They've gotta involve The Future at this point, right? Not only is Bill vs. Time Baby a thing, but there's no-longer-possessed Blendin right there now, possibly inclined (once he wakes up) to help fix what Bill just made him do.
Anyone willing to also bet that Dipper's birthmark is going to start playing a very important role now that aliens (and to that extent, space) is now involved? I mean notice that the planet chosen to imprison Ford happened to belong to a star in the Big Dipper? It might just be pure aesthetics, but we all know Gravity Falls by this point.
Interview with Hirsch about the upcoming episode Spoiler: ominousness Huh. How does that tie in with the "decaying dimension" thing? That comparison makes me sad and uneasy. ??? Well, that sounds awesome!
I have a Problematic Crush from Hell on Ford, but I'd be the first to admit that he's not too "likeable". (Also, he joins Jim Profit, Dr House, Karkat Vantas, and pre-Book 5 Severus Snape, among others, in my Problematic Crush Club. I pretty much automatically assume that any fictional character I crush on probably isn't a nice person in most people's eyes.) Ford has a giant ego and has picked up blue/orange morality (as many other folks on this thread have pointed out). I also feel he's being sexist about Mabel because he hasn't had the experience of growing up with anyone who gets him like Mabel gets Dipper (I don't think Stanley and he were as close) and especially not a female-identified or female-assigned person, and the era in which he grew up was extremely sexist. It doesn't seem to occur to him that she's been 50% of what Dipper has done and I strongly suspect that part of that is because she's femme and sweet and manipulative and sparkly. This would make me want to punch Ford in the face if he were an actual person I knew, but in stories the kind of obsession with truth and power and secrets that Ford shows is catnip to me, idk, I'm effed up. Someone said that Dipper was painfully Slytherin but one of the reasons I like this show is that every single Pines we've seen is Slytherin. (Slytherins can be nice. Mabel is a very good example of a nice Slytherin. She has flat out said on numerous occasions that being nice is effective and her preferred tactic; she doesn't really talk that much about being nice or kind as an abstract morality thing.) Ford comes off as a Ravenclaw but he's obsessed with power, knowledge is his favourite form of power, and that played a part in his "seduction" by Bill. I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain how Stan is a Slytherin. I'm so Slytherin I probably hiss in my sleep so I relate to all of them. I think this show's morality with respect to mind control is pretty problematic regardless of who's doing it--look at "Love God". The unfortunate Aesop of that one was that it's unwise to force or manipulate people to fall in love, because it will set into motion all kinds of other issues you didn't think about, but if you do screw up, let it fix itself instead of compounding your errors. This is not what I'd call a morality play with regards to consent issues and mental autonomy; nobody ever addressed how Robbie and Tambry might feel if they knew they'd been dosed with a love potion; Robbie knows Mabel Did Something and is grateful, but ahem, Robbie is also okay with mind-controlling people. So I'm not really surprised by Stanchurian Candidate. I don't...really expect...this particular show to portray good consent ethics when it comes to mind control. I'm not sure whether it's the POV of the authors or simply that the authors think that this particular set of characters would think this way and perhaps due to tumblr fatigue I don't spend too much time worrying about it. On the other hand showing young Slytherins how following some of their impulses to meddle will fuck them up is actually a pretty good way to train them until they're ready to consider moral issues. I'm a firm believer in teaching kids about the consequences of their actions and letting them come up with the morality on their own once they're old enough to be turned off by homilies. Which for me was around age 4, but that's because my mother is a Fun fact, though: while I've watched the episodes mostly in order since going to Watch Cartoon Online, then getting annoyed with it not loading on my TV's web browser and buying them all on Amazon because watching more than a half-hour of TV on my laptop is difficult for some reason I don't understand--either Stanchurian Candidate or Dungeons, Dungeons and More Dungeons was the FIRST episode I ever saw. I think it must have been Dungeons because I'm such an old D&D nerd. Anyhow...here's what gets me. My family was addicted and abusive