret relationship. It seems more like they bundled the sexual/romantic stuff into their "thing" where it was just part and parcel of who they were and what they did. "It's only gay if the balls touch" etc. At some point that changed but Paul became convinced early on that it wouldn't work out so he didn't acknowledge his own secret desires and dreams. There was no roadmap between him and John about where they were taking this exactly and how they were going to make it work. He had sex with John and even engaged with romantic actions with John, hoping against hope that something would change and he would be proven wrong, but then John would be careless and Paul would collapse into hurt.

And oh yeah: Paul never, ever discussed any of this with John Lennon. He never told John how hurt he was because he didn't want to put up with John's derision. He felt devalued and lost and in typical Paul fashion he chose to ignore this for years and never bring it up, forcing it to come out in bizarre nonsensical actions when he inevitably boiled over. Why would he choose to confront it? He made sure to set up several safety nets to catch him! Jane and the Ashers, striking out on his own with "The Family Way" score, rubbing John's face in his escapades with other males as a way to go 'see, I don't need you just like you don't need me. How about THAT?'

I don't think John ever intended to hurt Paul as badly as he did. He thought that if Paul was upset about something then he would know via their ~telepathic connection.~ I think that he deliberately overlooked warning signs because he felt intensely guilty about certain actions he took (God only knows which ones) and that he helped himself not see Paul's hurt. I do think if he had the slightest idea of what was going on in Paul's head then he would have changed tactics immediately out of fear of losing Paul forever. But at heart John was a coward and if he didn't want to see something was wrong then he wouldn't see it unless something forced his hand. Like say, having his former best friend/ex-lover look him in the eye and go "I can write new songs" and kill The Beatles in a court of law. (And of course once he realized what he had done, years after the fact, it was too little too late. He couldn't take it back. How do you make up for inflicting that much hurt on someone that you supposedly care for? This paralyzed John for years.)

This was obviously a huge mistake and I think it was one of the landmines that blew their relationship up. Paul allowed his distrust and bitterness to overwhelm him. He should have been honest with John about his feelings; maybe not immediately but when they were able to look back with some perspective. Paul should have realized that their relationship could take heat. He should have trusted John more and if he had then John could have risen to the occasion. Everything could have been different. No more "I believe in you baby, so don't tell me lies." No more "Do not mock me when I say/This is not a lie."

He even expresses this in a third song, one that IMO puts this entire thing into perspective and ties these three songs together with a neat bow. "This One":

youtube

Did I ever take you in my arms, look you in the eye Tell you that 'I do?' Did I ever open up my heart And let you look inside?…

Did I ever touch you on the cheek Say that you were mine, thank you for the smile? Did I ever knock upon your door Try to get inside?…

Please take note of the bolded "Tell you that 'I do'!" Paul's deepest regret with regards to John is not trusting him more. He wishes that he had opened up to John about his hurt and how he angry he was that John was devaluing their relationship. That he wanted to commit to John but that he was scared John wouldn't say 'I do' back.

From John's POV he's just being John; he's looking out for the band. God knows he tried to be what Paul needed him to be but he got mixed signals and inconsistent behavior and Paul's ice queen behavior frustrated him to no end. This resulted in an endless circle of "fuck you/no no no, fuck YOU/well fuck you then!/fuck you" that ended up killing what they had.

But John is guilty in this too. He never made himself accountable to Paul. He didn't explain his actions. He acted rashly and selfishly and then was shocked when it blew up in his face. He didn't consistently act like he loved Paul. He took Paul for granted and told himself that he was doing the right thing, because changing your behavior is very very hard. He didn't let Paul in when it mattered.

Did you ever take me in your arms Look me in the eye, tell me that 'you do?'

As Paul grew up and he started to come to grips with the "What happened" of it all, maybe he realized that he had procrastinated. That he put off what mattered most because he couldn't bear to make himself vulnerable as a young man. Maybe he was waiting for a perfect moment to open himself up to John knowing perfectly well it would never arrive, a common delaying tactic for insecure and avoidant people. Not admitting that the perfect moment would never come and that he had to extend trust to receive it in return.

If I never did it, I was only waiting For a better moment that didn't come There never could be a better moment Than this one, this one

I think he's still angry at John for multiple betrayals, slaps to the face, and devaluing the specialness of their relationship and their affection for each other. But I also think that Paul is angry at himself for not trusting John, for not working harder at their relationship. He also delivered multiple betrayals and slaps to the face to John, feeding John's insecurity and fears of abandonment. Making a mockery of their relationship and how special it was. Paul has been doing public penance for this ever since John died, which snapped everything into perspective and he finally realized the full scope of his own screw ups.

Because it took two to destroy a relationship this intense and this special. If Paul did not know that before...

Well. He does now.

#the beatles #mclennon #john lennon #paul mccartney #mclennon meta #my meta #mclennon server #this was a really fun ask anon thank you!

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thegreatcaptainusopp · 10 months ago

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ive seen you talk about usopp's dream a lot, and i agree with a lot of your points (basically all of them lol) except for one: the part where you say he's already achieved his goal and simply needs to realize it.

ive always seen usopp's goal as being similar to zoro's, in the aspect that neither of them will be satisfied until they themselves can determine that they've achieved their dreams.

for zoro, he'll be able to say that he's achieved his dream once he, as stated before, has beaten mihawk in a fight (and also helps luffy become king of the pirates, if i've read it correctly).

and for usopp, despite it being a lot more vague, he also has a self-determined goal like zoro. "become a brave warrior of the sea". i personally don't think its simply a matter of him realizing he's already one, but another matter of him only being satisfied once he thinks he's done enough to warrant the title- just like zoro will only be satisfied once he thinks he's done enough to warrant the title of "greatest swordsman in the world".

ah, but these things are pretty up to interpretation, right? i'm not here to say you're wrong or something, hopefully it doesn't come across that way! i just think it's interesting how similar usopp and zoro's dreams are, i wanted to share. :]

Hi! I really like the connections you’ve made here between Zoro and Usopp’s dreams, and I do agree they share a lot of similarities. I think they’re the only two besides Luffy whose dream is to achieve a specific title (king of the pirates, world’s greatest swordsman, brave warrior of the sea). Unlike Luffy, however, Zoro and Usopp’s dreams don’t have a commonly agreed upon path to reaching that title (for Luffy, it’s finding the one piece). You’re totally correct in that both Zoro and Usopp have defined their own terms of when that title as finally been achieved, and they’re the only ones who can basically say that the dream has been achieved.

