Fiddleford Hadron McGucket (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
terribibble) wrote2023-12-30 06:44 pm
terribibble) wrote2023-12-30 06:44 pm
Sing Application
PLAYER INFO
Player Name: Inkwell
• Player Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
mister_inkwell, PM
• Player Age: 30+
• Permissions: Here. Modified off my Deer one but it should hit all the important points.
CHARACTER INFO
• Character Name: Fiddleford Hadron McGucket
• Character Age: Late 30s; for the sake of consistency I go with 38.
• Character Canon: Gravity Falls
• Canon Point: Day 74 of his mental breakdown
• Character History: On the Wiki.
• Character Personality: 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. It's also worth noting a lot of his positive traits very easily become negative traits in practice; he has a problem of doing everything at 110%. I still tried to do three of each but there's going to be some of both in a couple by the nature of how fucked up this guy is. Essentially these are the traits HE thinks are positive and negative about himself (for instance, he doesn't see his need to solve problems as a... uh... problem).
— Positive Trait: Creative Fiddleford 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.
— Positive Trait: 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.
— Positive Trait: 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 moves states to help Ford on a project he knew very little about, leaving behind his wife and son and his own ambitions, because Ford is 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.
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.
— Negative Trait: Highly Reactionary/Extremist 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.
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, what does he do? 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 what does he do? 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.
— Negative Trait: Prone to Addiction We see this especially with the memory gun. 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).
To be very clear, addiction is something that happens to people and not a personal moral failing. Me listing it under negative traits isn't meant to imply a person who struggles with addiction is a bad person; rather, it's something that impacts this specific character negatively.
— Negative Trait: 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 (which is true); 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.
— Negative Trait: Attention-Seeking SURPRISE FOURTH BAD THING! 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.
• Character Skills:
• PhD in engineering; skilled with everything from heavy machinery to computers, with the uncanny ability to make complex creations out of bare bones supplies
• Grew up poor on a farm; general knowledge of self-sufficiency skills (cooking, sewing, home repair, gardening)
• Knows how to slaughter, clean and butcher an animal
• Always able to find a way forward. This is more of a mental skill and can easily lead into Problems, but Fiddleford just does not give up and that is a threat. He will always be actively doing something.
• Character Inventory: Characters may bring THREE items with them. These can be items a character owns, but might not happen to have on their person when they are brought to this world. They may bring tools they may already own to help them survive, or cherished personal items. The clothes they're wearing do not count as a slot, but if they have really good winter coat at home, that would count as a slot.
— ITEM ONE: The Memory Gun
— ITEM TWO: Cubic's Cube
— ITEM THREE: Banjo
• Important Notes: I don't believe so! Except that obviously he will mostly only be using the memory gun on himself and I would ask before using it on any other player characters or in a way that would highly impact npcs. No plans to use it for cheaty purposes, just to make this man specifically worse.
• Writing Samples: Players must provide TWO prose writing samples. These both must be log threads. Due to the fact there is no network in this game, 'network' or 'texting'-style threads will not be accepted.
— SAMPLE ONE: On the Sing TDM oh god I fell off hard for the holidays
— SAMPLE TWO: This thread with Mabel at the Deer paleblood bakeoff is still so important to me
Player Name: Inkwell
• Player Contact:
• Player Age: 30+
• Permissions: Here. Modified off my Deer one but it should hit all the important points.
CHARACTER INFO
• Character Name: Fiddleford Hadron McGucket
• Character Age: Late 30s; for the sake of consistency I go with 38.
• Character Canon: Gravity Falls
• Canon Point: Day 74 of his mental breakdown
• Character History: On the Wiki.
• Character Personality: 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. It's also worth noting a lot of his positive traits very easily become negative traits in practice; he has a problem of doing everything at 110%. I still tried to do three of each but there's going to be some of both in a couple by the nature of how fucked up this guy is. Essentially these are the traits HE thinks are positive and negative about himself (for instance, he doesn't see his need to solve problems as a... uh... problem).
— Positive Trait: Creative Fiddleford 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.
— Positive Trait: 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.
— Positive Trait: 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 moves states to help Ford on a project he knew very little about, leaving behind his wife and son and his own ambitions, because Ford is 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.
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.
— Negative Trait: Highly Reactionary/Extremist 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.
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, what does he do? 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 what does he do? 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.
— Negative Trait: Prone to Addiction We see this especially with the memory gun. 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).
To be very clear, addiction is something that happens to people and not a personal moral failing. Me listing it under negative traits isn't meant to imply a person who struggles with addiction is a bad person; rather, it's something that impacts this specific character negatively.
— Negative Trait: 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 (which is true); 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.
— Negative Trait: Attention-Seeking SURPRISE FOURTH BAD THING! 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.
• Character Skills:
• PhD in engineering; skilled with everything from heavy machinery to computers, with the uncanny ability to make complex creations out of bare bones supplies
• Grew up poor on a farm; general knowledge of self-sufficiency skills (cooking, sewing, home repair, gardening)
• Knows how to slaughter, clean and butcher an animal
• Always able to find a way forward. This is more of a mental skill and can easily lead into Problems, but Fiddleford just does not give up and that is a threat. He will always be actively doing something.
• Character Inventory: Characters may bring THREE items with them. These can be items a character owns, but might not happen to have on their person when they are brought to this world. They may bring tools they may already own to help them survive, or cherished personal items. The clothes they're wearing do not count as a slot, but if they have really good winter coat at home, that would count as a slot.
— ITEM ONE: The Memory Gun
— ITEM TWO: Cubic's Cube
— ITEM THREE: Banjo
• Important Notes: I don't believe so! Except that obviously he will mostly only be using the memory gun on himself and I would ask before using it on any other player characters or in a way that would highly impact npcs. No plans to use it for cheaty purposes, just to make this man specifically worse.
• Writing Samples: Players must provide TWO prose writing samples. These both must be log threads. Due to the fact there is no network in this game, 'network' or 'texting'-style threads will not be accepted.
— SAMPLE ONE: On the Sing TDM oh god I fell off hard for the holidays
— SAMPLE TWO: This thread with Mabel at the Deer paleblood bakeoff is still so important to me