af, but even after two weeks at camp having a great time I was mostly glad to go home just to be in my own room again and be able to be with my actual friends. (And not have to go on overnights where we had to pee in the woods and I couldn't do it.) I really wonder why Mabel and Dipper don't seem to be more attached to the people they normally live with. They don't talk about missing their parents. They don't see any upside to going home at the end of the summer. I hated middle school and dreaded high school; my brother is kind of a sociopath and I never felt close to him; and I didn't particularly like living with my mother but I did like living with my dad. And I did miss things about home, like my dad, the food I liked, my actual friends--I had one close camp friend but that was it. The twins are more attached to each other than they are to anyone else in the world. They seem to be more attached to Grunkle Stan, whom they've known for what, 3 months, than they are to their parents. And Dipper is clearly overly and unsafely attached to Ford. Stan and Ford were also unhealthily attached to each other as kids (I can so see the Stancest somebody mentioned, that's why I like Wincest) but we know their parents sucked as parents. Mabel and Dipper seem to be emotionally healthy but there's a big void in terms of them not seeming to think there is anything at home worth going back to, and Mabel has admitted that she can only even stand the THOUGHT of going home if she has Dipper there. They never talk about their parents or other siblings or any friends back home that they miss. I think something is really wrong in that household--it has to be. Spoiler: Spoilerish? Also there are really obvious parallels being drawn between Stanley and Mabel vs Stanford and Dipper. Like Ford, Dipper can imagine a life where he doesn't live with his sister and spend 90% of his time with her, whereas Mabel cannot. Which is really freaky, because Mabel is the one who is good at making friends--when Dipper feels left out because Mabel spends most of her time with Grenda and Candy, he doesn't go and find boys his own age to hang out with, he puts all his emotional energy into Wendy and by extension her friends. I don't know what normal family dynamics are like on a gut level because I have never experienced them, but I haven't met any siblings who would rather spend time with each other than anyone else in the world. And I think Mabel and Dipper are actually closer than Stan and Ford were. Probably because Mabel has no trouble expressing her feelings and tends to make Dipper spit his out as well. Whereas neither Stan nor Ford is particularly good with expressing their feelings, especially positive ones--and both of them seem to be really fixated on the "tougher" forms of love, like the way Stan picked on Dipper to toughen him up. I suspect Ford always knew he and Stan wouldn't REALLY spend their lives sailing around the world because Ford was a lot more desperate to get out, despite being the "good" child. This is one of the things that makes Ford so relatable to me. I was allegedly the "good" child but I don't want to know who or what I'd have been willing to throw under the bus just to get away from my mother.
Epigenetics is your friend. Two animals (or people) can have exactly the same DNA but developmental stresses can change how genes are expressed. Obviously the sixth finger had grown before the boys were born but given the habits of their mother it's entirely possible that some chemical or physical stress she was under caused the same genes to express themselves somewhat differently in each of the twins. For instance, BPA damage to mice before birth can produce two animals with the same genes (because they are actually clones/twins) of which one will be small and brown and the other large and yellow. Unfortunately the citation for this is at work and I'm not, but trust me I did read this in a Pubmed peer reviewed journal article, not Wackypedia or some woo-infested natural healing site.
Wellp, the new episode airs in less than 24 hours. To quote Hirsch: Spoiler: theories! Assuming a plot meant to cause the maximum of emotional pain, I'm putting my money on Mabel being possessed/mutated and caused to fight Dipper. Could go either 'Bill convinces her to take REVENGE with the aid of mind altering magics' or 'Bill alters Mabel's psyche to think that trying to pull her brother's organs out via his mouth is perfectly normal Happy Families Bonding.'
I need to put this out there before the new episode airs, but I came to realize that basically EVERYONE in the show is sociopathic to some degree. Like, even Soos and Wendy are sociopaths. Largely benign and/or on occasion if anything.
