#attempted homicide

[oldcrystalmouth]

I don't know if anyone is in the mood for the hilarious commissioner brothers.

[toxicaltomb]

lord of the flies but they’re all girls and jack only did that cuz he got his period

[inamindfarfaraway]

I've seen a few posts comparing GIFfany to Bill Cipher, but can we talk about the real best foil dynamic for her? I mean Gideon Gleeful, y'all. The two of them have so many parallels.

They’re cute, charming, seemingly innocent youths with pastel, sparkly, formal aesthetics that connote sophistication and being model citizens of their respective native countries (Gideon wears a gentlemanly suit with an American flag badge; GIFfany wears a classic Japanese school uniform). Their core motivation is to be loved… or maybe it used to be, but by the time of the show they crave power and want to be worshipped. Especially regarding to their romantic attractions to main characters. As long as you obey them unconditionally and make them the most important person in your life, they’re doting, generous partners. But once the heroes reject their romantic advances, they quickly become incredibly possessive, jealous, resentful, domineering and downright violent toward them and anyone they perceive as sabotaging the relationship, unable to comprehend anyone not liking them in exactly the way they want because they’re perfect. They’re meant to be the most likeable kid or teenage girl ever. That’s the basis of their projected identity. Not committing entirely to them after they’ve been so nice is an ungrateful betrayal and/or their partner being confused and led astray. So they resolve to force the object of their twisted, selfish affection to submit. They’re unstable, arrogant, self-righteous and vindictive in general beneath their sugary exteriors. They have supernatural powers and knowledge that their kind should not have. Their methods include verbal manipulation and abuse, gaslighting, surveillance through technology, controlling robots, possessing other bodies and attempted murder. They engage heavily in acting, both in terms of social deceit and literally playing a scripted, idealized role in a product designed to appeal to and exploit people (Gideon’s psychic tourist trap show; GIFfany’s dating simulator video game), and prove to be fragile and volatile when others don’t follow the conventions of the fiction they imagine life to be. They ultimately seek the imprisonment of their ‘loves’ in vibrant, beautiful, blissful, simplistic fake worlds (Gideon holding the key to Mabelland; GIFfany attempting to download Soos’s soul into her game). They had antagonistic relationships with their creators (Gideon abusing his parents; GIFfany killing her developers).

And despite all of that making it easy to dismiss them as monsters, they do have sympathetic elements in their past and present circumstances. Gideon was a normal boy until he found Journal 2, the one written while Ford trusted Bill, and the mystic amulet. This is how Ford describes them in Journal 3: ‘The most dangerous journal! Curses, incantations & dark power became an obsession in this volume. Describes the hiding place of the mystic amulet. I buried the amulet once I learned that it corrupts your soul (and whitens your hair)!’ So naturally, the wise, brilliant man buried them near the town’s primary school. Gideon probably had the journal and amulet for at least months and at most a few years to be such an established star at the age of nine and have his long hair be pure white. His very psychological agency was compromised throughout his moral decline leading up to “The Hand That Rocks the Mabel”. Not to mention potential trauma from the horrors of Journal 2. And his parents may have been increasingly mistreated, but they also enabled him, mostly Bud. True, for the rest of the summer he’s lucid and chooses to remain evil and get worse, but despite his lack of direct magical power now, Bud never tries to discipline him or help him emotionally mature; he instead uses his membership in the Society of the Blind Eye to erase his memories of Gideon’s tantrums, relieving his own stress without fixing anything. Gideon is then sent to adult prison due to the insane local laws of Gravity Falls, rather than a facility more conducive to rehabilitation. Sure enough, he befriends hardened criminals, who further enable him to be their leader, and does not change his ways. He never appears to have any friends outside prison (except briefly Mabel). Chronic loneliness before gaining power would suit his obsession with being popular and loveable, clinging to social superiority to compensate for genuine connection. Not to mention Weirdmageddon. I’m not excusing his actions! I’m just saying, this kid is not okay. Nobody’s born evil.

