It takes a very special kind of strength to spend three decades working on something you can barely comprehend just to bring back someone who didn’t treat you as well as they should.
What kills me is just how uncertain everything would have been. Stan had frighteningly little information to go off of, yet staggeringly unshakable faith. The way he talks to himself while he’s working on it just twists my soul about because he has no idea what’s going to happen when he turns the portal on. He has no idea if Ford is even still alive and I think at this point, the idea of all his work being for nothing would actually destroy him.
Imagine if Ford didn’t come through the portal. The implication that you spent 30 years on something and it didn’t mean anything, that you probably killed the only person who ever believed in you because you’re just That Incompetent and they were all right about you, you were never going to amount to anything because you are the scum of the earth, you are nothing more than a Stan Co. knock off of the real thing and even though you deserve every bad thing that’s happened, it just hurts and the fact that no one cares makes it that much worse.
Ford calls Stan a hero, but I worry that that epithet is too vague to really impact him. Because sure, Stan may have untold trauma from living in the dregs of society, but Ford has blood splattered journals and a rivalry with a demon. That’s what heroes look like. They don’t look like tired old charlatans who run a tourist trap.
But strength - especially the kind of strength it must have required for Stan to even get up every morning - isn’t always flashy or even visible. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is continue to love when the world has given you absolutely no reason to.