#i think. Bill's a goddamn triangle. at what point does it become enough to tag that. probably at the point i gave Ford freaky love bites...

[paintedcrows]

Totally Normal Trigonometry Things

[wyblogging]

For the sake of posterity

and also so I don’t forget, myself, I’m looking back to sort out my positions on all divergent Ford and Bill theories and when they changed. 

Something is fucky.

Something to do with Mister Triangle.

Stan is not what he seems, these are the ten people required to either summon or defeat Bill. Initially suspected Stan, Dipper, Mabel, Soos, Gideon, Robbie, and Thompson, plus four unknowns, with the hand referring either to the journals or their author.

Gideon refers to Stan as “Stanford”. My immediate response is that Gideon is being a pompous moron. I don’t know exactly when I first noticed the STNLYMBL license tag, but the only way this reaction makes sense is if it happened before that point. Regardless, I didn’t consider STNLYMBL to be important enough to be worth the mention. Even after this incident, I had basically zero doubt that Stan’s name was actually Stanley.

A certain Younger Stan makes his appearance at the Shack. I did not make any particular observation about the glasses at this time.

I did not take any note of the particular date on this book. Which sucks really, as a few episodes later I was casting about for any significance for the year 1982.

Real Stuff starts happening to change the status quo, and I embark on my Right For The Wrong Reasons path. There’s a hidden room in Stan’s house. He knows it’s there, and it clearly doesn’t contain anything that belongs to him, although it does have a bit more Cipher paraphernalia. 

Most important are the glasses though. The glasses that exactly match those on the Cipher zodiac, which are deliberately drawn in a distinct style from Stan’s glasses, and which, in retrospect, match Ford’s glasses from the time-travel segment. Stan knows exactly what they are, that much is clear, and he’s a little upset about whatever they signify. In my attempt to cast around for a theory I suggested that they might belong to his ex-wife, whose aim may or may not be getting better. The fact that the house was previously inhabited by a mad scientist of some sort becomes inescapable.

Stan continues to suppress anything remotely supernatural, and does as much damage control as he can to keep the secrets of the Shack safe. At this point I have him pegged as the likely leader of a pro-Cipher cult of some sort.

Alright. The episode where my interpretation and the general fandom’s differ most widely. But first, an uncontroversial observation. This is Young Stan, and he is not the man who opened the Shack door in the snow to investigate a strange noise. Cartoon tropes being what they are, though, he’s clearly a relative. 

In passing, these two incidents give a very interesting shade to Stan’s actions. He is not a prepper. He’s the scam artist selling the Brown Meat, not the rube buying it. His entire schtick is making peace with the supernatural and trying to ignore or hide it. 

He doesn’t do this.

I’ve been told that many of the off-key character moments in this episode were intended to be comic relief, but this is Gravity Falls. I wasn’t going to accept that answer then and I’m still a touch annoyed that I have to now.

The fact that Stan didn’t know anything consciously, despite this apparent smoking gun...yeah, I feel a little bit hung out to dry by the writers here.

A clear shot of STNLYMBL. There was no doubt in my mind, despite Gideon’s repeated exhortations to the contrary, that Stan’s name was Stanley.

The big one. I’d speculated for a long time that the Cipher eyes held some latent magical power, even without the triangle himself being present. It seems that the official Journal 3 release supports this idea to some extent, although to what degree is ambiguous. Numerous major conflicts had burst out in front of the one particular red-paned Cipher window in the attic, and this latest one felt inexplicable to me. Mabel doesn’t lash out at her BFFs. She just doesn’t. Even her temper tantrums take more of the form of creating Dippy Fresh than ripping down a poster and tearing it in half to signify the end of a friendship. And at the end of the incident, she openly admitted that she had no idea why she acted the way she did. Sure, it could be comic relief of some sort, or just an awkward off-character moment from the writers. But this is Gravity Falls. 

My theory that images of Cipher are able to inflame the passions of those around them, amplifying hostility and irrational behavior, remains intact and I stand by it. Especially given the echoes of this scene in the behavior of Stan and Ford during the zodiac scene of the finale, in the heart of Cipher’s temple to himself. I do not think Cipher can directly control people without their knowledge. But I think he clearly has some degree of subconscious passive influence, to bring certain chaotic responses to the forefront when they would be held in check otherwise.

