Characters / Three Can Keep a Secret

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Characters First Appearing in Three Can Keep A Secret:

Mabel Pines

Arguably the main protagonist of Three Can Keep A Secret, Mabel has finally returned to Gravity Falls after three long years. She's extremely dissatisfied with the status quo and hopes to bring a number of changes with her to Gravity Falls. But as it turns out, the changes she really needs may not be changes she likes…

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: The consequences of Weirdmageddon have taken their toll on everyone. The consequences for trying to avoid those consequences have, too.
• Anti-Hero: All of her family are this, but Mabel is perhaps the biggest, and her difficulties with her moral compass are easily the most focused on. While she knows she has flaws, Mabel has little to no decent guidance on how to deal with them and is seemingly unable to separate her goal of being a better person from her self-interested goal of getting Dipper to trust her again, and thus, while genuinely wanting and trying to do good, the "good deeds" she does "for others" still end up largely self-serving. She's outright left allies to die so she can accomplish feats that will hopefully impress Dipper.
• Aesop Amnesia: Deconstructed. Mabel's unwillingness to confront her issues and meaningfully self-reflect make her increasingly unstable as she externally shrugs off and internally flees from self-awareness over her actions.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Downplayed. During the events of the show, Mabel was a confident, cheerful girl who easily made friends, hated the concept of dishonesty, always had a positive temperament, and believed she'd never done anything wrong and thus couldn't relate to the concept of regret. By the time of this story, Mabel is guilt-riddled, faking confidence, emotionally unstable, constantly regretting her own bold actions, and not at all comfortable or content in her life. She also increasingly struggles with making and maintaining friendships and believes she wouldn't have any if she didn't manipulate and lie to them to maintain their sympathies, and swings rapidly between bold cheer and depressive self-loathing. It's downplayed because there are major signs of Mabel's emotional instability in the face of misfortune in the show, the show just doesn't focus on them as much.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Mabel behaves like this at times, especially when she first returns from Piedmont, saying things she knows are incredibly hurtful or manipulative and passing them off under the guise of her being Innocently Insensitive.
  • Most visibly when she first re-encounters Pacifica. After being told that Pacifica helps with Dipper's research and internally declaring that "No bleach blonde stereotype is going to replace me as Dipper's mystery buddy," Mabel's verbal response almost literally dehumanizes her:
    "So you're helping Dippen-Dots out with all his research huh? What's he got you doing, running on a hamster wheel to power the laboratory, or are you testing new cosmetics out before they move to animal testing?" The twin asked teasingly, preemptively playing it off as a joke.
  • When Mabel finally manages to make Pacifica angry in front of Dipper and gets the opportunity to frame Pacifica as the instigator and thus still secretly a bad person, Mabel pretends to be well-intentioned and sincerely apologetic for fighting with Pacifica in front of Dipper and then celebrates "in glee" as soon as she leaves Dipper's line of sight, presuming that she's close to ruining Pacifica's good relationship with Dipper. This despite the fact that deliberately escalating her conflict with Pacifica in an attempt to damage Dipper's opinion of Pacifica has clearly hurt Dipper, and he's still very upset and blaming himself when she leaves the room to celebrate. Then Mabel encounters Pacifica and Pacifica quickly ends Mabel's little victory high.
  • Once Mabel's further down the road towards developing out of her entirely self-centered perspective, she actually learns to utilize this aspect of herself for purposes beneficial to the war effort, such as social dynamics-centered intelligence-gathering. Since Mabel is extremely extraverted and sincerely interested in other's romantic and social struggles, people tend to just assume she's being Innocently Insensitive when she asks prying questions.
• Blithe Spirit: In contrast with the source material, this is subverted and inverted. Mabel comes to Gravity Falls with the intention of faking this attitude to shake things up and change the circumstances of Gravity Falls to best suit her own ideals, but instead Mabel herself is the one who's challenged to change.
