#thank god the blacklight edition is largely 'pick-and-choose-canon' material to most fans and also not entirely canon by Word of Hirsch

[abyssalzones]

For the character ask game: fidds!! :]

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character?

PARAGRAPH INCOMING. You activated my storytelling analysis trap card

Everyone who has ever talked about gravity falls and its failings in depth has brought this up already but if I had to name anything I Dislike about him it's not a trait or anything he's done but definitely just.... how the narrative presents him.

I feel like, pulling an example from another animated series I like, simon petrikov is a great example of what gravity falls failed to do with fiddleford's arc. simon's story is well known even to surface level fans of adventure time as an exercise in what I'm going to call hindsight horror (because I can't think of a better term right now), where the narrative switching from "look at this weird pathetic old man! Isn't that hilarious?" to the entirety of I Remember You makes it impossible not to look back on everything initially established about this character with a twinge of horror. I think it's one of many ways AT uniquely grows and evolves with its audience... which is something gravity falls obviously never aspires to, largely because it doesn't need to as a two-season show compared to the cultural monolith of AT, but I make this comparison mostly because I think while both characters have a drastic narrative turnaround (related to tragic memory loss no less) one is done very well and the other is executed pretty poorly.

I'll try and move away from the comparison for now because this is supposed to be about a specific character but the writing in gravity falls tends to give characters a conclusion and then fully ditch them (pacifica is another good example of this). fiddleford is instrumental to the conclusion of this show (I could write More paragraphs about how full-circle the memory gun is as a plot device but I'll spare you) and his arc with ford is... mostly satisfied, including journal 3, but we never really get to see him change tangibly or, even more importantly, see the writing reflect that change. To put it simply it's like they were too content joking about him in the same way since season 1 than they were interested in his character growth or the way he benefits the larger story.

Idk though I mean it's not like I have invested way too much time in thinking about this weird old man in a scarecrow hat's writing

^ this wall of text is funnier if you read it thinking about this picture the whole time