However, I think there is a very specific difference here, and it’s one that led me to say that Usopp has already achieved his goal while Zoro has not. And this difference is this: Zoro has already defined the specific action he needs to do in order to achieve his dream, while Usopp has not. Therefore, we can see that Zoro has not achieved his dream yet by his own terms, while Usopp, as his terms are yet undefined, may be able to claim that his dream is completed.

Zoro has made it clear from the start how he intends to claim that he is the best swordsman in the world, and that is to defeat the current best. He has indicated that the current best is Mihawk, therefore, he wants to beat him in combat in order to achieve his dream. He’s expressed that specific goal, even promising Luffy that he would engage in this specific duel in order to get to the title. It’s completely self inflicted: he could potentially already claim that he’s the best swordsman in three sword style, for example. But for Zoro it doesn’t work that way because he won’t think he’s achieved his dream until he completes the specific action he wanted (like you said in your ask).

Usopp, on the other hand, has very much not done that. We don’t have a specific action that he needs to complete in order to achieve that title, and as far as I know he hadn’t indicated anything specific that will demonstrate that he’s finally achieved his dream. So in my opinion, as he hasn’t expressed what exactly will make the goal completed, we can claim that it’s already been reached. At the end of the day, like you said, he’s the only one that can declare he’s achieved this title, but I think if he stepped back and took stock of what he’s done up to this point, he may be able to declare it achieved based on all the brave things he’s already done.

I think another element of this is that Usopp is a special case because of his insecurities. Part of the journey that he takes emotionally through the series is confronting his self hatred and realizing that he is enough as himself, that he is already a warrior and can accept himself as he is. In my opinion, realizing that he’s been the brave warrior he wanted to be all along would complete this journey and allow him to overcome those insecurities. Zoro doesn’t have the same emotional journey here to go through, and therefore doesn’t need to have that specific realization.

This is a really interesting conversation, thanks for prompting this train of thought!

#one piece #op #usopp #roronoa zoro #monkey d luffy #speaks #op meta #one piece meta

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t4tpumpkinduo · 5 months ago

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OK not to be guy who's once again annoying abt lore and fanon misinterpretations but. ok v mild nsfw warning under the cut. it's just a critique of a very popular fanon ctnt dynamic that pisses me oawf so bad and i don't want to be misinterpreted in the process of critiquing it. ok.

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y'know how i always complain abt like...how cq is v susceptible to being reduced to a "hot dom role" so much?

the thing is. i actually do think he is largely a top. a lot of his character straight up lines up w it. he's a pouncer, he's eager to please, he likes indulging his partners that's just like. true. that's not the probble, however. 🤚 it's how it's being talked about, WHO it's being done by, and WHY. things of that nature.

first off, cq isn't like. a violent guy in the specific way fanon tends to portray him as.

the thing is. he's Ruthless. he's more than willing to take drastic measure, but outside of those situations, it's mostly just mc mechanics? he swats people playfully, he chases people w axes, but none of it is ever treated in any kind of different way, and especially not in a way unique to him. many, if not most, other characters do this as well, to him, to eachother. everyone on the dsmp is kind of annoying, and most enjoy a little minecraft coded rough housing, but to code it a certain way, towards THIS character, especially in lnv where he's explicitly trying to come across as more perfessional, and therefore ditching most of that rough housing and the inherent playfulness that it holds...

if you turn this specifically brown character into a domineering hair trigger physically violent freak at the expense of explicitly shown and stated character traits of his... all in service of sm white guy getting off about it.... do you like get what i'm saying....

another point i must mention: the fundimental misunderstanding sm ppl have abt las nevadas in the first place.

q is like 😭. not having a good time there. las nevadas in the first place, while objectively a labor of love, was also a gesture of desperation, same with him getting engaged to karlnap as quickly as he did. he wants to settle down w them as soon as possible so they won't leave him. that's what it is.👍 and then he gets left behind anyways. and with the compounding of everything, the gesture turns into a grave like immediately. it's shitty, it's bad, cq explicitly starts recreating the actions of actual shitheads (ctech cdrm), and ppl who warped his pov, even if unintentionally (cwilb cschlatt), because he doesn't know what else to do with himself. that's the reality.

but he also doesn't like doing it. 👍 that's the reality too, that's the wholeee. fucking point. he doesn't LIKE torturing dream, he doesn't LIKE manipulating people to the extent he does, he doesn't LIKE being alone and isolated. and while there are parts where he does find a twisted senses of catharsis about things sometimes, being the wielder for once instead of the guy being attacked like. it's still cornered prey animal trying to kill you swag. and the reason he's even be able to be pushed that far in the first place. is because he wants to and is actively planning on killing himself. legacy this, i won't be around long anyways. she sunk on my cost, this is all i have left to try, what's one more repulsive thing. my final stand.

so to then frame all this as like. actually super hot and super cool and. uuwgrurgrurgrueuURGRURYRGH. ok. hold on.

to make it abundantly clear: I DO NOT THINK CSCHLATT IS AN ABUSER. 👍 i never will. he narratively is not. he's an asshole, sure, and makes some terrible mistakes but. it's very very much not some unique evil. everyone on this server is an asshole. he wasn't an abuser to the cabinet, and especially not to cquackity.

i think to interpret this addict character, who has over and over shown to be sympathetic and more complex that ppl want to engage with, is still liked and vitally important to sm other characters, doesn't lay his hands on ppl in any way different than others do, as being a behind the scenes violent disgusting freak abuser is reductive and shitty and. bad. (and ableist. but yk.)

and even if somehow you want to interpret him as something else, despite the everything in the show telling you it's not true, you don't get to then turn around and make hypocritical handwavey arguments for cwilb when he and cschlatt are the exact same. they are direct narrative parallels, unignorably so. the pit = the festival. they're both deeply paranoid, deeply suicidal people who were genuinely psychotic for most of their worse actions, and if you can understand that cwilb doesn't deserve condemnation bcs of being put in a shitty situation and lashing out about it then you can very easily understand the same for cschlatt. 👍

i bring both of these points up to make my next point even clearer. cschlatt is *not* an abuser, but many ctntduoers are more than willing and happy to interpret him that way. and it's 👍 uhm. well. to layer on that point of lnv and its direct ties to self harm.