• The Bus Came Back: The outline for the canceled ending indicates that, after being absent for the entirety of the story thus far, Mabel was planned to reappear in Three More to help with Star's diplomatic efforts as an expert party planner.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Platonic variant. Mabel's thoughts when meeting Pacifica after three years are wondering if her twin replaced her and then determinedly stating that "no bleach blond stereotype is going to replace me as Dipper's mystery buddy". She spends most of the story trying to discredit Pacifica in Dipper's eyes and in one moment of emotional instability, legitimately considers murdering Pacifica. Though Mabel tries to argue this is because Pacifica is actually a bad person with a negative influence on her brother's life and she's being a good protective sister by trying to drive Pacifica away, Mabel's eventually forced to grapple with the fact that she herself was a toxic influence and Pacifica and Dipper have actually been enormous boons to each other's personal growth.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Formerly, with Dipper as her former Cloudcuckoolander's Minder, a heavily deconstructed dynamic. The fact that their previous environments had encouraged the burden of responsibility for both of them to be pushed onto Dipper meant that Mabel in particular was extremely codependent and couldn't handle their separation in a healthy way, because she'd never properly learned how to deal with being independently responsible for her own behavior. While being Mabel's minder in all things to compensate for her lack of self-control was an unfair burden to put on a sibling, breaking this dynamic after it had already developed and been relied upon for years led to Mabel going out of control without it, both emotionally and behaviorally. Further, her behavior being indulged by their parents is also the reason the twins' relationship crashed so hard in this story: a healthy relationship between equally validated people can't run on only one person's efforts, and Mabel not only isn't stable enough to provide Dipper with what he needs emotionally from her, but has never been expected to be.
• Coming of Age Story: Three Can Keep A Secret is very much her story, and involves her returning to a place that changed her life in childhood in order to finally process through and overcome the circumstances in which she grew up.
• Delinquent: Chapter one hints, and the outline confirms, that Mabel got up to some pretty troubling behavior in Piedmont post-Gravity Falls. Author commentary on the canceled outline outright refers to Mabel as a "pretty hardcore juvenile delinquent." Her implied crimes include (at the very least) drugs and B&E, possibly extending to Questionable Consent and assault (depending on exactly what Mabel avoided getting arrested for doing to a rival for one of her many crushes' affections back home).
• Demonic Possession: Played with and subverted. She was unwittingly hosting a fragment of Bill within her mind, although it was never strong enough to influence her. However, her behavior towards her brother is bad enough to convince Dipper that she is possessed and has been since the start of Weirdmageddon, because it's the only explanation he can rationalize for the way his beloved sister has treated him, specifically referencing "Dippy Fresh." The fact she behaved cruelly and manipulatively enough towards Dipper for him to mistake her actions as those of a literal demon horrifies her.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Much like in canon, Mabel still gives Dipper her blessing that he can stay in Gravity Falls with Ford, clearly expecting him to do what he did in canon and say he's giving it up. As it turns out, when you give someone your blessing for something they want to do, they tend to take that as a sign you are okay with it as well.
  • Mabel throughout the story keeps trying to get Dipper to return to his former life with her, failing to consider the idea that he is genuinely happy in Gravity Falls, danger and trauma be damned.
• Enter Stage Window: One of Mabel's more… questionable actions in Piedmont is the implication from her internal ruminations in Chapter One that she broke into one of her Temporary Love Interest's houses through his window and stayed with him all that night. She briefly mentions how "the combined might of a locked window, conservative parents, and the apparent safeguards of God were no match for the Ol' Jersey Window Cleaning," comments on how much fun she had, and mentions that she hopes his conservative parents never found out.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Downplayed, rare sympathetic example.
  • Mabel's attempted solutions at regaining Dipper's trust are, among other things: learning how to fight so Dipper will think she's more capable, giving Dipper presents, and attempting to get involved with his interests, all while continuing to hide her mistakes in order to give him a better impression of her. Unfortunately, none of these address the actual issue Dipper has: Dipper doesn't want her to try to earn his favor back through gifts or pandering or displays of physical capability, Dipper just wants his sister to trust him enough as a person to make his own life choices and thus allow for an honest and respectful relationship. Even when Dipper tries to spell out what he needs in a clearer manner, Mabel's reaction indicates that she's either unable or unwilling to understand why honesty is important in a healthy relationship, and she continues to repeat her mistakes and lie and omit key information from those around her.
  • Another problem Mabel has is that she doesn't really understand why Dipper is refusing to return to their old relationship. Now that he's had time away from her, and a actual support system in Ford and Pacifica, he has come to realize that their former relationship with her was nothing more then Dipper constantly having to sacrifice his wants and dreams for Mabel, while she never returned the gesture. Mabel, however, was so used to their relationship being toxic and based around those behaviors that she doesn't get how it hurt Dipper. Even Pacifica spelling it out for her doesn't seem to do much.
