#gravity falls timeline

[pinesfamilyguidetotheweird]

If there was one thing I disagreed with Hana (or fordtato) is what year Gravity Falls takes place. They say 2013, but I thought 2012.

My only source was the calendar Stan held in 'Summerween'

And then, when you take account of when the science fair project took place (likely in the Stans' final year in high school) and the years that followed (Stan being homeless for 10 years, Ford being in the portal for the next 30), so 40 years since the incident, the year of the science fair was likely 1972.

This was further proven when, in Journal 3, Ford's timeline had him coming to Gravity Falls in 1975, which falls perfectly with Ford gaining his first PhD in three years (PhDs usually take 6, depending on the program).

In Journal 3, in the first entry, Ford said it had been six years since he arrived in Gravity Falls. This again falls perfectly into the timeline I thought.

1975 + 6 = 1981

So, if the June 8th entry was in 1981, then the January 17th entry would be in 1982.

Take all of this into account and Gravity Falls takes place in 2012.

And I thought that was it...

Until I decided to look at one more clue to the timeline.

The calendar in Carpet Diem.

First off, it has five days in a week instead of seven and it bothers me.

Second, I don't think I've registered the month. Just the year.

July of 1982...

In Journal 3 (both in-universe and out), the first entry was in June and the last dated entry before Ford was sucked into the portal was in January, likely in 1983 when keeping mind of the Carpet Diem calendar.

While evidence for 2012 being the year makes it more likely, this slight difference was enough to make a wrinkle that started to make cracks...

However, I just thought about this...Who says the calendar was still being used by Ford? What if it was Stan? I don't remember when he boarded up Ford's room, but I do remember a source saying that Stan kinda moped in this room for months (I don't remember if it was a post or fic; someone feel free to correct me). Now, it's kinda unknown when the brothers reunited before Ford went into the portal, I estimated it to be in March at the latest.

This is purely speculative on my part though. I'm sure that, in spirit, you can pick when it takes place (since that's what Alex was kinda going for, as he wanted to invoke the 90s feel into the show.)

I just like the details.

I am curious about the significance of July 4th being circled. Who was this relevant to, Stan or Ford? And why?

[haystarlight]

What are your headcanons about Shermie Pines?

I honestly don't have that many headcanons, if I'm honest 😅

He's 15 years older than the Stans, which means he was born in 1936

He would be 77 during the events of the show (because I think the show takes place in 2013, personally)

He moved out at 18, when the Stans were 3, which is why they don't really remember him from their childhood

He was in Vietnam and he was M.I.A. for a few years

The baby is his kid (Dipper and Mabel's dad), Robert

His wife was probably at work or something and that's why she left little Robert with the grandparents

He knew that Stan and Ford had switched places and just didn't say anything

He was the favorite child, but Filbrick briefly replaced that title for Ford when he thought that Ford was gonna be rich

[goat-and-a-pig]

that moment you realize that the Gravity Falls timeline fucked up again

[callipraxia]

calli what do you think of sherman pines. you have a lot of opinions about stuff so I would like to know. I think I might go around and ask everyone actually. actually yes I will… anyway. i really like him. he is very cool 2 me and I wanna know what you think of him. is he the baby? the older sibling? someone completely different? there is a correct answer /hj. i have him as the older brother—I have three fics with him as a titular character. you haven’t reached the chapter where shermie appears in The Search yet, but I think he is very delightful and that you would like him too. i have a lot of a headcanons and personality traits about him. like for one; he loves popcorn. he used to make it for his brothers back in new jersey. he loved them a lot and was always the normal brother, which was sometimes okay but left him out of the loop for many things like ford’s life and stan’s kick out. ksjjdhdidgrgr one post has triggered my love for shermie again and now I pester Everyone (this went on for a while. sorry!)

The fun things about my having lots of opinions on everyone is...I usually don’t even know what they are until I start typing. I usually make ‘em up, applying canon to justify or refute as needed, as I go along. So...this could get interesting!

