So I was thinking about Bill Cipher while making cookies (two activities that come naturally to me) and I found myself confused about his abilities, or lack thereof. Namely, he can see the future, but he can be easily tricked. We know he can see the future because of things like 'seeing,' with images flashed across his body, Gideon's fall and the destruction of his robot an episode or two before it happens. But we know that what actually happens in the future can surprise him (see Mabel not going along with his plans in Sock Opera, The Stan flip in Weirdmageddon 3, and literally everything that happens in Dreamscapers.) He clearly isn't, like, omniscient if he can be tricked so easily. Conclusion: he knows some things, but not everything. What I think is that he has extensive knowledge of the present, but not the future. It's easy for him to go everywhere and learn everyone's secrets, especially if he can enter heads, and he may have some innate knowledge of goings-on anyway. With this knowledge, he easily computes things that could happen (Gideon will become angry and use his robot to capture the twins, but does not have enough firepower compared to the twins to pull off his plans) and works based on those assumptions. But the assumptions are wrong pretty often, for a few reasons. I think it's mostly because of the age old failing of children's media villains--he doesn't understand how is human. Based on his dealings with Stanford, he reasonably assumed that sibling love was not a powerful enough force to overcome fear or personal gain. Ends out, it's not that way for everyone, and especially not a sweet 12 year old girl with admittedly less to lose. However, he IS genuinely surprised when Mabel doesn't play along with him, and when people find out how to fight against him in Dreamscapers, and by the Stan switch in the finale, so, his knowledge of the future, if he has any, is fallible. He's SURPRISED when things don't go his way, meaning, he didn't expect it. He didn't know it would happen. I assume he's expecting the most likely course of events, based on his calculations, and gets pissy when it doesn't happen. And he does seem calculating. Again, when he flashed images of events, past, present, and future across his body, he seems to be weighing in details and finding out what is most likely to happen and most likely to work before coming to a conclusion. This makes me thing that his other limitation is that he has limited mind space--he can only think of so many things at once, only account for so many things, and it takes time, just like it would for a human. So, he can overlook things, forget things, not consider absolutely everything in one second, and be surprised when he's in the wrong fucking guy's mind. He doesn't have a constant eye over everything that can and will happen--it's much more limited than that. He seems smart and smooth with his 'want to see an impression of you in three seconds' tricks, but of course Dipper's going to freak out when Bill flashes him back to reality after a big bang. Sure, he seems to know when everyone's going to die, implying some future vision, but assuming we can trust that, my theory still stands--the most likely course of events, based on the knowledge he has. If nothing else insane happens, nothing that I don't think will happen, you'll die of a heart attack at ninety. He seems to reliably know the way things will PROBABLY go, but he can't be certain, and he can be wrong. He can be surprised by what actually happens because, for the most part, he's guessing. He's guessing with incredibly wide knowledge, but without total certainty, and without comprehension of WHY people do what they do. Just evidence about what they usually do. And you can put the facts together wrong, despite having all the facts, if you don't really know the why along with the what. Also, the cookies smell delicious!
Whoops people replied to me I made up a reply but never wrote it I agree with that actually. When you say it, I see how that could have been included. I would only be worried that... emotionally, they wouldn't have the time to do justice to being torn away from a good home in another place, but then again, Gravity Falls handled heavy emotions pretty well by having that painfully broken siblinghood in the first place. That would have been interesting.
I've finally decided to watch this show, so, does anyone know where I can get subtitles for the episodes?
@palindromordnilap Sadly, I do not. But oh god, the meta, the glorious meta... Ominous handholding That pretty purple lighting at the end OH SNAP Ed: But what happened to...?
That handholding one gave me a thought - Way back in the bunker, shapeshifter Wendy winked at Dipper when he told them to give him a sign. And Mabelland Wendy did the same thing, didn't she?
I can't reblog this yet because my gf hasn't finished GF yet (wait) But I need someone to see this NGL the source material gave me a lot of feelings too. No, not GF, though GF gives me a lot of feels. The other reference.
