Ad Astra Per Aspera

[mannenzak]

I'm out here shipping Bill/Ford in a god-honoring way unlike other people, by…. *nervously flips through canon* m-making Bill mentally and physically abuse and demean Ford's autonomy and masculinity but NOT LIKE THAT— *keeps flipping pages* i-i mean it, not like— "coerced alcohol consumption and drunk sex, noncon shirtless exhibitionism, a noncon tramp stamp, noncon possession as a violation of the self and forced insertion into his body"…. fuuuuck i swear it isn't a proship i swear i swear i sw *explodes*

[dandeleon]

something something moth pinning

* do not tag as ship

[abyssalzones]

"Jealousy" is now up on itch!

while working on "dungeon master" I took a short break to get something out of my system. in about 24 hours I put together a quick 4-page comic which I decided I'd sell at a much lower price if the other comic did well enough... I'd call it a bonus but that implies it's rewarding to read. I'm not so sure about that but maybe it'll be cathartic for someone. again this is mostly something I drew to get it out of my head, but now you can go buy it for 5$.

(and for what I think will probably be the last time I'll ever have to clarify: this is not ship art! so, fair warning, if you reblog this and tag it that way for organizational purposes I'll most likely block you. sorry! them's the breaks...)

buy it here!

[abyssalzones]

ENTER THE LAIR... OF THE DUNGEON MASTER!

my Gravity Falls fancomic is officially up for sale on Itch.io! (... and hopefully it stays up there. if not I'll update you but we'll just see how it goes for now.) this'll be the first time I've sold a comic online, so for 15$ USD you get 20 fully colored comic pages. should be a pretty good deal :]

this has been a huge labor of love so please do me a solid and get the word out! chances are if you like fiddauthor, stories about characters navigating gender identity and sexuality, or maybe just staring at comic pages for a couple of hours, something in here will interest you...!

>> link to Itch page <<

[abyssalzones]

if I seem reclusive lately it's because as of last night I am officially HALF WAY DONE with this comic. projected finish date some time late june, maybe july.

[abyssalzones]

priorities

*as always: do not tag ship

[abyssalzones]

prev reblog this is why I think ford pines isn't a true logician archetype I think he's a very emotional character masquerading as a logician. due to the horrors of being the hypothetical breadwinner (and already having a lot to prove on that front on account of having a deformity) (and being gay. if you're really about it.) in his jewish immigrant family during the extremely misogynistic 1960s. guy who is ugly crying into his diary while writing out "I am to join the ranks of isaac newton and albert einstein I am a SCIENTIST I am NOT CRYING ABOUT MY BREAKUP." he studies fairies and gnomes and shit. he wrote an entire research paper about a color that doesn't exist. what I'm saying is everyone's understanding of ford pines needs to be built on the fact that he should've been an art major.

[mannenzak]

crazy how the man's raising money for charity for a currently ongoing tragedy and people still find a way to bitch about billford

how dare the writer of billford use what has been the most popular thing in the online gf fandom for like 6 months straight to get more eyes on charity

[abyssalzones]

[takes drag of cigarette] do you guys ever think about how ford was taught in childhood that love and respect could only be earned through his intelligence and worth as a financial investment and then later in adulthood this was taken advantage of by someone who rewarded him directly based on his intelligence and worth as an investment (building the portal). I don't think about it at all

[milfsatan]

cat’s got the cream

[thereareeyesinsidethetrees]

stan: y'know how you said you'd both kill and die for me?

ford: yeah

stan: how many people would you kill and die for?

ford: hm...three

stan: ...three?

ford: mhm

stan: i...feel like you know more people than that

ford: yeah

stan: am i included in those three?

ford: of course

stan: who's the other two?

ford: mabel and dipper

stan: not fiddleford?

ford: he shot me in the face. multiple times. against my will. i love him, he's a great friend, but no

stan: i thought you guys made up?

ford: he never apologized for it...the obvious answer is that he simply forgot, but i- i'm still upset about it

stan: yeah, that's...understandable

ford: ...are you still upset with me for shooting you in the face? :[

stan: it wasn't against my will and i was never upset with you, bud. he had no good reason for shooting you with that thing. they're not comparable situations

ford: mm. it's still just three

stan: and that's okay. also if you could avoid dying or killing anyone, i would appreciate that

ford: noted :]

[ckret2]

i know that you prefer Billford, but lately I’ve been wondering what your thoughts on Fiddauthor are?

It's a perfectly respectable ship with a strong canon basis, but it doesn't really do anything for me. Couldn't tell you why, usually I love ships with morally dubious mad scientists/inventors and that ship has two of them. By all accounts it makes no sense. But it just doesn't set my heart on fire.