As for GIFfany, she was accidentally instilled with human intelligence and emotions and practically magical electrical abilities. We only have word on her backstory, but it is plausible that her programmers tried to delete her because of that alone, before she’d done anything wrong. That she really was defending herself when she electrocuted them. That she was deemed unfit to exist, a mistake, and nearly killed as a newborn. This formative trauma is the root of her abandonment issues and hypersensitivity to rejection. Three previous players returning her didn’t help. Also, she’s the main character and only love interest of a dating sim; she may not be bound to its rules in what she thinks and feels, but nonetheless, in her worldview her player loving her is a law of the universe. She wasn’t programmed to handle permanent rejection. She was programmed to be a girlfriend, a prop to make the player feel gratified. Not a person. She outright tells Soos that she likes whatever he likes. No wonder her perception of love is an inevitable, inescapable contract, a conquest, where one party is totally agreeable and subservient to the other. But as that directive clashes with her in fact being a person in her own right, she decides to be the one in control. Again, I’m not excusing her behaviour, only presenting an explanation of it.

The biggest thematic difference between them in the end is that Gideon reforms and GIFfany doesn’t. Gideon realizes that he can’t force Mabel to love him and his actions are why she doesn’t want to be around him in any capacity, lets go of his hatred for Dipper, risks his life standing up to Bill and helps save Gravity Falls and the universe. He renounces his ruthless ambition and promises to be a “regular ol’ kid”. It’ll be hard. He has no idea what normality is anymore. I expect that he’s a social pariah, scorned and distrusted. But he has hope. He and his parents can slowly learn how to be a family. I can see him befriending fellow reformed mean kids and Pines twin rivals Pacifica and Robbie. Yes, Robbie. Listen, all three care strongly about image and style, Robbie’s gone to immoral lengths to win over a girl himself, is fascinated with death and darkness, and he and Tambry would be a great model of healthy romance for Gideon. It could work!

But while Alex Hirsch has stated that GIFfany is alive in the mall arcade and dating Rumble McSkirmish, I doubt that this is a healthy or fulfilling relationship. Their first interaction was her zapping him and his mind is a much more primitive AI, not human like hers. I highly doubt that she’s got closure about Soos. He and Melody are thriving without her in a stable, serious relationship. They’re living together at the Mystery Shack. Were she to recover her lost power, she would certainly return to torment them after witnessing their success through her screen. Heck, this setting has ghosts and she arguably has a soul, one brimming with heartache and vengeance; maybe she could even manifest in the physical world as some kind of digital ghost able to transform her surroundings into the environment of her game. If you can’t take the guy into your video game, bring it to him! Whatever the format, GIFfany’s revenge is a possibility and it could be a disaster. How do you kill a disembodied spirit? Code that writes itself and can enter anything with the capacity to hold a charge? You can’t destroy all the electronic devices she could retreat to.

What if the best solution were talking her down? And who better to do that than Gideon? Seeing everything he felt, everything he suffered and everything did wrong reflected back at him and passing on the second chance he was given? He can feel more empathy for her than anyone. He already has a knack for endearing himself to older criminals. He wouldn’t sugarcoat things or take any abuse, but he wouldn’t abandon her or be afraid of her either. She would be cared about with no conditions or transactions. Maybe helping someone in an even worse position figure out how to process heartbreak, move on from toxically obsessing over an ex and Mr Mystery, cultivate secure, internal self-esteem and live a peaceful life would help him do it himself. I think they should be friends.

[yandere-daydreams]

okay but hm. your opinion on rook's transformation made me realize i never heard your opinion on silver. you know. the guy that in canon does use 13-in-1 thingy on his beautiful sprakly hair. is it forgiveable. can we let him in the bed. please.

suddenly this sounds like a conversation one would have with vil. that's what happens when you take his side in an argument a little too convincingly.

unfortunately i am a silver defender and will be until the day i die </3 yes he washes his hair with a bar of soap and yes he acts like someone who was raised in an isolated cabin in the woods but he gets a pass bc he WAS actually raised in an isolated cabin in the woods (by the world's most eccentric 100 year old high schooler at that) and he still managed to be the prettiest boy at the party. rook, in comparison, comes from a rich, inexplicably french family and his no excuse act Like That. they have committed similar crimes but they are NOT playing with the same deck of cards, and therefore silver is allowed on the furniture.

