#The Last Mabelcorn

[cloudysarts]

Hi there!!

I want to say that your “Mabel’s muse” Au concept has absolutely called my attention, Bill mentions multiple times (Dipper and Mabel’s guide to mystery and fun and TBOB) how he likes Mabel’s personality and wanted her to be his ally…sooo the idea of an alternative time where he decided to approach her and where she trusts him and considers him as her friend is absolutely full of potential

I just think about how many stuff would change and how bill would be a little more genuine with her as he for once isn’t pretending to be an all-wise being and having to constantly rise the ego of Genius minds…instead he just has to party with a teenager whose idea of fun is quite similar to his…he doesn’t have to be the “supreme being” for once just a silly fella in order to earn Mabel’s trust

Also about how some episodes would have to take a completely different route:

maybe “Mindscapers” wouldn’t even take place…because I doubt that Mabel would trust a Bill if he went inside Stan’s head

Bill possessing her during the “sock opera”episode instead of dipper

Also don’t get me started on “the last Mabelcorn” episode. All the angst and horror that Ford would feel when he finds out about the whole friendship with bill situation reflecting himself on Mabel and probably Dipper being the one who search for the unicorn hair while ford tries to convince her that Bill isn’t trustworthy

I apologize for my rant but I seriously love your idea and sorry if it’s a bit confusing English isn’t my first language

I hope you have a nice day and thank you for reading this silly thing!!

first of all, your english is great!! second of all, i am SO sorry it took me so long to respond to this ask, it just made me so happy that i wanted to take my time to craft a response!!!!!! :DDDD (context: for people who don't know what my 'mabels muse' au is, you can check it out over here!)

you are practically SPOT ON with my ideas for this au!!!!!! but i'm gonna briefly run through all the things you brought up!!

first of all, yes, absolutely!!!! for bill, partner-ing up with mabel was a very nice change of pace. he likes stroking the ego's of genius', just for his own amusement, but he doesnt get the THRILL of just getting to PLAY very often!! he's a very childish being, at the end of the day. he enables mabel's selfishness, while getting to indulge his own, silly passions right alongside her!! and obviously, mabel LOVES being enabled <3 i imagine most of the dreams he gives her would make any normal persons eyes bleed

as for your episode ideas, you're mostly right!!! :) mindscaperers does, in fact, NOT happen in this au. in my head, i imagine gideon trying to summon him, only for an 'I.O.U' to appear where bill should be. he's busy hanging out with his favorite pre-teen!!! so gideon skips straight to his backup plan, aka, gideon rises ^^

for sock opera, i'm still on the fence a little bit. one of the reasons bill is hanging out with her at all in this au is because, unlike in the regular timeline, this bill actively wants stanford to be brought home. the reason mabel is important to him, is because he can see timelines where she presses the button in not what he seems, and keeps him from returning. in his mind, he has the greatest shot of success if mabel doesn't press it. in this au, she doesnt even hesitate to trust stan, because she has another, trustworthy voice in her head, yelling DON'T PRESS THE BUTTON. its 2v1! ANYWAY, the reason any of that matters for sock opera, is because he wouldnt have any need to possess anyone, because he has no interest in smashing the laptop! BUT.....i can see him doing it anyway. i figure, most likely, he gets mabel to (willingly) let him use her body, so that she can work on her sock opera while her body sleeps. i just imagine a bill-possessed mabel up at 3 am, covered in hot glue and googly eyes as he tries to work it out shjdkfhjsdkf. but......honestly, he probably destroys the laptop in the process :) just to fuck with dipper <3 not that dipper ever finds out its her. he has no idea that mabel was ever possessed/has no reason to suspect her, because at this point, he still doesnt think bill is real. that is....until the last mabelcorn.

IN the last mabelcorn, mabel reveals to ford that she does recognize bill, and that he lives in her brain! she says it really excitedly, at the table, while dipper kind of just rolls his eyes about it. to her, its vindicating, because it's the first time anyone has ever acknowledged bills existence. but to ford, its HORRIFYING, because he knows it isn't just a coincidence. he knows he has to do something, but he doesn't know what, right away. this is where our ideas differ a little bit, because i think that mabel still WOULD be the one retrieving the unicorn hair! ford just didnt tell her what the hair was for. ford sends her off, because he wants to brainstorm a way to get him out of her head, preferably without hurting her/her memories. he also plans to bill-proof dippers mind in the process, just in case mabel is too far gone already. the events here happen basically the same (with minor tweaks), but instead of dipper suspecting that ford is evil/bill-possessed, this is where he finally learns that bill is real at all. ford tells him about his backstory, and explains the REAL reason he sent mabel out to get the unicorn hair, etc etc. he loves mabel a lot, but hes not sure how to go about dealing with this situation yet. its not HER fault she trusted bill, but he knew that if he just tries to tell her hes evil, she wont believe him. shes known 'her muse' longer, and as of right now, he's never lead her wrong. just like what happened to him in the past...

i wonder how mabel would feel if she only heard the end of that conversation...