  • When Mabel first returns to the Falls, she can't comprehend that her brother is legitimately happier away from their toxic life and dynamic in Piedmont and searches around for someone to blame for his contentedness with their seperaton. She concludes that Dipper is being misled by the vile seductress Pacifica, who's ensnared Dipper for vaguely evil purposes. Mabel thus goes about using her reputation for being Innocently Insensitive to insult Pacifica in front of Dipper and play the insults off as jokes, the goal being to make Pacifica angry enough that it's easy to frame her as the instigator in the conflict and thus convince Dipper that Pacifica's actually a bad person and he should go back to doing what Mabel wants, not what Pacifica wants. This is, of course, nothing close to reality. It's heavily implied Mabel makes this assumption because Mabel assumes a lot about herself is true of Pacifica; that is, Mabel subconsciously assumes that Pacifica is as manipulative and self-centered as Mabel herself is and that Dipper is catering to Pacifica's whims the way he used to for Mabel's, and thus it is Pacifica's whims, not Dipper's, that are what motivate Dipper's desire to stay. To this end, Mabel actually ends up really hurting her brother again once she finally succeeds in angering Pacifica, and her short-lived celebration at causing conflict for Dipper's and Pacifica's relationship (complete with a "dance of victory") is crushed under Pacifica's assertion of the moral high ground that Mabel never saw coming.
• Face Your Fears: It takes a lot of emotional determination for Mabel to get over her own self-defense mechanisms and face her bad behavior, insecurities over not being a good person, and the reality of the unfair and toxic relationships in her family. But she faces it all to get her brother back, and comes out of it finally understanding what she has to do to be a better person.
• Foil:
  • To Pacifica. Both are girls with manipulative tendencies who were raised to think of selfish behavior as the right course of action. The difference is that Pacifica had a self-awareness break through three years ago and has spent the years since actively seeking out her issues in order to deal with them and work to be a better person, while Mabel has slipped further into erratic behavior, denial, and self-justifications. Further, Pacifica has spent that time listening to and trying to understand Dipper, while Mabel had never prioritized doing so. As a result, Pacifica's relationship with Dipper has become healthy and strong, while Mabel's relationship with Dipper has become increasingly tenuous.
  • To Stan. Both are socially gifted and manipulative people who treasure their relationships with their socially awkward genius twin brothers. Both came from terrible home environments that favored one sibling over another, and both are in denial of this. The difference is that Stan was The Unfavorite while Mabel was the favorite, and the distance between that bad homelife and the present means Stan has gotten away with not confronting the issue, while, because Mabel wants to go back to that homelife (and drag her Unfavorite brother with her), she's having to confront the toxicity of their childhood head on.
• For Happiness: Mabel's main, constant motivator. Early on in her character arc it's for her own happiness at others' expense (though she's oblivious to this), then it becomes for her own idea of Dipper's happiness at others' expense, before finally simply becoming for Dipper's actual happiness, period.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Mabel claims that Pacifica is no good for her brother and refuses to grant her "permission" for Dipper and Pacifica to date, but in actuality Mabel's jealous of the fact that Pacifica seems to get along better with Dipper than Mabel herself does now. When the group is escaping the Futurekind and Mabel and Pacifica are climbing a vertical shaft using the grappling hook's rope, Mabel is even sorely tempted to cut the rope behind her, knowing full well that this would almost certainly kill Pacifica either through the fall itself or from the Futurekind beneath. Mabel's only able to prevent herself from giving into the temptation and killing Pacifica by reminding herself that cutting the rope would also trap Dipper below. Mabel begins to really struggle internally with this when she realizes just how good Dipper's and Pacifica's relationship has been for the both of them, mentally and emotionally, in direct contrast with how genuinely toxic Mabel realizes her relationship with Dipper has been—something that simultaneously makes Mabel feel both more guilty and, again, more jealous.
• Heel Realization:
  • Mabel faces a number of these throughout the story regarding the consequences of Weirdmageddon and what her choices involving that situation actually have done to the people of the town and the people who love her.
