Character Base

• Character Name: Fiddleford Hadron McGucket
• Age: Late 30s; for the sake of consistency I go with 38.
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: Gravity Falls (2012 with extra material released in Journal 3 in 2016)/Day 74 of his mental breakdown, 30 years pre-canon.
• Items Coming Along:

1. The Memory Gun. A device made out of scavenged bits and bobs that can delete specific memories out of a person's head.
2. A banjo.
3. The Cubic's Cube; functionally-identical to a Rubik's Cube but with an off-brand name like most branded items in Gravity Falls.
4. A metal tin containing six chewing tobacco twists.
5. A photo of his ex-wife and son.
6. His wedding ring.

Content Warnings for Character: Memory loss & lost time, mental and physical deterioration, paranoia, divorce, child estrangement, harm to self and others (physical and mental), cult activity, addiction

Character Background

• History: On the Gravity Falls Wiki.
• Core Relationships:

Stanford Pines. Former college roommate and former best friend. Fiddleford moves across state lines just to help Ford on a project and continues to help Ford despite it taking a serious impact on his mental and physical health. He puts himself out for his best friend far past the point where other people would have probably called it quits, and what it takes for him to finally leave is for Ford to essentially say point-blank that he cares more about his research than Fiddleford's safety. At the canonpoint I'm taking him from he is incredibly distrustful of Ford. While he has erased some of the reasons why, he knows that Ford is bad news and has left himself stern warnings to that effect. 30 years after the fact he is able to forgive Ford and rekindle their relationship in the show's finale, which speaks to the strength of their friendship.

Emma-May McGucket. Ex-wife. During the early portions of Journal 3 (before their divorce) Ford mentions that Fiddleford carries a photo of her and their son with him pretty much at all times. The impression given is that he loves her very much and uses the reminder of her as a grounding object. This is further evidenced by him creating the Homicidal Pterodactyltron in response to her leaving him; I think it's fair to say you don't make a giant robot about a woman you don't care about. In Deer Country he'll be fresh on the heels of that divorce getting finalized and still incredibly broken up about it.

Tater (Tate) McGucket. Son. Even after Fiddleford has erased all memory of his life before 1982, he remembers that Tate is his son and that he loves Tate and wants to spend time with him. It is as far as we know the one thing from his past life he consciously retains and from this we can infer that he cares about Tate a great deal; again, to the point of making a giant robot in season one episode two specifically with the intent of getting Tate's attention.

The Society of the Blind Eye. Not a single person, exactly, but at the point I'm taking him from Fiddleford feels very strongly about the Society and the people in it. He formed it to help other people who were suffering like he was and while ultimately both he and the other members of the Society forgot that he was its founder, their mission is not much different thirty years later than it was when he founded it. He could have left Gravity Falls after the trauma he endured there, but instead he stayed to take care of the Society until it ultimately destroyed him physically and mentally and, quite possibly, ruined his relationship with his family (this is conjecture, but it's not unreasonable to think his wife divorced him because of the cult). He felt responsible enough for the Society and its mission to stick with it even in the face of it causing him a whole lot of harm.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

As a note, while I'm playing Fiddleford from 30 years pre-canon, I supplement with examples from past his canon point as well. I believe that older Fiddleford is essentially just younger Fiddleford with no reason to have a filter, and traits he exhibits as an older man are traits that he had as a younger one. While he has lost all his memories of who he used to be, a lot of his personality traits are surprisingly consistent.

Fiddleford is Creative; he is a genius inventor and is shown to have been working on a prototype for a portable laptop computer well before the year they actually were invented. He invents many highly-advanced robots, including a sea monster that is life-like enough to fool people into believing it's real until they get up close enough to knock on it and hear the clang of the metal. The Memory Gun, while undeniably terrifying in concept, is still an incredibly creative thing to invent. He's also the mastermind behind rebuilding the entire Mystery Shack into a mobile fighting robot in the show's finale (notably his first invention that 'won't be used for evil', his words). On a less mechanical note, he's an accomplished banjo player and can also hambone and play the spoons.

Fiddleford is a Problem-Solver. In general this goes hand-in-hand with being creative and mechanically-minded: he is good at engineering and programming and you have to be good at problem-solving to be good at both. A good specific moment to illustrate this is when he and Ford Pines are in a cavern and their lantern goes out. The cavern is also home to faintly-glowing geode creatures, and Ford suggests gathering them up to use as a light source, while Fiddleford just picks two up and bangs them together to make a spark and re-light the lantern.

The issues begin when Fiddleford perceives a problem that has no simple solution, but which he still thinks he ought to try and solve. He is proactive often to a fault and can quickly get himself in over his head because he can never do anything halfway.