i like. very often see not only the complete dismissal of cq's issues with that. and. ugh. if you somehow see cschlatt as abusive. if you can get that cq's replication of behaviors in lnv are self destruction he doesn't actually like in pursuit of being "enough." why do i so so so often see. him replicating behaviors you're interpreting as abusive. specifically to get this white guy off. in his self harm context. completely uncritically. do i really need to explain. why that's not like. cool. lmao.

and even under the benefit of the doubt, the thing is, i never see exploration for it. i never see anything about how doing something like that would affect cq, how his mindset would lend to things, what he feels or thinks. there's no "reclamation", no restitution, there's no thought to him at all. this character who had direct issues with hating being treated like an object if he doesn't ask for it, being treated like an object. but don't worry guys it's actually ok this time. because i get to see my blorbo on the ground at the expense of everything this character stands for. i won't unpack the like obvious glaring bigotry rotting it's way through everything abt it too btw dw abt it dw abt it. it's fine lol.

idk. i hope i'm making sense, that i am explaining clearly and thoroughly enough. it's just so. tiring and deeply alienating and frustrating, and the absolute insistence to reduce poc to nothing but violent sex object caretakers and extentions to white characters is sooo i need to rip my hair out core. and to reiterate, i do think cq is largely a top, i don't think there's anything wrong writing certain dynamics or whatever the hell, it doesn't have to be a big deal. but can we. for once. with the brains that we have. try to think abt how things come across sometimes maybe. thanks.

#huri.txt #discourse #tnt neg #<- for blacklist but its not so much abt ctnt as it is its abt racism 👍 so keeb that in mind #edit: also this is ok to rb dw =^__^= tysm to the ppl being v niceys abt me posting this #i kinda feel a weight off my shoulders hvng finally posted and articulated this frustration that has bothered me. for a v v long time

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laithraihan · 7 months ago

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I really don't care about whatever someone ships or doesn't & I do believe you that it's not meant shippy & I think that's fine, because it's fiction so you can make up a bond between whoever you like however you like. But that goes for everyone else alike.

Art will be interpreted as soon as you look at it not after digging for the artist's own opinion, so I can't say I'm surprised that people look at it and think it's shippy first. Sure, some were annoying about it I grant you that, but I think it's because it simply comes of hypocritical to act like a ship interpretation is nuts when the art simply does look like that on first glance.

The average MP100 viewer will not interpret a familial bond between these two characters who canonically barely interacted, but you did. (& more power to you) Maybe your average follower will not interpret a romantic implication in your artworks, but others will. (& more power to them)

I really don't think people lack parental love to see it shippy, I think people simply expect parental love between, well, a parent and their child. Not someone you personally declared to be a "weird uncle" to a girl he barely knows. I didn't even want good night kisses from my actual "weird uncle" as a kid idk man.

Again, I don't see the slightest issue with the platonic relationship you make up for them. I just also get where the romantic interpretations are coming from.

Your uncle/niece interpretation sincerely is farther removed from canon than ship interpretations are from your artworks.

Interesting message so I'll answer this genuinely.

To start off: I Never once implied that it was crazy that other people would interpret this as romantic at first glance. I quite literally said that I understood the confusion because these two barely interacted in canon. Which is why Im always happy to explain my intentions. Experiences vary so what one considers normal may not be normal to someone else: I'm very much aware of this but y'all clearly aren't.

When it gets to the point where people say "this artist drew that AND said it wasn't shipping even though we can obviously tell theyre delusional and in denial", that's where the problem is. I provide an explanation, that explanation gets ignored, people either answer "lmao just admit it" or they treat me as if I'm the worst person alive and they refuse to accept they must've been wrong about their interpretations. They proceed to openly "discuss" this (by just mocking me repeatedly, nothing constructive) in a public space where they think I can't see it almost as if they forget I'm an actual person who can come across these messages at any time.

What others ship or don't ship is none of my concern, I stay away from circles I dislike. But when people constantly attempt to force me into "admitting" I'm into something that I have zero interest in out of malicious intent, then naturally it'll annoy me.

I'm sure you didn't really mean to imply that I was merely outraged at the thought of someone interpreting this as romantic if they didnt know every single thing about my headcanons which is why I'm answering you sincerely. So please forgive me for assuming the ones who compared a peck on the cheek to some nonsense like "platonic breastfeeding" have never experienced any sort of familial love growing up 💜

#asks #and whether or not you think my headcanons are 'so removed from canon' is also not an issue by itself #this is 100% me being self indulgent and i don't hide that fact #i draw whatever i want whenever i feel like it and if others dislike it then i understand #but please don't act like these people were totally oblivious when making these comments: they knew very well what they were doing

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ingravinoveritas · 1 year ago

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Georgia talking about staged again and now their…… flirting? Is that what you would call putting a heart on Anna and her calling Georgia a flirt?? Radio silence from the both of them and now randomly there’s this.

Hi there! Well, I'm not sure it's really random. But let's get the visual up here first, for those who haven't seen Georgia/AL's Insta stories today:

So this seemed to start with Georgia posting the story about Staged playing on BBC iPlayer after she finished watching OFMD. The second story is the one with Georgia drawing the heart around AL, followed by the story with her drawing a heart around the glass of wine Michael is holding, and then Anna shared Georgia's story and called her a flirt.

The reason I don't believe this is random is because for the last several days, all everyone has been talking about online is Ineffable Con and Rob/Gavin's comments about the kiss between Michael/Aziraphale and David/Crowley. And as we've seen before, just when the conversation gets too focused on Michael and David, Georgia and AL post a story or photo to bring the attention back to them. It's actually fairly predictable at this point, since it's happened multiple times previously (though I would say this seems a bit more blatant than other instances, given that there isn't any reason for either of them to promote Staged right now).

My thought in regard to the "flirt" comment is that I agree with you in not understanding exactly how that reads as flirting (as it didn't come across that way to me). I do wonder if this is another attempt at Georgia and AL trying to be the female analogues to David and Michael (which we've also seen before), but it again doesn't work because they don't have that same chemistry or flirty dynamic that Michael and David have. Also, if this actually was "flirting," what was the purpose in GT circling the glass of wine? Is she flirting with the wine as much as AL? Once you look past the straightforward promotional aspect of these stories, it just seems very weird.

