In An Alternate Universe Where The Classic Barbie Movies Were Based Off Gothic/horror Public Domain Works

not over the fact that Jekyll only cries after having committed bloody murder but straight up dissociates after having traumatized Lanyon…

What's your stance on Ford as a person? Honestly, I believe that for thr majority of canon he is a bad person. But I believe he grew. Still not great though XD

(Love him anyways obvs)

I disagree entirely! I think he's equally as good a person as any of the other main cast.*

*Except Mabel, who, as we all know, is always right about everything.**

(**This is a lighthearted joke. For the love of god, I don't want Mabel discourse in my inbox.)

His biggest sins in the show:

After telling his brother that he was thinking about changing their shared life plans, and then discovering that his brother had gone to the high school that night for no good reason and gone to the science fair for no good reason and messed around near Ford's science project for no good reason and broke it and didn't tell Ford about it... Ford believed Stan did it intentionally and held a grudge for it. You know what, it WOULD be pretty damn hard to believe it was an accident.

Hilariously ill-equipped to cope with Fiddleford's mental health. A guy who responds to "I have anxiety" with "have you tried yoga, it helps me" isn't a bad person, he's clueless. "Character cheerfully enacts a bad idea while a loved one in the background goes NO PLEASE DON'T DO THAT" describes half the episodes of Gravity Falls.

Was successfully manipulated by a professional manipulator into believing his best friend wished him ill. Man, what a terrible person Ford is for being manipulated by a manipulator and saying cruel things to somebody he'd been genuinely convinced was trying to harm him.

??? Didn't say thanks to a guy he was still mad at after the guy fixed a problem he himself had caused. This is a solitary example of stubborn bad etiquette, jesus christ. There's half a dozen different reasons why it makes perfect sense Ford wasn't in the right mindset to feel grateful, this is not something worth indicting his entire character over.

He had high ambitions, which everyone seems to lambast him for, but high ambitions that wouldn't have required doing anybody harm! (Until the professional manipulator started manipulating him into harming the people around him, but we are going to demonstrate some reading comprehension and not blame Ford's underlying morality as a person for things he never would've done if not for Bill's bullying, con artistry, and outright lies.) Like, what is it that he wanted to do with his life? Use his talents to get rich and famous? Shit, that's exactly what Stan wanted to do with his life. It's what Dipper fantasizes about doing with his life. Even Mabel, who thinks about her long-term future the least, dreams big with her art & performances and is already making big money off cheap-ass commissions. What terrible people they all are, for—let me check my notes here—uhhh... unrealistically fantasizing about achieving success in life by doing the things they're good at.

When their dad accuses Stan of lying as a child, Ford puts his entire summer on the line to defend Stan even though he knows Stan is a habitual liar and has no reason to believe Stan is telling the truth this time.

When his new college roommate he barely even knows gets laughed at for proposing an outlandish scientific theory, his first emotion is outrage at this injustice and he drops everything to convince his already-despondent roommate that he was right and help him prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

When he moves to a new town, he tries again and again to befriend his new neighbors, and fails not because he's rude or a jerk, but because he's awkward as hell, tells terrible jokes, and sucks at identifying phoenixes.

When Fiddleford gets hurt around him, he cares about it, feels guilty about putting him in that position, doesn't want it to happen again, and tries his best to help even though he's bad at helping.

When he gets kidnapped by a weird holiday folklore creature, he concludes without even thinking about it that he's now in charge of protecting and rescuing the kidnapped kids. Yeah, then he immediately starts hollering at the folklore creature for trying to impose his religious beliefs on Ford and the kids—but like, Ford was right tho, he just had bad timing.

When he discovers that the Northwest family committed atrocities against their poorer neighbors a century ago, his first instinct is to march up to their house, find the first Northwest he can locate, and give them a piece of his mind for it. Like, this won't even FIX anything. He's just THAT OUTRAGED over the injustice.

When he sees what he thinks is a fortune telling fraud conning the people, he attempts to debunk her because he's mad to see someone cheating other people with lies—and when he can't debunk her, he just leaves her alone rather than harass her about it. Typically, if assholes think somebody's doing something wrong but don't have any proof of it and fail to get proof when they look, they decide they're right anyway and keep giving that person shit. Ford doesn't give her shit. That's the opposite of an asshole move.

When he discovers his Portal To Knowledge (And Fame & Fortune) is actually a Portal To Doom (But Still Possibly Fame & Fortune, Maybe Even Godly Power), he isn't tempted for a second to keep working on it anyway. There is no moment where Bill manages to tempt him. No matter what Bill offers, no matter how long Bill offers, never, at ANY point, does Ford have a SECOND of "but what if I did make a deal with the devil?" the way so many heroes in similar situations often do.

