@megarhyssa-sp yes! its important to remember that for as competent and charming and manipulative and powerful bill cipher is
tbob is a "tell on myself" in a lot of ways:
1. he shows you his hand. all his tactics and tricks are laid bare and now youll be able to spot them.
2. he shows you his weakness. oh he tries to cut us off with the required reading, but the problem is, hes so fucked up over ford that he cant help but over-share when given the chance.
as an addendum to this, one thing i noticed was that the only things bill ever redacts are info about his family and his old pawns
(obviously with the last one its meant to protect the identities of those people irl, but play with me)
so given that, what are we meant to make of this:
particularly given the tbob draft:
3. he shows you that his arrogance is always his downfall. here's the thing about the "my history," "sixer," and "losing sixer" chapters: all they do is reaffirm the above two points. bill shows us how he manipulates people, what he does to people who try to fight back, and how he is thwarted. but he either doesn't realize he's showing us these things or doesn't think it'll change anything about our willingness to work with him.
there is a warning not to summon bill painted on the cave wall, but ford summoned him anyway. do we really think we're smarter than stanford pines? bill doesn't think so.
bill's also of the belief that humans are selfish and predictable, he believes that our greed and ambition will cause us to overlook the warnings and our own ego will lead us to believe we can handle it, we can do it better. look at what i said above about dipper, for example: he wanted the password and believed himself capable of handling bill, even though he knew he shouldn't trust him.
but the thing with bill, abusive relationships, and cults is that if you have a social support system you can be pulled out of it. bill shows us his book and the whole time ford is screaming at us not to listen, showing his own vulnerability and admitting his own mistakes, trying to connect with us, to show us that yes it's easy to fall for but don't make my mistakes again. and the book ends with the pines rallying against bill and trying to bring us into the fold. and when we reject bill? he turns on stanley, it's all stanley's fault, stanley took us away from him just like he took ford. (but look at every bill interaction we have across canon, bill is always defeated by teamwork. he blames stan specifically because he's a true #1 full blooded hater.)
if we had been alone with him, the "my history," "sixer," and "losing sixer" chapters would just be things bill told us. but with the pines there telling us another side, giving us a different perspective, we're able to see them for the red flags that they are. because when you escape a bad situation, hindsight always reveals the red flags you didn't notice before. but they were always there. (go through j3 and "sixer" and see how many red flags ford just walks right past! and in the show, ford only realizes something's up when fiddleford finally manages to instill doubt.)
bill is always himself, you just have to be able to see what that means. and he either doesn't notice or doesn't care that he's throwing off these warnings. maybe he's so high on himself he really believes the lines he's selling are true. maybe he's so used to being around yes men he thinks we'll fall in line. maybe he thinks we're too stupid to notice, too spineless to question, too weak to fight back. maybe he doesn't know he's said the quiet part out loud.
but with bill and in real life, there are always tells. you just have to have people you can talk to about new relationships, new organizations, new communities, so your own words can be bounced back at you, you can see how your loved ones react, and you can start thinking about the situation differently.
