#// ok so i'm thinking this is probably after ford comes back from the portal

[starsandpigs]

@sixersigned / rev!mabel starter call.

mabel gleeful is one girl that has never been one to question her own drive for something that she wants. the amulet in her hair is glowing its steady blue as she steps to ford's office, knocking with all intent and purposes. a soft, almost amused smile pulls at her lips. power had a way of drawing her in, an irresistible pull she’d learned to embrace over the years.

she doesn’t wait for an answer before pushing the door open, eyes scanning the room. the dim light dances off the shelves lined with old tomes, strange relics, and things her own twin brother would be too smug to appreciate properly. mabel’s fingers brush against the door frame as she steps inside, her smile curling into something far too knowing for a girl her age.

"great uncle stanford," she started, her voice smooth yet cutting the area a bit too harshly as she looked around his office, "you've always been the smartest, haven’t you? the one who really understands how this world works, how to bend it to your will."

mabel leaned against his desk, tilting her head as the blue glow from her amulet illuminated her face in the dim light of his study. "mason thinks he’s untouchable with the magic he’s been collecting, but… i see through him. he’s not the only one in this family with potential. i’m tired of being in his shadow. . . honestly and truly. it's sad to see how he thinks he's so important! "

her eyes meet ford’s, unblinking, unrelenting. “i want to learn from you. i want more.” there’s a pause, her voice dropping lower, darker. “i want what he can’t even dream of. i’m ready to be your apprentice, to have the power i deserve.” her gaze hardens, the amulet’s glow pulsing in sync with her words. “mason? he’s soft. always has been. but i’m willing to go as far as it takes.”

the room falls silent as mabel leans back, watching him with that same hungry glint in her eyes. “so… what do you say, uncle ford? ready to teach the one gleeful with some real ambition? ”

[callipraxia]

[Well, this was supposed to be my big NWHS/ATOTS review...but I literally made it three minutes in before I got on an epic tangent and now I desperately want to write about and read up on stuff related to the tangent. I haven't desperately wanted to write something for quite some time, now, so the review proper will have to wait - as for now, enjoy ten observations on the first three minutes?]

Whew. Here we go. NWHS/ATOTS, planning to watch it straight through, let's go. It's gonna be intense, but we/I can do it. Probably.

Not What He Seems

Aaand now Stan's irradiated his forehead. No way this could ever have terrible consequences. He's better at lab safety than Ford, sure, but that's...reeeealllly not saying much. However, since Ford, Fiddleford, and Stan should probably have all had much worse side effects from constant improper handling of radioactive materials...maybe it's something about Gravity Falls' weirdness that shields them, or it's just not quite as dangerous in this world?

2. "Minor gravitational anomalies." Ford, that...feels like a bit of an understatement? Ok, so, I expect you could have written down "Stan, do not do the thing, it will make the house fly to Oz and destroy half the town. Yes, Stan, I'm specifically talking to you. Don't do it." and it would not have made any difference, but...'minor' is a relative term....

3. I am kind of impressed with Fiddleford managing to sleep, all things considered. Though who knows how long he's been awake, working on the laptop? I would give ten pretties to know what he knows at this point, though.

5. If I hadn't already done an AU stemming from NWHS, I...might be tempted, now that I think about it, to see what I could come up with in response to "what if Fiddleford had been awake when the laptop indicated the device had just become active?"

6. Ooh, is that a picture of a very young Caryn and Filbrick that the twins run under, after they pass the end table and just before Mabel stops in front of the random door she found? It looks...kinda like them, but also kinda pilgrim-y? But the woman's hairstyle is better suited perhaps for a very young Caryn, timeline-wise, and the pictures are more silhouettes than anything, and the male figure wears its hat very low.

7. Also, wow, does the Shack have a lot of doors or what? Manly Dan definitely should have picked different trees to build the Shack from...that, or the reality-breaker in the basement has started affecting geometry slowly upstairs over the decades. Which is also not a bad idea, I guess.

8. "I am the god of destruction!" More like a significant priestess at best, honestly, Mabel - no shade on you, of course, but when you've got the likes of Stanford "let's punch a hole in reality!" Pines, Stanley "danger, blah-blah-blah, can it, Poindexter!" Pines, Fiddleford "homicidal pterodactyl-bot I made when my wife left me" McGucket, and Bill running around in your setting...the competition is pretty intense, y'know?

9. Though I do wonder now if Mabel ever thought about that line again...if she remembered saying that, say, during the period where it looked more and more like the world might end...or that they might all get arrested...or after she heard that keeping the Portal open did not fix her family...maybe even when she handed "Blendin" the Rift, seeking a perfect endless summer....