  • The turning point of Mabel's character at the end of Three Can Keep A Secret comes from her realization that nobody in the Piedmont Branch of the Pines family had ever cared enough about Dipper as a person to try to understand him and his values, interests, and insecurities. Mabel realizes that not only does she not understand her brother, but that she's never really understood her brother, that she was encouraged by their parents not to try, and that she actually has spent her entire life looking down on him for all of the ways his values differ from hers, and can't think of a single explanation she's told herself for why Dipper likes the things he likes that isn't insulting towards him. She openly compares the delusion she's been living in regarding her family's relationships to Bill's Bubble prison—a facade so wonderful she'd never want or try to see through it without Dipper. It's an incredibly painful realization for her and takes a lot of courage to face, but she ends the story in a much healthier place for it, resolving to actually try to get to know her brother on his terms.
  • When she returns in Three More and sees Dipper and Pacifica waltzing at the party, it's the tipping point for her hitherto war of denial over their good relationship. She admits she believes they're perfect for each other and by that point has matured enough to be genuinely happy for them.
• Honesty Is the Best Policy: She's currently attempting to defy this, as she doesn't understand why anyone would want to confide in another about their problems, openly believes that doing so makes things hurt more, and sincerely believes that the more honest she is with those around her, the less people will like her. It's worth noting that Mabel is by far the least mentally stable and most self-destructive of the Pines family as a result, although she's largely in denial of this.
• Hypocrite: Has elements of this.
  • She's the character with the longest list of relationships, all of which were very short term and are implied to have had very few personal boundaries on her end, yet she calls Pacifica a "hussy" ^*  Basically a vintage synonym of "slut" or "whore" when trying to break up Pacifica's and Dipper's relationship.
  • She implies a personal familiarity with drugs yet disparages Gravity Falls for its large population of trauma-induced addicts and includes them in her internal reasoning for why Gravity Falls is bad for Dipper.
  • Despite having cheerfully created Dippy Fresh, Mabel becomes extremely vicious towards Pacifica once Mabel gets it in her head that Pacifica is Dipper's replacement for Mabel's companionship.
• I Reject Your Reality: The one truth Mabel absolutely does not want to see is just how bad life was for Dipper in Piedmont, because it means she could never justify asking him to return with any other reason besides her own selfishness. Gravity Falls may not be perfect, but there is nothing in Piedmont for Dipper besides Mabel herself; their family home was cold, demeaning, and unsupportive to him in particular and he had no friends; the only thing Dipper could gain by returning is more of Mabel's company, and while he loves her very much, that's hardly a definitive benefit. Gravity Falls and the people in it have provided Dipper with acceptance, a supportive family, a respected place in the community, the tools to pursue a career in a field he's passionate about, and a life direction in which he can feel appreciated and positive about himself, none of which he would have in Piedmont. Heck, he even has a very healthy and mutually committed romantic relationship. But admitting that means admitting that she's not only hurt her brother in the past but is, by continuing to try to return him to Piedmont, ultimately working to cause him more harm for her own benefit, and Mabel can't bear to see that.
• Irony:
  • Mabel kept quiet about giving the rift to Bill for three years because she was terrified of losing her friendship with Dipper if he found out. Once he does find out, he's mad at her not for starting Weirdmageddon, but for not trusting him enough to admit her mistake, and later, for his upsetting hindsight realization that she also hid the truth because the truth would lessen her chances of manipulating their relationship back onto her terms.
  • Mabel feared that knowing the truth about her actions in Weirdmageddon would cause those around her to be less cooperative with her or even would cause those she loved to reject her. Years of living with this secret and the resulting fear has left her pathologically afraid of admitting to her own mistakes and has left her convinced that no one would still like her if she were honest about them. The bitter irony is that even after her major secret is out in the open and after those she's deceived have told her directly that it is the continuous manipulative dishonesty, not her mistakes, which makes her untrustworthy in their eyes, she's so used to hiding things and pretending things are fine that she can't stop being dishonest and doesn't even seem to comprehend the benefits of honesty anymore, even though her own dishonesty is what's caused all of her current problems.
  • When she and her brother were twelve, Mabel was cheerful and confident and couldn't understand or sympathize with her brother's anxieties or insecurities. Three years later, Dipper is the relatively cheerful and confident twin and Mabel is riddled with anxieties and insecurities.
• Jerkass Realization: Mabel undergoes several throughout the story.
  • She'd never actually cared before about why the things that upset Dipper actually upset him. She'd just assumed he was being dumb. Because of this, she never really understood her brother and often didn't even notice when she hurt him. And she did hurt him.