Weirdness is apparently the theme for the day, however, as there was also this reply from AL on Twitter earlier:

If you look at the timestamps, AL replied to this tweet/Michael's tweet exactly one minute after Michael replied. Going back to the idea of predictability, there's been nonstop discussion for the past several days about Michael and David kissing, and my first thought was that she seemed to just be looking for a reply that she could jump on and insert herself, to where I would not be surprised if she has notifications set up for his tweets for just such an occasion.

Upon further consideration, I did get the feeling that her "Where can I get one?" was not at all sincere in the way that Michael's was. It came across to me as a passive-aggressive way of reasserting her position (i.e., "I'm the only one who actually gets to love Michael Sheen"). It also makes it seem like she is fighting with the fans for Michael's attention, on top of already competing with David (although let's be honest, there is no competition there). More than that, however, I also got the feeling that AL copying his comment was her way of mocking him for wanting the t-shirt at all (i.e., "Look how stupid he is for wanting this stupid shirt"). Which of course is not something she would actually say, but the copied text along with the reply coming only one minute later makes it seem a bit circumspect. And it makes me feel sad for the fan who made the original post who may not realize what is really going on.

In any case, those are my thoughts on GT and AL's social media posts today. As I've always said before, I know I could be completely wrong in my interpretations, but the timing is just too strange for me to believe it's a coincidence. I'm happy to hear others' thoughts, though...

#phantomstars24 #reply post #georgia tennant #staged #or 'Brokeback Mount Him' which is what i am referring to Staged as from here on out #the more i think about it the weirder this all seems #again if this was a one time thing i wouldn't even say anything #but the fact that it keeps happening is...yeah #the whole thing just gives the vibe of keeping up appearances #but i will leave it to my followers to make up their own minds #also historically i am terrible at picking up on flirting so i know i may not be the best person to comment on this #although i think i did pick up on Neil flirting with me on Twitter one time #anna lundberg #discourse

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archaeology-findings · 2 years ago

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I know this isn't what I usually post, but I want to share my journey of getting an autism diagnosis.

I want to show everyone who might be considering seeking a diagnosis the actual steps, to help de-mystify the whole process.

I know that I despise unfamiliar situations, and therefore going into a process where they hide each next step from you can be very anxiety-inducing. I couldn't find much information online about the actual process, only that I needed to ask my GP for a referral, then go to the assessment. It didn't help that none of the articles referred to the changes to this system that covid has made.

The process I'm sharing with you may not be exactly like yours. I'm trying to get a diagnosis on the NHS in England, post-covid and while most doctor's surgeries are experiencing severe staff shortages. I am also an 18 year old white female, so your experience might be different than mine.

My first step was to make an E-consult on my local surgery's website. I would have preferred a face-to-face appointment because it's a lot easier for me to interpret tone and get my point across this way, however they're not really offered anymore, especially for this type of appointment. Making the E-consult was quite hard, because you have to jump through a lot of hoops to find the right option for a referral, and even then I don't think I picked the right one.

The next day, I received this text, so I followed the link to download the questionnaire. It turned out to be the first ten questions of the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire for adults. Since it was only a scan of the document, I printed it off to fill it out then scanned it and sent it back.

The next day, I received this response:

Obviously I had selected the wrong option, which is easily done since none of the options in the E-consult were explained. In true socially-anxious fashion, I put off responding to this for a few days but I eventually did and explained that I would like a NHS referral.

I then got this reply the day after:

The form was in the format of a word document so I completed it on my computer. It consisted of some personal details then a more in-depth list of symptoms for which I had to describe my personal symptoms. My mum and I filled it out together and I sent it back the same day.

This morning, I received a reply:

I am choosing to assume that this is a typo and that they meant to say ASD, since I don't show any symptoms of ADD (attention deficit disorder) and I did not ask for a diagnosis of ADD. Hopefully I will be contact by the ASD assessment service soon and I can confirm I was referred for the correct disorder.

This is everything up til now, I will reblog with updates as they occur. On the whole I'd say I'm fairly impressed with how fast my GP has responded to me, so I'm hoping this continues to be the case.

#actually autistic #autistic adult #asd #autism diagnosis

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louisupdates · 10 months ago

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Review: Louis Tomlinson @ The Riverstage (Brisbane)

By Keali Russell

Louis Tomlinson's fans erupted with excitement as he entered The Riverstage in Brisbane for the second night of his Australian leg on the 'Faith In The Future' world tour.

Despite the challenges posed by humidity, rain, and occasional storms, Louis' devoted fans gathered from the early hours, forming bonds over homemade bracelets and forging new friendships as they eagerly awaited the evening's festivities (30 January).

For many, attending multiple shows of his 'Faith In The Future' tour was a cherished tradition, with enthusiasts travelling from various states and even countries to partake in the experience.

Kicking off the night were hometown heroes Safety Hazard, delivering boundless energy to the stage.

From showering the crowd with stickers to introducing their unconventional third member, Sloane the Cone (a charming traffic cone), Safety Hazard left an indelible mark. Their set featured original tracks along with their own interpretation of Britney Spears' 'Toxic'.

Next to take the stage were British rock sensations Sea Girls, whose contagious enthusiasm instantly won over the crowd. With their captivating dance moves and undeniable chemistry, Sea Girls had fans across the venue jumping, dancing, and singing along.

From beloved originals like 'I Want You To Know Me' to 'All I Want To Hear You Say', they held everyone's rapt attention from beginning to end. However, Tomlinson wasn't the sole attraction drawing fans from afar; Sea Girls also had a few loyal supporters journeying from their home country to catch their performance.

After much anticipation, Louis Tomlinson finally hit the stage as deafening screams travelled across the venue as soon as the lights dimmed and the opening chords of his song 'The Greatest' entranced the massive crowd.

There was undeniable mutual adoration between Tomlinson and his fans, evident as he expressed his gratitude to the crowd: "Brisbane, SCREAM! Let me start this gig like I start every gig and say a massive, massive thank you to every person in here for making these gigs happen.

"There's no comparison, this is my best part of the job. I don't get to do all these unbelievable shows without all of you people, so thank you, thank you, thank you!"

Fans were treated to a diverse array of songs from his albums, including 'Copy Of A Copy Of A Copy' and 'Walls', but Tomlinson had some surprises in store for those who had been with him since his One Direction days or hadn't experienced their live performances.

