Artwork by me - image ID included - click for full quality! Please do not use, repost, edit, etc. without permission.
I just finished Another Crab's Treasure and can't get it out of my head, so have a little Kril. He was so fun to draw, I love his shapes. He's just a lil' guy be nicies to him...
Artwork by me - image ID included - click for full quality! Please do not use, repost, edit, etc. without permission.
Commission for @adreaminmyheart of his roleplay muse, Danny from Cats Don't Dance! This was so incredibly fun to draw, thank you so much for commissioning me!
HI THIS WAS SENT TO ME A REALLY LONG TIME AGO AND I FORGOT TO POST THE RESPONSE,,, This has been in my drafts for like a year I think oopsie. Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway--
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[Send a character’s name to receive four different headcanons!]
OH BOY do I have many a thought about this man. Picking just four is tough and these are going to be so long so I’ll place them under a read-more.
Heads up - significant Gravity Falls spoilers!
Headcanon 1 - Canon-Compliant:
This is a relatively common headcanon already, I think, but Ford is absolutely covered in scars from his time in the Multiverse. He also already had some from his years in Gravity Falls. If you can name an injury, Ford's probably experienced it at some point - bitten, stung, broken bones, shot, stabbed, fallen from a height, poisoned, burned, he's seen it all. (Thankfully he's managed to keep himself away from fatal or debilitating harm, but there's still time! :D His common sense and self-preservation instincts leave something to be desired and his hero complex never quite went away.) He isn't too fussed about others seeing the scars, usually, but he tends to be evasive if asked about them - he prefers not to think about his time in the Multiverse in too much detail.
Headcanon 2 - Hilarious:
Ford is resolutely convinced that, throughout his time working with Fiddleford, he did an astounding job at hiding Bill and their partnership. He is 100% certain that Fiddleford couldn't ever have known, not in the least! It does, however, turn out that Ford is a terrible liar and has about as much subtlety as a fork in the garbage disposal. That's not even counting the moments (that Ford is unaware of) when Bill would talk directly to Fiddleford, making no pretenses but never telling Fiddleford exactly who he is other than a 'friend' looking after Ford and helping build the portal. At one point Bill even tried to directly tell Ford that Fiddleford knew, hoping they'd get to stop the charade - Ford just laughed and brushed it off, saying, "Don't be ridiculous, he doesn't suspect a thing!" Bill didn't care enough to push the topic.
Headcanon 3 - Painful:
[CW: Substance misuse, life-threatening physical illness, mental illness, paranoia]
Being possessed repeatedly by Bill had serious effects on Ford’s body which neither of them expected. Towards the end of their partnership, his body essentially began to treat Bill like a parasite - his immune system began attacking his nervous system. This caused swelling in his brain, accompanied by fever, hallucinations, chronic headaches and light sensitivity, and just in general an awful time all around for him. After the betrayal, it didn’t matter if Cipher was actually tormenting him or not; hallucinations of him were enough to fuel Ford’s paranoia, and depriving himself of sleep to 'protect' himself from these hallucinations did extremely little to help.
The one saving grace is that Ford began to self-medicate with steroids in an attempt to keep himself awake and alert for longer periods, which had the (accidental, on his part) side-effect of slowing/reducing the swelling and suppressing his immune system's attack on his body - and likely saved his life by keeping him going until he finally ended up in a hospital. He has long-lasting damage from this, though thankfully things have improved with time, and he has learned to live with and work around the lingering symptoms. He's still not certain how much of the torment in those years was actually Bill, and how much of it was his own paranoia and illness... If he's honest with himself, he'd rather not know.
Headcanon 4 - Canon Is Dead:
Stanford Pines likes poetry and I will die on this hill. I know this directly contradicts Journal 3 (”I never understood poetry, to be honest") but, in my eyes, Ford loves self-expression through written and visual mediums. He is a man who has always struggled with expressing things like emotions verbally, which is part of the reason he ends up using his Journals more as a diary than as a record of research methods and discoveries, and so art as an expression of things you can’t otherwise put words to fascinates him. The written word, in general, is something he loves - whether fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose. Poetry in particular is something that helps him with recognising his own emotions and understanding them. As such, I explain the Journal 3 comment either as “-plugs ears- he didn’t say that” or “he’s being deliberately snarky because he knows what the Hand Witch is implying and he doesn’t like it or want to admit/acknowledge it”.
...
Now I’m. Stretching the rules a bit lmao.
Here are some in-depth extras that are important ones to me, but don’t particularly fit the above categories.
Bonus Headcanon 5 - Trauma, coping mechanisms, and the importance of social support after so much isolation:
[CW: Discussion of PTSD symptoms]
Basically implied in canon already, he has some pretty serious PTSD as a result of his years spent paranoid and alone in the Multiverse, and suffers from frequent nightmares as well as occasional flashbacks, amongst other things. One of his biggest coping mechanisms for the related anxiety is being armed so he can defend himself at a moment’s notice. At first after returning, Ford never went without his weapon belt, not even at the Shack, and all it took was an errant floorboard creak for his hand to fly to his gun. After a long while, he steadily got used to the idea that he was home, and he was safe, and started to forgo the belt more and more whilst in what he felt were safe places (ie. in the Shack or on the Stan O’ War II).
Despite that, he still feels the need to be armed for reassurance whenever he goes out, even if it’s just to the town - and there are days where he will, without explanation, carry a weapon in his safe places too, something that Stan tactfully doesn’t mention. However, later on those same days Stan will usually a spot a new anomaly and insist they need to stay home so he can tell Ford about it, then spend all evening spinning a grand tale of how terrifying and fantastical it was in great detail, until Ford either is listening with complete awe or is terribly unamused and poking holes in the blatantly fabricated story - either way, the gun often ends up on the table, forgotten.
Bonus Headcanon 6 - Probably the most important one to me and plays a massive part in how I characterise Ford as a whole - I apologise for how LONG this one is but I have so so so many thoughts about it:
Ford is autistic and was diagnosed as a child, in the 60s. He grew up masking a lot of the more “obvious” traits, like repressing many of his body stims, because of bullying and family pressure - he was already “weird” and this just made him stand out more, so he tried to hide it. Big traits he had as a child that carried over to adulthood were his bluntness, difficulty in relating to others, sensitivity to sensory input (noise and texture were the main ones), and how he would focus intensely on particular topics that interested him. Behind-the-scenes he also received a lot of support from Stan (who I headcanon as ADHD and autistic, though his traits present very differently to Ford’s and he was never assessed or diagnosed, instead just treated as a ‘problem child’), and as such, began to struggle a lot more than he thought he would once Stan was no longer in his life and couldn’t secretly help him through things.
As an adult, since he started living alone and had embraced his polydactly and made it his, Ford steadily started unmasking and just let himself exist in all his “weird” glory; including being more vocal about his own limits and needs, both personal and social. He stims a lot with DD&MD dice (which he is an avid collector of) as well as whatever little desk toys he can find (especially physics-based ones), and also has several hand-based stims like tapping or rubbing his fingers. One of his anxious stims, picked up during the nights where he was trying to keep himself awake, is tapping his thumb against his fingers sequentially and counting along “one, two, three, four, five”. Counting is general is an action he finds very soothing when he’s stressed or anxious.
Finally, one thing that has never, ever changed about him is that once he gets focused on something he Will Not Stop - he’ll forgo food, sleep, and anything else because he simply forgets he needs it once he gets into the zone, and he’s terrible at reading the signals from his body informing him he is hungry or tired. Having others around, like Fiddleford and Stanley, to prompt him to look after himself is something he benefits from heavily.
