#they assume that the backslash is part of an html code and vanish it into the air )))):

[allieinarden]

Have you ever encountered the idea of Greg growing up to be Greg from SU?

I have–and I actually took it under consideration, because in a number of ways it’s pretty tempting (strong musical tendencies, the East Coast setting, the through line about “rocks,” the fact that it’s almost as easy to picture Steven as a Greg-spawn as it is to picture Dipper as a Wirt-spawn), but ultimately it was pretty clear to me that Over the Garden Wall couldn’t share a world with Steven Universe and Gravity Falls; it had to be either/or. 

(Over the Garden Wall spoilers follow, please turn your head:) 

From the little we glimpse of it (and it is, admittedly, very little), the world that Wirt and Greg inhabit is “our world” sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, with a few acceptable breaks from reality such as Wirt’s “3 Non-Blondes” tape (obviously a reference to real-life band 4 Non-Blondes); the weirdness happens in the Unknown. 

The world of Gravity Falls skews a good bit stranger than Wirt and Greg’s world, but it’s nonetheless easily recognizable as our world in a particular time and place–Piedmont exists, the United States as we know them exist (Stan grew up in New Jersey), the year is 2012. Sure, we have to accept the fact that there’s been a massive government cover-up of the 8 1/2th president, Quentin Trembley, who refused to wear pants and who is alive to this day because he cryogenically preserved himself in peanut brittle (this could be straight out of Greg’s “rock fact” compendium). But as in Over the Garden Wall, the strange is confined, contained–this time not to another plane of existence but to an overlookable small town in Oregon. Gravity Falls operates on the principle that “weirdness,” while alive and active in the world, is particularly drawn to certain places, and that where it exists it is carefully swept under the rug, whether by governments, local law enforcement, uncles with dark secrets or vigilante brainwashing cults. Like Wirt and Greg, Mabel and Dipper aren’t encountering the strange as a part of everyday life; they’ve been granted a window into it. With a little suspension of disbelief, this is nonetheless the world we live in–we simply haven’t been fortunate enough to find the rabbit hole. (Cf. Dipper’s voiceover in the final episode, in which he urges the viewer to seek out Gravity Falls, despite the fact that “it’s not on any map.”) So far, so good. 

Steven’s universe is a completely different animal, a fully-realized alternate Earth influenced by thousands of years of Gem activity. As such, the recognizable elements of our ordinary world are arranged in unpredictable ways. The Delmarva Peninsula is its own state, the nearby Pennsylvania area is called simply “Keystone,” and the show can’t do a New Jersey joke without terming it simply Jersey–even on the traffic signs. “Gems,” while hardly a majority, are out in the open, exhibiting their strange powers in plain sight; everyone takes their existence for granted. Until alien ships begin descending from the heavens and wreaking havoc in Beach City, it doesn’t occur to resident conspiracy hound Ronaldo to go after the Gems, who, as he and his neighbors know perfectly well, are simply a couple of friendly locals from outer space; he’s had bigger fish to fry, trying to prove that the government is run by snakes. Gravity Falls makes us believe in Bill Cipher by associating him with the “Eye of Providence” on US currency; Steven Universe inserts the gems into reality by placing a diamond on the dollar bill instead. The entire Earth might be termed an Unknown, or a Gravity Falls, Oregon; its ordinariness is our impossibility.

In other words, Gravity Falls and Steven Universe can’t take place in the same version of the United States without a great deal of Canon Twister. Although, as others have pointed out, there’s nothing in Over the Garden Wall to imply that Wirt and Greg don’t live in Steven Universe’s America–for all we know, there are alien gems duking it out beyond the narrow limits of their East Coast suburbia–it seems easier, more natural, to associate them with a world closer to our own. 

Looking at the characters on a more personal level, Greg “Universe” DeMayo is lacking in familial relationships to the point where he asserts that if he loses Steven he’ll be “fresh out of family”; the only other relation to turn up so far has been his long-lost cousin Andy, the first human relative that 14-year-old Steven has ever encountered besides his own father. For Wirt to exist as Greg’s brother in this scenario, he would have to be either long-dead (which, gosh, aren’t we a little early for Pottsfield?) or estranged from him to the point of never having met his teenaged son–and given the events of Over the Garden Wall, I can’t imagine that this would ever happen, unless Greg himself made a firm and inexplicable decision to get lost. On that note, Greg Universe, while generally a gregarious chap (see what I did there) who believes that every imperfect pork chop is a perfect hot dog waiting to happen, has a noticeably weaker character and a less-firm resolution than the nearly-unbreakable Garden Wall Greg–and while time and tide can do that to a person, it’s a depressing thing to think about. Any of these points might be a fun thing to explore in a fanfic (what could tear Wirt and Greg apart? What could bring them back together?), but I’m probably not the woman to write it, although I’d be happy to read it. 

Greg Universe might be some seven-times-removed incarnation of the Greg we know in one of the thousands of bizarre dimensions the Author explores during his 30-year exile from Dimension 42 Apostrophe Backslash. But that’s as far as I’ll go.