With renditions of tracks like 'Drag Me Down' and 'Where Do Broken Hearts Go', this performance was definitely one they would remember.

The genuine affection Louis holds for his fans shone throughout the night, especially when he expressed his love for them saying: "Every now and then you get one of those gigs where absolutely everything clicks into place. This is one of those gigs!

"I've mentioned a couple of times before, touring is me favourite sh.t! I'm about as far away from home as you can get from home right now, and to be playing shows, not just this atmosphere because that goes without saying at this point, but this kind of scale, this kind of size absolutely blows my f...ing mind!

"This is going to be a special night tonight, I can already feel it. I hope you guys are having as much fun as I am, I love you all!"

Fans had some delightful surprises in store for Tomlinson himself, organising special fan projects to demonstrate their unwavering love and support for him. From illuminating the venue with red lights on their phones during 'Kill My Mind' to creating a breathtaking sea of lights during 'Angels Fly', their thoughtful gestures added an extra layer of magic to an already unforgettable evening.

As he exited the stage preparing for his encore, the atmosphere was charged with excitement. In a spontaneous burst of energy, fans joined together in a rendition of One Direction's beloved anthem 'No Control' followed by the infectious beat of 'Hey Baby' by DJ Ötzi.

Their passionate singing and lively spirits served to amplify the anticipation for what promised to be a thrilling and unforgettable finale to Tomlinson's performance.

As the inevitable moment arrived when the last song was played, Tomlinson wasn't quite ready to call it a night. "Brisbane, this has been absolutely perfect. I don't want it to end! We've got about 90 seconds left, so give me every last bit of energy you've got! Sing this next part with me."

From leaping onto the barrier to join the crowd to staying behind after his performance to take photos with fans, Louis Tomlinson ensured the night was truly unforgettable, leaving an indelible mark on the hearts of every single person in attendance.

MORE PHOTOS

#louis tomlinson #louis press #fitfwt24: brisbane #30.1.2024

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mysaldate · 2 months ago

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(First time use of this feature, idk what I'm doing) Good evening, I'd just like to ask what your sources in terms of afk arena lore are, especially of obscure stuff; can those even be obtained anymore? Were they from a limited event and you may or may not be one of the few, who are knowledged of this? I really like reading your explanations, interpretations and especially your critique/criticism (unterschied? Keine Ahnung). Though I'd like to have my own interpretations too and again - just want to know if you can share your sources of the obscure stuff if possible! I like your stuff :) (side rant: I feel a little insecure about this; I don't want to come off as just asking to get, instead of appreciating what you provide, yet I saw your reblog, so I got some confidence. Sorry for this email ahh ask, have a nice rest of your day!)

Aaa I'm so glad you enjoy my stuff!

A lot of the more obscure AFK lore comes from the artbook which contains over 500 pages of lore, concept designs, and more. It also includes a complete timeline of Esperia (at least until the Draconis because the entire writer team got fired and replaced <- info from Lilith's own community managers). There is an online version of it you can find here, however, it is incomplete.

Some info comes from the official webcomics (Silent Blade, The Bloodclaw, Resurging Flame, The Last Obsidian Finch) or from time limited events (mostly VoWs, not all of which got added permanently, but also from seasonal events, event dialogue, etc.) Rarely, some info comes from other sources (official social media, for example the Chinese social media account posted the "Why don't you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?" questionare, community managers, sometimes dev interviews or live meetups).

I've been in the AFK fandom for years at this point so I came across a lot of sources that may now be difficult to find but I try my best to stay true to the source material, which is sadly more than I can say about the new writers (and which is the exact opposite of whatever it is the Journey writers are trying to do). If you want to know where to find info on specific parts, feel free to send another ask! I love interacting with fellow fans and will always be happy to have a discussion either through asks or even dms! Just be patient with me as between Tumblr's awful notification system and my own current health issues, I may not be responding the fastest.

#afk arena #afk news #afk analysis #afk journey #lilith games

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pico-digital-studios · 7 months ago

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Into, Across and Beyond! Scripting: Clashing Beliefs

Like with "X for Danger", this scene is a mini-crossover with Funkinverse by @robovoidfrog, another Spider-Verse themed crossover with beep-boop rappers.

(Agent Blueballs is owned by Malicious Bunny; this interpretation is owned by LemonDew)

During one quiet evening, Benjamin was on his way back home, quietly singing to himself.

Benjamin: 🎵 Then you're left in the dust... Unless I stuck by ya~! I'm a sunflower... I think your love would be too much! 🎵

On his way, however, he heard someone land behind him.

Benjamin: Huh?

He turned around, seeing someone with purple eyes in the shadows.

Benjamin: Who's there? You're not one of those creeps, are you?

<It's funny. I've been getting that quite a lot.>

Another iteration of Boyfriend stepped out of the shadows, albeit slightly taller, with long, dark hair, and much duller skin.

Benjamin: Huh? Another me?

???: <And you thought you'd already seen plenty of alternate "Boyfriends" in life, Miku?>

Benjamin: Who are you, exactly? And... what happened to you for your skin to wither like that?

???: <It's classified.> *sigh* <Never mind. I'll explain it for you; I'm from another dimension.>

Benjamin: You are? Guess that explains your differences compared to me, huh?

???: <My name... is Agent Cam "Blueballs" Malicious. I run an elite strike force dedicated to protecting the multiverse from harm.>

Benjamin: Then why did you come here then, Cam? Nothing's threatening me here right now from alternate realities.

Cam: <It once did, though.>

Benjamin: W-What do you mean?

Cam: <I bore witness to the creeps that wound up in that dimension out of our usual bounds, and I've been stuck trying to get guys like them back to their dimensions before all of time and space collapses. I'm also fully aware of your little friend from a neighbouring dimension trying to mess with the space-time continuum just to disrupt HIS canon event.>

Benjamin: Canon-? Oh, great... Another Miguel-type guy.

Cam: <Urgh... And please don't get me started on the Spirit and that little time-tinkerer back on Earth-103122.>

Benjamin: I already know about circumstances from other dimensions, sheesh!

Cam: <Ugh. Got quite the attitude, I see. Well, I've not as much reason to have to be here, considering your dimension does confine to the canon points and has remained stable. Surprisingly more so than I'd expect, considering some things had changed.>

Benjamin: And? What's the point you're trying to ask?