Maybe because most content I've seen for it is post-show soft wholesome fluff and that doesn't do anything for me? The versions of Ford+Fiddleford I usually see get reinvented for fiddauthor drains out everything I find interesting in their characters and I have a hard time thinking up a compelling version of the ship that doesn't do that.

Or maybe it's because I am into billford and I don't wanna subject the poor humans to a love triangle lmfao; plus it's a whole lot funnier to headcanon that Bill thinks there's a love triangle when actually there's nothing going on and the other two are oblivious to what he thinks.

Although TBOB's just about got me convinced that Fiddleford had an enormous dumb crush that Ford somehow never noticed. Like, you don't painstakingly make a pair of custom gloves and an intricately detailed snow globe for your bestie who doesn't even celebrate Christmas and then go home and forget to get your wife & kid gifts unless something's going on. And a one-sided crush retroactively makes the infamous "it's good to be doing this with a FRIEND" in J3 hilarious.

But "I think there's a high probability something mighta been happening there" is different from being personally interested in exploring it.

[strawberry-smog]

I find it interesting that regardless of whether a Fidd/Ford meta post is trying to argue that they’re healthy or toxic or in between or whatever they all still tend to take the stance of “Fiddleford is such a saint for putting up with and forgiving Ford!” when the more canon stuff I see about him the more I’m convinced he’s a fucking maniac. I don’t mean this is a “wow McGucket is so problematic, I guess he’s the REAL toxic friend” way, but I do mean this in a way where I don’t find how he acts around Ford very admirable at all.

Like, this is a guy who cannot have a serious argument or disagreement with Ford, not just to the point where he hides his own feelings around him and then snaps, but to the point where he hides his own feelings around him and then snaps and then secretly uses his memory gun to erase it out of both their heads so it’s like the argument never even happened. This is a guy who moved to and stayed in a town full of dangerous monsters that gave him panic attacks because Ford asked him to. This is a guy who moved ten hours away from his wife and small child for a year, visited them once on Christmas, and then immediately flew back to work because he got into a fight with his wife over not buying her a present while he was busy hand-making Ford, a man who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, two presents. This is a guy who started a cult to cope with all of this rather than telling Ford something was wrong. This is a guy who stood by Ford even after receiving a really mean and disrespectful ultimatum from him and only left when he got irrefutable proof that Ford was about to unleash a demon that would devour the earth, and even then he just ran off to forget everything with his cult rather than try to, you know, stop Ford from doing that.

This is him bending over backwards for Ford, yes, but this is fucking insane. Yeah sure he’s pretty put upon by Ford, but he’s also putting quite a lot of this upon himself, because he can’t just have an important discussion with him and will instead martyr himself upon Ford’s disregard endlessly, to the detriment of himself, everyone who knows these two, and, tbh, Ford.

[abyssalzones]

[1/3] Hello! My apologies, I'm not sure how the best way to approach this is, so I hope you'll bear with me. I have been struggling with some thoughts surrounding Ford and Fiddleford that I haven't really been sure how to parse, and I am genuinely interested in your opinion. I mean this in good faith, an open mind to learn, and from the perspective of someone who really enjoys your depictions of these two characters. Especially in your review/analysis of the Book of Bill, I really agree with the way you describe Fiddleford's significance to Ford and how their relationship with each other is.

I'm going to keep this fairly short and simple because my feelings on it are honestly not that complex, but I do really appreciate you coming to me with an open mind and explaining your own perspective. The truth is that I really don't think anything Bill did to Ford is equivalent to what Ford did to Fiddleford- which is not to say we're setting a standard for abuse at "the most extreme shit ever", but more that... I just don't see any evidence for it, whether that's textually or thematically.

Don't get me wrong- Ford definitely treated Fiddleford unfairly at certain points in the story. It's a major part of why their reunion feels all the more satisfying... but I think that has less to do with Ford not respecting Fiddleford and can be attributed largely to Bill's manipulation driving a wedge between them both. Ford and Fiddleford are, objectively speaking, equal partners: they were roommates in college, Fiddleford drove up to Oregon and stayed of his own accord to help Ford with what would become their portal project, and when shit gets to be too much, Fiddleford leaves. It's clear that even outside of a romantic interpretation they make for very good friends, something that to me is clearly not just a boss-employee relationship.

So the biggest faults in how Ford treats Fiddleford boil down to two things: a lack of trust ingrained from childhood bullying, and the evilest motherfucker in the world sitting on his shoulder and whispering lies into his ear. When Ford gives Fiddleford a stack of equations to work on, he's working himself to death just as hard if not harder. When he mixes up his Cubic's cube, he's playfully messing with him and potentially not understanding that it really is bothering him (if it is.) And later, when things start to truly unravel, Ford's rash behavior (leaving him at the diner, yelling WELL FINE I DON'T NEED YOU I DON'T NEED ANYONE >:(, etc) it's Bill's influence well and truly consuming him and successfully isolating him from someone he had a once-healthy relationship with. hell, even in the journal's small segment about the "a better world" dimension, Fiddleford and Ford eventually make up and become business partners after the success of their portal project, regardless of everything that happened between them- with a way shorter timeframe between those things than in canon.