  • Dipper and Pacifica help each other feel more confident, secure, and happy. Trying to break them up means that Mabel was actually trying to hurt them, not help them, solely because Mabel herself felt disconnected from Dipper and wanted to feel more central to his life again.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Downplayed. Eventually her better nature does begin to resurface and she starts sincerely trying to balance her own values and desires with genuine consideration for others', however, she can still be very callous to those who present obstacles to her goals.
  • Even though Mabel fully plans to do her best to keep Pacifica away from Dipper and Pacifica had just given her the dressing-down of her life in chapter 3, Mabel is still instantly on board with Pacifica staying in the Shack to shelter from her abusive father only minutes later. Mabel herself is confused as to her reasons for this, but it's an early hint that there's nobler motivations in her than her selfishness and that she can put her selfishness aside for their sake.
• "Just Joking" Justification: Uses this to get away with comments she knows will offend, usually directed towards Pacifica.
• Kick the Dog: The existence of Dippy Fresh, and the majority of the events of Weirdmageddon Part 2, are treated as one big conga line of this in story. These events were evidently so upsetting for Dipper in the aftermath when he had time to sit down and think that, when the possibility came up, he leaped onto the opportunity to assume Mabel had been possessed by Bill while doing them. The fact that her behavior was bad enough for Dipper to comfortably reason it was actually the behavior of a literal demon trying to torment him horrifies Mabel.
• Lack of Empathy: While every member of her family has had some moments of this throughout the story, Mabel's moments are much more habitual, frequent, focused on, and indiscriminately expressed (she's shockingly unempathetic to friend and foe alike at multiple points). Mabel's sense of right and wrong is largely dependent on what will get her what she wants and what will make her look good, especially in earlier chapters. Mabel does experience remorse, especially about Weirdmageddon's 113 victims and the various deaths she causes over the course of the story, but it's unclear how much of it is genuine regret over causing others harm and how much is regret over damage to her own good and heroic self-image and personal interests; there is evidence to both.
• Like Parent, Like Child: Negative example. The Pines parents are implied to have been emotionally abusive to Dipper and Mabel treats Dipper as dismissively and callously as her parents do. She realizes later in the story that neither she not their parents ever really cared to get to know Dipper in terms of why he feels the way he does on things.
• The Load: Subverted. Mabel takes Dipper's assertion that he can't trust her anymore to mean that Dipper sees her as this. In reality she's just avoiding dealing with the real issues in their relationship.
• Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Her inner monologue in the beginning explains that she's had many Temporary Love Interests but hasn't managed to maintain anything more committed than a fling. She smugly assumes that at least she can commiserate with Dipper, as there's absolutely no way he could be doing better in the dating scene than "Da' Mab".
• Love Redeems: Despite her many, many, many flaws, Mabel struggles through facing them because she genuinely wants to keep her relationship with her brother, and eventually comes out of it a much better person.
• Manipulative Bastard: She's extremely emotionally manipulative of those around her and because she believes that her self-interests are actually what's best for everyone, it takes her a long time to realize that this behavior is wrong. For example, she goes out of her way in the first few chapters to try to bait Pacifica into getting angry at her in front of Dipper so that she can frame Pacifica as the instigator and bad guy and hopefully sour her very obviously romantically-toned relationship with Dipper.
• Mask of Sanity: While Mabel is certainly selfish in her dogged insistence on finding a way to get Dipper permanently back to Piedmont, she has very clearly suffered emotionally and mentally from living while keeping her culpability in Weirdmageddon a secret, and being without Dipper for so long (and the circumstances of his seperation) clearly only magnified these problems. Her guilt and stress coping mechanisms of self-delusion and rationalization, which have helped her avoid and ignore confronting her emotions, have caused her to become the Mood-Swinger. However, she's become so used to hiding her own emotional instability that the brief instances at which she fails and displays genuinely harmful unstable tendencies tends to stun her family due to them considering this highly out of character. On the outside she's a cheerful, loving, if Innocently Insensitive Fun Personified, but on the inside she's been spontaneously tempted to murder Pacifica and only talks herself out of it because the method involved would likely also kill Dipper. It doesn't help that living in fear of her secret being discovered for years has left her convinced that no one would like her if she were honest, a mentality she can't shake even after her major secret is out in the open. Her mask slips briefly in front of Grunkle Stan during the boxing incident; see Self-Harm.
• Mental Health Recovery Arc: Subtly done and unfortunately unfinished, due to the premature ending of the project. Mabel learning to have a healthier relationship with Dipper coincides with a lot of self-searching, which has the effect of helping her confront a lot of other issues inside herself. She still has a lot of alarming behaviors that seem deeply ingrained in her psychology, but her overall ability to function in a healthy manner was planned to improve greatly over the story.
