[ Still, it takes him a while to craft a response - several literal minutes, in fact. Much like Fiddleford he types and deletes and then retypes the same answer, then finally decides it's best to be blunt. ]
[ The question of 'why' should be off-putting, but it's actually a really interesting subject. While it's by no means Ford's area of expertise, it's something he thinks would be interesting to discuss.
It's almost disappointing when Fiddleford switches to a question that's easier to answer, even though it's going to make for an easier conversation. ]
I don't mind answering, but that is a somewhat long story. It wasn't just one thing.
[Frankly he's free to do both. Fiddleford will take any crumb of information right now, and he'd prefer to not have to keep formulating questions when it's very clear he's not good at it.]
Stanford with all due respect I know you well enough to know that when I ask you a question I'm going to get a long response. That won't be a problem. You say however much you feel's important.
Thoroughness and clarity are important, Fiddleford.
[ But okay. He can do this. He can be a little vulnerable and a little emotionally intimate if it's in the name of summarizing an old anthropology dissertation.
Still, he does just as Fiddleford expects and presents him with a wall of text. ]
After we parted ways, I wasn't able to return to Gravity Falls for years. I traveled a lot, and I spent a lot of time with a lot of different cultures. Some were similar to American culture, and others were so different you can't even meaningfully contrast them. Many weren't even human cultures.
There were some that had three or more 'primary' genders, or none at all, that didn't have binary sexes, or that didn't have any consistent links between their sex and gender at all. So of course, in some of them sex and romance were treated in ways I'd never considered before. I probably would have figured it out just from that, eventually.
Early on in my travels, I met someone and I ended up getting along well with him. His culture was one with largely binary sexes and genders, like ours, but the criteria for taboo relationships was based far more around social status and genetic potential. It only took a few weeks in that area before same-sex relationships started to seem common and normal to me. And he and I were both male, and he was a low-ranked commoner while I was a drifter that technically wasn't even the same species, so none of the taboos applied to us anyway.
It did turn out that courtship and dating worked very differently, so he thought we were already romantically involved for three full months before I did.
But once we cleared that up, accepting his advances felt more natural than I would have thought. And that was the first time I was consciously aware that I was attracted to men.
[Alright. Okay. He reads that wall of text -- honestly shorter than he thought it would be -- over several times to make sure he's got it sorted. It takes a couple of times because there's some hurdles there he has to jump, mentally. He's never considered the concept of genders that aren't male or female, and certainly he's never considered that gender and sex and sexuality are not all essentially the same thing.
But if men can like men then clearly they aren't, are they, and the rest of it follows logically enough. That's the one good thing about him: he's simply too mathematically-minded to not intuit logic when it's presented to him. It's just the equation is a lot more complicated than he thought it was, and he hasn't learned the theory behind it yet, and also this specific type of math scares him, and the metaphor is getting a little confused but that always happens to him when he's discombobulated.
Now of course the Trench corruption is making him more likely to purposefully engage with things that scare him, and for the first time that might be... good? At the very least, not immediately dangerous. Just awkward.
Which is all to say, he has this very thoughtful inner monologue but what he winds up writing is:]
Are you telling me I knew you were a queer before you did
That's not ALL I got from it but there was a lot to get, let me tackle it one bit at a time.
I've known since college. I figured it was obvious and I never asked because it wasn't my business to pry.
[And why was it obvious?]
You never brought girls back to the room, you never even talked about them. You didn't talk about ANYONE. So I figured you weren't talking because it wasn't the sort of thing you talk about in public and that was fair enough.
Also I had to sleep every night across from that poster of Carl Sagan making bedroom eyes. You cannot possibly tell me you bought that and didn't know.
Edited (how could i forget our good friend carl) 2022-08-24 03:45 (UTC)
Are all some pretty solid points that Fiddleford just made, which is the worst part. It's very hard to argue when you don't have a solid counter-argument!
There is at least one point on which he can defend himself, though. ]
I'm only asking because that isn't how it happened for me and I'm trying to suss out how much of it was me and how much of it was this place messing with my head.
I don't think it's likely to be Trench. The Pthume
[ That's as far as Ford gets before what Fiddleford says really clicks into place in his mind. In his haste to scroll back up and make sure he really read what he thinks he read he hits send.
He can't even care about that, however. There's a lot he knows about Fiddleford, but this definitely isn't one of them. ]
It wasn't just scholarly curiosity or I'd have asked you all the way back in college.
[Which... actually the alternate universe where that happened might have been real wild, huh? They might have both learned some things a lot sooner.]
Trust me, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to have this conversation, but I'll be up at night about it otherwise.
[Which begs the question of why he didn't just erase the memories that are making him this discombobulated, which is another very unsettling data point to consider.]
The point is it didn't happen like that. I didn't have to wait for someone else to suggest it, it just sort of hit me like a truck one day.
[ Huh. This isn't remotely the direction Ford expected this conversation to go but... okay, yeah. He can roll with it. ]
Not everyone figures it out like I did. Dipper seemed to understand right away, and I believe Ruby did as well.