10. "Plenty of summer left." "Enjoy it while you can, Stan." Stan really did think the kids might well never forgive him for lying to them all this time, and that's even if he got the real Stanford back alive. If he hadn't...if he hadn't, then he was confronted with the possibility of both the kids cutting him off and not even having the satisfaction of success to cling to. Or anything to cling to, unless you count loads of new guilt, now that he has seeming confirmation that he's responsible for Ford's death. I...do not see that ending well, really.

And yet, he took that chance. He could have decided "it's been so long that the odds of success are very low, and these kids are definitely alive and not too irradiated yet. I could just let this go. Settle for what I've got instead of endangering it for a one-in-a-million shot at getting back what I've lost." But he didn't, even though he was aware of how thoroughly failure really was an option. He was gambling everything at once, with no reserves to get him out of town if the dice landed the wrong way - willing, essentially, to burn the world (certainly his own world, but possibly, y'know...the world) for one person, for no better reason than his own feelings about that person and/or what had happened to that person. And I suspect this is at the root of what I find so interesting about him as a character. There's a reason, after all, why characters like this feature in so much of what's considered Literature, folks. [And here there were tangents; while I'm sure I will one day figure out what the character limit for tumblr posts is, I don't have enough hours in today to do it with]

[thebrokengate]

Hi, FiddleStanner here!

I would say the ship is different to everybody because I've seen multiple ways of interpreting it: Fiddleford projecting Ford onto Stan, Fiddleford and Stan finding healing through each other, Fiddleford and Stan trying to find healing through each other but end up making each other worse, Stan getting Fiddleford's help to work on the portal and they fall in love during this, etc. To me, part of it did start from vibe pairing. As the kids say, I felt like they matched each other's freak (dude who punched a dinosaur in the face x dude who ate his way through a dinosaur, and so on) better to me personally than Fiddauthor (though I have no problems with that ship at all, their character vibes were just too different from each other for me to be that interested in it). But FiddleStan later became something more to me with the possibilities that they could find healing in each other after the portal incident. They would both be going off the deep end at this point, Fiddleford with the memory gun, Stan trying to get his brother back, and I think they could both find comfort in each other that they're not alone in their struggles.

Thinking about it my way, I always go back to the Scary-oke episode where Stan admits to lying about the truth of Gravity Falls and that the town was weird to protect the kids, and I think if he and Fiddleford had been in a relationship at any point, Stan probably would do that for him too if he saw how unnerved Fiddleford was about it. It would be a way of putting the idea of the town's strange happenings out of Fiddleford's mind without him even having to use the memory gun (though to be fair, he would still use it if he saw it.. but I imagine a scenario like where Fiddleford might hear something rummaging through the garbage outside and wonder if there were raccoons or possums outside, only for Stan to go out and check and just see gnomes out there that he'd have to chase off and then come back and tell Fiddleford "yup, just the raccoons again" lmao).

Another way I like to think of them bonding is post-finale when they're older men and maybe they would bond over memory loss which would open them up to actually talking about how they were both hurt by Ford's obsessions, and though they're both finally letting bygones be bygones, it could still be healing for them to talk about and acknowledge what they went through. (Also this is not a jab at Ford at all, this is just to say that they were both caught up in the crossfire of Ford's downward spiral, being so obsessed with uncovering the truth of Gravity Falls that he summoned an interdimensional dream demon who had him build a portal that he then got sucked into, and they might bond over their feelings about that whole incident.) A lot of times, I like to combine both of these ideas, that they could've been together post-portal, it was comforting for a while, but then things went wrong when Fiddleford rediscovered the portal Stan is working on and suddenly remembers everything, leading to more memory gun usage perhaps on both of them.. and then years later they manage to bond again over all the new things they've been through and their shared issues with memory loss.

Of course there's no real canon story to go off of to ship this, unless you're crazy like me and try to convince yourself the Old Goldie marriage and Raccoon Wife is actual evidence.. I'm leaving this here to look a little less crazy.. but who am I kidding here?

Anyway, that's pretty much why I ship it: it's a trope of "we're both hurting and find comfort in each other" which is one of my favorite tropes of all time besides lovers to enemies (yes, you read that right, usually most people go for enemies to lovers but I'm usually the opposite lol). But hey, one last thing before I drop this reblog that got so much longer than it should have (I'm so sorry), I do want to thank you for asking so nicely about it! There's been a big influx of people just randomly dropping hate in the tag lately, so it's refreshing to see someone just genuinely being curious. So thanks! :)

Genuine question, what's the hype behind fiddlestan?

I cannot emphasise enough how much I don't mean to be rude with this question, I just want to understand it.

Is it pairing vibes together and deciding it would make a great coupling or is there more substance I'm not considering?