• The Mermaid Problem: Runs into this in the side story Field Work on her date with Mermando.
• Mood-Swinger: Noted to be this, possibly owing to the sudden disruption of her co-dependent relationship with Dipper. Regardless of exactly why she lacks the ability to self-regulate her emotions, though, the fact is that her unchecked emotional instability, when coupled with the added pain of being separated from Dipper, has turned her into this over the years of their separation.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The deconstruction of Mabel's Aesop Amnesia means Mabel has this reaction in cycles between bouts of denial regarding Weirdmageddon and the state of her and Dipper's relationship. In response she tends to do her best to either rationalize away her realizations, concoct in a shallow solution she can perform to make herself feel better, or suppress these feelings for fear of facing consequences should her perceived culpability be acknowledged. She's come to openly disbelieve in the worth of honestly acknowledging her issues in her relationships because she believes that if she were honest with the people in her life, she wouldn't have any relationships. As a consequence, she not only never grows from her realizations, but spirals in a cyclical nature of denial, guilt, and temporary escape via further denial, which has done serious damage to her emotional stability.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: Gender-inverted Type 4—Doesn't want to be replaced as the most important person in her brother's life, and so is intensely jealous of his (reciprocal) crush, Pacifica.
• No Sympathy: Subverted. Mabel has significant difficulty with feeling sympathy, but she is capable of feeling it, particularly notably when Pacifica moves into the Shack after her father attacks her. Mabel herself is surprised by this moment, as she'd been spending the previous two days building Pacifica up into a villainous "temptress" and her enemy. It's notable that Mabel's capable of both sympathy and empathy, she's just really inconsistent in when she does and most of the time she only feels them in hindsight when she has time to think through situations. The problem is that by then, the damage from her lack of sensitivity towards others is usually already done. Also, because she's so reactionary and emotionally unstable, she quickly forgets to try to correct for this flaw by the time the next conflict with someone rolls around, instead clinging to whatever plan she's made to make things better with those she's wronged, and she sticks to this even when the circumstances change and demand she care about other priorities... care which she often fails to show, so she's stuck in this loop of callousness and guilt.
• Not Helping Your Case: Mabel to Dipper: "Don't you feel accepted or whatever with me?" Yeesh.
• Opinion Flip Flop: Mabel loved Gravity Falls right up until the point at which Dipper decides to stay. She spent the next three years fantasizing about Dipper actually being miserable and bored in his lab—despite Dipper himself contradicting this every time he visited—and convincing herself that, once Dipper realizes how great her life is in Piedmont, he'll want to move back home with her at once. Once Mabel returns and faces the reality that Dipper genuinely loves both his job and his new home, she begins seeking out reasons to dislike the town in an effort to justify her belief that it's a bad place for Dipper and he should return to Piedmont, deriding the town for being violent and having a drug problem.
• Parental Favoritism: She's her parents' clear favorite child, although she'd naturalized and rationalized the favoritism to the point where she didn't realize it was a problem in their family's relationships or unfair to Dipper until Dipper calls her out for trying to force him to move back in with them.
• The Protagonist: Mabel is the main focus character of most of Three Can Keep a Secret, although she begins losing this primary focus status once her brother and his group depart through the portal without her and the narrative follows them.
• Psychological Projection: Mabel assumes that Pacifica is using Dipper's affection to manipulate him into doing what she wants. In reality, that's Mabel's plan.
• Put on a Bus: For the entirety of Three More Can Keep A Secret, which is focused solely on one of her brother's group's trips out into the Multiverse.
• The Resenter: When she first returns to the Falls, she notices Dipper's close relationship with Pacifica and immediately begins to view the other girl as a Sucksessor for Mabel herself. She thereafter tries to sabotage and break up their almost-romantic friendship under the assumption that, without Pacifica, Dipper will return to his and Mabel's previous dynamic.
