Russian Dress From Tver Region, Russia. XIX C.

billie ciphilis

One of Michoacán’s most well known folk arts. Photo taken in 2019 and sorry, none in stock! (at Urapan Michoacan) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLpoFbXldWo/?igshid=1b1vlo8srqpan

youve gotten a few asks about billford before, and your plans for ford's relationship with bill in your fic, but im curious if you personally ship it yourself/*like* it. and, just for the hell of it, if you have any opinion on billdip too, since that one's even more controversial.

I'm gonna put most of this under a cut since it's not only long, but also long about two different topics, but the tl;dr is:

Yeah, I'm a fan of billford. I don't think it's canon, inevitable, or necessary to their dynamic, and I'm still on the fence about whether things will tilt toward the romantic in my fic or if it'll stay platonic, but I do enjoy the ship a lot because it has a lot of (obsessive, weird, unhealthy, angsty) elements that interest me to explore in ships. Billdip, on the other hand, does nothing for me. I don't care about how people ship imaginary characters in their fictional fandoms and I'm not gonna block anybody for liking it, so this isn't a moral stance, here—I just don't like it personally.

One of the things that intrigues me most about a ship is the idea of love that's gone so far it isn't even love anymore but punched out the other side into unhealthy obsession, and "I'll spend the next thirty years of my life hunting you to death" versus "What if I turn you into a gold statue and carry you around to stare at you a lot" sure fit right into "unhealthy obsession." On top of that, some of my favorite ship dynamics are:

the worshiper and the person they've picked to revere as their god, either metaphorically or literally—with bonus points if the person they've devoted themself to doesn't deserve that worship and maybe isn't even all that special, and the worship actually reveals more about the mind of the lover than it does about the (un)divine nature of the beloved

the mad scientist and the muse who gives them ideas and inspires their work (one of my all-time OTPs has a line where the mad scientist says to his ex "we were each the muse to the other"), with bonus points if they both get so caught up in "what can we do together? What dreams can we make reality—" that they plunge into full "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" territory—and bonus bonus points if they eventually come out of the haze of SCIENCE and one of them is horrified by what they've done... but maybe the other one isn't.

two people who are wildly compatible with each other (similar hobbies, tastes, worldviews! they fill in the gaps in each other's personalities! they each happen to be the other's type! they understand each other like no one else can! whatever, fill in the blank!), but for some reason one betrayed the other, they've tried to kill each other, and now things are vicious and bloody and painful and raw between them; but if they talk to each other and accidentally let their guards down for even a split second, all that history is still there, they still like the same stupid movies and share the same stupid inside jokes no one else will ever understand and have the same stupid complementary life dreams, they could have been good for each other, but there's no road back to where they were before the betrayal. Their chemistry is like two huge magnets strapped to land mines: the attraction is as powerful as ever but heaven help them both if they ever touch.

or, alternatively, two people that have all that chemistry, but are just really toxic and do bad things when they're together and enable all each other's worst tendencies, even if they don't necessarily do bad things to each other; and they've got to navigate the fact that they might adore each other so much but they are objectively worse people when they're together.

I like ships with inhuman things. As a writer I like waxing romantic about the inhuman things and trying to convince the reader that yes, this too is beautiful and lovable when seen through the eyes of a lover. I will make you take the stupidest love interest seriously for five minutes. I've romanticized a sticky pile of goo, I've romanticized a robot spider, I've romanticized the concept of being a disembodied voice, I've romanticized a pteranodon made out of lava, and I'll romanticize a cyclopic gold-plated corn chip too, don't test me. Who better to adore a sentient triangle than a scientist-artist who sees the beauty in precise angles?

Depending on the headcanons and/or AUs you're working with, you can get all of these pretty darn easily out of Billford.

I like writing Ford as the awed naive intellectual, hungry for knowledge, for the secrets of the universe, for more, who was utterly dazzled and starstruck by this divinity who tantalized him with esoteric secrets—and who's been furious at Bill for thirty years for betraying him, hurting him, threatening his home and everyone he loves, but underneath all that also furious at him for not being what he advertised when he could have been that; and Bill, meanwhile, playing it cool, far too comfortable playing the role of faux god, but privately, secretly distraught that his favorite "student"—the one who takes Bill's "teachings" and gets creative and inventive with them, the one who always wanted to know more, not just about the universe but about Bill personally—his favorite student no longer worships him, doesn't even respect him, doesn't even see him as an equal, but looks at him like he's the scum of the universe, and Bill won't even admit that it bothers him but it's killing him that nothing he does can get his favorite to so much as smile at him again.

That's the dynamic in my head when I write them. You could play it as purely professional, a god disappointed to lose a worshiper like a boss disappointed to lose his best employee or a celebrity disappointed to lose the president of his fan club; or you could play it like platonic friendship, maybe a QPR; or you could play it like a romance. I like the zest added when you toss romance into this already nasty mess of emotions. I like capping off all that heartache with, "—and if things had turned out differently, maybe I would have taken your hand and traveled with you to the ends of eternity, if only you weren't [such a brutal heartless backstabbing piece of shit]/[unable to forgive a few white lies and some light torture]."