Idk I just think that while it's true Ford has flaws I think that's true of... any other character on earth? and I just personally can't see a reading of their dynamic that's abusive being true. and that's not only for textual, canonical reasons but a matter of framing between Bill & Ford vs Fidds & Ford. I think "well abused people are capable of abuse too!" is a fair point to make but in this context seems superfluous and really committed to this idea that Ford is just as bad of a person as Bill, or something, that often happens with abuse victims in or out of fiction.

but that's just me

[fridgrave2-0]

I'm tired of pretending that I'm okay with ford being an absolute asshole towards fiddleford and basically abusing him.

first of all, yes, it's not ford's fault that he was manipulated (doubtful tbh) and abused by bill, but that doesn't give him the right to be a jerk who closes his eyes on his friend's deepest traumas. the traumas fiddleford got only because stanford completely ignored his warning and got fidds involved into bunch of shit. like his monster hunting which wasn't even the reason fiddleford went to gravity falls in the first place. he was there to help ford build the portal, not to be a part of ford's anomaly quest. and when fiddleford spoke out against it he was ignored because ford doesn't give a shit about anyone else but himself or his muse. fiddleford got traumatized physically and mentally so deeply that in the need to be able to sleep at night peacefully he completely destroyed his mind to the state that even bill was scared to be in there. and what stanford did? he (the one who couldn't care less about fidds warning him about gremoblin) critiqued fiddleford for using the memory gun and didn't even bother to apologize or say that he's sorry in the journal. god, what am I saying, he didn't even took fiddleford to the hospital after fiddleford feel from the sky through the roof of a fucking barn with a dozen of poisonous quills in his body AND A BROKEN ARM. ford described what happened to fidds in the journal, said he "took him home for a treatment" and the next two paragraphs on the other page is "good news the hyperdrive works" LIKE IS THAT THE ONLY THING YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT THE HELL??? "despite our fortune, I have become worried about my assistant... I myself have survived many monster attacks without trauma, but perhaps F is more sensitive that I realized". no shit sherlock, who would've imagine that seeing your worst nightmares and being poisoned can leave a mark on your mental state. sure it's just fiddleford, he's just overreacting because he's "sensitive"))) /src

ford was ignoring fiddleford's concerns all the fucking time that mcgucket was there with him, he took a superstitious and religious guy with anxiety into the forest with real ass monsters who's no one but ford is used to see. fiddleford was warning stanford about shifty and got kidnapped with his identity stolen by the shapeshifter because ford didn't listen. well, at least this time stanford had bothered to apologize for another traumatic event- ah no, next thing ford said is that when the portal is finished all the traumas fiddleford had been through were "worth it". ford just finds ways to make everything worse

we all know that fiddleford has an addictive personality and that the memory gun is the biggest example of that. what we don't talk enough about is that ford at some point decided that sleeping is for losers, but didn't stop at himself and made fiddleford drink 13 fucking cups of coffee, not allowing him to sleep, what in the future made fiddleford a caffeine addict. ford is not only an overworking idiot who gladly damages his own health, no! he wants fiddleford to be the same and quote "gets frustrated" when fiddleford cares not only about his own, but their both basic needs. fiddleford had to work on the portal, get in the trouble with monsters because of ford, but also babysit this manchild to prevent him collapsing from exhaustion (which is more impossible than building a giant portal into the multiverse)

and here we are, the portal testing. once again (and as always) fiddleford did warned ford about everything. fiddleford was working without breaks for days to make sure if the portal will work, and when he found the flaws, he wrote a whole fucking thesis paper, putting all ford's research into a solid work (not taking even smallest credit even tho he was the one to build the portal. when fiddleford had his own theory in the university, ford helped him to only proof that fidds wasn't going crazy by checking the calculations and ford bothered to take the credit for the whole theory, but fiddleford who was a part and a victim of this monumental theory of weirdness didn't took it because he unlike ford doesn't care only about fame). but what did stanford do? he assumed that fiddleford wanted to steal his fucking fame and backstab him. ford didn't even bother to look at something fiddleford was making for three days without resting to make sure that portal won't hurt anyone in the town and that ford won't end up with empty hand if the portal was indeed a lost cause. stanford coldly dismissed fiddleford like they weren't friends, said that he doesn't really waiting fiddleford for the test of the device that fiddleford did built, and even knowing that the portal was dangerous fiddleford chose to come for the test

and then fiddleford got in the portal and it was the biggest traumatic event for him. it was the breaking point for him from which he couldn't stop using the memory gun. it damaged him so much, that he turned from that bright 30-y.o. man into the familiar to us old man mcgucket in the span of two years. his life was ruined for another 30 years, a half of his life he was a mad lonely guy who lived in the junkyard. the man who could've become someone like steve jobs but much better if only he didn't go to help stanford. his family could've been full, tate could have his father. the incident with the portal was the moment of no return for fiddleford, and what did stanford do?