• Self-Harm: When Mabel convinces Stan to teach her boxing so Dipper would consider her more competent and trust her more. Stan tells her to weight her gloves with something to add force to the hit, subtly leaves several items around for her to choose, and while she goes to choose something, he sets up a punching bag in the yard. Stan then tells her to go at it freestyle so he can see what he's working with. She starts punching the bag slowly but works up to beating the hell out of it, hitting faster and harder while getting angrier and angrier until she breaks the bag off its structure and then continues to beat it while it's down while clearly holding back tears. Stan intervenes at this point, alarmed, and takes off her gloves to find that instead of picking the items he'd left for her, she'd filled the gloves with broken garden bricks for maximum force and the insides of both gloves are now filled with blood. Mabel chooses to pretend that nothing is wrong and requests the next lesson; the conversation that follows makes clear she knew this would hurt her and considered hurting herself acceptable if it helped her earn Dipper's trust back.
• Serial Romeo: Continues this from the show, much to her disappointment, possibly verging on Really Gets Around depending on how one interprets her internal narration when discussing what she and her various Temporary Love Interests got up to. She's still boy crazy and still unable to gain and maintain a stable, committed relationship for very long. However, she expresses little to no actual emotional attachment to any of her previous flings aside from Mermando and talks very cheerfully about the various normally-upsetting circumstances that ended these relationships, much to the clear concern of her family.
• Shipper on Deck: The outline and extra materials laying out what would have been the story's direction had it not been canceled indicates that Mabel eventually comes to accept that Dipper and Pacifica are perfect for each other and does her best to help their relationship.
• Spoiled Brat: Mabel is her parents' favorite and accepted her brother's status as The Unfavorite without question for most of her life. As such, while she's aware enough of others' feelings to have moments of kindness and empathy, she's so spoiled that, when made to choose between respecting others' feelings and getting what she wants, she'll choose to benefit herself, because she believes that what's good for her is ultimately what's best for everyone, just as her parents raised her to believe.
• Their First Time: Depending on how you interpret her account of secretly spending the night with a Temporary Love Interest, it's possible she's already had this.
• There Are No Therapists: There's no mention of Mabel receiving mental health help from anyone during her years in Piedmont, despite displaying a number of alarming behaviors that certainly should have more than warranted it in the eyes of even those Locked Out of the Loop.
• Took a Level in Badass: Learns to box under Stan's tutelage.
• Took a Level in Kindness: It takes a while, but over time she sincerely starts trying to notice and consider others' feelings and needs before her own. She's not very experienced at it, but she's trying.
• What You Are in the Dark: In the immediate aftermath of Dipper's group departing into the multiverse, no one's paying any attention to Mabel, and she promptly fails to function, lays down in the mud, and begins banging her head against hard surfaces in a manner very reminiscent of her month-long depressive episode in "The Time Traveler's Pig." It's unclear how long she suffers through this self-harming emotional incapacity, but it's implied to be several hours at least, during which she considers using the threat of self-harm as leverage to guilt Dipper into doing what she wants, but decides against that and instead chooses to try to learn how to fight (in an equally self-harming manner) so Dipper will think she's more competent. This moment alone epitomizes Mabel's manipulative and unstable personality, but also shows that, once made aware of some of her issues, there really is a part of her that genuinely wants and is trying to do better for those she loves—she just has too little self-awareness at this point to figure out how to do better and a whole lot of unhealthy coping and defense mechanisms to reject before she can do so.

Mason "Dipper" Pines

A fifteen-year-old Gravity Falls transplant of three years and counting, Dipper has flourished in the years since leaving Piedmont. Confident, clever, and ruthless, Dipper dreams of introducing the benefits of arcane science to the world.

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Played with. The story emphasizes the more troubling aspects of canon that logically should have carried with it significantly more emotional issues than were portrayed, however, in the present, Dipper's actually much more grounded and comfortable with himself than he was in canon. This is in direct contrast with his sister, Mabel, who hasn't adjusted well to growing up at all.
• Anti-Hero: He's evolved from the Classical Anti-Hero he was in the show (striving to save the day despite being weighed down by emotional flaws like insecurity and a general lack of skill or strength) to the more modern definition, bordering on a '90s Anti-Hero being a much more skilled, experienced veteran of the town's weirdness while also having become more underhanded and even violent in the pursuit of his objectives. He's friendly and kind with allies and strangers (if more wary with the latter), but he has a distinct ruthlessness towards antagonists that can be quite alarming, as Star demonstrates. Pacifica semi-jokingly refers to Dipper as an "intellectual Bad Boy."
• Armor-Piercing Response: After laying into her for lying about starting Weirdmageddon, Dipper cuts off Mabel's response that he should come back home with seven words.