Well now I'm scairt. :) Also~~~~ Quoth @Neurogabu : "I need to put this out there before the new episode airs, but I came to realize that basically EVERYONE in the show is sociopathic to some degree. Like, even Soos and Wendy are sociopaths. Largely benign and/or on occasion if anything." That's a much looser definition of sociopathy than I'm comfortable with. For one thing, they all genuinely care about each other. They all have blue and orange morality and they all show the symptoms of severe family dysfunction. I would bet that most of them are brainweird. But not sociopaths. I think they'd all sort Slytherin and I think that Dipper and Mabel have inherited some degree of blue and orange morality from their parents who are after all related to Stan and Ford and don't seem to have bonded very well with them. I think Stanley was told over and over that he would never amount to anything legitimately and because he believed it he became a con man. I think Ford has spent too much time outside of his natural environment and has never recovered from his first experience of betrayal because Stan was the only person he ever loved up to that point. But sociopaths? I don't see it. "Mind control is always wrong" isn't something I'd expect all 12 year olds to fully understand and from Ford's perspective he's probably seen things bad enough that a little mind control seems a low price to pay to prevent them; he shouldn't have given the children a mind control device, but my thoughts are he probably believed that having Stan be Mayor would come in handy in preventing/surviving the apocalypse. Stan is a con man who fucks with people but he also seems genuinely sad about some of the things he's done to fuck up his relationships and he really cares about the kids. Dipper and Mabel are 12 going on 13 and have stumbled upon more power than anybody that age is competent to justly wield. But I think they care about doing the right thing most of the time, which is not a sociopathic thought process. Wendy and Soos also love those kids. I have a brother who is an actual sociopath, to go with my mother the narcissist (I'm pretty sure those two problems are related), and I don't think he's ever been legitimately sorry for anything a day in his life, unless you count the "I wish I hadn't done that because it's made my life so much harder now" sorry. I'm pretty sure every single person in this show has been sorry for hurting someone else at least once, and not just because it fucked up their own lives.
I noticed that while Dipper and Ford were talking in The Stanchurian Candidate, Ford is looking at a journal page about Gideon's amulet. So it's my headcanon/guess that in their unseen conversation leading up to that, Dipper told Ford about previous events involving the Gleeful family and the danger of Bud becoming mayor. That would probably constitute a big enough threat for Ford to consider himself justified in busting out the mind control tie, especially if Dipper mentioned or implied that Bill had been involved. I'm not sure if the writers intended this; I feel like they would have been more explicit about it if so.
That makes sense. I don't really care what the writers intended because I'm that kind of fan, LOL, but I accept that headcanon. Also I'm not sure how explicit the writers would have been about it given that half the time the writers don't appear to have much morality around the issue of mind control. (I was pretty shocked by Love God, which as I've said before seemed to be implying that mind control was a bad idea unless you had the Love God's level of experience/understanding and was likely to lead to unforeseen consequences that you don't want, not that it's a bad idea to coerce people into romantic/potentially sexual situations without their consent, and the attendant message that if you do fall prey to the temptation, the important thing is that you DON'T try to fix what you did but rather just stop interfering.)
This show does get kinda sketchy around the issue of tampering with others' minds. I've been vaguely hoping for there to be some kind of consequences/acknowledgement for the occasions on which Dipper and Mabel have used the memory gun on a group of people. I realize they didn't have a lot of good options in those situations, particularly with the government agents, but they didn't show a smidge of moral discomfort or even recognition that messing with people's brains is a big decision.
They're 12, and nobody else around them shows moral discomfort with it either. I'm hoping they will have something come up where they have to learn better, too, but I wouldn't have expected them to come up with the idea that it's wrong on their own.
