The irony of this Sunday morning rabbit hole is the fact that it grew from pure serendipity, as I pondered who Michael Cera was married to, after noticing a wedding ring on his finger in an Instagram reel about his role as “Allan” in Barbie (2023), and found this article:
Michael Cera and his lovely wife Nadine have proven that it IS absolutely 97.6% possible to keep your private life private, if you truly did want to keep your private life private (and didn’t tell Amy Schumer.)
It was at the bottom of this article that I found this fascinating juxtaposition of headlines.
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE
Just as there’s a thin line between love and hate, there might be an equally thin line between girlfriend and stalker.
COMPARE & CONTRAST:
Loud & Proud
VS.
Whatever this is casual and “pRiVAtE”
The “insider” source’s solitary, continuously-retreaded statement still gets traction months after making its first appearance in the trash tabloid press, despite many opportunities for an update in the numerous new articles magically appearing every few weeks that no one asked for because no one really believes this specific fairy tale.
Tim- I've always wanted to be a spy! As a kid, I even had my own secret identity: whenever we were in public, my parents would tell people I was someone else's kid.
Jason-...
Bruce-...
Damian-...
Steph-...
Dick- Tim's repressed childhood trauma aside, let's continue with the meeting...
when you mentioned in your tags that there was hardly any laughingstock i didn't believe you at first, but holy shit ur right. YOU AND @krasytoonz MADE ME INTO A LAUGHINGSTOCK BELIEVER. I WILL PAY TRIBUTE TO THESE SKRUNGLY FUCKERS SOON, MARK MY WORDS *shakes fist into the void*
no yeah Seriously though its just us out here, fighting for our lives in the fucking Trenches. in ten years someone is gonna use the word 'laughingstock' casually in conversation and im gonna have War Flashbacks
Sam: so are you and Cas together? You guys kinda seem like a couple
Dean: please, Cas is just a friend that makes me feel I'm home every time we make eye contact. And sure when I smell him I feel like a part of me that I never thought was missing is complete. That doesn't mean that I have romantic feelings for him though
Carmen projectmoon is a great character because they went “yeah she's just the dead wife character sorry :( FUCK YOU JUST KIDDING SHE HAUNTS THE NARRATIVE” and then she haunted the narrative so hard she caused fundamental changes to the entire setting and affected literally everyone in the world of the story and she’s still haunting the narrative to this day, even after the game that was about her haunting the narrative. most recently they made her a narrator (probably) and [uh hi future bluejay here, what was originally here might not have been true but since this post was made she's done even more]. she died before the first entry of the series
I remember getting nosebleeds every so often last year and it always freaked people out and the only thing I could do was laugh it off while I put a bunch of napkins of some ice cream place to my nose so I absolutely relate Machete in that nosebleed comic
You made a post saying “it has been zero days since our last alex hirsch hates ford so much bullshit” and i know it was mostly hyperbole, but you have some really good takes that I would love to be elaborated on in terms of how ford is written
it really wasn't hyperbolic. over the years he's just really shown a lot of hatred towards this one character.
content warning: discussion of abuse
i want to start with this clip from the commentary which i think of as a microcosm for how the writers and especially alex think about ford.
transcript:
rob renzetti: i mean he [mcgucket] should've basically knocked ford out, and... and destroyed the... you know, tied him up, and, destroyed... and...
alex hirsch, speaking over him: yeah he should've beat ford with a wrench and taken this thing apart piece by piece! he's the one who understood how to built [sic] it, but...
... so that seems like a pretty violent course of action. shall we unpack that?
ford is a character who's pretty explicitly written as a victim of abuse, and who now has c-ptsd as a direct result of the abuse he experienced. alex hirsch believes that ford deserved everything bad that happened to him, that it's ford's own fault, and that he also deserved worse things to happen to him. this is why, given every narrative chance, alex hirsch has piled more suffering onto ford's plate. the biggest example of this i can think of is in the journal, when he wrote that fiddleford was actively erasing ford's memory (despite this being a massive timeline contradiction which i still refuse to accept). because god forbid ford even have one remotely healthy relationship with somebody. that would be too good for him.
ford was manipulated and lied to by bill, but alex repeatedly compares him to icarus, a teenager whose demise was the result of his own ignorance. this comparison is still so fucking offensive to me. the sun did not lie to icarus, did not guarantee icarus all of the happiness and success and sense of belonging which he had been denied all his life, did not actively shut out the voices of those around him who would try to help him.
alex in general has a very strange relationship with abuse. he seems to get really upset when people read his characters as victims of abuse. the strongest instance of this is actually not with ford, it's with pacifica - especially in the nwmm episode commentary. the episode says "pacifica's parents have conditioned her to respond to a bell" and alex says people got "the wrong idea" about it. like. dude. what the fuck. you wrote abuse. even if you didn't mean to, that's what you wrote. you can't say people got "the wrong idea" just because you didn't think about the subtext of what you were writing.
anyway, back to ford: i believe this extends to him as well. alex wanted to write a character who's a foil to stan and who was a selfish unlikable victim of his own arrogance. however that's not what he wrote. he somehow seemingly accidentally wrote a really compelling and relatable awesome autistic guy who had to fight for every good thing he he ever had in his life only for it to be taken from him every single time. but alex can't let go of seeing ford as just "the opposite of stan". when he talks about "how someone as smart as ford could fall for bill's tricks", he refuses to realize he wrote a situation in which a man was being psychologically manipulated and tortured.
it goes back further, too. people repeatedly theorized that filbrick was... not a very good father, to say the least. on top of the very explicit and canon fact that he threw one of his children out on the street (seriously, there is no defense for this), people pointed out that stan would flinch at filbrick, that ford seemed upset by things filbrick said but dared not talk back, that filbrick was mad at stan not for hurting his brother, but for "costing the family potential millions". but alex can't have people seeing ford as sympathetic. ford can't have it bad like stan did. ford had to have everything and he lost it all because he sucks so much. so he wrote the graphic novel story where ford is filbrick's favorite child and filbrick also is not even a bad parent you guys he's just stoic. ignore the whole thing in dreamscaperers where stan perpetuates the abuse that filbrick did to him. ignore the fact that ford was shouting at stan and then completely shut up as soon as filbrick entered the room and did not say another word for the rest of the night. ignore all that because i just made up this story where he cries at a present from stan. filbrick loved his boys for sure you guys!!!
i'm not even touching on how alex repeatedly villainizes traits commonly associated with mental illness and neurodivergence. ford's hypervigilance becomes arrogance. his passion for knowledge means he's a know-it-all. his difficulty socializing and making friends means he's a misanthrope. his lingering resentment for the way he was raised means he hates his brother and is the worst human being to ever have lived. i could go on, go even further into how the finale reaffirms this, but i feel weird talking about this too much.
hot take, but if you can't enjoy even casual H x P inspired romance stories made for fun without justifying or defending your enjoyment of it with "well ACTUALLY these stories are MORE accurate because Persephone WANTED to go down there, she LIKED it in the Underworld!" then you sound like an out-of-touch adult intentionally omitting/changing facts to scrub the story down for a 5 year old who you know won't question you