Cam: <I was going to ask if you wanted to join my strike force. Help protect other dimensions from harm, and work alongside others like you. You can make so many new companions there, Benjamin, and I'll be there to keep you on the straight and narrow.>

Benjamin thought about it for a moment, before stepping back.

Benjamin: I'm alright with what I've got, Cam.

Cam: <You're skipping out on an opportunity like this?>

Benjamin: If I wish to interact with more "-friends" like Softie, Evan and Lexi, I can do it outside the confines of some fake utopia.

Cam: <You could be one of THE best recruits available for the job-.>

Benjamin: I'm not joining your little cult, Malicious! I've already seen the Spider-Society's failures, and you're going to make those same mistakes. I'd rather hang out with other counterparts of myself not bound to your ideals of fate.

Cam: <Benjamin, we've all wanted to live the life we wish we had, myself included. Believe me, I've tried. And the more I tried, the more damage I did. You cannot have it all, kid. Being "Boyfriend" is a sacrifice. That's the job. The job you signed up for when you dropped out of high-school. I need you to come with me, Ben.>

Benjamin (glaring): I'm. not. coming.

Cam (suddenly speaking): I wasn't asking, Miku!

Judith (DJX GF) (through comm): Hey, Cam, cool it a bit, will ya? We shouldn't be capturing every -friend we come across!

Benjamin: Y-You were intending on CAPTURING me?! You're WORSE than Miguel!

Cam: <Urgh... You could've kept quiet about that, Judith. We'll talk later.>

He advanced towards Benjamin, his TP infection showing on his arms as he went to grab the kid.

Benjamin: Get off of me!

Cam: <At least you won't have to worry about being alone. I'm sorry in advance, kid.>

Benjamin just spat at his face in response.

Benjamin: What part of "I'm not coming" slipped out of your infected mind?!

Cam: <Ben, this is what happens when you attempt to break the canon. I broke it myself, and paid horribly for it.>

Benjamin: I'm sorry about what happened to your alternate Girlfriend, but how do you know that it's attributed to "canon"? It could've been something else entirely!

Cam: <Your friend violated canon by causing this universe to come into existence.>

Benjamin: Leave Pico out of this!

Cam: <Listen, kid. You have a choice between saving one person and saving an entire world. Every world.>

Benjamin: Like the alternate Salty, I'm willing to do both! I'm not afraid to say it to your face and revel in it, Blueballs; canon events SUCK!

He activated his ECHO ability to replicate the TP infection harmlessly on his arms before pushing Cam back. His eyes glowed yellow to symbolise his angelic self.

Benjamin: You're one to talk about "canon" when you clearly don't abide by it yourself! In fact, I'm willing to bring an entire TEAM into the equation to screw your philosophy over! If Gwen Stacy's universe could survive a canon aversion, MANY more universes can! I'll give you one chance, Malicious. Either you leave my world, or you're in for an extreme butt-kicking.

Cam shook a bit before HIS eyes became pitch-black with purple sclera, and glared angrily at his younger counterpart.

Cam: (telepathic) <The youth of today, huh...?> (speaking) Seems like you and that white-haired mistake aren't so different, after all, huh? And considering you're so adamant on averting canon when your friend averted YOUR demise... (maniacal laugh) Alright, then, kid! If that's how you want to make your move, then let's dance... anomaly!

(Cue their clash between each other)

After whatever cover represents this battle, Benjamin managed to trip Cam up.

Benjamin: Last warning, Malicious. Book it, or you're dead!

Cam: <You could've listened. This would've been so much easier otherwise.>

Benjamin: *sigh* Look. You don't have to keep going down this route. Your own Society's faith in you is going to be in shambles if you keep up this behaviour. Please... turn back from this dark route. We can get that TP infection out of you, and you can live a genuinely happy life if you're not dead-set on letting others perish to an algorithm.

Cam: ... <I don't always like what I have to do, Miku... but I still know that I have to be the one to do it. I've given up too much to stop now.>

He got back up.

Cam: <If that's how you wish to be, then there's no reason for me to associate with you anymore unless you decide to intervene further. And if you try that, I will send the Funkin' Society's whole wrath upon you. Guess that's one more -friend I have to add to the anomaly list, then. Farewell... Miku.>

Cam walked off into a portal.

Benjamin: If that's how he wants to play it, then it's a chance I'll take when the time comes. The other Salty's got his band in his side of the action, so I'll try to make my own to face down Cam with.

As he continued on his way, he found a special lavender watch on the ground, clearly placed there by someone before.

Benjamin: D-XML's work, huh? I'll take it.

He activated its communicator feature.

Gracie (SNS GF): Who's this?

Benjamin: Benjamin Miku, the Boyfriend of Earth-111723. You must be the one leading the Gang against the Funkin' Society, right?

Gracie: I am, yes. I see you got XML's watch safe and sound.

Benjamin: Mhm. I encountered Blueballs and gave him a butt-whooping of my own, and now I'm amongst those he's classed as anomalies. But I'm ready to do whatever it takes to defy his twisted canon and contribute in saving Salty and putting an end to The X!

Gracie: So you want in to our own band?

Benjamin saw Brooke (VS OURPLE GUY BF with his son), Toon BF, Mobian BF, Aloe Mano, D-XML, Golden BF and Boom (Electro Funkin' GF), each still on the search for Salty.

Benjamin: Once I've acquired my own crew to help out? Yeah. I'm in!

So Benjamin got to gathering his own team to assist Gracie's team, and with the fate of the Friday Night Funkin' multiverse on the line, he was ready to give it his all to help others around him.

To be continued...

Below is the unedited sprite for Cam/Agent Blueballs that I made, along with the original Benjamin sprite for comparison and an armless alt for different poses. I'm still not sure how to get the pics back in top quality in a small size for you guys, but I'll work on it.

(And yes, Cam's in the same art style as a nod to that gag of Miguel not maintaining the same animation style between universes.)

So, I can drop the team members that Benjamin was able to gain below:

IAB!Softie (younger than the base Softie, but with the right amount of courage)

Barbara (Arrow Funk GF)

Soft Pico (the original; there to get Softie back from the Society's clutches)

MIX Boyfriend (specifically an alternate counterpart, since the original's working in the Funkin' Society and replaces Web-Slinger)

B-Bot (BF from Mega Man: Funkin' Heroes)

Return Funkin' Girlfriend

Mii Boyfriend

Evan (Childhood Memories BF; mainly as emotional support)

Neo Girlfriend (also there to get Neo BF out of the Funkin' Society's cult-like hold)

BluBuni (Bunfriend's genderflip counterpart (Leideri's take) from one dimension; accents more cuteness than anything)

Bently Forceloyed

IAB!Softie and Evan were immediately on-board with this goal, though as for the others:

Barbara joined the group after she had to keep Judith from admitting Bidu into the Funkin' Society by force.

