Yknow Its A Hard Line To Dance, But I Do Love When People Make The Stans A Bit Mean At Times In Fics/art

yknow its a hard line to dance, but i do love when people make the stans a bit mean at times in fics/art (hard line to dance, because its pretty easy to stray into ‘sounds like author just hates these two’ territory unfortunately)

it seems to me that ford has trouble with communication. he often cant tell when something he says could be hurtful to someone

(i say that because you can tell he really does care about his family and he does to try to make things up to them- ie, comforting dipper after the bill thing, praising mabel and letting her write an entry in the journal after the unicorn thing, actually trying to find ways to mend his relationship with stan in spite of everything)

stan is the type of guy to scare children and laugh about it. there is an entire episode dedicated to this. he nonchalantly insults people, hes unapologetically cocky, and, maybe most interestingly, he also seems to have trouble telling when something he said might have been hurtful

hes kinder towards his family/friends (note: kinder, he is definitely still mean to them at times. see: boss mabel, the bottomless pit, etc.) but he really just does not care at all about upsetting strangers. he delights in making people angry, at least, the facade he puts on does. and of course, this isnt an insult towards him, it…actually kinda makes sense when you think about his past. not that it made him that way necessarily, more that it sort of emphasized those traits i think

in a similar vein, i think at least part of the reason ford has difficulty interacting with people could be because of his time spent in the multiverse. it seems he doesnt really like having to interact with strangers (excluding most anomalies). in fact, the only time you see him doing that (that i can recall) is when hes talking to the government agents. otherwise he just sort of…doesnt acknowledge their existence at all. the only exceptions are the members of the zodiac, and he gets time beforehand to know most of them

anyway- when you take those two people and put them on a boat together, you get a really interesting (platonic) dynamic! these two guys who are aggressively protective over each other and who will both absolutely deck a stranger in the face

imagine a scenario where stans insulting some random stranger and the person throws an insult back just to get knocked out by ford whos absolutely not going to tolerate it (except from stan, who gets the equivalent of a slap on the wrist)

or imagine a scenario where someone notices fords extra fingers and theyre overreacting about them and it gets to be stans turn to fistfight someone

its fun to think about, but hard to pull off. oftentimes you get ‘ford is definitely egocentric and thats it’ instead of ‘ford struggles with communication/general human interaction and especially hates interaction with people he doesnt know’

oftentimes instead of ‘stan is unapologetically mean to a lot of people (and theres a good possibility that being homeless and having to live with filbrick emphasized this)’ you get ‘stan can be mean but hes not as bad as ford and also it doesnt actually count as being mean if its directed at ford’

and, of course, this isnt to say you have to change the way you write them, this is simply me saying i like seeing these two parts of them interacting with each other. and it ended up much longer than intended

if youre like me and youre afraid of depicting them as mean in any way because other people scare you, you dont have to write them that way! you should write your fics for you first and foremost and if you dont want to write them that way, you are in no way obligated to!

anyway- theres a lot more i could say about this subject, but i think this is long enough

(just a small bonus bit to say that living with filbrick + all the bullying he had to go through definitely affected ford just as much as stan. and that neither of their traumas are more important than the other)