Stanford Pines

User Name/Nick: Krystal
User DW: crystalcleared
E-mail: chronicfangirl@gmail.com
Other Characters: None

Character Name: Stanford Filbrick "Ford" Pines
Series: Gravity Falls
Age: 66 at death
From When?: Post-canon, a week or two into his voyage with Stanley.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate.

Ford's been responsible for a lot of hurt in his time for one reason: Ford Pines Knows Best. He trusts his own judgment above all others, and when he puts his mind to something, he will trample anything in his way. In the past, this has led to driving family away, driving friends insane, and coming a hair away from ending the world. He recklessly endangers the people around him because of tunnel vision on his goals. At the end of his canon, Ford has been shown how wrong he is, and he understands: he's sorry for what he's done, he knows why it was wrong, but the basic behaviors haven't changed. If it came down to it, Ford would make the same choice to erase Stan's mind, even if he knew it was never coming back, if that were the only way to defeat Bill Cipher. Ford still puts the people around him at risk for the sake of his goals, even if those goals are "adventure" instead of "become famous through risky science." He'd put Dipper in harm's way again because he identifies with Dipper and because he can handle it, clearly Dipper can, too.

In addition, though he's got a sense of right and wrong in theory, in practice Ford's moral compass is very much oriented toward what's best for him -- and, post-canon, those he's bonded with. Again we see the tunnel vision: Ford stole technology for his death ray quantum destabilizer and is wanted in multiple dimensions. He's killed in order to remain alive, and he would kill again for someone he cared for. He created a mind-control device for the government and gave it to a twelve-year-old without supervision, and he'd do it again if that twelve-year-old asked. At the very end of the series, we see him flash a gun at a bus driver so that his niece can take her pet pig home to California. He disregards law, order, an unsettling amount of collateral damage, and the wellbeing of people he doesn't care about to get what he wants and what his family wants. He still holds grudges and lets them inform his behavior -- he forgave Stanley because Stanley proved himself a selfless hero, but that doesn't mean everyone else is off the hook. If Ford Pines cares about you it's ride or die, but if he doesn't, he'll walk away from your problems without a guilty conscience, and god help you if you get in his way.

Arrival: Ford agreed to come. His death (he punched a monster and it didn't go as well as he thought it would) came much too soon: he and Stanley have only just reconciled, and Ford wants more time to spend with his brother and the rest of his family. He'll do whatever he has to in order to make it back to them.

Abilities/Powers: Ford's a genius, straight-up. He's got 12 PhDs, some of which he earned in time-looping dimensions. He's well-traveled and competent at navigating the multiverse and its bizarre places. He took classes with ridiculously sci-fi subject matter, so while he's not the best mechanic he knows and couldn't build a portal to punch a hole in space-time alone, he's got way more engineering know-how than the average engineer and is creative with it. He's familiar with alien technology and alien races. He's a font of paranormal knowledge, though without his journals it's limited to what he remembers (which is a lot). He aced cryptography, he draws well, and he's in the best shape a 65-year-old man can possibly be in: he survived in dimensions with barely-breathable atmospheres. (This may be due in part to a vampire bite he received and recovered from back in the 80s, though there seem to be no other effects). He's a good shot with a laser gun, and he can accidentally kill any woman's attraction to him in five minutes flat.

Personality: You remember those old pulp adventure novels, don't you? The ones with the old-timey art of square-jawed men in long coats and open shirts, with yellowed pages that have gone soft with age, that all have that old paperback smell and are on sale in the bargain cart for $2?

Yeaaaah, that's who Ford Pines used to think he was. He knows better now. He's been brought down from Doc Savage past Lovecraft protagonist into normal person, albeit one skilled at adventuring.

Everything about him is a little incredibly dramatic. He's got a long coat with elbow patches, a Booming Adventure-y Adventure Voice, he carries futuristic space-guns under his coat, and he pauses to pose dramatically on top of spaceships. That isn't to say Ford is all talk; he's survived the apocalypse and a lot of weird and dangerous things over thirty years of dimension-hopping, and he studied dangerous supernatural creatures in the woods of the Pacific Northwest for years before that. Very few things truly frighten Stanford Pines; when something is dangerous but not an immediate threat (and even sometimes when it is) he's more likely to respond with interested curiosity. He's in amazing shape for his age, thanks both to deliberate exercise and nutrition as well as years of interdimensional adventures.