Soft Pico and Neo Girlfriend joined to get some answers as to where their boyfriends had been dragged away to.

The alternate MIX Boyfriend just needed the right payment to be brought on board.

B-Bot, Return Funkin' Girlfriend and BluBuni simply joined the crew out of the goodness of their hearts.

Mii Boyfriend getting admitted into the Funkin' Society was hijacked partway through, and he simply relegated to Benjamin's side since he needed something worth doing.

As for Bently, when he was dealing with a multiversal trespasser in his dimension one evening (sometime after Benjamin's run-in with Cam), said trespasser being a cartoonish lunatic known as Max Chaos, Cam came along to assist him (even interfering with a planned ambush that would've knocked Bently out cold). And trust me, Cam's already well aware of Max's antics in his dimension.

Max: What's up with dis whole trouble tryna mag me anyway, mac?! Bently: To keep this city safe from bandits like you! Max: Bandit?! Why- I'm new here! Dis is my first time doin' a crime. Ya see, I grew up- Cam: Silence! Bently: What's his reputation like? Cam: <Ran over and destroyed numerous planets in a cartoon gag, literally shattered the fourth wall, can grab a nuclear warhead from hammerspace, and he's got a huge bounty on his head in his world.>

(Art by @mcgamejolter)

And though the two cooperated well in sorting him out, it came to a halt after B-Bot and Neo Girlfriend interfered in his attempt to recruit Bently in. And after this came out, the kid instantly wanted nothing to do with Cam and was willing to fight through EVERY -friend under his lead to put an end to so-called "defined fates" and truly make his own way in life. This got him as a member of the crew to help stop The X.

#sonic exe #sonic the hedgehog #spider verse #sth #sonic #sth au #sonic fandom #sonic au #spider man #friday night funkin

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cherrylng · 3 months ago

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Upcoming Victories UK ‘00 - Coldplay Interview [BUZZ (November 2000)]

“I'm like, why do I have to answer that? People say it's boring and too sincere, but we're just a band that wants to sing and play songs!”

Chris finally explodes. The huge sales in the blink of an eye, the pressure and frustration of "Best New Band in the UK" falling like a torrential downpour, and why we in the press, more than anyone else, are tinkering with Coldplay, the most unconscious miracle harmony of anyone.

Photograph by Shoko Ishikawa Text by Shino Kokawa Interpretation by Erica Yamashita

"It's getting to the point where it's out of our control…… The least we can do is just keep writing good songs and playing them as well as we can. I really don't know what else is going on." In an interview in the September issue, Chris expressed his bewilderment at the situation surrounding them. Coldplay's debut album "Parachutes" debuted at number one in the UK and they were reverently awarded the title of "Best New Band in the UK". They were thrust into a huge number of microphones. Immediately, the "New Sensitive Rock" scene was launched and made its banner.

Two months have passed since then. "Chris won't be doing interviews for a while. He is on the verge of declining all interviews." It was the night before the interview that the record company informed us of this. The next day, the three members excluding Chris regrouped for the interview and interpreter Yamashita went to their live venue. When she visited the designated dressing room before the show, Chris was waiting for her with the three members. He said it was okay to talk, after all.

The result was an interview in which Chris' honest feelings exploded in a big way, as shown below. However, this mode of thinking was not born out of a distrust of the press or post-break nihilism, but rather a more fundamental frustration: "Why can't I get my message across through music alone?" In the UK guitar scene, which continues to be in a stupor, everyone is struggling in different phases, from bands that try to differentiate themselves with intelligent presentations to those that run amok with a negative or positive attitude. Amongst these bands, Coldplay are the only ones who have so much faith in the sound that spills out of their guitars.

After the release of your debut album "Parachutes", you went to Glastonbury, Summer Sonic in Japan, and V2000. How was your first festival summer? Guy (Bass, G): 「It was good.」 Jonny (Guitar, J): 「Yeah, it was mostly good.」 Will (Drums, W): 「Except for Portugal (laughs). The venue at the Portugal festival was horrible, first of all, and the audience were all people who were listening to heavy rock.」 Chris (Vocal, C): 「I mean, there were more interviews than gigs.」

How do you feel about that? C: 「It was the worst.」

……The worst, huh. C: 「Yeah. But I'm fine now, because the tour starts on Monday.」 J: 「Well, especially recently, because we've been doing nothing but talking instead of playing.」 W: 「Yeah, we haven't been able to play any shows for a while because of Jonny's throat, so it's been a bit stressful.」

Do you feel like you've been put in an environment where you can't genuinely enjoy your band activities and music? C: 「There are too many things that don't matter. Think about it, nobody cares what Beethoven looks like or anything like that. All people know is his music. That's our ideal situation, but it doesn't work like that. We live in a multimedia age and it's all about the pictures and how they look. It's not easy. But basically we're only as good as our music, so I think there's still a part of us that can be left to the music.」

"Parachutes" became a huge hit album that still sits in the top 10 of the national charts, but what do you think it was about you that attracted audiences? W: 「I guess it was our simplicity, or purity of it. We weren't competing for fashion in this day and age, or for badmouthing other bands, but just for the quality of our music.」

Amongst the many guitar bands that write good, melancholic melodies, I think you guys stand out because melancholy is not a ‘dead end’ feeling. W: 「Yes, that's exactly the kind of thing we want to put forward. We didn't want it to be just a melancholic album. We were very careful not to make it sound like that. And the key to that was what kind of songs to choose, and what kind of song order to make the songs flow. The promo CD we made before the release had all the songs in a random order, and when France heard it, they said, "This is a really sentimental record". But when we told them the order was like this, they said, "Oh, I see."」

There's strength in the delicacy of it. C: 「We believe in what we're doing. We get excited by our songs and we really, really like it. In the end, it's the reason we get up every morning. There has to be some positivity, because it's something I feel positive about. I don't want to make music that doesn't give me a sense of hope.」

