Gen, family-centric, rated T or M depending on installment
Do you like longfics? Gen fics? Reflective, OC-centric examinations of family dynamics? Maybe you'd like my fic!
Look at this fanart!!!! by Tardibabe, ranchsoda92, Jellyskink, and ghosttai
Hi! I am not generally speaking active on Tumblr, but I just completed Part 5 6 of a fanfiction that is almost 150k words and which shows no signs of slowing down soon. I figured I'd show it to class. :)
Fragile First Chance and its follow-ups is a story about a nineteen-year-old boy whose legal name is Joss William [redacted] Pines but if you call him anything except Will you might end up in a fistfight. It's also a story about how the Pineses are basically good people with a lot of baggage.
Major themes are tagged and optional content warnings for individual chapters are included in drop-down tabs in the notes. For the most part, heavier themes are not gratuitous.
Below the cut you'll find a rough outline of each section. If you don't want spoilers, though, just head on over.
This story was well under way before The Book of Bill came out. It isn't perfectly TBoB compliant, but the themes and plot aren't really something that makes that an issue.
Part 1: Fragile First Chance
Dipper and Mabel Pines were sent to Gravity Falls at the beginning of summer for, from their perspective, no reason. In reality, it was because they were being sheltered from some very old family drama.
Will is May's son from her first marriage and Fil's son by adoption. He's nineteen years old, just getting out of his second incarceration, and a recovering addict. They planned to put him up for a few months, and after that Fil's weird black-sheep uncle agreed to give him a shot in Oregon.
Ford, of course, knew nothing about this. He's not happy about it.
Part 2: Learning to Breathe
Will and Ford are slowly acclimating to each other like two feral cats. They don't really have anything in common except insomnia and a mutual desperate quest not to get in too many fights.
Will doesn't like Gravity Falls. It's lonely, there's nothing to do, and it's full of weird bullshit he doesn't want to deal with. He's coping, though - Soos is pretty cool, the local teens are entertaining, and he ends up getting a long really well with the local bait shop guy and his dad.
Part 3: When Family Matters
Will has started to figure out how Ford works and make an effort to be nice to him. He also tentatively almost likes the guy. (cue Stan audibly sighing in relief off-screen.)
Also: Dipper and Mabel have figured out that their long-lost brother has reappeared, and there are certain family traditions about how you deal with long-lost brothers.
Part 4: Lancing the Wound
Ford and Will are both under a phenomenal amount of stress for a wide variety of reasons. By this point in the story, words like "panic attack" and "therapy" are coming up more often. They have more in common than they ever realized, although for two people with severe abuse-related PTSD, that's not necessarily a good thing.
The McGuckets are around to help. The Twins are too, although whether that's a good thing is open to debate.
Part 5: Nature versus Nurture
In the wake of Part 4, Stanford Pines is coming to realize that his mental health is a much more serious problem than he had previously realized. He struggles to come to terms with this and decide what to do next. This segment of the story is primarily about self-reflection and realizing that you need to change. We also get some serious discussions about the mental health industry (and how it tied into the gay scene in the 70s) by people who are personally invested in it.
Part 6: Definition of a Real Pines
This story arc just started and concerns Ford navigating his life as he tries to re-integrate with his family and society while working through a very difficult mental health situation.
We'll get to meet more of the Pines family. Shermie lives in Florida with his sister-in-law. (Note for those curious about the timeline incongruities: Shermie's age is- wait, look over there! *smokebomb, jumps out the window*)
Part 7: Consequences of Inaction
Will has pretty much adjusted to his new life, and the family as a whole had stabilized. However, there were some things left to rot outside the family while everyone was getting their feet under them.
This arc deals with Tate McGucket, straight-faced stoic extraordinaire, who may not be doing as great as he pretends he is. Also, Ford gets a love life.
Bonus: Erastus Kankerson's Toxic Ex
This is a stand-alone one-shot about Erastus Kankerson, an old friend of Fiddleford McGucket who dated him for a while after the divorce.
ASGDFJ THIS IS GREAT. Sorry, Tate, nobody's on your side with this one, it was too fucking funny. I need to send this gif to everyone who were already laughing at Tate before Will found out what happened and also laughed at Tate.
Anyway, I CAN'T GET OVER THTHE WILL DETAILS!! The colorful bands! The DIY repairs and embroidery on his jacket! The beloved bleach stain! I love how you did his skin, too! Then Tate's over there just staring dead-eyed directly into the camera like he's in a mockumentary
If anyone isn't caught up, GhostTai has illustrated the most recent chapter of Tourist Traps. (This scene is in the first section.)
Adding a cut for spoilers, but full context below.
Will is insanely protective of his family, as we know. Tate picked a fistfight with Ford, so he expected Will to be mad at him. Thing is, he got absolutely creamed by a man twice his size with years of martial arts experience.
Tate really just wishes Will would be normal mad at him.