[icanlife]

Thank you to this YouTube comment for this

[zeriphi]

..... And he never recovered

[hkthatgffan]

Just noticed this in both seasons of Gravity Falls.

When Dipper screwed up in a major way while with Stan or Ford, the episode ended with them both having a Pitt Cola and him being cheered up and motivated by them.

It happened at the end of Boyz Crazy after Dipper ruined Wendy and Robbie's relationship and angered Wendy...

And again at the end of The Last Mabelcorn when he nearly memory wiped Ford and broke the machine.

IDK about you, but I just love this small little bonding thing he has with them. Nothing like an S&P approved drink and some Grunkle motivation to get you going again!

[nias-nook]

out of interest has the ford fandom gotten their hands on scrapped storyboard cloak ford yet??? personally? HUGE fan of him. i have so many questions every time i see him. why the cloak? why the lantern? why can't you calm down for a second?

from the last mabelcorn storyboards from artist miguel puga!!

[realtimefanduboutofcontext]

Real-Time Fandub | Gravity Falls, "The Last Mabelcorn" (2018) [YouTube]

[thicctails]

Question!! Would Ep 15 S2 (the uh, Mabelcorn thingy where Mabel fights unicorn to get hair) and Ep 17 S2 (that one ep where Ford offers apprenticeship to Dipper) still happen? I doubt it would since Bill is sort of neutral by now.

I don't know if it would or not, but I would love to see the cipher parents' reaction to its events! (Just ignore/forget that the rift breaks and weirdmageddon happend at the end of ep 17-)

The events of The Last Mabelcorn do happen, but in this au it's how Mabel and Bill really first start to bond! Mabel makes Bill a plush unicorn doll to inhabit and the two of them go searching for unicorns. It ends with them getting unicorn blood and hair to use for their Family Scrapbook once the judgemental hoofbags start making Mabel feel bad. Scalene and Euclid are very happy their kids are getting along.

As for the other episode, it would probably just go like it does in canon, without the tears at the end, because Mabel is also staying in Gravity Falls to apprentice under McGucket!

[pealeii]

girls just wanna have fun!

[artunderwraps]

THE LAST MABELCORN!!!!

[space-hopper14]

Last mablecorn

Im Literally begging everyone to watch the last mablecorn with fresh eyes, fords avoidance of dippers questions is so fucking funny

Gotta be the best episode ong 😭😭😭😭

[ceruleanwhore]

We've gotta talk about The Last Mabelcorn

I’ve seen people critique some aspects of Gravity Falls, primarily stuff pertaining to sexuality and gender plus the occasional line or scene that didn’t age well, but I still have yet to see anyone actually talk about everything wrong with The Last Mabelcorn. I find that especially surprising given all the criticism I’ve seen (and written) about Mabel herself as a character but, for some reason, the same people who have criticized her for disrespecting boundaries and being selfish/entitled don’t then also talk about those problems in this episode. Well, if no one else is gonna talk about it, then I am.

First off, I think we need to start by talking about the weird ethical shit around sentient, intelligent fantasy creatures. The problem with creatures like the unicorns in Gravity Falls is that they definitely can think and talk and have emotions like people, but we and the characters in universe aren’t meant to view them as people. Celestabellebethabelle is supposed to be a really special animal who also is the source of an important ingredient for Ford’s science shit so, even though she’s intelligent, we are not supposed to view her as having personhood, similar to the gnomes. All the characters in this episode obviously have this view as well and I strongly believe that the girls would’ve reacted differently to the same situation if, instead of a unicorn, Celestabellebethabelle were a human. Even when Pacifica was at her worst, Mabel and her friends never literally beat her up like they did to the unicorn in this episode.

Now, getting into the actual episode, I invite you to join me in a little thought exercise. Imagine you are enjoying a nice day off, rotting in bed or baking a cake or whatever you do with such time, and a group of random strangers just up and walk into your house and ask you for some of your hair. Even if they’re really polite about it, you’re probably asking them to leave and maybe even calling the cops, right? Now imagine that this same group of strangers is weirdly insistent and they show up at your house multiple times, leaving when you tell them ‘no’ again and then later coming back to ask again, until they get angry with you for ‘wasting their time’ and beat you up, taking some of your hair by force. That’s what Mabel and her friends did, basically, and no one ever bothered to say hey, that’s kinda fucked up.

