#IN A BOOK WRITTEN BY ALEX HIRSH!! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dansemacabre · 3 months ago

Text

ohhhh i will be thinking about this forever.

i’ve been having trouble recently trying to wrap my head around what in the book is true. we know the references to euclidia are true. we know the pages from ford specifically are probably true. we know the little bits of information he supplies about dipper’s dreams, the encounter in mabel’s head, and the deal with the axolotl are most likely true based on what we know of canon and (in a more meta sense) things alex hirsh has said were his intentions with gravity falls. and i had assumed that the journal three pages were genuine, but when you look at some of the details, they absolutely might not be.

i keep going back to the fact that ford explains how the book will appear as “whatever you want it to be”. bill actively uses every manipulation tactic possible to get us, the collective reader, to keep reading. and he’s not shy about showing it (stares at secrets of the universe page). so why show the weakness? why assume any bits of truth at all? is the tragic backstory true, or is bill painting himself as a wet cat of a god, so he can be pitied and feared all at once?

i have no answer to this. but i think it’s a fun little exercise, to doubt everything bill’s said and try to map out where in bill’s fuckass psyche it stemmed from- or where the actual truth lies. like the rats. EXACTLY like the rats. bill wrote an entire page on love, and if he felt some love-adjacent attachment to ford, no wonder he talks about ford’s feelings about him and the fallout for so long. the people LOVE doomed old man yaoi. this is for us, whether it’s true or not. this book could literally be bills ford x reader lovers to enemies centuries-long slowburn fic.

also the journal pages being influenced or fully written by bill explains why ford uses the same code bill uses in the rest of the book, not the code from the actual journal three, despite it being ford talking. that was BOTHERING me. that was REALLY PISSING ME OFF

anyway this analysis eats. sorry for adding so much of my piece but the gears have been turning i lowkey could talk about this for years and years

So, for Starters: Book Of Bill Spoilers warning. Another opinion from me below. (Here's my first opinion I shared, if you havent seen it) This new one is about the lost journal pages again, of course.

Originally, I wanted to make a super big crazy essay about all the reasons I think the journal pages in BOB (The Book of Bill’s given name) are fake, and show off my super-cool totally completely sound deductive reasoning techniques in the process.

Unfortunately, knowing myself I’m not sure I’m actually capable of accomplishing such a feat. You all know how I tend to post things in parts, sometimes out of order, often never finished. However I would like to share something in particular that’s been eating at me that I’ve seen… partially discussed, but only partially. And certainly not the part that I would like to discuss.

It’s about the rats.

You know, the rats.

I saw these rats being talked about since before I was even able to have a look at the book myself.

But before I get further into it all, I would like to start off with a joke:

Why did dead rats, eggnog, a land orca, shrimp colors, It’s a Small World After All, and an Anti-Cipherite Suit cross the road?

Well, that’s easy. To get to the other side.

Of the book, that is.

If you’re anything like me, you probably skipped right to the journal pages upon contact with the book. And if you’re even MORE like me, you were probably left a little confounded by them. Not only did they seem… wrong somehow. But they also felt random. Full of odd choices of subject that didn’t make a lot of sense. Could these pages really have come from journal 3? If so, why do parts of them feel so… completely out of context?

And this is where the rats come in. As I mentioned before, I saw many people discussing them. In particular, they were noting their connection to this passage from earlier in the book:

Many of the related discussions also felt odd to me. Though I lacked the knowledge to be able to articulate why at the time. UNTIL, I read the book for myself from start to finish. That's when I realized something: This is not the only time something from earlier in the book connects back to the journal pages. In fact, it happens many, many times throughout the earlier passages. (Here is a small collection of them for your perusal.)

And then it started clicking into place. The reasons the pages felt like they were so abnormally out of context… is because they WERE lacking context!

Now, before you can finish saying “Gin, you’re an idiot.” I would like you to ponder these three questions:

1) Why, if these pages were taken from Journal 3, should they require context from outside of it to be able to be completely understood?