As I begin typing, though, at least, I’m a true agnostic on the subject of Shermie. I’ve written him in as the older brother, the younger brother, and the Non-Specified. In the original very rough outlines for parts II and III of FWJB, it was a plot point that Shermie both did and didn’t exist at the same time without his age ever being specified.[1] I keep saying I’m going to do a proper time travel Shermie someday; time will tell if this is true. As for theories I might run with in a story, if I were writing one where I couldn’t leave him unspecified:

1) If I wrote Older Brother Shermie, he’d be, like, much older. Possibly actually only a half-brother, as Caryn (irrc) looks a fair bit younger than Filbrick (though even if I recall incorrectly, eh, I believe I read somewhere that it was Word of Hirsch that Stan made the infamous remark about how your life will fall apart if you get someone pregnant at the drive-in movie because he’d heard Filbrick complain along those lines in the past. Who knows – I’m making things up as I type here - maybe there was a first Mrs. Filbrick who got cheated on at the drive-in, resulting in Stan and Ford and the half-brother they are only vaguely familiar with the existence of. That’s the fun of Filbrick and Shermie, there’s very little you can’t do, except, like, make Filbrick a nice person outside of Anti-Mabel’s home dimension, I guess). In any case, this variant of Shermie had a motorbike as a teenager and had only the foggiest notion that he even had siblings, making it vaguely plausible, when they bonded after the parents’ deaths, for Stan to sell the idea that “nah, you got us mixed up, Stanley was the one with six fingers” in the unlikely event that this variant of Shermie even knew one of them had had six fingers.

2) Younger Brother Shermie works, in my opinion (or at least, my opinion as it stands right now), only in one of three ways. One: he’s a time traveler. Two: his life is an angstfest on par with Stan’s. Three, of course, is that both of the preceding are true, to one degree or another. But anyway. If he didn’t go time traveling, his life’s pretty definitely an angstfest, considering that it implies that at least one of Dipper and Mabel’s parents was the product of Adolescent Indiscretions (my second fic ran with that idea, actually – in that case, the “next thing you know, you gotta raise a kid, your life falls apart….” remark was Stan talking about his brother. Though that plotline could also work with an Older Brother Shermie as well, of course.[2])

But yes – even after writing all of this and its footnotes, I’m...still a Shermie agnostic, really. Heck, you could probably call him into existence with the Infinity Die and I’d just nod and proceed without hesitation, lol. I will say, though, that the only Shermies I have actually read and clearly remember are yours and another Old!Shermie, who was also relatively normal and was a functional enough brother to the Stan Twins back in the day. I quite liked both of them (I have got to see more of your Shermie attempting to converse with Fiddleford sometime...and just more of that guy in general) – I’m far too cruel to Stan to allow him a decent person in his young adulthood, but I apparently enjoy reading the results when other people show mercy. My apologies if this document is, due to all this failure to promote a single thesis and the way it was written, useless and/or incomprehensible; will attempt to clarify any incomprehensible bits when I get a chance tomorrow (I’m actually going to have to go to bed at a reasonable hour for once and...at least make a better-faith-than-usual effort not to give up on sleeping too soon and whip the phone out; I’m having brunch with some friends in 3D tomorrow morning, so gotta sleep tonight and then be occupied for a while tomorrow, but yeah, it’s inevitable I’ll be online at some point.)

(1) To vaguely explain that very long story, in the unlikely event anyone wants to know: the half-baked idea (I never put it through all the wringers that ideas which make it into print get, so it’s still quite rough) was that time broke due to Weirdmageddon, time travel antics, or both, and – to borrow a metaphor from Terry Pratchett – had to do the equivalent of being put back together with glue sticks; among other problems, this created Shroedinger’s Shermie. Therefore, Ford nearly caused the end of the world by being like “...who’s this guy?” when Shermie showed up to help save the day in the finale, which caused Stan to realize “...I don’t actually have a single childhood memory of this guy, but I keep thinking I do??” while meanwhile, Shermie is like, “can you guys debate my existential status later, this is giving me a literal headache.” In the end, though, FWJB Shermie ended up being a killed-off Not Specified.

(Though now that I think of it, if I combined the idea with the ideas that took its place...Dipper already had to deal with a fair bit of temporal displacement. Mix that with a grandfather who both does and doesn’t exist...existentially unstable Dipper leads to existentially unstable Mabel, Tracey, and Quattro (especially the latter two), which leads to issues with both halves of the split-by-the-town-limits timeline, which all defies the fact that yet: here all four of them are, just as prophecy demands...dang, I could have horrified y’all more, huh? Or at least confused and/or induced headaches more. Plus, the rest of the story got significantly darker and more serious than it originally was supposed to be between the first and second outlines, only to get darker and more serious still between the second outline and the final product because of reasons, so the scene as originally pictured would have likely gotten much too slapstick to fit where it would have gone. Eh, probably for the best, it really did get trippy enough as it was. )

