#Gravity Falls but stan has healthy relationships & less self esteem issues

[chaoticvintagelesbian]

FiddEmmaStan AU where Emma May moved to Gravity Falls around the same time Stan took Ford's identity. She divorces Fiddleford & dumps him on Stan's (newly acquired) porch. While Stan is trying to fix the portal and run the mystery shack, and a recovering Fiddleford builds lots of robots for the mystery shack & does upkeep, Emma is raising Tate & having weekly Wine Nights with Stan (she finds out the truth of him not being Ford & they kinda become best friends about it). Fiddleford & Emma May fall for Stanley separately and accidentally fall back in love with each other along the way (Stan is Tate's favourite parent during the like 3 years this takes). Emma ends up moving into the mystery shack & with no prior science knowledge takes up helping fix the portal & gives some of the tours. Stan is having huge amounts of Bi Panic cause omg he's fallen for Emma May & Fiddleford and their son now calls him Dad (Stan balled his eyes put the first time) but they seem to be working stuff out and he shouldn't get in the way of that??? Anyway Fiddleford and Emma co-seduce Stanley. It works. The relationship is surprisingly healthy. They get Poly Married (it's Gravity Falls) but it's Emma & Fidds both being married to Stanley - when Emma May is annoyed with Fiddleford she describes him as her husband-in-law.

Mabel & Dipper visit Gravity Falls for the summer and are greeted by their Grunkle Stan, Grauntie Emma May, Grunkle Fidds & Cousin Tate

[apathetic-revenant]

so I was having some thoughts about Gravity Falls last night, in lieu of going to sleep at a reasonable hour. specifically there were some things I noticed about Weirdmageddon. 

literally only finished watching this show a week ago so like. I’ve no idea how much any of this may already have been discussed or pointed out. probably all of it. this post may well be hilariously redundant. 

but uh

okay, so...initially the situation with Mabel wigging out over Dipper accepting Ford’s apprenticeship, and Dipper ultimately giving that up without much of any discussion on the matter, and just all that jazz, that bothered me a little bit. I do think the show handled Mabel’s characterization a bit awkwardly at points and the way she tended to get favored over Dipper resulted in some missed opportunities for development on her part. 

(note that I’m saying this in the sense of “yeah they could have done that a bit better” not “screaming and punching my computer screen”. it’s not perfect. guess what! no tv show is. it becomes perfect when you learn to accept it for what it is. please don’t send me death threats for saying this.)

where was I? right. so. at the same time, even if the lack of focus on Dipper’s decision to give up the apprenticeship kind of made it seem kind of like another case of Dipper giving up what he wants for Mabel, that’s tempered pretty strongly by the fact that as much as the apprenticeship might be what Dipper wants it’s really not that great a thing for him in the long run when you think about it. and thinking about that was what led me to realize that actually, Dipper and Mabel’s situations with the apprenticeship and Mabeland actually parallel each other a lot more than initially meets the eye.

the situation with Mabeland is, quite obviously, that Mabel’s being given everything she could possibly want. it’s her perfect world where everything is as she wants it to be forever and nothing has to change or grow, and she never has to face anything uncomfortable or unhappy. thing is, this is basically what the proposed apprenticeship would be for Dipper, albeit in a much less obvious and thorough way since, y’know, it’s an offer being made by a real person instead of a fantasy prison conjured up by a dream demon. Dipper spends his whole summer idolizing the author of the journals and wanting to follow in his footsteps, and then he finds out that said author is actually his great-uncle and is way cool, gives Dipper the approval and validation he desperately wants, and then literally says he wants Dipper to follow in his footsteps. Ford’s offering Dipper a chance to do everything he wants-study weirdness, have grand adventures, spend time with someone who gets him and approves of the things that he’s previously been made fun of for-but he’s also, if unconsciously, offering him a chance to not have to do the things he doesn’t want to. he wouldn’t have to go back home, or back to school, or really interact much with anyone except Ford. he wouldn’t even have to put up with the things about Mabel he finds annoying, at the cost of also losing the things he likes about her, much like how in Mabeland Mabel can ‘fix’ the things she doesn’t like about Dipper by replacing him with a ‘better’ copy, at the cost of losing the things she does like about him, since whatever she says it’s pretty clear Dippy Fresh really doesn’t bear any resemblance to Dipper.

don’t get me wrong, I love Ford and I love Dipper and I think their relationship could be great for them in a lot of ways. Ford gives Dipper a self-esteem boost that he badly needs, and gives him someone to talk to and connect with about his interests, something he’s obviously sorely lacking; Dipper tempers Ford’s cynicism with enthusiasm and makes him come out of his shell some. but the two also share a lot of not necessarily healthy traits-obsessiveness, overthinking, paranoia, difficulty with socializing/communicating, a tendency to ignore health or safety when in pursuit of a goal-and if there’s no one else around to temper any of that, it’s gonna turn into an echo chamber that magnifies those traits badly. (this is not even getting into the fact that no one should ever let Ford “it’s okay to give children weapons, right” Pines be solely in charge of raising a teenage boy). 

