30.mp4

he is a normal and mentally stable individual

paranoid ford era enjoyers raise ur hands

early 1980s to early 2010s is possibly one of the funniest 30-year periods of history to miss out on, especially for a scientist

experimented a bit with digital painting/lineless art for this! what if after having the metal plate installed, ford got a bout of this and was terrified that the surgery backfired and trapped a little piece of bill in him forever? :D

part 2 of these, by popular demand

"ford doesn't know about 9/11" this. "ford doesn't know the ussr fell" that. bro doesn't know about the fucking challenger

so i was thinking about ford's terrible lab safety protocols, which are frankly so bad it's amazing to me he managed to clutch 12 phds. how he only double-checks his calculations and teases fiddleford for quintuple-checking (it's a blessing in a test setting to have a guy eager to do that! that guy is the backbone of so many scientific operations!!). how his redundancy measures are ass-backwards. the portal shutdown procedure requires three keys to be turned simultaneously and a button to be pressed, but turning it on can be as easy as the accidental push of a lever??? did bro learn nothing from chernobyl?? from the challenger?!

and then it hit me. no he didn't. he wasn't there for that. BRO DOESN'T KNOWWW THIS IS GONNA BE WORSE NEWS THAN 9/11 TO HIM

these fucked up guys + text posts

gee i wonder who my bias is

part 2

this is how that first meeting went right

The missing Journal 3 pages in TBOB are so interesting to me in further contextualizing Ford's mindset of shame regarding Bill. We'd gotten a snippet of it in the original J3 release:

But Bill shows us the less pragmatic motivations behind his actions, the mushy feely stuff he was too embarrassed to properly journal, putting certain series events into new context. Particularly this scene where after a whole episode of dancing around it, he finally opens up to Dipper about the nature of their relationship:

"Bill wasn't always my enemy, Dipper. I used to think he was my friend, long long ago..."

But does he really tell the full truth here? The cat's out of the bag, Dipper knows they had a deal, there's no reason not to tell everything. But Ford proceeds to explain his reasoning for summoning Bill as a purely practical, scientifically-driven one.

"I had hit a roadblock on my investigation of Gravity Falls. Until I found some mysterious writing in a cave. Ancient incantations about a being with answers. It warned me not to read them, but I was desperate."

Desperate...for what? Ford would have us believe it was for the sake of knowledge. Yet TBOB shows us that this is the entry immediately preceding his and Bill's first meeting.

Ford isn't some unfeeling robot powered solely by knowledge, he has human needs. He was lonely, lonely enough to summon a demon for companionship. A companionship so intimate, he describes his meeting Bill as the best day of his life, and laments the periods of absence from him.

That desire for intimacy is ultimately what drove him, and even with all his dirty laundry laid out he can't admit that part to Dipper. Maybe he doesn't even realize it himself, at least not until the post-Weirdmaggedon sections of TBOB:

Under the shame of unleashing Bill Cipher's destruction on the world, there's a much deeper shame: that Stanford Pines is not a lone-wolf, unfeeling sci-fi hero, but a fallible human being, capable of illogical sentimentality and longing for approval and (in)human connection. The exact nature of this sentimentality and longing is left to interpretation, but the efforts he goes to to conceal it make me lean towards something beyond platonic. Alex Hirsch's own words might support this:

"I think he is deeply, deeply hiding from his real feelings about things, because at some point early on, he decided that he could run from hurt by achievement and by creation, and has dug that hole so deep that he has no relationships. He doesn't have friendships, he doesn't have romantic relationships, he is someone trapped in a tower of his own mind and estranged. Ford shows none of that. He has sublimated himself romantically so, so deeply. (…) I really thought of Ford kind of like Tesla in that realm.”

TL;DR Ford is up in his feelings about Bill and repressing hard. This is also eerily reminiscent of the self-blame abuse survivors engage in, the hesitance to tell others, and shame over persisting feelings for their abuser.

reasons stanford pines is a teenager and not, in fact, a 60 year old man,