You ever notice that? So often moral moments in the show are presented as choices the characters make. Will or won't Dipper give Bill a "puppet" in exchange for knowledge. Will or won't Stan fight a pterodactyl to protect Mabel's pig. Will or won't Mabel hand Bipper the journal. Ford is never given a "will or won't he" moment over Bill's threats, offers of friendship, or offers of infinite power—he steamrolls straight past them without a second of consideration—because, to him, the selfish, cowardly, easy choice ISN'T EVEN AN OPTION. He doesn't even SEE it as making a choice because the possibility of doing the wrong thing is invisible. A character who wavers first before turning Bill down would look more noble for "overcoming" temptation—it's harder to notice just how much stronger Ford's moral compass must be to not even feel temptation in the first place.

Greed and pride never tempt him to join Bill's side. Exhaustion, despair, and fear never tempt him to give up. He bears up under weeks, possibly months of extreme sleep deprivation, physical torture, psychological torture, emotional torture, threats of death, threats of brainwashing, threats to his family. He doesn't hold up so that he can pat himself on the back for being a hero—if that was all it was he would've gone "screw it, this isn't worth it and nobody would know I'm the one who gave up" a week in—he does it because he simply knows it must be done and because he's so isolated (half because of Bill's influence!) that he believes he's the one who must do it, all alone.

Thinking he has to do it by himself isn't egotism or pride; it's helplessness. He thinks no one else stands a chance. He thinks he's alone.

And, when he discovers his Portal To Knowledge is a Portal To Doom, he immediately feels guilty. No trying to deny the situation to protect his ego. No shuffling the blame off to someone else. No "maybe the apocalypse could have a silver lining!" No locking the door and trying to ignore the problem. He blames himself for being fooled—he IMMEDIATELY takes full responsibility for his actions—and he CONTINUES to take responsibility FOR THE NEXT THIRTY YEARS.

He takes more responsibility than is even warranted—he treats himself like he's an idiot for believing in an APPARENT GOD who's been practicing manipulating humans for thousands of years and who had never given Ford reason to believe the portal was anything but what Bill said it was. He beats himself up to no end every single time his past with Bill comes up. He even keeps beating himself up thirty years later when he's shoving warning notes to future readers in Bill's evil unkillable book!

When he falls into the multiverse, he dedicates his entire life NOT to finding a way to rescue himself, but to finding a way to permanently stop the CHAOS GOD who's still at the threshold of destroying Ford's world and countless others. He makes himself a hated criminal in the process, just to stop Bill. He's ready to spend the rest of his life trying to protect a world he doesn't think he'll ever see again. He does it because, as he sees it, somebody has to stand in between the children and the obnoxious folklore cryptid menacing them, and he's the only adult in this damn cave with the skills and knowledge for the job.

When he gets home, he doesn't tell his family about Bill and his quest because he's afraid that doing so will get them involved and endanger them too—and because he's too deeply ashamed of himself and his mistakes to stand the thought of his family knowing about the horrible things he's done (AGAIN, WHILE BEING MANIPULATED BY THE GOD OF MANIPULATION).

He loves his great-niece and great-nephew the second he lays eyes on them; he nevertheless tries to steer away from them to keep them safe from Bill; and yet he caves to the very first temptation to emotionally bond with his great-nephew he gets, because in spite of his noble "keep them safe" intentions, he wants so so badly to be close to his family.

As pissed as he still is at Stan and even though neither of them can look at each other without hissing like cats, he still makes an attempt to start bridging their divide by inviting him to play DD&MD.

When the apocalypse happens, he immediately puts his life on the line to try to kill Bill.

And when he's captured, isn't fazed for a second by Bill's offers or threats... until his family is threatened. The exact thing he'd been trying to avoid & prevent from the very start.

And when he's reunited with Fiddleford, his immediate reaction is to point out that Fiddleford's well within his rights to hate him—which isn't a new revelation, it's not like Ford had to do any soul-searching to reach this conclusion, he'd concluded that 30 years ago the instant he realized Bill had played him and that he'd been lied to about Fiddleford.

And then he tries to kill Bill again.

And then he's ready to sacrifice his own life to kill Bill—and the only reason he doesn't is because he has a metal plate preventing him from making the sacrifice... but, Stan doesn't have a plate. If Ford hadn't had the metal plate, he would have gladly done the exact same thing Stan did—and he would have thought it was right for him and only him to make that sacrifice, because it's VERY clear he feels (and has felt from the start) that this is all his fault and he's obligated to fix it.