2) Why is it that this context can be found in what Bill Cipher has been writing in the preceding passages up till now?

3) If you put food in a mogwai’s mouth at midnight EST but drive it over the CST time zone line back to 11PM before it can swallow, will it still transform into a gremlin?

Okay, you caught me, that third one is unrelated. But the first two I believe require further thinking. So let’s delve a little further into the idea. Consider this the real third question:

3) Are we to seriously believe that these, the only pages of J3 still lost to us, just so happen to tie into the new topics from the rest of the Book of Bill over and over like this?

And since you’ve done so well thinking thus far, I’ll ask a fourth question:

4) Are you aware of the concepts of Watsonian and Doyalist analysis?

Assuming you don’t and you won’t google it, I’ll skip to the important part. Watsonian analysis is to analyze a story from within it, as if you yourself were Watson making deductions in a Sherlock Holmes novel.

Now, from a Watsonian point of view, what happens when we try to answer our earlier questions? Why should it be that the Book of Bill provides so many of these points of reference to the journal pages?

One possible line of thought could be that Bill wrote the earlier passages of his book *around* the idea of what was contained in the pages, but I think this doesn’t work for a few reasons. For one thing, the purpose of the book is to get the reader to make a deal, not to take a whole novel to set the stage for a 3 day mini Ford adventure. For another, not all of what I described prior is really fit to be called “context”, is it? The rats, the “Small World” cassette, and the Bill-Suit are one thing, but Eggnog? Shrimp colors? Land Orcas? I certainly wouldn’t define them that way. If anything, they’d be better suited to being called “references”. And unlike the more contextual ideas, there’d be no real need for Bill to sneak mere references to the pages into his grand story. And lastly, there are a great deal of Bill pages that have nothing to do with the content in the journal pages at all.

So what exactly am I trying to say here?

If we do intend to think of the callbacks outlined above as references, the only logical conclusion within the story is that the journal pages themselves are referencing back to the Book of Bill, not the other way around.

But… how? And why? Something Ford has written in the 80’s shouldn't be able to reference something Bill is writing post-weirdmageddon certainly.

That’s because “Ford” isn’t referencing it at all!

And as for why… Well, have you ever noticed when you're writing a story on the fly, things you wrote earlier all come crashing back to you as you try to wrap things up? I believe personally that the journal pages are nothing more than a strange endcap on Bill’s crazy train of thought! And the "references" are just fuel that further the pages creation. Almost as if, to quote someone much more knowledgeable than me on this subject…

In the end, all I've described above (as well as other aspects of the pages I've not mentioned here) leave me with the impression the pages are not real.

As I stated only a bit earlier, the idea that these pages, the only pages of J3 purported to be lost, should be so connected to the rest of the book is beyond coincidence to me. Not to mention that in order to take these pages as total truth, you must give credence to several other passages of Bill's book as well. And I'm not too keen on having to trust him that much.

To all who have read this far, even to those who may have scoffed at the ideas in here or think I've only written up nonsense. Thank you for reading and considering my thoughts.

I am not saying anyone must agree with me on this. I know some people have found the pages to be important and meaningful to them, and I do not wish to give the impression that I think my view is the end all be all correct one, or that I think lesser of those who believe in them. I only want to share my own opinions. And to anyone else who found the pages to feel "off" somehow, possibly validate their feelings too.

#shutupmac #the book of bill #book of bill #bill cipher #journal three #average everyday normal things for a person to think about #rats #gravity falls

424 notes · View notes

negativereader · 7 years ago

Text

Everything Wrong With Twilight: Forever Dawn

When writing, one of the most important things that a person must do is plan out what is going to happen. Of course, for many writers, these plans are sometimes forced to change.

For instance, in Harry Potter, Rowling originally had the entire ending chapter written out, so that she knew where the seven books were going to be heading. However, somewhere around between the fourth and fifth books, Rowling realized that she’d written an epic plot hole, which caused much of the fifth book to be writing around it, and during the final books, everything had to change from plans.