He's also a nerd, though. A giant nerdy nerd nerd. He's anxious in normal social situations and loves science fiction, the paranormal, and super crunchy tabletop roleplaying games from the 70s. In his weird cartoon world, he has twelve PhDs. He's intellectually brilliant, though his strengths lie more in mathematics and the paranormal than engineering. His pop culture and technological know-how are very spotty after 1982, though, since he had more important things to do after his return than catch up on computers and Star Wars. Anything he knows from more modern times is thanks to his grand-niblings. Even when there's something important going on, Ford is more distractable than he likes to think he is: his enthusiasm for his nerdy interests can carry him away against his better judgment, especially if he's found someone to share it with. (Though he dislikes parties, it's worth mentioning that celebrations fall into this same category: Ford has ingested some truly fantastic recreational substances and is chill with this as long as it's with people he likes and is comfortable with instead of strangers he has to engage with.)

Personality-wise, underneath the bravado and curiosity and scientific enthusiasm, Ford Pines is someone who has always depended on others for validation. His six-fingered hands and the childhood bullying they caused left him feeling isolated and misunderstood; Ford still carries that isolation and insecurity with him. As a child, everyone thought he was a freak and a nerd, so as a young man, Ford shaped his identity very strongly around that, throwing himself into things that were "nerdy" and loathing things that were considered more jock-ish/popular/~cool.~ Think "Other Girls vs. Me" for an idea of how skewed his perception of popular people was. Ford Pines isn't like other girls. The positive attention he received (the only positive attention he got from anyone besides his brother) was for academic excellence; therefore, his brain had to be the only thing about him that mattered. When no one wanted to be around him because his social skills were poor and he was terrible at talking about anything besides his areas of expertise, Ford's answer wasn't "become a more pleasant person by improving myself," it was "become so famous that everyone HAS to like me no matter what." This led to an ambitious drive that, when combined with Ford's natural unstoppable determination and stubbornness, turned out to be very, very dangerous. Once he gets going on a project, he's hard to stop, and he tends to sweep unsuspecting people up with him through personality and enthusiasm.

The stubbornness, condescension, and Ford Pines Knows Best attitudes are....he's working on them. He still has a little bit of trouble listening to others' advice, he overexplains things in a way that can come off as talking down to people, He makes a production out of everything, he's bad at not accidentally insulting people because he hasn't thought his words out first, and he makes very morally ambiguous decisions. This man is wanted in dozens of dimensions for stealing technology to make a death ray to fight Bill Cipher. He built a mind-control tie in college because the government asked him to. He recklessly endangers a twelve-year-old boy because he, Ford Pines, thinks the kid can handle it. One of Ford's bad habits is projecting himself and his situation onto other people without realizing it. Self-examination is hard, okay, especially when you're a proud person who's made unbelievable mistakes. Ford likes to think he's a rational, logical being whose judgment isn't affected by emotions, but this is incorrect: Ford's behavior is very motivated by emotions, especially hurts and grudges. For over sixty years this man has held his old injuries close and dwelled on them, picking at them to keep them fresh. Forgiveness of Stanley only came when Stanley proved beyond a doubt that he was the hero Ford could never be, and that Stan cared about his family above all else.

Ford loves his family deeply. He doesn't call someone a friend lightly, and so he makes few, but the few he's had are people he would fight for. (It didn't stop him from recklessly endangering them, sure, but Ford does care.) He was grateful to have a chance at rebuilding his family relationships at the end of everything, now that he's pulled his head out of his ass and learned some humility: Ford is full of lingering guilt over his ENORMOUS mistakes, and there's a risk of him overdramatically brooding over it, but until his untimely death, he had been looking forward to rebuilding his relationships and going out and doing good. What Ford wants is to do right by his family, to study anomalies, and to go on adventures, and he'd been all set to do this before his untimely death.


Barge Reactions: Look, Ford Pines has seen some weird stuff. He's familiar with multiversal mechanics, both in theory and in practice. He's been to parallel Earths with parallel Stanfords, so the fact that there was a version of him here before isn't going to blow his mind. Neither will characters from worlds different from his: he's been to the M Dimension, where everything is shaped like an M. He'll roll with a lot of the Barge's people. The worst of them, the really nasty types, Ford probably won't confront in ways that aren't passive-aggressive. There's also the fact that he only has so much room to judge: Ford nearly caused the apocalypse twice, erased his brother's mind, and drove his best friend to madness. His hands aren't clean. He'll get on better with people who admire his talents and who remind him of himself in one way or another: people who are likewise Different, who he empathizes with, and who seem to think he's cool.

He won't like the floods and breaches much: it's going to unsettle him to be at the mercy of those forces. Ford will bounce back from it, and he'll most likely cope by treating it like it's trivial (the coping mechanism he usually uses when things are gravely serious) but he'll dislike being affected by floods/breaches.

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