I saw someone point out-I think it was on TV Tropes somewhere-that accepting Ford’s apprenticeship would mean that Dipper basically would get to avoid confronting the things that are hardest for him. yeah he would be dealing with all kinds of scary things, but at the end of the day monsters and mortal peril are clearly not what Dipper has the hardest time with; we see several times throughout the show that he struggles most with social issues, communicating and connecting with other people, and repeatedly we see that he has a tendency to try to ‘cheat’ at this situations either by over-planning or more literally by falling back on actual magic/weird science (the clones, the time travel, the shrink ray, etc). that’s something he improves a lot on over the course of the show but it’s not something that’s going to get any better if he just spends his entire adolescence in a basement lab with Ford. he even says something along those lines when he tells Mabel he’s not accepting the apprenticeship, so he’s clearly aware of this to some degree (”I actually thought I was going to spend my entire teenage years cooped up in a lab with Ford” or something like that). 

basically, both Mabeland and Ford’s apprenticeship are temptations for Mabel and Dipper that offer them the chance to have what they want, or at least what they think they want, and the chance to escape from the things they find unpleasant; but by doing that they would also not be growing as people, or at least not in very healthy ways. when Mabel rejects Mabeland and Dipper rejects the apprenticeship, they’re basically turning down comfortable stagnancy in favor of change and growth despite that being frightening and unknown.

I also sort of feel like it’s relevant that both situations are sort of capitalizing on or maximizing the qualities that are most prominent for the twins, and the ones that they identify with the most. Mabel, quite obviously, has her personality imprinted all over Mabeland; it’s everything she loves, silliness, sparkliness, cuteness, stuffed animals and dream boys and sugar. the apprenticeship is also centered around Dipper’s core interests and qualities, his intelligence, his research ability, his love for the paranormal and weird. and I think that’s a big part of what makes them so tempting because both of the twins are afraid of losing those things. a recurring theme in the show is “if I’m not [single personality trait], what am I?” Dipper struggles with this more obviously, but we also see that Mabel has some insecurity there like in Irrational Treasure where she reacts very badly to Pacifica mocking her silliness, so much so that it’s one of the only times where we see her actively trying to change her own behavior. for both twins growing up and returning home could seem to pose the frightening risk of losing those things and what they see as their identities along with them: Dipper would be going back to a place that’s presumably quite normal and doesn’t have the weirdness that he loves or anyone to encourage his interest in it, and Mabel-I think a big part of Mabel’s desire for summer to never end and things to stay as they are might come from the fact that a lot of the things she loves and centers her personality around, all her sparkles and hyperactiveness and glitter, are the kind of things society would generally consider childish, things she would be expected to start growing out of as she enters high school and might be mocked or reprimanded for if she doesn’t. which makes for a clear contrast between Mabel and Dipper that probably didn’t help the divide growing between them in season 2 at all: Dipper is in a hurry to grow up as fast as possible while Mabel wants to hang on to childhood. Mabel could easily see herself as being more threatened by oncoming adulthood than Dipper because in contrast a lot of Dipper’s core personality traits-his intelligence and analyticalness- are things he would be expected to retain and develop as he grows up, even praised for. (let’s face it, Dipper’s basically a college student already.)

so, Mabeland and the apprenticeship are tempting not just because they offer what the twins want in an immediate and material sense but because they offer safety and reinforcement of the twins’ identities at a time in their lives when anyone is going to be questioning and worrying over that a lot, without even getting into massively complicated family dynamics and literal armageddon. 

but, even as the younger Pines twins are about to go brave a big scary unknown future, the show kind of also offers a point of comfort that contrasts all that. look at the older Pines twins.

what are Stan and Ford doing at the end of the show? they’re fulfilling their childhood dream, sailing around the world together looking for treasure and adventure (and babes). it took a huge amount of time and effort and pain and trauma for them to get there, but they got there in the end. and the thing is, for them, this is still change. if the show ended the way things were going right before Weirdmageddon, you’d have Ford back to studying and being more or less isolated, and Stan would be homeless again which would almost certainly mean he’d have to go back to conning and stealing and all kinds of shady business practices just to keep going. basically, it would be stagnancy for both of them, things continuing on the way they were before. change and growth, the same thing that’s looming and frightening for Dipper and Mabel at the moment, is what allows Ford and Stan to move on from unhappy lives and do what they always wanted. and for all the fear that the younger twins are facing in growing up, the fact that Stan and Ford are living out the dream they had as children is there to prove that growing up doesn’t have to mean giving up what you love or losing your identity. it all sort of comes full circle in the end.

/2 cents