A very lovely reader has asked about my versions of the Pines Twins' parents! Now that they've been introduced in the fic, it's about time anyway.
You don't need to have read Tourist Traps to understand these characters. Just know that the story centers on an OC who's Dipper and Mabel's older half-brother.
Shermie
Shermie got married fairly young to a woman he was certain he was completely in love with and would never want to leave. His marriage was actively falling apart during the earlier years of Fil's childhood, and all of this has the backdrop of constant fights between Filbrick and Ford. Despite the personal issues, though, Shermie was a fairly successful career man and managed a nice, stable job with plenty of room for advancement. After he divorced Fil's mom, he remarried, had a second child, and maintained a pretty normal American middle class lifestyle. He was able to set up a good college fund for his kids, and by the time Tourist Traps takes place, he and his sister-in-law have bought a retirement property in Florida. (His second wife passed several years ago.)
A quick note on timeline: I didn't like any of the common Gravity Falls timelines for Shermie, so I fudged the timeline a bit. Shermie is significantly younger than Stan and Ford, but he isn't eighteen years younger. He and his son both had kids relatively young, but not in their teens.
~*~ Fil ~*~
Fil Pines is Shermie's eldest. He looks almost exactly like his grandpa Filbrick, albeit a much more clean-cut version. He was very young when Ford fell into the portal; they've technically met, but he doesn't really remember.
Fil got into computer science at an early age and went to school in San Francisco for software engineering. He eventually landed a very cushy job, but nooooot before landing himself in some pretty serious trouble:
He knocked up a married woman.
Fil met May in a bar when he was still doing his undergrad degree. He was nerdy, young, kind of awkward but very enthusiastic, with the same sort of false "suave" energy that Stan Pines has in the show. May was in a very bad situation already, she thought Fil's awkward flirting was adorable and charming, and she was very attracted to the the fact he obviously had money. When she got pregnant, she contacted him immediately. He helped her get away from her extremely abusive current husband and they got married as soon as possible because the way he was raised, that was just the right thing to do. Needless to say, this was a Bad Idea. It took them years of therapy to work their shit out. In the end, though, it turned out that Fil and May make an extremely good pair. What started out as functionally a shotgun wedding became a very healthy and committed relationship.
As mentioned, Fil looks a lot like Filbrick. He doesn't wear sunglasses and he's more likely to wear a tee shirt than Filbrick is, but he does have the mustache because he thinks it makes him look more Dad-like. All of his neckties are extremely stupid for the same reason. He tends to be fairly clean cut but casual. Aside from the stupid ties, he isn't usually flamboyant with his fashion sense the way Stan is. He's more likely to be in a tee shirt, jeans, and a blazer. He works out enough to keep himself healthy, but isn't particularly buff, and he's noticeably paler than Ford or Stan because he's worked a desk job his entire life.
~*~ May ~*~
May is fun! One of the surprise twists of her introduction is that she has symbrachydactyly on both hands, with three fingers on one side and four on the other. It means that she and Ford make insufferable hand jokes when they're near each other. (Ford doesn't know this, but Fil actually used his "six fingered uncle Stan" as a pickup line. It was very awkward and cringey of him. May found it hilarious.) She's part Japanese-American.
May was once an angry, reserved, difficult woman, but therapy and stability have made her grow into a very vibrant and pleasant person. She's loud, silly, and creative. She's obsessed with musical theater. there is quite a lot of her in Mabel. One reason her relationship with Fil works out is that she's able to surpass the Pines spirit in both absurdity and bull-headedness, and those are extremely high bars to clear. When we first meet her in the story, she is dressed like a werewolf for no apparent reason.
May's childhood was rough, but her young adulthood was rougher. She married her first husband, Joss, way too young, and he turned out to be absurdly violent to both her and their son. One of May's biggest regrets is that she didn't take the latter seriously: as long as she was around, the worst of Joss's temper fell on her, and so she didn't realize just how bad things were for Will until she'd been married to Fil for a year or two. When Will was eight, they finally sued for sole custody and were granted it. The entire process was horrible for the entire family.
Will's legal first name is Joss, after his biological father. He hates it and May regrets it. When she had twins and Fil didn't insist on naming them after himself, May got a little power-mad and named them both after herself. Dipper regrets this, but Will thinks it's great. May sometimes refers to her children as The Maylings.
I needed a cute, nerdy music joke for the next chapter of Tourist Traps, and instead of just describing it like a normal person, I had to make an actual score. Thanks to RobertLovesPi for calculating Pi in Duodecimal so that I didn't have to!
The 26th measure is where Fiddleford walks in, and he immediately knows that.
Just finished what was supposed to be the first section of Chapter 5, and I'm immediately realizing that it should have been the last section of Chapter 4. I might futz with the organization a bit once it's all done, because a really good, dramatic last line is being wasted as a mid-chapter break.
Taking a deep breath and reminding myself that this is a gravity falls fanfiction, not a beginner's guide to the history of Oregon's sex and obscenity laws
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