Over and over and over, these are Ford's two defining character traits: getting so pissed off at injustice that his common sense shuts off and he goes into terminator mode until he's righted this wrong as best he can, even when he can't actually do anything about it; and feeling like he's Atlas, weighed down with the full responsibility of fixing everything he's done wrong and made to believe that, for everyone else's sake, he has to do it all alone. Even when doing so puts himself in harm's way, even when he has to put his entire life on hold for it, even if it might cost him his life. Scrape off his awkward social skills, his loneliness, his nerdiness, his endless curiosity, his zealous love of the strange, his starry ambitions, his yearning for recognition and success—scrape his personality down to the bone and that's what you're left with. A man who believes in defending the exploited so strongly that it makes him a little stupid.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that you probably don't think Stan's fundamentally a bad person, and that you probably think that isn't even worth questioning. Stan's made a whole career out of swindling people, conning them out of as much money as he possibly can, stealing, lying, committing a long list of goofily-named crimes, and attempting douchy pick-up artistry on women; and to cap it all off, he held the safety of the entire universe hostage to demand a goddamn "thank you." Don't send me any "But he had reasons—" "But it was only to—" I don't need it, I don't want the essay, I'm not arguing that Stan's a bad guy, it's fine.

But. You can look at Stan's moments of cruelty and unkindness, his uncharitable thoughts, his character flaws, and think, "that doesn't define him. He's more than his cruelest moments and worst mistakes. He's imperfect, but he cares so much and his heart's in the right place, and beneath all the flaws his core is good."

And if you can't do the same for Ford, it's not because he's a worse person. It's because we got two seasons with Stan and five and a half episodes with Ford—and while we saw Stan yearning to fish with the kids or encouraging Mabel to whoop Pacifica's butt at minigolf or crying over a black and white period drama or punching zombies to save his family, we only saw Ford at the worst moments in his life and under the stress of a prolonged apocalyptic crisis—and, it so happens, all the moments he was pissed at the guy we spent two seasons learning to love.

Ford's got moments of cruelty and unkindness, uncharitable thoughts, and character flaws. But, at his core, he's a good person, and he always has been, and he still is.

Seeing the tags "Ford Pines Is A Jerk" and "Bill Cipher Needs A Hug" in the same fic will never not be funny

It's just. Edward Hyde is an incredibly violent person with no sense of shame or morals or limits, but he still is polite enough to have breakfast at your home and be an unremarkable guest. He's a soft-spoken young man with good taste and nerves of steel and a crazed homicidal maniac getting hard over turning a defenseless old man into an unrecognizable pile of offal. He's a monster in every sense of the word and yet he perfectly blends into the crowd and can afford to be called a gentleman. Do you see it.

"This last re-read of Jekyll & Hyde really entrenched me in my interpretation, that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person."

"Well. Duh. That's the point of the story."

"No, you don't get it."

"..."

"I mean well, yes, technically, it's the point of the story that they are the same person, and most people get that - but they get it wrong."

"...you are overthinking this so hard."

"No! Listen. Ok maybe i am but- listen. Most pop culture interpretations give Jekyll as the full good side and Hyde as the full bad one, which we can both agree is a gross oversimplification."

"Yeah, obviously. Hyde is all evil, but Jekyll is not all good. He is a mixed bag like all humans are. He wouldn't even think of creating Hyde otherwise. He says as much himself."

"See! That's exactly my point! That's what Jekyll says!"

"...what?"

"When we get Hyde's full story, it's not Hyde telling it. It's Jekyll, a man who is characterised as caring so much about his own legacy that he went as far as doing all of this to not risk it. In other words, someone who has all the interest in the world to depict Hyde as somehow wholly other than himself."

"But he doesn't."

"Doesn't he? You said it yourself. He says: I am a mixed bag, like all humans are, while Hyde is not. He is something else."

"Well, that's confirmed by others, though. Poole calls Hyde an 'it'."

"It's 19th century England and Poole is an old man, he probably talks about chimney sweepers the same way."

"OK, but what about Enfield and Utterson and Lanyon and everyone else being repulsed by Hyde? That all points to him having something deeply inhuman about him."

"Inhuman, I'm not sure. Unnatural, definitely. He is a creation of science, like the Creature from Frankenstein, and as such he is deeply uncanny - I don't need to break out the freudian unheimleich, do I, you got what I meant. But would you say that the Creature is not human? The whole point is that he is."

"Ok, then what about Jekyll talking about how his perceptions and ideas and ways of thinking changed when he was Hyde? Or how Hyde grew with the passing of time?"

"Ah! See! That's the thing. That's Jekyll saying that. But hear me out. What's more probable: that whatever radical physical change that brought on Hyde's appearance brought on also some changes in brain chemistry that could feel as if one's thought patterns had transformed? Or that Jekyll truly managed to create a chemical sieve to separated good and evil, and put only the second to the forefront?"