(2) No matter which Shermie I use, I seem to saddle the Child of Shermie with a pretty dysfunctional family, too, now that I think of it – the most detailed one I’ve come up with involved his mom running off with some guy in the Navy when he was two, leaving him to be partially brought up by the dysfunctional trio of Filbrick, Caryn, and Shermie and later be brought up by a stepmother who was loving on one hand, but had a personality of cast iron on the other. She and Shermie had an only half-joking agreement that she would not try to murder Stan during Shermie’s lifetime. She was Not Amused to get back from a cruise and find that Mr. Pines had sent the twins to Gravity Falls while she was away; she was Even Less Amused by the explanations Mr. Pines and Stan attempted to give her for why there were suddenly two Stans around after she discovered Ford’s existence. I haven't developed the other potential backstories for other versions of Shermie I've touched on much, but ten to one they're equally fun. Why stop at Dysfunction Junction when you can take the whole family right on to Soap Opera Station, am I right? (jk; I haven't seen them done in much detail anywhere, including my own work, but I have no objection to the idea of Dipper and Mabel's parents being semi-normal humans. They're another set who are fun because there's very little that you can't do with them, if so inclined).

[candycatfalls]

the book of bill is great

[scurvyboy]

funniest picture i've ever drawn or something

[artsymeeshee]

Them 🧡

[pinesfamilyguidetotheweird]

Could be a causal time loop/bootstrap paradox kinda thing.

I saw a post on here back a little while ago claiming that Stanford built the shack in Bill’s image when they knew each other (or something like that!) and that’s why there are so many triangle & pyramid motifs built into the shack. I think that idea’s really interesting, but there’s one problem; it’s impossible based on the journal three timeline.

according to this timeline in journal three, ford came to gravity falls in 1975, a good 6 years before he first met bill. so, using his grant money, he built the shack and all of the triangle and pyramid things inside…for some reason. why?????

ok so hear me out if it’s IMPOSSIBLE for ford to have known bill when the shack was built, maybe ford somehow knew him in a…subconscious way?? the image above is from TBOB, and it seems like from a young age ford was already interested in yellow floating triangles; and while this could totally just be foreshadowing, what if it implies some kind of …fate-related thing? something something ford was just MEANT to meet bill by some predetermined twisted fate created by the universe & that fate of them meeting was also subconsciously the thing that made ford research all that is strange & weird, thus making him end up in gravity falls???? i’m not sure how to put this into words! but just based on the shack triangle stuff and the photo, there’s just something there that screams that bill was and always has been subconsciously in ford’s thoughts and they were always meant to meet in this universe for better or for worse (it’s for worse)???????

edit: hey it’s five am and it has now come to my attention that he could have probably just remodeled/somehow made his own stained glass windows & such, BUUUT it’s still a personal theory that there is some kind of fate thing going on with ford and bill, & REALLY holding onto that theory with how ford was mesmerized by that kind of stuff at straight up infancy….hmmm time for bed for me

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

vampires age in your halloween au? (vampire old man gucket is fun! just curious about the logistics)

old wolf stanley.. so awesome. tail betrays him by wagging when hes trying to pretend hes not a sap

Vampires don't usually age by getting grey hair and wrinkles, but Fidds hurries his aging process by using the memory gun!!

Stan helps him outta the habit, but it still takes it's toll, y'know?

And, I totally love the idea of Old Stan not being able to hide his fondness because he just can't stop wagging his tail when he's with the people he loves 🙏 So cute 🥹

Previous!!

Next!!

First!!

[noodles-and-tea]

personally i think the funniest way of explaining anything off about the reported timeframes in your au is to have both stan & ford being absolutely terrible with time

stan being like damn the 50s sucks & little ford going its the 60s???? & ford going ‘nearly 30 years ago’ and fidds being like ford you’re like 30 that doesn’t make sense

I love that so much

[yujateaandpi]

*gestures incoherently* Stan unhappy. Fiddle unhappy. Maybe they happy… together?

[mejkosmos]

why has 2024 literally been THE summer of toxic old man yaoi i'm genuinely tweaking rn

[hiwelcometothemonstersancturary]

you know that one time-traveling episode where we had a young ford cameo? okay, so-

[theashop]

the twins are completely fine in every timeline just a bit sleepy

[toqiuh]

man i cant take them seriously

[paintedcrows]

Some Fords! (and Martin K Blackwood is also there)