i used to have a black cat. i had him for 15 years and for most of his life i didn't know about the outdoor cat debate and by the time i learned i thought it would be cruel to deny him something in his last few years of life that he'd always had. so i let him stay an indoor-outdoor cat. this came back to bite me squarely in the ass because one time he was picked up and taken to the shelter.
when i was driving to go pick him up i was so anxious that i wouldn't be able to tell him apart. he wasn't chipped at the time, so there was no sure-fire way to identify him. and he had no distinguishing features. think of a black cat and that was him. i was so worried there would be other black cats there and i'd be fucked. this was insane, of course, because i immediately was able to tell him apart from the other two black cats there because i'd had him for 15 years and he'd been my companion through some of the worst shit in my life and i knew him.
but the thing is, i couldn't tell you why. other than a slight notch in his ear there was nothing special about his appearance. i could tell you the difference between my mom and step-mom down to minute details, but can't tell you the shape of my cat's face compared to other standard all-black american short-hairs.
i think about this experience a lot when i think about the stan switch in the fearamid. yes, to us, it was obvious who was stan and who was ford, but that's because we're humans.
bill isn't just an alien but he's from an entirely different dimension, in both sense of the word. yes bill has some phenotypical similarities to humans, in that he has four limbs and an eye, but even those aren't the same as ours.
would bill have known to look for a cleft chin? is his color vision the same enough for him to tell that ford's hair is not only a different color but two-toned? does bill even grasp the concept of facial hair let alone personal styling? even if he does cognitively understand it, are they obvious enough to him that he can clock them as easily as we can? and especially while desperate and under pressure? you get tunnel vision when you're angry, after all.
i'm sure if i'd asked my cat about it he would have been offended i couldn't tell apart the facial features and fur length and whisker alignment that made him different from the other black cats. let alone things cats use to identify each other that we can neither register nor comprehend, like scent.
what's the primary way euclydians tell each other apart? color? shape? that's not enough, that's like saying ethnicity and body type are all i'd need to distinguish two people. those are certainly helpful starting points, but i'm going to need a lot more, and most of those things are so subtle i'd probably struggle to describe them. have you ever tried to make yourself or a loved one photo-realistic in a video game? huge pain in the ass, right? there's always something not right about it and i bet you're never able to tell just what exactly is wrong.
that cat has since passed and i have two new cats. they're both tabbies, both girls, both the same age and size and body type. they are different colors and different patterns, but i don't even need that to tell them apart. i can tell them apart by fur-texture alone. rolling over in the middle of the night and bumping someone and knowing just who it is.
if bill had picked "ford" up would he have been able to tell it was stan? would the weight of him, the way "ford" struggled to find footing on his palm, the way bill's fingers didn't wrap around him right, the texture of "ford's" hands against his skin, would all of that have given away the ruse? this is not what it feels like to hold ford, just like i know kiki is silky and bubbie is soft.
my covid lock-down hobby was rescuing stray cats. my neighborhood was just infested with them and i'm good with cats and my neighbors were not so fuck me i guess this is my job now. i ended up rehabilitating, socializing, and re-homing 22 cats that year. a lot of those were kittens that wound up being born in my yard or in the crawl space. one of the litters wound up having twins and i couldn't for the life of me tell them apart. they were just brown tabby 1 and brown tabby 2 until they got a little older and one of them wound up having longer fur on the top of his head and i could work with that.
so much of telling other animals apart, for us, is color and shape and obvious details like fur length or injury.
ford wore the same stupid trench coat for over 30 years. even when he was in his scifi action hero getup, he was still in a trench coat. and when he changed into his post-portal fit, it was exactly the same as his scifi look just in a different colorway. and i know, obviously, this is because he is a cartoon character and that's how character design works but play with me here.
is ford dressing himself in a uniform to be obviously and consistently distinguishable?
i have a leg-up on telling cats apart because we're both mammals and share a common ancestor. yes humans and cats are very different, but not really. i think it'd be obvious to an alien that we came from the same planet; or if not obvious, then once told i'm sure it'd be believable.
bill is a 2 dimensional being that's over a trillion years old and has been all over the multiverse and has fist-fought time baby and the cosmic axolotl owes him a favor. humans are probably less than bugs to him.
but i have friends who keep insects and molluscs for pets and they can tell you just the same as i can with my cats: once you know a creature, you can tell them apart.
bill probably could have told stan and ford apart if he'd given himself a second to think, but he didn't. he was angry and tired and just ready for this to be over, so he let heuristics take over: this one has the shape and color and sound of ford, so that must be him. he didn't even pause long enough to see that the biggest, most obvious cue was missing: the extra finger.
if i had only given myself the time bill gave himself, and if the shelter people had been putting as much pressure on me as the town was putting on bill, would i have noticed the small notch in my cat's ear? or would i have made a split-second decision on pure instinct alone?
i had 13 more years than bill to get to know my pet, and i've sure as shit lived a smaller life than him, so maybe... but would i have banked the freedom and safety of my entire dimension on it?
