I AM GOING TO YELL ABOUT BOTH OF THEM and try very hard not to give anything away because I’m got BIIIIIIIG plans for Ian, ahaha I’m looking forward to this waaayyyyy too much and may need to tone the excitement down a notch.
I never expected to get as attached to Lionel as I did, or for him to turn into as much of a fully-fledged character as he did, even though I’m very glad that he did, because a) GREAT, more living breathing characters is always good, more interesting stories to tell, and b) it’s thematically appropriate for Gravity Falls that the character you least expect to have depth and backstory (of the tragic kind) turns out to be a fully-realised person with dreams and fears and problems just like anybody else! I love the fact that he turned out to be a would-have-been rock star who grew up to be a librarian, for pete’s sake, he is such a dork and it’s great. And I may have mentioned that the fact that he’s not a reincarnation of anyone or related in any way to the Pines family is intentional? He’s just about how people can surprise you, sometimes for the worse but sometimes for the better, and how sometimes you find the most important people in the most unexpected places.
(Also, he’s a dork. Have I mentioned that he’s a dork? Because he’s a dork. And he’s not always good at being the dad of a teenage girl and a teenage-ish demon, but he’s doing his best, and that means a lot to me.)
And Ian is…well, initially, Rosa was the hero of his story and he was her one-dimensional bassist and backup villainous henchman in her nefarious plan to take over the world by being charming and adorable and talented and basically Taylor Swift. And then the Alex!Bill design showed up, and then Toby got big on the TAU blog and there was a little bit of a reaction against that in him, because I’m generally just not as interested in characters/stories about characters who are 100% innocent and self-sacrificing and Good to the core and are just unfairly maligned by an unjust world that tries to stamp out Good wherever it’s found as I am in stories about characters who are not 100% Good and are in fact a little bit (or a lot) Bad but are trying, and who have to deal with a world that’s difficult and complicated and totally uncaring one way or the other, but isn’t particularly prejudiced against them or anyone else in particular (the system/society is another story).
Sooooo there’s a heaping helping of that in his character, and all of the characters in that story are struggling with determinism in one form or another, which is why there are so much higher a concentration of reincarnations in that fic than there is in RRR. Like, obviously there’s Mira grappling with the role of Mizar and the fact of her previous existence and what she means to Dipper/Alcor, there’s Dip trying to come to terms with the fact that he has, already, lost a good deal of his humanity just as a side effect of his life and his biological (metaphysical?) reality, and there’s only so much he can do against that when he hasn’t even noticed, and then there’s Ian and Rosa and whether or not you can fully and completely resist something that’s ingrained into you, whether it’s created by your circumstances or only enabled or suppressed, whether it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and whether you can exercise free will if you don’t even know that determinism is acting on you. (And then there’s Sun-mi who is there entirely because she popped into my head and demanded not to be left out. And, y’know, for plot purposes. But mostly because she was pushy. And I’m not a person who talks about characters as though they have some kind of life in the writer’s head, so that’s not really how I mean it, but the concept of her was a very persistent idea, just like most of the OCs in this fic.)
So yeah. I have a lot of deep thoughts and they come out in weird ways in dumb fics about superpowered demon-people hybrids. And then I get drunk and explicate the themes of said fics, because that’s a thing that people do when they’re English majors.
eeeee
