It will probably never stop rankling me that the fandom, as a whole, is so eager to take any scrap of indication that Bill Cipher might have Backstory and extrapolate it to a full-blown story in its own right wherein he is a noble-minded antihero, just to justify wanting him to have been redeemed or come back, but were so fucking ready and willing to write Ford (and anyone who liked him) off as the ‘real’ villain for acting badly towards his family, partly as a result of the torture Bill put him through.