[ Which is, frankly, none of Fiddleford's business - but Ford knows that Dipper and Ruby are open about their his relationships with Oscar and Ange, and Fiddleford is a trusted friend. ]
I sure didn't UNDERSTAND right away or I wouldn't be talking to you about it. I don't know where it came from, that's the whole issue. I've fancied women all my life and I can't imagine what's changed except that now I'm a squid, so it has to be something that happened here.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cryptograms) wrote2021-09-04 07:34 pm
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Yes, I do.
1/2
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I mean. How did you figure it out. What tipped you off.
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It's almost disappointing when Fiddleford switches to a question that's easier to answer, even though it's going to make for an easier conversation. ]
I don't mind answering, but that is a somewhat long story. It wasn't just one thing.
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Stanford with all due respect I know you well enough to know that when I ask you a question I'm going to get a long response. That won't be a problem. You say however much you feel's important.
[He readies himself for a dissertation.]
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[ But okay. He can do this. He can be a little vulnerable and a little emotionally intimate if it's in the name of summarizing an old anthropology dissertation.
Still, he does just as Fiddleford expects and presents him with a wall of text. ]
After we parted ways, I wasn't able to return to Gravity Falls for years. I traveled a lot, and I spent a lot of time with a lot of different cultures. Some were similar to American culture, and others were so different you can't even meaningfully contrast them. Many weren't even human cultures.
There were some that had three or more 'primary' genders, or none at all, that didn't have binary sexes, or that didn't have any consistent links between their sex and gender at all. So of course, in some of them sex and romance were treated in ways I'd never considered before. I probably would have figured it out just from that, eventually.
Early on in my travels, I met someone and I ended up getting along well with him. His culture was one with largely binary sexes and genders, like ours, but the criteria for taboo relationships was based far more around social status and genetic potential. It only took a few weeks in that area before same-sex relationships started to seem common and normal to me. And he and I were both male, and he was a low-ranked commoner while I was a drifter that technically wasn't even the same species, so none of the taboos applied to us anyway.
It did turn out that courtship and dating worked very differently, so he thought we were already romantically involved for three full months before I did.
But once we cleared that up, accepting his advances felt more natural than I would have thought. And that was the first time I was consciously aware that I was attracted to men.
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But if men can like men then clearly they aren't, are they, and the rest of it follows logically enough. That's the one good thing about him: he's simply too mathematically-minded to not intuit logic when it's presented to him. It's just the equation is a lot more complicated than he thought it was, and he hasn't learned the theory behind it yet, and also this specific type of math scares him, and the metaphor is getting a little confused but that always happens to him when he's discombobulated.
Now of course the Trench corruption is making him more likely to purposefully engage with things that scare him, and for the first time that might be... good? At the very least, not immediately dangerous. Just awkward.
Which is all to say, he has this very thoughtful inner monologue but what he winds up writing is:]
Are you telling me I knew you were a queer before you did
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[ Fucking really, Fiddleford?
Which would Ford would like to leave it but that comment has caused a surge of his greatest weakness: curiosity. ]
When did you know? And how?
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I've known since college. I figured it was obvious and I never asked because it wasn't my business to pry.
[And why was it obvious?]
You never brought girls back to the room, you never even talked about them. You didn't talk about ANYONE. So I figured you weren't talking because it wasn't the sort of thing you talk about in public and that was fair enough.
Also I had to sleep every night across from that poster of Carl Sagan making bedroom eyes. You cannot possibly tell me you bought that and didn't know.
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Are all some pretty solid points that Fiddleford just made, which is the worst part. It's very hard to argue when you don't have a solid counter-argument!
There is at least one point on which he can defend himself, though. ]
That is not why I bought the Carl Sagan poster.
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It seems to me that that's the kind of thing a man ought to have figured out before he hits thirty-something.
[Mainly because if it isn't, that is a troubling data point in the 'you might not be as straight as you think' evidence pile.]
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Maybe, but I was focused on my work for the entirety of my 20s.
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[Which... again... is an unsettling data point.
And also does unfortunately track for Ford. He knows Ford, and he knows Ford would never make a first move.]
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I suppose that's correct. And it's the short answer to your original question: I noticed the first time another man approached me first.
HERE WE GO
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[ That's as far as Ford gets before what Fiddleford says really clicks into place in his mind. In his haste to scroll back up and make sure he really read what he thinks he read he hits send.
He can't even care about that, however. There's a lot he knows about Fiddleford, but this definitely isn't one of them. ]
That's why you asked?
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[Which... actually the alternate universe where that happened might have been real wild, huh? They might have both learned some things a lot sooner.]
Trust me, I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to have this conversation, but I'll be up at night about it otherwise.
[Which begs the question of why he didn't just erase the memories that are making him this discombobulated, which is another very unsettling data point to consider.]
The point is it didn't happen like that. I didn't have to wait for someone else to suggest it, it just sort of hit me like a truck one day.
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Not everyone figures it out like I did. Dipper seemed to understand right away, and I believe Ruby did as well.
[ Which is, frankly, none of Fiddleford's business - but Ford knows that Dipper and Ruby are open about their his relationships with Oscar and Ange, and Fiddleford is a trusted friend. ]
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once again i draw on a for real fucking conversation i have had
Don't you have to pick one eventually?
[Like... that's the whole thing. He fell in love with a woman. He thought that was the final word on it. You pick one and he picked one.]
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cw: discussion of mental illness
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