The Society is a great example of this. First the problem was simply that he, personally, was disturbed by the traumatizing experiences he'd endured while assisting Ford. This led to the invention of the memory gun, and it could have stopped there except that he naturally came to the conclusion that if he was struggling then surely other people were too. This then mutated into trying to solve the issue of Gravity Falls just being a weird and upsetting place: not a simple thing to fix, which is why his solution wound up being to simply make people forget the weirdness because there was no way to eradicate it at the source. He wanted to solve other people's problems in the name of 'helping' them, first consensually by recruiting them to the cult and then ultimately by erasing the memories even of people who were not involved with the Society simply because he assumed things would be better for them that way. If that sounds like a wild escalation of what was initially something with good intentions, that's correct.

The issue is that Fiddleford is Highly Reactionary. The obvious solution to what happened to him in Gravity Falls would have been to leave, but he has a bad habit of often skipping over the obvious or simplest solutions and going for the wilder ones first -- 0 to 60 with little in-between. The best example of this is that he thought the best way to handle his trauma was to start a cult and that is more or less the first thing he did. Not only that, but think about how much work must have gone into setting up the Society in the first place. It wasn't just about building the Memory Gun, which was on its own already a wild first solution to the initial problem. He had to secure the space under the Gravity Falls Museum of History. He built, presumably, an entire secret passageway and a chair to strap people into and a spooky statue for the aesthetic. A person can't go down to the corner store and buy red robes with custom eye symbols embroidered into the hoods, so it's very possible he had to make those himself. He had to network; in the Journal Ford mentions seeing him hand a 'piece of paper with a symbol on it' to a young Blind Ivan, and though Ford doesn't know the context, we as the reader know what's going on. He had recruitment materials made up and ready to go pretty much from day one. So, he went 110% in on this from the start, likely because it made him feel better to feel like he was Doing Something at all. Once he had the solution he thought was the right one he went all-in.

This applies to his use of the Memory Gun as well. By the end of approximately two years of usage he has completely forgotten his former life and rapidly physically and mentally deteriorated; he looks, physically, almost the same as he would 30 years later at the time of the events of the show. Compare this to Ivan who, in his on-screen appearance, has been using the gun regularly for 30 years and seems more or less completely sane and physically fit. From this we can infer that Fiddleford was using the gun a lot to get so bad so quickly, and he only starts wondering about side effects on-screen once they've already set in. It was a coping mechanism and security blanket for him, and something I think it's fair to say he became addicted to. We can see this same addictive personality in his chewing tobacco habit and his drinking (in both his on-screen appearances as a young man there are jugs of alcohol shown).

That aside, there are plenty of other times he reacts very strongly and with an extreme solution. When he wants to design a security system for the research bunker he and Ford built, what does he do? Invent a fancy lock? No, he makes an entire booby trap room that will slowly crush you to death unless you know the passcode and are able to parkour your way through the room to input it correctly. When his wife leaves him, what does he do? He makes a giant fire-breathing homicidal pterodactyl robot and burns down half a town about it. When he starts to really fear where the project he's working on with Ford is headed, he takes it upon himself to write Ford's entire thesis for him using research in a field he is not personally familiar with, in hopes that if it's already done Ford will just publish it and they can move on. He writes an entire graduate level thesis compiling years worth of research in three days, without being asked to, because he thinks it's the best way to get Ford to listen to him. When as an old man he starts to feel like his son isn't paying him enough attention, what does he do? He gets straight to work on a giant mechanical sea monster to recapture his son's affection instead of, like, talking to him. When he's swallowed by a baby pterodactyl he eats his way back out. There is a point in the journal where Ford notes that he's glad Fiddleford is his friend, because 'it would be terrifying to be his enemy', and that's about the shape of it.

In addition to just being kind of feral, Fiddleford can be Petty. In the very first episode he's introduced in, Fiddleford mentions a 'pal' Ernie who didn't come to his retirement party, and his response was to build a gigantic 'Shame Bot' that 'exploded the entire downtown area'. We never see this man again. He's never mentioned in any of the backstory material. The Doylist reading is that this joke was written before the show writers had his backstory completely figured out; the Watsonian perspective (which is what I prefer) is that Fiddleford barely knew this guy. This was after his mental decline really took hold and he'd just sort of glommed onto some random dude because he had no friends so anyone would do, and a perceived slight from him was still enough to merit blowing up a good chunk of the town.

There's also a particularly excellent moment from when he and Ford were in Gravity Falls together. Immediately after the incident with the Gremloblin where Fiddleford is horribly traumatized by seeing his worst fear, Ford decides the way to fix this is to take him to the county fair. While there Fiddleford buys him a particularly ugly-looking (and possibly haunted) squash out of a barrel of 'reject gourds' and tells Ford it's because they look alike, which is the least-subtle drag possibly in the history of drags. There's also the time he and Ford encounter clearly-alien cows and, because Ford tells him not to drink the weird space cow milk, he decides to be contrary and drink the weird space cow milk.