When you were deciding on the direction Coldplay should take, how did you come to this mid-tempo and melody-oriented approach? C: 「The way we write songs is that sometimes I'll come up with an idea and take it to Jonny or someone else in the band, and then we all get together and shape it. It's something that we like in our own way. And that's the type of stuff we like so far. We don't discuss making them mid-tempo or anything like that, if we find a new song that we like that is mid-tempo, we just build it up as we go along. It's not like we decide on the tempo first. It's just that we get excited about songs that sound like that.」

What does it feel like to be excited? C: 「Well, I don't know. I just like it…… Obviously we're not a thrash metal band. We don't plan it that way anyway. We just let things come out. I can't even point to myself and say, "This is what I want to do".」

Hmmm. Has the meaning of music itself changed? C: 「No, I don't think so. I still feel great when I play and do really well, and depressed when I don't do well today.」

What's the percentage? C: 「…….6 to 4, I guess.」

That's pretty harsh…… Incidentally, this issue of BUZZ is a special issue on guitar rock. And we'd like to feature you guys as newcomers of the year 2000. By the way, the others were Muse (everyone nods in agreement), Doves (everyone nods in agreement), and JJ72 (Jonny frowns while everyone nods in agreement). What are your opinions about the other bands? W: 「We've met all three of those bands before, and they all seem to be making music for the same reasons as us.」 C: 「I like all the bands, especially Doves. I love them. But, you know, it's not about sympathy or anything like that. Everyone wants to create a scene, but there's just so many different bands out there.」

I think some people want to see it as a scene, hoping for a revival of UK guitar rock (laughs). C: 「Yeah, I get it. I'm honoured to be included with the bands you've just mentioned, because I like them all very much. It's just that none of us have put our heads together and tried to make a scene.」

I understand, don't worry (laughs). Now for the next question, which might be a bit rude. For example, what is it that drives you guys to make music, far from the desperate awareness of reality that British lad musicians have, that "we have no way to shine other than through music," and the ego-maniacal claims of bands that are fueled by that? C: 「But we don't think like that, we don't think like that. We're born and raised where we are, and we're very proud of that. Whether we have money or not doesn't make us good or bad. I wonder why we have to answer that question every time we are asked to do what we want to do. We just want to sing and play the songs we want to play. When we say that, people say it's boring or too sincere, but why else would you be in a band? That's our reason, there's no other reason. If you want to make loads of money, you'd be better off becoming a big businessman. The only attraction is the music itself.」

It's a problem that doesn't really make sense to me living in a homogenous society like Japan, but what do you think about the British tradition, but what do you think about the British tradition of saying, "You guys have no right to play rock!", just because you're from a middle-class background, starting from the days of Joe Strummer of The Clash to Blur and Radiohead? J: 「That’s really true of our country, isn’t it?」 W: 「But it also has something to do with social change. For example, in the 60s, most of the musicians were from the working class, and the laughing stock of TV comedies was middle-class university students, but now the whole country is middle-class, so workers are a good source of material. There's a tendency for everyone to wish for something they don't have.」 C: 「In the UK, there seems to be a sense of who is and isn't allowed to do what. But we don't really care. It's not like it's holding us back at the moment. You know what I mean? If you think it's a problem, it becomes a problem, you know? They try to hide it, they try to say they're not middle class.」

Is that one of the most depressing things you feel at the moment? You're just trying to deliver good music, and they just pick on things that have nothing to do with it. C: 「Yeah, absolutely. But I do the same thing with my favourite musicians. I can't help it, these things happen. For example, I think a lot about Bob Dylan, like, what kind of person is he? I guess it just means people are interested.」

I can really feel that you get very uncomfortable and that it's hard for you not to genuinely enjoy the music anymore. Do you still think the only way to overcome this is to keep playing? C: 「Yeah. Yes. In fact, we've just set out the terms of negotiation for next year. If we do two weeks of promotion, then we can spend the other two weeks doing whatever we want. We need to get that sort of thing settled.」

By the way, I've been reading your diary on your website, and the other day you wrote about the Radiohead show. C: 「It was amazing! They didn't seem to be having a lot of fun, but maybe they just weren't into it that night.」 W: 「I thought so too, but maybe the band couldn't get on. I think it was a very busy day with a lot of invited guests, and the whole atmosphere was a bit weird. I met Ed later and he said, "We didn't enjoy it at all." But I was impressed. My friends who went on the other night said the atmosphere wasn't too bad at all.」

Thom Yorke also said that "Rock is boring, it's rubbish music." C: 「That's ridiculous.」

Uhh..…. I think they are a band who have proved that conclusion to themselves, one by one, over the course of four albums. What do you think of their current phase? C: 「I just think they are trying to do something interesting. Maybe using guitars is boring…… But you know, it's what you play, not what you play with.」

You guys are now creating a sound that follows an orthodox guitar format. Is that going to change in the future? C: 「No, I can't say anything about that. The two new songs, one of them is a guitar…… I mean, we're not doing it with that kind of idea in mind…… No, we're just doing it with the idea of creating something interesting and new. I'm tired of explaining the songs, I just want to say they're songs, isn't that enough? That's the great thing about Bob Dylan. It's just him and the guitar. But no one says it's boring just because he always uses the guitar. It's just about how good the songs are played.」

By the way, I was firmly told by the record company that Chris wouldn't take this interview. I'm really happy that you accepted, but…… I wonder if you're really stressed out. That is, that you have to be involved in things other than music. C: 「Yeah, that's true. But I'm happy to do it on the days when we have gigs. But, to be honest, we were all a bit stressed out over the summer. Seriously. We didn't get a chance to play any music at all, and instead we just talked about our music. I think that took a toll on the band. The reason we're all so happy today is because we get to play shows again.」

That's good. C: 「Really.」

Translator’s Note: I enjoyed translating this interview for how much information I've gleamed out of it, especially seeing this side of Chris that I’ve rarely encountered before even with how few Coldplay interviews that I’ve translated so far. Like, being paraded around from one interview to the next, being asked so many questions that eventually became dull to them, with barely any actual gigs to play at? I can’t blame them for feeling the subsequent frustrations, especially when they were only 22-23 years old back in 2000.

Do support me on my Ko-fi! ☕

#Chris Martin #Jonny Buckland #Guy Berryman #Will Champion #Coldplay #Parachutes era #my scan #translation #interview #BUZZ #BUZZ November 2000

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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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