Gravity Falls originally had the Cipher wheel as nothing more than a sort of decorative thing, but when Alex Hirsh saw the work, effort, and thought that people were going to in order to decode the thing, he eventually integrated it into the finale, even if it didn’t change anything in the end.

Lord of the Rings went through so many changes that the original plot ideas are almost unrecognizable. It’s one of the reasons that when people say that Jackson was building off of some notes on the Hobbit that Tolkien had been writing out for a rewrite, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they would have found their way into the rewrite, if there ever was one.

Plans change. That’s something that all writers have to understand. When you force a story to follow your original vision, you have major, major, problems.

And that was something that Meyer ended up doing.

Forever Dawn and its legacy

Background

I’ve mentioned this a few times, but for those who don’t want to go back and go over everything I’ve written, Forever Dawn was the original book long epilogue for Twilight. The story was much like Breaking Dawn, almost spookily so. The differences were things like Laurence staying ‘good’ and helping Cullens, the werewolves playing next to no real part other that minor cutouts, and Victoria being the one who ran off on the Volturi to squeal on the Cullens for having eating a baby and making a vampire kid

There was an imprint, however some things, such as the love triangle, weren’t there.

This was something that Meyer had written intending on writing it only for herself, but then, as she started making money, and things started going well, she decided to keep going.

And so New Moon was born, and after it Eclipse. Now, both of these, while boring, do act like sequels. They advance the story and characterization. Kind of. You got more on the minor characters and the werewolves that Meyer had planned from the start but didn’t admit to, were also fleshed out. You got more on the world, such as the Volturi, and the fact that Meyer was making her newborn vampires the most dangerous.

She gave us more tension, relatively speaking, in the relationship between Bella and Edward, first with his going off to sulk and later when there was the run around with Bella not wanting to get married (but wanting to be a vampire).

The characterization of other characters was even advanced. Rosalie went from a thin Scary Sue who had been ‘created’ for Edward and rejected into one of the most tragic characters in the entire series, and Leah, who ironically is the only character with a real character arc, was also introduced as a means to show the reader the all consuming nature of imprinting (it’s romantic, honest).

Now, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good by a long shot, and I’ve spent a lot of time talking about why it wasn’t good, but it was fulfilling the basic needs of storytelling to build off of itself and lead the reader in the general direction of the plot.

Then came Breaking Dawn.

Epilogue

Meyer had Forever Dawn on her computer from the start of the series. Now, in some ways, planning backward is a good thing. A lot of authors usually plot out both the beginning and the end of the book, or even a series, so that you can tell where things are going to go from there. It can really help you to better know where you’re going and what you’re doing, and for someone like Meyer, who tends to just sort of go and not worry too much about where her story goes, it probably is the reason she had a coherent story to begin with.

It’s important to understand that Forever Dawn was an epilogue. It was just a sort of ending to tell you what happens after the main story ended. There wasn’t a real firm plot to Forever Dawn because, regardless of it being well over the size of a normal book, it was still an epilogue. It was meant to tell what happened to the characters after the main story. It’s not an actual story, and in many ways, that’s part of the thing’s problem.

The plot, such as it was, was little more than saying that after the main story of Twilight, Bella and Edward quickly got married, Bella get pregnant, Jacob imprinted, the Volturi got involved but were convinced not to do anything, and everyone lived happily ever after.

There was no resolution to the thing involving the Volturi because there didn’t need to be. The main story was done. You don’t introduce and resolve major conflict in your epilogue. The story was told, this was just the shameless fantasy that Meyer wanted to have about how perfect life would be if she had managed to bag a vampire. In many ways, the greatest problem with Forever Dawn is perfectly simple: it was completely wish fulfillment.

Meyer, being Meyer, never really realized, or maybe never cared, that since she, in her own words, realized that she wasn’t ready to stop telling the story of Edward and Bella, that she was going to need to change things around.