"See, you ARE overthinking this. You talk about brain chemistry and probability, but this isn't a scientific paper. It's a parable. Do you think deteriorating lead white is the cause of Dorian Grey's portrait changing? Of course not. It's not chemistry. It's philosophy."

"No, you don't get it. We know Jekyll omits or glosses over parts of the narrative that are painful to him. He doesn't say what happened with Lanyon after he transformed, for example. He says that he shares a memory with Hyde yet the memories of the murder are hazy. Jekyll is trying to say: all of my evil instincts, and nothing else, were Hyde. What else could Hyde be if not evil? But if we assume that the Hyde persona was just as double as Jekyll's, just as filled with the potential for good and evil - that it was just Jekyll, only younger and more wild... that means that it's not just the original sin of creating Hyde that belongs to Jekyll. It means that every time he did something wrong, it was him, actively choosing to do so, because he knew it would be without social consequence."

"Ok, let's say i buy that. Is it that big of a difference? It doesn't seem so to me."

"But it is! Because it changes the meaning of the story radically."

"How?"

"Look. We are having this whole conversation, right? And people who are reading follow the turns, maybe even read them in two different voices. But it's just one person writing. There's the illusion of a conversation, of an exchange of ideas, but actually the decision on who is right is taken, because there is only one person writing."

"Like Jekyll writing about Hyde, I get it."

"But that is also the situation for Hyde! That's why his character is so full of rage and rebellion and hatred towards Jekyll - because he *is* Jekyll. Jekyll takes all the parts of himself that he wishes to hide and puts them on Hyde. But that's not who Hyde is. Hyde is Jekyll as much as Jekyll is Hyde, and Jekyll trying to confine Hyde to the realm of the evil and wrong is just Jekyll trying to get away with murder, again, if not physically, at least in the memory of posterity."

"You are saying that, what, Jekyll killed Carew?"

"Of course Jekyll killed Carew. He also stepped on the girl. Hyde is small, and has a light step. He wouldn't have managed either of those things if he wasn't still Jekyll, with all of his weight and strength. Jekyll himself uses the first person when he describes the murder."

"So Hyde destroying Jekyll's things and putting blasphemous words in his holy books..."

"It's all Jekyll, acting in self-hatred. That's the whole secret. Jekyll hates himself because he is a coward. He wishes he had the courage to be the person he wants to be out in the open, but he doesn't. So he creates a mask for himself, one that grants him total freedom. And in that total freedom he is also free to hate himself and his own legacy and all the ways being Henry Jekyll has him trapped. But its all him, all the way, making the decisions."

"Alright, I guess. I don't see how this is radically different from my interpretation."

"You believe Jekyll when he says-"

"I believe Jekyll believes that. You dislike Jekyll because you recognise in him your same desire for a flawless, composed life, and this brings you to automatically treat him as a liar who knows he's lying. But you and I both know that a lie one tells to oneself becomes a truth soon enough. I think Jekyll truly believes Hyde to be all evil, and I think Hyde believes it, as well. It explains why the gravity of his sins escalates so rapidly, and why he never tries to reach out or form human connection as Hyde, although his appearance probably didn't help. And if someone thinks that they have no choice, isn't that the same as having no choice at all?"

"So your point is..."

"You don't believe Jekyll's last confession. I do, in the measure that I believe that he believes it."

"...but we are the same person."

"Yes. Well. We are all a mixed bag, aren't we."

au where every time Dr. Henry Jekyll introduces himself he attaches all his degrees and doctorates to his name and by au i mean this is absolutely canon and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Hyde as a metaphysical anomaly. He shouldn’t exist. Hyde as an infohazard. You will never understand him or describe him. Hyde as a hole ripped into the fabric of reality, a bending of physics and biology. He carries outliers with him. Coins fall on their edge. Cats hiss. Milk curdles. Hyde as a supernatural entity in all but name, making you doubt what the true limits of science are. A fae of the modern era, a spirit of the laboratory, a spell conjured not by magic but reason. Jekyll as a willing vessel of a knowledge so troubling it’s corrosive, the poisonous influence of Hyde and the distortion he brings onto natural law seeping out of him and peeking out not with life of its own but a mockery of it. His fingers brush the Bible, and the paper withers.

low lays the devil in me

*if you tag as ship it's an insta-block. not what this is. thanks

(+ bonus fiddauthor & Fiddleford Is Canonically The 45th President In The GF Universe edition)

I will forever hold the belief that Ford said “Grammar, Stanley.” as a sort of revenge for making him say “Thank you.” in front of everybody.