Moving to the next episode, we finally get solid confirmation that Stan does, in fact, care about people other than himself. This was almost entirely up for debate for the first 17 episodes, and this was the beginning of the long road to me respecting Stan Pines as a person.

Dreamscaperers was a nuke. Everything changed, all at once. And it began with the confirmation that Stanford Pines is or was, in fact, a real person and not a figment of Gideon’s imagination. And that the Shack legally belonged, at one point, to him. I still had the strong feeling that Stan was duplicitous at heart, Stan is Not What He Seems on the brain, and with the Finders Keepers law clearly laid out, this document didn’t immediately sway me to the idea that Stan was Stanford. But it was on the radar screen.

This feels like the biggest fakeout of the entire show. This arrow and these three exclamation points cemented the idea that the author of the journals was also the owner of the glasses and the mystery room, who was the man at the door in The Time Traveler’s Pig. In light of the previous revelation that Stanford originally owned the shack, things started to fall into place. By the end of this episode, I would be set in the theory that the most likely explanation was that Stanford Pines was the missing author, and that Stan was an impostor of some sort.

The prepper stuff annoys me, sure. But this really was irritating. This was the missing piece to the puzzle, the thing that made everything else snap into place. What’s more, the canonical ending of the show makes this particular screenshot nonsense. Why would Ford care about these glasses, if they weren’t his goddamn glasses? Why wouldn’t he point out his six-fingered hand, for instance? I feel like something about the endgame was changed in a big way, not just after the introduction of the Zodiac in the first intro, but even in the time after the season 1 finale, because the line of clues involving the glasses just lead nowhere when that doesn’t make any sense at all.

This was the frame that cemented me in what ended up being the correct theory. And this one is pretty much on me. I looked at this image and saw glasses with an unevenly weighted frame, with a thick top bar. Those matched Ford’s glasses and the ones in the zodiac, but not Stan’s as they were drawn in season 1. Since I was on a kick of “The glasses are the key here”, the fact that Bill pulled up an image of what looked like the mystery room glasses in response to hearing the name “Stanford Pines” felt like ironclad confirmation to me. I was even willing to overlook the fez, as there was nothing suggesting at the time that it wasn’t Ford’s accessory before he disappeared. In hindsight, I was underestimating Bill’s familiarity with the situation. Much like Gideon, I might add.

The zodiac appears in canon for the first time. The glasses still are a fairly close match to the ones Ford’s been wearing.

Evidently this page contains a code that spells out that the machine is a portal and not a weapon. I had no such context, so the fandom was ahead of me at this point.

Stan’s big cliffhanger. I suspected something was up the instant I realized that Stan, not Dipper, had taken Gideon’s journal, although I still didn’t expect to see Stan pull out the missing first. This played into all of my conspiracy theories about Stan: he knows far more than he lets on, especially about Cipher; he’s deliberately trying to lead Dipper’s investigations astray; and he’s a doomsday cultist actively trying to bring about the end of the world. I still think this was a cynical but fair interpretation of the available evidence.

The six-fingered glove. Real evidence that wasn’t chasing phantoms, yet it went mostly unnoticed because it reinforced the theories I already had. 

The final piece of evidence before the big reveal. Stan’s monologue at the start of Not What He Seems, where he lapses into an almost verbatim Cipher quote, after Cipher had done the same to him regarding “Buy gold! Bye!” By this point I’d come to the realization as well that within 24 hours of Cipher being summoned by Gideon, Stan suddenly got his hands on both missing journals that had eluded him for thirty years to that point. At the time I still thought he was a willing participant. A dupe, maybe, but actively in league with Bill in one way or another. Now, I can’t help but see his actions as guided by Cipher and influenced by him. You don’t see characters repeating each other’s end-of-episode catchphrases without it being significant, especially not in Gravity Falls. I still stand behind this theory as well.

Anyway, for those of you still with me, that’s the recap of my theorycrafting for the unfolding Author mystery. It fell together very quickly at the end of season 1, based almost entirely on key pieces of evidence that ended up not being actual evidence at all. This series was...puzzling, that’s for sure.