ARE YOU FUCKING JOKING and as everyone dramatically switches bodies constantly, the focus switches to Grunkle Stan for a few seconds, for no apparent reason, as he does this: Taps at the glasses, staring vacantly, until the noise bothers him, he turns up the T.V., and pockets the glasses. I JUST WANTED TO WATCH A SILLY SEASON ONE EPISODE OF GRAVITY FALLS. AND I HURT Do not rewatch Gravity Falls it hurts exponentially more the second time
I remember that episode being a good chunk of the evidence for Stan Twins theory! Along with Headhunters.
I had no blessed idea. None at all. I reasoned like everyone else that the Author was a polydactyly man who probably once lived in the Shack, but I was sitting back and laughing at the twin theory for being far-fetched wish fulfillment. Apparently I was a fucking pleb who didn't pay any damn attention to the early episodes because, pssh, season one fluff episodes with body swapping and whatever, how American kid's cartoon, they're fun but not what I'm going to jump to in a rewatch. When it slowly dawned on me in the course of watching Not What He Seems that, holy shit, this IS the case, I was... duly humbled. I miss Gravity Falls, and my aim is not getting any better.
Yeah, there was a LOT of stuff that were clues but I definitely didn't pick up on - like the broken swingset in Stan's mindscape, among other things.
This is a bit of a non sequitur but I would just like to recommend this fanfic to everyone who is caught up with the show. It's a very short post-finale conversation between Stan and Ford and it handles their relationship in a way that is deeply satisfying to my twitchy, fandom-discourse-overloaded heart. The same writer has also written a collection of other post-finale oneshots which are quite good; they're written in a prose style that I'm not a huge fan of, but the characterization is beautiful. Spoiler: spoiler commentary Stan's line “All this sappy brotherly love, glad to have you back is great 'n all but I remember enough to know it ain’t that simple” is kind of my feelings about the finale at this point in a nutshell, tbh. And Ford's qualified thanks is exactly what I would hope that he would eventually feel and be able to express to Stan in regards to the portal thing. Acknowledging and appreciating Stan's hard work and love without abandoning his own totally valid objections to the portal being opened.
Spoiler: in case you ever want to get back to reading WT @soulsuckingisaacnewton, if you ever get back to reading WT I can promise you'll probably like some of the recent bits :)
Ford actually says "Thank you" in canon. To the kids. And generally doesn't have trouble expressing gratitude in other ways when he actually feels it. *shrug*
"“average pines family member in need of constant rescuing” factoid actually just a statistical error."
i'm always a slut for Spiders Georg jokes Although in fairness, the whole getting-stuck-in-another-dimension thing was technically a single incident (or at least caused by one) and the statistics would definitely skew way differently if the metric counted individual instances of rescue-needing, which is how I personally would count it. But like I said, I'm always a slut for Spiders Georg jokes so I AM WILLING TO OVERLOOK THIS THING. ...I would come up with a formula that suits my personal opinions better but I don't like thinking about math. I never knew how much I needed to know this until now. "Average Pines family member has abnormal number of digits" factoid actualy just statistical error...
@Acey Yeah- the rescue taking a while doesn't mean it was multiple rescues. There's no way he wouldn't still have come out in first place by miles, though, however you do the math. Dude hides all the warning labels and literally sets his face on fire.
Funny thing is, I've heard of people using fire to shave before, outside of GF. The specific context I'd heard it in was women using lighters to shave their legs, which is probably somewhat less dangerous (less hair, not as close proximity to your head, etc.), but still seems like a potentially awful idea? Not without precedent, but also probably not the best depilatory aid out there. :P
i think my biggest problem with that method is just... burnt hair STINKS SO AWFULLY? why would you expose yourself to that on PURPOSE?
Nair's pretty bad too, in fairness. That's why I still brave the razor when I feel like having not-hairy legs. :P
'cause it's faster? and if i grew facial hair, which - thank god and afab bodies - i don't, i'm sure that i personally would wanna get it removed really quickly. like, it just seems like such a hassle and so uncomfortable and whatnot. just... no, no facial hair for me.