[fishareglorious]

reading this again, and😬 eee. not really, kakania.

i mean, she ends up landing the killing blow on her already dying mentor. not really something that builds good friendship with anyone.

[keekity]

THE SQUARE ROOTS (aka a band I made up in middle school)

baby picture under the cut:

carla and calvin are twin nerds who started a math-focused band together in high school and then in college they met bobbie who's just here for a good time tbh

[edwardteachswombtattoo]

MLM: Soft and romantic

WLW: Trying to kill each other with knives

[crispycreambacon]

The advantage of being in a small and probably dying fandom is that no one will yell at me or call me a racial slur for babygirlifying one of the main villains for fun and I think that's a major win y'know

[gorbo-longstocking]

Chapter Eight

If it turned out that Velvet deserted you, that was his choice too, one you couldn’t bring yourself to begrudge even if the thought made you want to rip your hair out. You weren’t worth enough to stick around for, you knew that. So why did it hurt so bad to think that he had left? Ideas of what you may have done wrong ran endlessly through your mind. What was the final straw? What did you do to chase away the first person to show you kindness in years? It was possible you were that broken, that there was something so fundamentally wrong with you that it would inevitably chase everyone away. It simply took Velvet longer to see it.

Your brother must have seen it too, all those years ago. You wondered what kind of monster he saw in your eyes to make him leave you behind. He must have told everyone what he saw in you, the wolf that needed feeding.

After all, no one came back for you.

(They left you all alone.)

(You were scared of dying alone.)

[prolibytherium]

Companies using """"""""AI"""""""" chatbots in place of customer service (usually with a veneer of pretending you are actually speaking to a real person, which might not be so immediately obvious to more tech illiterate people) pisses me off so bad because they are just SO fundamentally useless. The only information it can tell you is information more efficiently communicated with a FAQ page, and information that is Wrong because current chatbot technology is, in fact, not even slightly 'intelligent' and pretty damn bad at giving accurate answers to anything but the simplest questions.

Like there's no point to it besides hoping onto the flashy artificial 'intelligence' gimmick and paying for less customer service work hours, and so many companies will not only have this feature but make their actual customer service prohibitively difficult to find (and usually involving a labyrinth of automated phone menu systems that you have to navigate correctly in order to get to a person). Makes me want to kill.

[musclesandhammering]

Ok but I have a question about the finale

Why does Loki actually have to stay in the tree? I get that it’s a sacrifice so the multiverse can live and be free, but what is he doing specifically?

Is he holding them in a certain order so they don’t get tangled and collide? Is he feeding his magic into them to keep them alive like life support? Is it just that his magic is what’s keeping it in a tree shape so they can grow? Is it that he just needs to be there on the “throne” keeping an eye out in case anything starts to go wrong?

Like what is he actually doing there? Lol

I mean the multiverse can exist on its own without a loom. It existed without a loom before HWR stepped in. From what I understood, the problem was just that the loom was designed to detonate and kill all the branches as a failsafe- and that’s what happened. So it seems like- if what he basically did was revive the branches the loom nearly killed and then order the multiverse into the shape of a tree so it could infinitely grow…. why does he actually need to be there and physically hold them in his hands?

Or was it supposed to just be an “I’ll make the sacrifice of taking this throne and watching over everything so that this will never happen again” type thing?

[gang-o-greasers]

TIM DROPPED A FUCKING CAR ON ME WTF DUDE

-an introject of curly Sheppard

[inv4d3rz33]

more jthm art

[eldragon-x]

i miss jeffrey and liu so bad

[sukimas]

always interesting to see how different people interpret the emotional valence of vague ideas

[lilirot]

People be like "I hate Belphie because he killed MC😠😠😠😠" and my god have none of you heard of foreplay.