Hmm. I'm probably not very good at recognizing what it is and isn't reasonable to expect a twelve-year-old to figure out, honestly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development Mostly with regards to the age thing I'm coming at it from the perspective of Kohlberg's stages of moral development. (It's not a perfect theory and there are many valid critiques of it, but it's better than trying to gauge what's normal for other people based on my own experiences since I was really gifted and grew up with a sociopath and a narcissist... "It's always wrong to interfere with other people's minds" strikes me as a level 6 type of idea, and it's not something that one would infer from living in a world full of manipulative people and manipulative advertising and so forth. You could get there from "I wouldn't like it if someone mind-controlled me, therefore I shouldn't do it to anyone else," but then you get into all these arguments about how important the other person's feelings are with regard to the stakes and whether or not you'd mind it if someone used mind control to stop you from making a terrible mistake. We live in a culture that barely recognises the importance of consent in sexual situations and sanctions the use of force in a wide variety of situations. Look at all the people who are freaked out by affirmative consent laws, like they think it's weird that you should have to make sure the other person wants to have sex before you try to have sex with them. I think there are a lot of people in this world, some much older than 12, who'd have no problem using a mind control device. Throughout most of history, in most societies, a lot of people have been legally forced to do things they really did not want to do and the vast majority of society was at least nominally OK with that. IDK. I had terrible moral examples at home and got most of my moral training from books. Not just fiction but books about feminism and patriarchy and why the world was fucked up the way it was. I would not have been casual about using a mind control device at the age of 12 but it seems that Mabel mainly reads fashion magazines and love stories and Dipper's reading is largely technical; neither of them seem to have given much thought to politics or sociology.
first off, here's an apropos of nothing thought about gravity falls: i think stan must be a very good occulemens (you know, Harry Potter, opposite of legilimens [mind reader], not literally one 'cause this is gf not hp but you know...), in order to hide the existence of ford and his goal to get him back, from the people in his mind in dreamscaperers. 'cause, well, i get the impression rescuing ford was something he was pretty focused on, and probably the type of thing one'd expect to find real easily in there, regardless of how secret he was keeping it in the outside world. but dipper and mabel don't even realize he has a brother at all until not what he seems. so yeah, after thinking about how people were in his mind and yet they didn't find out about it, i'm hella impressed with stan's hiding and secret-keeping skills. and secondly: i wasn't very shocked by love god, since fairly oddparents (another kids cartoon) has a character with pretty similar powers, cupid, who is referred to as the God/Fairy of Love or Love God/Fairy. and in fop, da rules, which applies to the fairies on the show (cosmo and wanda, who are the main character's fairy godparents, for example), says that fairies other than cupid (it's iffy whether he is actually a fairy or not, as you might've seen with my uncertainty about his title(s) above) can't interfere with love. which is 'cause it's his domain, not 'cause messing with minds is wrong. it's the same with the tooth fairy and teeth. love, teeth, all morally and legally equivalent in fairy world. and genies have rule-free wishes as their thing, so they can grant love wishes and teeth wishes and other stuff da rules doesn't allow. so, well, in genie meanie mini mo, timmy wished for trixie tang to love him. and the only objection ever raised to that was, well, that timmy didn't like norm the genie deliberately messing up his wish. free will and messing with minds were just completely out of the picture. and i recall it was thought of similarly in the other episodes in which Timmy Finds A Way To Get Around That Rule (stupid cupid is the other example that comes immediately to mind). so yeah... i was not surprised at all by that ep, haha.
I've never seen Fairly Oddparents. (Pretty much my kids' show viewing consists of Adventure Time, MLP, GF, SU, Regular Show, and Sofia the First.) It wouldn't come up on Regular Show, it would be regarded as Bad on SU and Sofia and MLP, and on Adventure Time there are always horrible things going on because the world is a terrible place.)
@cryptoThelematrix eh, i was kinda using the quote as jumping-off point for explaining how i felt about the episode and why i wasn't particularly surprised by how the love thing was handled, 'cause, well, it got me thinking about it. i honestly wasn't really expecting people to engage much with my discussion of fop, so... no problem, basically. sometimes i say things on kintsugi simply for the sake of saying them, not 'cause i expect anyone to be particularly interested in what i'm talking about. yeah...
just started watching and my only reaction so far is what the FUCK, how the FUCK did they get this past the censor, holy shit