Actually that "No!No!" thing they advertise on TV burns the hair off. and yes, @IvyLB, burnt hair smells awful. It was one of the complaints about the device, and eventually someone in WT will overhear Valiska's commentary regarding this issue--it contains a lot of inmei'chi :) . But as someone who did accidentally burn off a lot of her hair as a teenager (leaning too close to gas heater while lighting it after getting a big frizzy perm), hair burns REALLY fast. You would actually probably not burn yourself. It stinks to high heaven but hair is extremely flammable, much more so than your skin, unless it's wet. Throwing a towel over my head put it out immediately with no damage to anything but my dignity--I made an emergency trip that morning but it was to a hair salon, not the ER. I have to agree (even though Stanford is my very favourite Disney princess) that one rescue is one rescue. I also stand by my theory that frankly by the time he got "rescued" he didn't really need it any more. He undoubtedly needed rescuing for a while and would almost certainly have been appropriately grateful if he had been rescued when he was immediately in the hellish part of the portal between Dimension 2 and Dimension 46'\ because we saw what it did to Fiddleford, but if he had just been stuck there in that interstitial howling void for 30 odd years without access to other intelligences to talk to, clothing stores, optometrists, running water, food, soap, etc. he wouldn't have: acquired an infinity-sided die acquired a new pair of glasses that look suspiciously like his old ones except for the crack (which for ages I actually thought was a scar on his face that was visible thru them) acquired that badass black outfit (he wasn't wearing that when he fell in!) acquired an assortment of badass guns (the gun he uses in DD&MD is not the same gun he threatens the bus driver with) been relatively clean and well-groomed (he's always had amazing sideburns, and nobody seemed to think he smelled like he hadn't had a bath of some sort for 30 years) been conversational and said things like, "do kids in this dimension still say--" as opposed to clearly not knowing how to talk to people any more. been obviously broader through the shoulders and narrower through the belly than he was before he left; he's been eating enough not just to survive but to bulk up You can certainly believe, if it suits you to believe so, that he was alone and didn't make any long-standing friends or have any kind of career, and just wandered from place to place without ever settling down or committing to any kind of work. It doesn't seem to me to be the sort of life he would go for, given how driven he is, but...there's nothing in canon that conclusively disproves this interpretation (although there's nothing in canon that states this is for sure what happened). But it's just. not. possible. for him to have been floating in the hellmouth for 30 years. If that were true--assuming he even survived, because where would he get food or water--the person Stan would have got back would have been filthy, feral, and really obviously very mentally ill, far beyond anything we've seen in canon (Ford clearly has problems with PTSD, paranoid ideation and the occasional manic episode, but he's functional most of the time), wearing whatever shreds remained of what he had on when he fell in. He would either have clung to Stan and the kids for dear life or he would have been so dissociated he wouldn't have been able to interact with them at all. Solitary confinement without human interaction is extremely mentally damaging even on a scale of months, rather than years--look into it sometime, there's a lot of research out there and a lot of information from activists like Amnesty on why we shouldn't be doing this to people except absolutely as a last resort when there is no other safe way to handle them. And that's without demonic torture, sensory overload and overstimulation. Clearly, even though he didn't come back to the Falls--whether it was because he couldn't or because he didn't want to jumpstart Weirdmageddon--he had already rescued himself.
Oh wow, I did not know this! Then again, I'm not sure I remember the device you're mentioning terribly clearly--most of what I watch on TV is recorded reruns, and most of those reruns are of GF or SU, and they don't generally show ads for shaving products during kids' shows. But I didn't know they advertised a burny hair-removal device in general, haha.
I saw an ad for it. It was cute and pink and I hate shaving because I cut myself a lot but I also hate having hairy legs. So I googled it and discovered that it was probably not the solution I wanted. I WOULD be up for electrolysis if it weren't so fucking expensive.