@KarrinBlue Yeah, the fact that that wasn't addressed seems like a fairly significant omission to me. It's possible that Mabel herself doesn't remember due to Bill's interference, but if she does, I'm concerned for her. It can't be good for her to be carrying that around without confiding in anyone.
So remember how Bill mentioned something along the lines of having everyone who is a threat to him all piled together? And remember Bill's final words? And remember how the circle is the one thing that's supposedly guaranteed to defeat Bill and how it fails because goddammit Stan? And remember how the fandom is fearing that if Stan was able to get his memories back that Bill is somewhere in him as well? Remember how Alex refers to Gravity Falls as a chapter to a larger thing? Well, I've seriously have a feeling we're not going to see the last of these 11 characters. Edit: There's also something about Bill I need to screech about but I just can't for the life of me remember what it is when I get onto Kintsugi. This has happened twice now, but it's something that feels kinda big?
The cool thing about Bill is just... there's no way to tell how 'dead' he is. Obviously you can't use human standards on him, and almost everything that seemed to hurt him over the course of the show didn't really hurt him so much. I mean, that final 'death' scene looked painful but he's set up to be a character that never really goes away. Besides that, they went out of their way (the final incantation, the statue, ect.) to give plausible deniability that he's real gone. I assume he isn't, not really, because he's by character something that just keeps coming back to haunt. There is apparently one 'official' way to be rid of him, and it's never been tried, and even then--how do you know this way officially gets rid of him if, well, he's never been rid of? I don't really think anything 'gets rid' of him, not permanently. He's not a person. I do hope the Pines are done with him, though. They've been through the ringer.
"I'm not 100% convinced Gravity Falls is over." "You think there's going to be another episode, where it turns out the last episode was all a dream?" "... You know, if that happened, and it turns out the series finale was just a dream sequence and the real series finale is going to come out like a year from now, I'd have enormous respect for Alex Hirsch."
Okay now I remember! It kinda goes along with the question of 'What, Bill is supposed to know everything about the future so why didn't he see this coming?'. Namely, to me, it feels like Bill might know of the future, but only in bits and pieces. Like, he can't see the whole picture, and needs to extrapolate for himself. Bill knows so much about everything, I can easily see him being overwhelmed by that and thus can only handle it by only remembering things in this manner. He might be all-powerful, but Bill sort of reminds me of more of a Greco-Roman god, with faults and weaknesses. He thinks he won when Weirdmageddon happens, but maybe he's forgetting or mixing this up with another event that's yet to be seen.
I recognized what episode of Gravity Falls a .gif came from today because I instantaneously connected whichever sweater Mabel was wearing to the episode that sweater showed up in. Help.
-nods respectfully- Oh yeah, and I just remembered what I was going to mention on this thread a few days back. As I have mentioned in other threads, I enjoy going to a fandom's AO3 page, pulling down the most popular 'relationships' category, and enjoying what I find. The usual pattern is 'obvious slash ship (or two)' followed by 'obvious het ship (or two)' followed (sometimes) by 'adorable canon ship' followed by 'atrocious unforgivable sins (or five)' followed by 'true hardcore they-never-speak slash (ad infinitum).' It's not really a test that tells me anything about specific fandoms, it tells me about fandom as a whole, and the horrible shipping spirals we get ourselves trapped in every fucking time. Some months ago, around the time when "The Love God" came out (since that's when I started watching), I saved the results of the GF most popular relationship results because I fucking cackled when I saw them. The image was saved as 'People going to a worse Hell than I am." MAJESTIC. For comparison, here are the results now, post-NTWHS, post-ToTS, post-Weirdmageddon. As you can see, I jumped the gun with naming the FIRST image "People going to a worse Hell than I am." What do you call a descent into anarchy and madness when you start with Billdip exactly?... Note the increased incest, the disappearance of Wendy, and the fact that fucking Wirt is on the front page. He doesn't even go here. And the fact that people have written and made publicly visible almost 2000 Billdip fics in like, the past calendar year. (FWIW I enjoy weird slash shipping and feel a sense of kindred to the suffering souls I see here, so trust me, there is no judgement here, only appreciation and gladness that, for whatever the reason, I can't really ship GF.)
