#and i do believe that ford's “debating politics with reagan” bit implied disagreement with his policies

[stripedtabbycat]

i've been watching hana hyperfixates' gravity falls videos after they were in the latest mystery shack lookback episode on the book of bill and greatly enjoying myself. much better than watching anything that might have been on tv today

their gravity falls timeline video really resonated with me as someone who also likes to engage with fiction that way (constructing elaborate conspiracy board level arrangements of canon to figure out where and when the hell everything is happening is in fact fun! if somewhat madness-inducing). my own thoughts on some of the matters raised there include:

personally i do prefer the idea that shermie pines is the oldest brother and has a significant enough age gap with the stans that he wasn't really around while they were growing up, and that the infamous baby seen in that one shot of "a tale of two stans" is his kid. if that is dipper and mabel's father it would make sense timeline-wise for him to be about 30-31 when they were born too, and regardless of what any of the creators say this is perfectly possible solely working with what the text gives us. BUT i also appreciate the effort involved in figuring out a way for the baby to be the very young grandfather of 12-year-old grandkids in the present day. alex hirsch you had no idea what you were unleashing with that one shot of the stans' mom holding a baby.

in fact i'm impressed by how much you can work out just from the stans' childhood years being nebulously defined as "the 60s". i like being able to set concrete dates working around what we've been given

characters do seem to forget dates a lot here. almost as if someone has some kind of device that can erase specific memories from your brain... (in all seriousness i was genuinely thinking okay so what if at some point fiddleford started regretting creating the memory gun and wiped his own memory of making it, but then found the plans later or even came up with the idea again entirely on his own, thus explaining why the journal has him creating it after the gremloblin incident while the show implies it was after the first portal incident. it's possible, and also shows the dangers of trying to solve problems with memory wipes. i didn't even think of the eurhythmics being the key to it all)

insane that the fiddleford mcgucket character tag literally only had 2 fics in it on ao3 before "society of the blind eye" aired. this is what i've been saying about prequels and backstory stuff - the impact a good one can have is incredible

i also fully believe that on the page of the journal after ford's realization of bill's betrayal where he writes complementarily about bill before crossing it out and writing CAN'T BE TRUSTED and DO NOT SUMMON AT ALL COSTS, the crossed-out parts were in fact written by bill temporarily possessing ford to fuck with him some more. i'm generally impressed with how the published journal works around the few full pages of it we see in the show and this is a good explanation for that. also might explain ford writing ICE ICE BABY in code long before the song came out...

(how the revelations in the book of bill about the lost journal pages play into all this is very interesting and might throw some of this timeline stuff off a bit, but that's a topic for another post)

i've been generally assuming the main events of the show take place in 2012 with 1982 being the year ford was lost to the portal, so this is the first time i've seriously considered that could be off by a year. it certainly does make a lot of the 1980s era of the timeline fit more comfortably, and if the twins are turning 13 in 2013 that means they were born the same year as me! yayyy

i am also now subscribing to the headcanon that the party in "double dipper" was a secret birthday party stan was throwing for himself and his missing brother, whose birthday he hadn't celebrated together with for a very long time. :( also tracks that he'd be keeping that kind of information about himself a secret

speaking of birthdays, i was going to try and figure out a solution to the problem of soos' birthday being different in the journal than what was shown in the episode about it, and was thinking that if he dislikes it enough he might go so far as to find a way to have a different one printed on his id cards, which stan could have helped out with (after his plans to get it removed from the calendar didn't work out) since he's got some experience with fake ids. but in the episode that card is how dipper and mabel find out it's his birthday in the first place so i guess i have no explanation for this. maybe it's another time anomaly?