The Problem

What ended up happening was that rather than using Forever Dawn as a sort of basic idea of what was going to happen, she forced the series into Forever Dawn. And it showed. While I have major issues with Eclipse, both it and New Moon at least attempted to drive the story and characterization forwards. The characters did move on from their first incarnations as well, but the strange thing is that once Breaking Dawn hits, everything is back to book one. You could actually cut out the second two books, and very little would have been lost. While the Volturi were established, the hints of Jane’s own secret agenda that would be resolved in the final book never came up again, the characterization, such as it was, of the Cullens also essentially was forced back into book one. And kind of characterization of the human characters was completely gone.

Everything had to happen like in Forever Dawn. And that made a lot of weirdness.

For instance, any actual threat that the Volturi were to anyone who wasn’t Bella and the Cullens was forgotten because in the original epilogue, they’d only been here as a threat to Edward and Bella. There were ineffective villains because they couldn’t be anything but ineffective villains. They were meant to be, essentially, another James, a random bad guy who showed up at the end, and rather than Edward saving her, she saved him and everyone else.

They were there to show Bella’s final, amazing transformation into a vampire. She was superman, just like she’d said in the first book. Meyer was showing a reversal of Edward and Bella. It’s one of the reasons that she really wasn’t interested in a fight. It wasn’t necessary. The whole thing had been there for Bella, and no other reason.

The werewolves are the characters where Meyer’s forcing everything into the mold of Forever Dawn shows the most. Jacob of the other Quileutes were basically nobodies in the first book. Jacob existed to spout some exposition and return to non-existence. Later, when Meyer realized that the werewolves were necessary for her ‘clever’ ending, Jacob imprinted on Bella’s kid, and since the pack wouldn’t hurt an imprint or their family, they had to help.

However, by the time that the actual series is written, Meyer’s werewolves are actually a second set of characters. Issues such as Leah’s problems with imprinting, and Sam’s leadership are introduced, and Bella is actually developed slightly. Maybe not well, but Bella in Eclipse is not the same person as Bella in Twilight.

It’s only natural. Characters change, and that’s a good thing.

Then, Meyer reached the final book, and she already had a plan. Oh, she knew that she was going to have to change things, but she had her plan and she was going to stick to it. The problem was, much like her very premise, Meyer tried to force the other two books into her original vision, not really worrying if Forever Dawn had been nothing more than an epilogue.

The other two books had become nothing more than fluff. They only had two reasons that they even existed anymore. One, so that Meyer could keep writing about them, and to make some loose ends and resolve them before the actual end, all characterization, other potential plot threads, and everything else was forgotten, so that Meyer’s original vision could come true.

The Effect

In the past, Meyer’s wish-fulfillment had worked out just fine. Her fans had rallied behind her. In reality, she had no reason to think that this wouldn’t be more of the same. And it shows. All of her interviews right before the book comes out are her usual, bubbly, ‘lol I’m so crazy’ stuff that you usually see from writers.

The problem was that Meyer’s lack of understanding of her audience and the fact that she was trying to force the story into the original vision was a bad combination. One that essentially broke down her entire writing career.

What Meyer didn’t understand was that the fans weren’t there for Bella. Most of them didn’t even like her all that much. They were there for Edward, or they were there for Jacob. Edward became little more than a footnote in Bella’s perfect life, and Jacob feel in life with a newborn baby. Neither team was thrilled by this.

Breaking Dawn broke the fandom. There’s no other way to say this. Twilight’s fandom was powering on happily, completely ignoring its critics until this book came out. I’m not sure how many people remember this, but it was glorious. There were youtube videos of angry fans burning the books, some girl finally saying rather than burning the books, they should return them.

But, what was most important was the posts on posts of fans saying that this book ‘didn’t feel like their characters’. They were right. It wasn’t. Now, I’m not going to pretend that I like Meyer’s characters. I don’t. I think almost all of them are two dimensional cutouts, but at the same time, the fans were completely right. Those characters were different. They had suddenly been yanked back to how they’d been in the first book, and for some characters, that was pretty flat.