Billdip, on the other hand, does absolutely nothing for me. Not even just for the age reason—that does squick me out, but even if I try to look at it like "okay pretend he's aged up" or "stick it in an AU where they're both dumb kids having dumb kid crushes" I just, see nothing there. I don't even see anything there platonically. Like, legitimately—for the fic I'm working on, I've been trying to figure out what kind of dynamic/interactions they'd have beyond just "Dipper scowls at Bill a lot" and even on that level I've been struggling to think of something compelling between them. I look back on the fact that for a good few years billdip was the ship in the fandom and I go, "why? where's the meat? what do they do for each other?"

I'm forced to imagine that the ship must have been based on some combination of "fandoms naturally want to ship the everyman main character with the charismatic fun villain," "a bunch of teens with crushes on Bill were using Dipper as their self-insert stand-in," and "people assumed Bill wasn't lying when he said Dipper impressed him and didn't start revising that opinion until we got to see firsthand that he uses lines like that on everybody." It feels really uncharitable of me to the shippers to assume that their OTP is founded entirely on statistically average fandom trends and character misinterpretations rather than, like, y'know, traits actually present in the characters, so I'm taking it on faith that there's probably more to it than that and I just don't see it because it just ain't my jam.

When I do try to speculate harder on "how would I get them to interact with each other in a compelling way, like, just in a platonic sense?" my brain starts going "well, dipper's a nerd who's into the paranormal, he wants to know about mysterious things? maybe he's fascinated with bill as a mysterious thing? and maybe... idk, why would bill give a hoot about dipper—maybe bill takes advantage of that fascination, tempts him with more information, maybe he's amused by Dipper's curiosity about weird things—?" and that's usually about the point where I go "this is just, the way Bill and Ford met. This is the watered-down junior version of Bill and Ford's first few weeks." In trying to figure out what the heck Bill and Dipper would even talk about I keep accidentally recreating a less interesting version of Bill and Ford's dynamic.

I want and need Bill and Dipper to have an interesting character dynamic in this fic so being unable to come up with something that personally compels me has been actively frustrating me lmfao, but it does serve to illustrate my main point here: man, billdip does nothing for me so hard that I can't even see them platonically interacting.

Q: Was it fun to shed some light into the backstory between Ford and Bill Cipher and to get a glimpse at the larger threat?

Hirsch: Befriending Bill was the worst mistake Ford ever made. His ego was so seduced by the idea of being “chosen” by a muse that he became Bill’s biggest fan. Ever wonder why there were so many Bill shaped artifacts in the shack (rug, stained glass, etc.)? Ford was obsessed with this god-like character’s influence on history. Unfortunately for Ford, this “god” was really the devil in disguise. And he’s getting ready for Revelations.

“I liberated my dimension, Stanford.”

Ever think about how impressively vulnerable Bill’s confession in the Fearamid was? Bill looks uncharacteristically serious and even distressed while delivering that line; it’s clearly a hard thing for him to admit. “Says he’s happy, he’s a liar.” This is something he regrets, a mistake. He misses home. He’s scared and he’s hurt, but he’s also angry and powerful and that’s one destructive combination.

Moreover, I really don’t think he’d make that confession to someone he just considered a throw away pawn. Hell, Bill was fully prepared to give Ford literally everything. I can only imagine the fact that “literally everything” was unacceptable just because Bill was the one offering it made Bill’s loathing way worse.

No wonder he tortures Ford, that’s a painful thing to be confronted with and no one does that to Bill Cipher! I’m almost certain he’d turn his own pain onto Ford: “Your family isn’t coming back. No one actually loves you. You’re worthless. You were never special.”

My brain provided me with

"Fordsy was a pain in the backside even when I didn't have one."

I like the idea of Bill horrendously mishmashing flatland and Gravity Falls sayings.

(Also I like to headcanon that the Bill code we see in the Journal is plain Flatlandese script and Bill got such a chicken scratch handwriting he's automatically a doctor)

I've got a line coming up like "Would you stop walking around at night without turning the light on? It freaks everyone out." "And do you also want me to start doing a peace cry so I can't sneak up and stab you in the back too??" so Bill sprinkling in some Flatlandisms is a go.

Since the code in the Journal would be impossible to write/read in Flatland and since we also see variations on it being used by Ford and being used by aliens in Lost Legends, I assume that it's a common multiversal alphabet, or at least is commonly used in the Nightmare Realm.

For any writing system to be useful in Flatland it would have to visually present as a straight line, since that's all they can see at a time—so I headcanon their native writing system looks kinda like Morse code written out, all dots and dashes. My version of it also uses two different colors/tones, to introduce another element besides just dots & dashes to differentiate each letter.

The somewhat tragic upshot of this is that by headcanoning "no, that code ISN'T Bill's native writing system," it means we've seen him using multiple different writing systems & ciphers but we've never once seen him share anything about his own language. And that's sad! 🎉✨

I just wanted an excuse to draw these two, also, outfits are from the hwt cd covers.

Original image below.

I had a few other ideas (for other characters to draw for this) but as said earlier, I wanted to draw these guys a lot so here we are.

what if bills legs actually were proportional to his body but he just wore some very ill fitting jeans

Traditional Russian Peasant Dress, XVIII-XIX (From the collection of the Russian Museum of Ethnography): Ryazan, the North, Arkhangelsk, Tambov