You would think given how front-loaded this is with examples of him not getting along great with people that Fiddleford would be antisocial, but the truth is that he strongly Values Relationships. Both as a young man and an old man he deeply needs interpersonal connection and the reason he so often gets upset with or petty at people he's close to is because he thinks they don't value their relationship as much as he does.

You can see both sides of this with Ford. He moved states to help Ford on a project he knew very little about, leaving behind his wife and son and his own ambitions, because Ford was his best friend and that's what best friends do. He goes along with Ford's research even when it puts him in direct danger and only bows out when Ford tells him directly that Ford values the research more than him. In the journal he's noted to ask several times about Ford's other research assistant (Bill), and in a flashback in the show we see him yelling 'who are you working with' directly in Ford's face. Clearly there being someone else in the equation he wasn't allowed to talk to was a point of contention. Notably, he decides to forgive Ford in the finale after Ford displays clear remorse for what happened to him.

As mentioned above, I'd also cite his ex-wife as a good example of this. A person simply does not make a robot pterodactyl about a person they don't have any strong feelings for. It says a lot about how strongly he feels about his family as well that even after he loses all of his other memories of himself, he remembers Tate and his relationship to Tate. Basically his only understanding of who he was as a person before the time he can't remember is that he was Tate McGucket's Father, and while he eventually gets to the point of making robots for attention we also see him outside of Tate's window with a baseball and a mitt. He clearly very much wants to be in Tate's life and is upset by the fact that he's not.

As a by-product of this focus on relationships, he's attention-seeking. This is the entire thrust of his introductory episode: he built the Gobblewonker for attention by his own admission, and from the way Tate reacts this is not the first time he's done something like this. He is desperate to be included in things especially in the show proper: a Fiddleford who is isolated as he is in canon will always be trying to worm his way into social situations, even when explicitly told that no one wants him there. We see this in Land Before Swine, where he tags along with the main characters even when Stan tells him multiple times he's not wanted. This is conjecture, but it's possible the reason he didn't simply keep the Memory Gun to himself and rather started an entire cult around it was because of this same drive to be around people and form relationships.

Deer Country Attributes

• Canon Powers: None.
• Blood Type: Coldblood
• Omen: A female pig named Hollyhock. Fully-grown, so somewhere between five and six feet long.
• Blessed Day: February 13th (headcanon birthday)
• Patron Pthumerian: The Doorway. I think once he got over the idea of government-assigned spooky eldritch beings he'd be very pleased to be associated with a being who stands for honesty and the importance of relationships. He considers those things that should be valued, and on a more personal note has his familial relationships he'll need to come to terms with no longer having and a Ford in-game to try and patch things up with. My goal is for him to eventually become a Certified Doorway Enjoyer and feel a strong connection to them.
• Blood Power Manifestation:

1. He won't feel temperatures strongly; both cold and hot days will feel middling to him and he won't ever need to wear extra layers or add another quilt to his bed. He'll also be immune to extreme temperatures (to a point). As an example he could stick his hand in a fire or hold dry ice and would only begin to take damage after a delay and then at a slowed rate compared to a normal person, but if you were to toss him in lava or trap him under the ice in a frozen lake he'd almost definitely die. At the very least he'd kinda wish he had died because recovery would be incredibly unfun. Related problem: because he doesn't feel temperature strongly he may not notice he's taking damage until it's set in.

2. He will develop the ability to shut down his emotional responses, becoming emotionally 'cold' and ruthlessly pragmatic. At first this is mostly something that will kick in on its own when he feels threatened and will be difficult to then turn off again, but as time goes on he will get better at turning it off and on at will. This will also include things like normal fear reactions and reaction to pain -- he'll still feel it, he just won't react to it. He will pretty much become a robotic unstoppable force until he turns it off (and suffers a delayed reaction) or keels over and can't keep going. Is it a healthy power to use? Almost definitely not. Will this stop him? Have you seen the guy?

3. In terms of actual elemental magic, he'll have power over electricity. At first it will be difficult to control for him, particularly while he still has virgin blood, but otherwise it will pretty much be a bog standard ability to generate and direct electricity. Like all Coldbloods he'll have to recharge if he uses a lot of energy all at once or for a long period of time with no breaks; if he really overdoes it there's a good chance he'll straight up knock himself out. He'll have to learn to read his own battery meter, as it were.

4. Given his inclination toward engineering and design, I'd like him to develop a particular intuitive skill for augmenting weapons with his own blood. Since this is partly an art and not just a power it will take even more time to really get good at but once he knows what he's doing he'll be able to make particularly powerful weaponry or provide desirable upgrades to existing equipment. He might even be able to make enchantments more complicated than just Tonitrus levels of 'turn electricity on or off' (not sure what that would look like yet but you know!)

Writing Samples

One: March TDM
Two: April TDM

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