It’s even worse because, when the other unicorns pop in and reveal that the ‘purity of heart’ stuff is all fake, it conveys to us that humans showing up and disrupting their peace to try and insist the unicorns give them pieces of their bodies is frequent enough that she had to come up with that in the first place. Not only that, but the reason you come up with something like that is because the people in question won’t take ‘no’ for an answer and insist upon disrespecting your boundaries. With all of that, what happens in this episode between the girls and Celestabellebethabelle actually feels like an allegory for SA — they try to get this person to share her body with them and, after trying a few different ways, they grow angry and assault her, taking what they were after from her by force. 

In my opinion, the worst part of this is that having the perpetrators be young girls and having the victim be a non-human person is clearly meant to exhonorate everything and we, the audience, are meant to come out of this episode supporting Mabel and the others completely. These girls did something horrible and are never held accountable for it, so they won’t learn from it and very well might do similar things in the future. This is especially a problem for Mabel’s character since one of the biggest issues with how she’s written is that she does tend to be a bit selfish and disrespects people’s boundaries, but everyone and their mother rewards her for it. She just committed assault against someone solely because that person tried to set a boundary with her and, the entire time, everyone around her was telling her what a good person she is and their victim was such a bitch for not validating Mabel and giving her what she wanted. I don’t hate Mabel and this isn’t even meant to be Mabel slander, it’s just that the writing failed so hard here in a way that features her character.

Along with that is how we know nothing of what Ford’s experiences with finding and interacting with the unicorns actually looked like. I think it’s no accident that we never see a grown ass man beating up Celestabellebethabelle and ripping out her hair because she tried to get him to leave her alone, but it does also raise questions around what those interactions actually looked like. What we do know is that when the girls walk in all fucked up from their fight and Grenda even says how they also got unicorn blood and tears in addition to the hair, his only response is basically ‘good job’. This is where, taking it back to the top of the post, I think the root of the problem here is that Ford doesn’t view any of the local creatures as people, regardless of how sentient and intelligent they are, and in The Last Mabelcorn, he’s the adult in the room who should be saying something to them about their actions. Hell, he should’ve gone with them, they really needed an adult in the room to be the voice of reason, but that’s where we run into the biggest problem with Ford, which is that he never will be the voice of reason for any situation.

But yeah, Ford depersonalizes the unicorns, so Mabel and the others do as well and, when they have difficulty getting Celestabellebethabelle to do what they want, they assault her with no remorse, which would not be the case if they viewed her as a person, and they're validated for it the whole way through.

[zeriphi]

-I'M SORRY FIDDLEFORD-

(redraw of a piece from 2021)

[bestepisode]

Vote on more episodes here!

See the full list of round 3 polls here.

Northwest Mansion Mystery: Pacifica asks Dipper to help get rid of a ghost that is haunting the Northwest mansion before he wreaks havoc on her party. The Last Mabelcorn: A new threat requires that Mabel venture into the enchanted realm of the unicorns. Meanwhile, Dipper learns an unexpected twist about the enigmatic Bill Cipher.

[eldragon-x]

[ID: A traditional artwork of Mabel Pines and Ford Pines from Gravity Falls, colored with alcohol markers.

Mabel is in the lower middle of the image which cuts off below her upper body. She has an upset expression and is crying with her eyes closed. She is holding a noteblock tightly against her chest and wears an unicorn ear ring. To the right of the image behind her, Celestabelle's eye is looking at her. A colorful, glittering unicorn mane is flowing on the left side next to Mabel.

On the upper half of the image, behind Mabel and the mane, Ford is visible up to his bust. His back is mostly turned to the viewer though his face is still visible from a side profile. His eye is closed and he looks distressed. His mouth is covered by the collar of his coat. Bill's eye is looking at him from the very left side of the image. To his right, various screens from the mind scanning machine can be seen. One screen shows Bill's eye looking to Ford's direction, another shows static, and the last shows the text "I'm sorry Fiddleford" cut off.

The image is colored in various colors save for Mabel and Ford, who are colored in grayscale. /end ID]

your mistakes and flaws don't define you

[realtimefanduboutofcontext]

Real-Time Fandub | Gravity Falls, "The Last Mabelcorn" (2018)

[imsogayyippee]

"When I look into your eyes I see

A facade, you are not trustworthy

You are my enemy

Faking your empathy

I was right to be wary

When you know how to pretend" (How to pretend - CircusP)