For characters like the werewolves, who’d had no personality, they faded away more and more after Jacob imprinted on Renesmee. We’re told what happens, but they’re not really important anymore. They were just background in the original and they are that now.

The Cullens and Bella even mostly dropped what character development that they’d had, and were right back to the way they were.

In most respects, it was as if the former two books hadn’t really happened, and, yes, the fans noticed. And that, as well as Meyer’s own reaction, essentially ended Meyer’s career.

This was the book where Meyer’s original mistake, that of focusing her entire book on only one real vision, really bit her, and probably the only one. The reason was simple: while people were perfectly happy to have Meyer’s wish fulfillment mesh with their wish fulfillment, Breaking Dawn mostly ended up erasing Meyer’s own characterization and continuity in the name of remaining true to her own vision.

Fixing It

Let your story grow. Things change, things grow, you grow. Sometimes the story that you started out telling isn’t the story that you end up telling. You’ve changed, and that’s a good thing.

Meyer needed to let her story grow too.

Twilight and Forever Dawn were stories that were written at a specific time, and with a specific mindset, but in a series where two more books had been written, a lot needed to be changed. As hard as it is, sometimes, things move past the visions you originally had for them. Characters change, the plot alters. Even things that authors loved aren’t necessarily things that you can put into a final draft. That is one of the places that the phrase “kill your darlings” comes from.

Meyer had created two more books, and with those books, characters had changed, subplots had formed, and the expectations of the audience had altered.

Maybe they would have been ok with Breaking Dawn if that book had been right after Twilight. Maybe. But as it was, Meyer tried to force her series back into its original vision, and unlike before, when her obsession with her dream was ignored by readers, who were projecting bits of themselves and their ideas of themselves unto the characters, this was something that no one could make better.

As it was, Meyer, and all writers who find that their original vision is becoming less and less like something that is possible, that’s ok. You change, stories change, and one part of writing is, unfortunately moving past the first ideas that come to you. Often first ideas aren’t very good. Fault in Our Stars might be pretentious clap trap in my opinion but Green at least had the understanding that the ending where Hazel and the Crabby Dutchman band together and kill a drug lord for…reasons without repercussions in memory of Augustus was stupid. There are several writers who ended up changing an ending that they liked better because they knew that the revised one suited the story better.

It’s hard to revise, and it’s hard to let the story grow past that idealistic first stage, but it’s something that needs to be done.

Final Thoughts

Meyer took her initial vision very seriously, and in the end, while she managed to avoid it for longer than I thought possible, she eventually suffered for it. The reason was a combination of the fan’s own expectations, Meyer’s refusal to allow her story to grow beyond her original vision, a lack of understanding of what her fan base even wanted, and a story that was formatted like an epilogue, with little lasting conflict (be it Bella actually struggling or even the main confrontation at the end), too much happening in the background, and a sudden jerk of character development backwards.

In some regards, it’s a little sad to watch the very thing that Meyer thought was so important to her books, staying true to her original vision, end up as the thing that essentially destroyed her own work.

However, she claimed that she loved her characters, and regardless of saying that this was their true personalities, she should have considered if they’d really do the same things after the plot had happened. Would Bella, who didn’t really like the idea of marriage because it was too big of a step for her, (regardless of becoming immortal, but whatever) really suddenly want to have a child at eighteen? Would she really be willing to potentially die for that child? That answer should have been no.

If Meyer wants to really come back from the problems of the Twilight Saga, what she needs is not to write a gender bender, but to consider if her original vision really is something that CAN be published well and move from there. It will take time, it will take humility, and it does take sacrifice, but, at least as I see it, forcing a story to do something that makes no sense is worse.

#the twilight saga #Everything Wrong With #everything wrong with the twilight saga #stephenie meyer #writing

77 notes · View notes