when fiddleford got sucked in the portal, he thought only about the success of his work, that for fidds it was "a remarkable opportunity to confirm or deny the theory" (which he already did with his pre-test research). he didn't think that it was dangerous on the other side, that the portal wouldn't just disintegrate fidds on atoms. and when stanford saw him speaking in a non-human way, shaking and twitching in shock like fiddleford did after the gremoblin incident, ford decided it was nothing. when fiddleford warned him about the apocalypse because he was in the portal and saw it with his own eyes, ford, as always, didn't listen. he didn't just not care about fidds' condition — he diminished everything fiddleford was feeling and everything he witnessed only because it didn't fit in ford's believes which were based just on bill's words (and for stanford it's not something new to belittle things related to fiddleford. he wasn't taking fidds' dream of creating a portable computer seriously, believing that his weirdness theory was much more important)

and after this, stanford insults fiddleford and his family in the journal. he says that he doesn't regret their partnership (it's not really a partnership if stanford didn't count fiddleford as an equal) and friendship breaking up. "to think I considered him a friend!" I doubt he ever did. stanford doesn't know shit about being a good friend (or even a decent person) to someone who sacrificed everything for him. who did put his life aside to be with ford, who cared enough to stay despite stanford again and again putting him in danger, constantly waving him away and feeling no remorse for that. fiddleford was breaking himself for this guy, he canonically was going through "I am nobody to ford if I don't build stuff for him" (and in the end this is exactly what happened). fiddleford didn't tell ford most of his fears and concerns because he didn't want to bother him. fidds was constantly scared and kept in inside because he wanted to be a "better partner". "if I have an anxiety, I will pop anxiety pills", "I'm gonna get through this". and then he didn't

fiddleford was abused by stanford. he was to stanford that ford was to bill, in some ways even worse. it's fucking wild that fiddleford did forgive ford after 30 years of a neverending madness nightmare with his mind being destroyed so much as like it was the earth in the times of the dinosaurs after being hit by the meteorite. fiddleford had lost literally everything, he wasn't even himself for a half of his life and still fidds found the strength to forgive someone who is responsible for it and who used him with regular emotional neglect. and you know what? fuck this. ford would never forgive bill and fiddleford had every right to stay mad at stanford. ford needed to be stuck in the portal to get his head out of the ass and by that time there were only crumbs of someone who fiddleford once was

fiddauthor and billford both are about abuse and toxic relationships. it's up to you what you like to ship, but we need to acknowledge the fact that fiddauthor isn't some fluffy healthy thing where both are happy. fiddleford was never happy and stanford didn't care about fiddleford and his feelings. they made each other worse and ford ruined fidds' life. THIS is the real fiddauthor

[manoveathajrboard-fic]

Bill/Ford and safewords, set pre-Fiddleford being sucked into the portal. Contains dream!gore and noncon.

*

When Bill’s teeth sank in, Ford hit his limit. Not because of the pain—pain was different in the Dreamscape, muted, less physical—but because of the sight of his flesh buckling, the sudden spurt of blood, the hole Bill was creating. He screamed. “Stop, Bill, stop-stop-stop!” Bill didn’t stop. He didn’t have to: This was his body, his mind, his pupil. Ford knew that entering this, but in his panic he didn’t know what else to say. He writhed, horrified, as Bill took another bite, his bottom teeth catching on Ford’s rib cage. Then, quite suddenly, Ford remembered: Bill had given him a phrase to say if he was ever close to being broken. Bill had assured him that there were stopgaps in his mind of his own design, to ensure he never irreparably broke a mortal. Just say that, and I’ll remember who you are. Got it? Ford stammered, struggling to remember the phrase as the fog of panic rolled over his mind. Right. Right. “Potso tuoyd nammoci!” Bill froze. His multitude of eyes turned to Ford’s face; the teeth lifted away from Ford’s chest, trails of blood dripping from them. A hand touched his cheek, gently. Very gently. Relief flooded Ford, so intense that tears filled his eyes.  “Oh, Stanford,” he said. “Stanford, Stanford, Stanford.” One of his thumbs brushed blood away from Ford’s chin. “This isn’t your limit.“ 

His monstrous mouth opened wide.

[anonheart]

I need to push this thing here before I change my mind. It has been sat on my folders far too long.

Pics inspire me. Fics inspire me. RPing inspires me. So here is something I got inspired by RP I’m currently having.

This goes out for @koncreates. I have so much fun RPing with you dearie!