#(remind me in 5ish weeks when the axolotl arc is over—)

[ckret2]

I just realized the reason for Ford's questions in chapter 23, and it is that Bill did not want to admit that the reason why the portal had to be so powerful and destructive to bring Bill to reality, is because the portal is designed to allow him literal passage to the center of existence, plus it makes me laugh that Ford does not know that Bill is the center not only of his life but of everyone else's, figuratively and literally.

I got three asks about the same topic a few minutes apart so I'm assuming they're connected.

"why the portal had to be so powerful and destructive to bring Bill to reality, is because the portal is designed to allow him literal passage to the center of existence" - Nope! Sorry anon, I appreciate the deep thinking, but I'm afraid you read too much into this one.

Ford already knows that the interdimensional portal opens into the Nightmare Realm (a.k.a. Dimension Zero), which Ford himself defines in Journal 3 as "the dimension between all dimensions." So he already knows the portal's default exit point opens at the center of reality; that's not a twist, that's canon info available to both the audience and to Ford.

Once you get a portal that can open in the center of reality, it's not much harder to make it open in the center of the center of reality—like how if you invented a rocket that could carry you from Mars to Texas, it wouldn't be that much harder to get it to Dallas.

If Ford asked "why did you need to get from Mars to Texas riding a missile powerful enough to blow up half of North America rather than any other rocket design?" and Bill said "because I really needed it to hit Dallas exactly because I'm currently in City Hall and can't leave" it wouldn't answer Ford's question at all. So build a different rocket that can land in Dallas, jeez.

Plus, it's pretty easy to open portals to Dimension Zero. Every single Henchmaniac made their way there somehow. Ford found an exit wormhole within minutes of entering the Nightmare Realm (which means he was still pretty physically close to Bill—so, still pretty physically close to the center of D0.) And consider the tiny rifts left behind after Weirdmageddon; consider the Bottomless Pit, which has one exit in D0 that's close enough to Bill that in J3 Bill complains about receiving some of Ford's junk through it. With TBOB, we now also know that something as simple as nuclear testing (well, simple on a cosmic scale) can accidentally open a temporary rift from Earth to Bill's location.

There's plenty of cheap, easy, and safer portals & wormholes & the like open and available near the location of the center of existence. It's just that Bill can't go through them.

But—you're in the neighborhood of the true reason. Bill being defined as coordinate point 0,0,0 of Dimension Zero is a symptom of the problem—not the problem itself.

Anonymous asked: At some point Ford will discover that Bill is the center of existence or it will be information that is always hidden, although I am not really sure how it could affect him, besides an attack of paranoia when he starts to fear the implications of Bill no longer being the center or even worse that he continues to be (and that the center is not in his position) perhaps Bill could take advantage of this.

I haven't thought about whether he'll discover that specifically, because it's not really "hidden" because it's not really a secret that's being kept. The center of existence is only a location. I suppose there's no reason he can't, but... it's not something I've put thought into yet because it's not something that narratively matters lmao. There's more important things to discover about Bill.

And at the moment, Bill is very demonstrably not at the center of existence, because the center of existence is over there in Dimension Zero and Bill's over here in Dimension 46'\. In fact, Bill hasn't been at the center of existence since Weirdmageddon—he passed through the rift to Earth, then went to the Axolotl's tank, then to Theraprism, then back to Earth.

But the info could come up casually in conversation at some point. ("I miss being the center of the universe." "It must be so terrible, not having everyone around you do everything you say." "No, literally, I used to be physically at the center of Dimension Zero." "Huh. So that's where you got your ego." "Hey.")

At this point, it seems more like something he'd happen to let drop to Mabel than to Ford. He's told Mabel about everything from shape genetics to Euclidean dance music to his mother's history as a model. Meanwhile he won't even admit to Ford that he can make soda cans float while making a soda can float.

If Ford does find out, he'd be more likely to go "well, why was Bill at the center? Was he just hanging out there or was there something significant to it?" than he would be to immediately assume that, for some reason, Bill MUST be the center.

Anonymous asked: Scenario that will never happen Dipper finds out that Bill is the center, which drives him crazy that no one from outside (the gods) are going to do anything in case his dimension suffers consequences by having the center of existence sleeping on the floor, this paranoia is fueled when he remembers what Bill told him about the axolotl cutting a timeline which serves as an excuse for him to become more alarmed by their indifference to what happens to his dimension.

No yeah that tracks, Dipper would invent a crisis around a non-existent problem he created in his head.

(Fun fact though: the gods aren't indifferent. Some of this will be in future chapters and some of this will only be seen when I finish editing ch 51 for TBOB-compatibility—but the Axolotl is working very hard to keep Bill safe, and just about everyone else really, really wants Bill back in Theraprism—or worse.)