Continuing from the conversation in the reblogs of the link below the keep-reading, since while the broad subject of "let's ramble about mental illness and substance abuse metaphors in this kids' show!" is still the same, I'm on to talking about a different character (Specifically, Fiddleford)/realized belatedly that the OP might appreciate this.
So, Fiddleford and his memory gun.
It is, as usual, impossible to be 100% sure of much about the Portal era, considering that Ford's view of reality seems to have already started becoming distorted by the time he began writing Journal 3, and it is true that Fiddleford's signs of trauma after, say, the gremlobin incident, or his nerves when he realized what the probability of failure was, were actually pretty reasonable responses to the things that he was going through. However, Ford does act as though he's always been a bit concerned about Fiddleford's nerves, and when everything is taken into account, it seems more probable than not that the man does/did suffer from some form of anxiety disorder, probably in the OCD 'family.' Once I accept this premise, his story rapidly becomes a solid metaphor about the dangers of self-medicating.
Yes, yes, I know. The moral of the story is to deal with your problems...but nevertheless: the memory gun works as a metaphor for drugs and compulsions and how they don't really solve your problems, and it works especially well, I think, as a metaphor for alcohol and/or sedatives (Ativan, Valium, etc.). When used judiciously and with deliberate goals and limits, these things can be highly useful, or at least do more good than harm (alcohol is an antiseptic, for a lot of history it has been safer to drink than the average water supply, and it at least used to sometimes be 'prescribed' to people with certain heart problems who couldn't afford expensive medications, nerve pills are actual medicine, and as for the gun, we have the canon examples of the end of 'A Tale of Two Stans' and the finale). If you start to feel you need a drink after work every day to keep coping with your job, though, or needing a nightcap just to go to sleep...that can go real bad, and that's if you aren't developing this habit on top of OCD and/or one of its sister disorders. Fiddleford does appear to have such a disorder, and while he already had some ritualistic behavior (his Cubik's Cube, his alleged superstitions around graves, his tendency toward trichotillomania, the amount he checks and rechecks his work), he really loses control of himself when he gets access to the memory gun.
I suspect, between the temptation to instant relief it presented him every minute of every day and the secretive nature of it (no doctor supervising him, nobody frowning disapprovingly into his trash can, etc.) that memory gunning himself at the slightest inconvenience became both addictive drug and compulsion for him at some point, to the point that he was eventually frying his brain for even such a minor stressor as cutting himself shaving - or rather, for such seemingly minor stressors, since to him...who knows what that looked like? Anxiety Brain is wonderful at forming objectively sketchy connections that spiral into long chains of increasingly frantic 'reasoning.' From an outside viewer's perspective: it's a scratch, big deal. A path I could imagine Fiddleford's brain going along might run more like: "I cut myself shaving - why are my hands so shaky, why did that happen - were my hands even shaking, or was I just not paying attention? I can't do anything right! I can't even shave right, never mind raise a kid right! Which reminds me that I haven't seen my son in six months, I might as well have been cheating on my wife, I'm a terrible husband, a terrible father, just a terrible man, why didn't I do something before things got so out of control?? I could have stopped all of this, but now my Friend is out of his mind, he might end the world any day now, I don't know if my wife would have me back at this point if I even had the guts to go home and beg, and now I have this cult to run - but how can I run a cult when I can't even be man enough to face my own family? And it's slipping out of my control, I never meant things to go this far - They're all gonna turn on me, Stanford and Ivan and Emma-May are all gonna team up and murder me, oh God, it all makes sense now - !").
And then the gun made all that noise just...stop. He could sleep. He could run a cult. He could do things other than worry about Ford blowing up the planet any day now, or what was going on at home, or if the things he saw in the gremlobin's eyes could really happen. As soon as it started, he could just...make it all go away, as often as he wanted, at the click of a button. And by the time the side effects started becoming obvious, and he was losing his ability to speak properly and tearing his hair out without even remembering he'd done it and stealing clothes off scarecrows, well...thinking about those side effects, wondering if this thing he feels he cannot live without anymore could be responsible for them, was almost as distressing as thinking about all those motor accidents. Which, naturally, meant it was time for another mind wipe/drink....
So, there, started a couple of days ago and then delayed until I found this tab again though it is, you have it, @gravi-mania - the tale of how one could, if so inclined, warp the backstory of Gravity Falls into a story about bright young things whose lives fall apart courtesy of one of them getting too many uppers and the other getting too many downers. Make the framing device "Stan finally got out of prison after thirty years and went to visit his brother in the state hospital, where Ford laid eyes on him and immediately started yelling about portals and the end of the world and Stan doesn't even know what; as a result, Stan decides to stick around long enough to narrate the whole sorry tale, Prince of Tides-style, to the new doctor Ford seems to think is their nephew," and you could even get some super-depressing sober commentary on society and the justice system in there, too, along with at least very slightly lowering the research load, since sticking to that point of view would limit the scope of things to what he could see/what he knows about rather than going too deep into everyone else's heads and happenings. Though tbh, I suspect going with "yeah, let's just...not" is still the wisest possible course of action all around. really.
9 notes
·
View notes
speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.
the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.
you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.
73K notes
·
View notes
My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.
Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?
What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?
Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.
19K notes
·
View notes
Expanding a thought from a conversation this morning:
In general, I think "Is X out-of-character?" is not a terribly useful question for a writer. It shuts down possibility, and interesting directions you could take a character.
A better question, I believe, is "What would it take for Character to do X?" What extremity would she find herself in, where X starts to look like a good idea? What loyalties or fears leave him with X as his only option? THAT'S where a potentially interesting story lies.
In practice, I find that you can often justify much more from a character than you initially dreamed you could: some of my best stories come from "What might drive Character to do [thing he would never do]?" As long as you make it clear to the reader what the hell pushed your character to this point, you've got the seed of a compelling story on your hands.
53K notes
·
View notes