  Dipper (bluntly): Life back in Piedmont was terrible, Mabel.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Downplayed. He's not a completely different person, but 12-year-old Dipper was an insecure, neurotic, socially awkward, occasionally unstable individual whose primary focus was the wellbeing of his sister, whereas 15-year-old Dipper is collected, confident, more stable, and much more fair towards himself when it comes to a healthy balance in his relationships. He's still a bit socially awkward, but it's not something stigmatized by his present-day friend group and so his awkwardness has actually lessened over time.
• Broken Ace: Three Can Keep A Secret retroactively makes him out to have been this during the show proper, as much of his emotional issues and insecurities that hindered him in daily life are here implied to have largely originated from his extremely harmful living situation in Piedmont. Living away from his parents and sister for three years has enabled him to heal enough to no longer be this.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Deconstructed. For all the good qualities it gave Dipper in regards to his ability to guide and teach others with similar difficulties to Mabel's, the fact that their previous environments had encouraged the burden of responsibility for both of them to be pushed onto Dipper meant that Mabel in particular was extremely codependent and couldn't handle their separation in a healthy way, because she'd never properly learned how to deal with being independently responsible for herself. While being Mabel's minder in all things to compensate for her lack of self-control was an unfair burden to put on a sibling, breaking this dynamic after it had developed led to Mabel going out of control, both emotionally and behaviorally.
• Combat Pragmatist: When thrown into a large brawl against a gang of monsters, Dipper's first instinct is to cheat outrageously during the fight, at one point literally kicking a monster while he's down AND on fire before eventually blowing the place up and running away when the odds turn against him and Star. It's worth noting that this is the explicit policy of all the Pines family when it comes to life-or-death scenarios, and that the ruthless attitude of the Pines stems from the fact that they're more often than not Properly Paranoid regarding the potential danger of their opponents and more extreme tactics said danger justifies. As the project goes on this is deconstructed, as this means that the few instances in which they are not right in their paranoia highlights the negative affects of this very obviously, as demonstrated when Pacifica and Marco discuss the weird, paranoid behaviors their respective partners have displayed and still consider justified (from avoiding carrying one dollar bills to chasing away Gustav and still wanting to find him and bug his house). It's clear that this combination of Combat Pragmatism and the frequent state of being Properly Paranoid has had a negative effect on how much "honorable" leeway Dipper is willing to give a new opponent and how quickly he can find a reason to rationalize using extreme measures against them.
• Creepy Stalker Van: Drives one, to Mabel's amusement. It was chosen specifically for its carrying and storage capacity and tinted windows in order to store scientific equipment and protect delicate samples. This doesn't stop Mabel from making jokes about luring the samples into the van with offers of candy.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The idea of returning to Piedmont permanently is one of his greatest anxieties for a reason. With distance and time, Dipper came to understand that not only did he have no friends to support him there, but no supportive family either—his parents were actually emotionally abusive, cared little for his thoughts and feelings, and only validated him when he served as their beloved Mabel's crutch. Mabel herself really does love Dipper, but was also taught to put herself first and not to respect his thoughts or feelings. Understandably, he has no desire to return.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Beyond simply embarrassing, the use of Dipper's birth name is portrayed as legitimately unpleasant and uncomfortable for him. The Pines parents chastizing Dipper for "indulging" in the use of his nickname over the summer despite knowing full well how uncomfortable he is with his birth name is one of the early signs of how unpleasant his home life was in Piedmont.
• Deuteragonist: For a significant portion of Three Can Keep A Secret, Dipper is co-secondary protagonists with Pacifica, with his sister, Mabel, being the primary protagonist. Once he, Ford, and Pacifica begin journeying into other worlds in which Mabel does not follow, the three of them become co-primaries with Star.
• Grew a Spine: Three years of having his talents, goals, and contributions validated has helped Dipper grow out of many of the insecurities he'd had as a child. It's implied that it's during these three years that he came to terms with how bad his homelife in Piedmont had been for him. However, Dipper loves his sister so much that it still takes Mabel returning to Gravity Falls, the place where Dipper is most accepted and supported, for Dipper to realize how unsupportive and manipulative Mabel has been and stand up for himself. In their confrontation, he verbally disowns his own parents and challenges Mabel to be more trusting and respectful towards him first if she wants to earn his trust back.
• Happily Married: The Distant Finale explained in the outline reveals that he and Pacifica are this in the future.
• Hates Their Parent: It's not necessarily a hatred, but appears more like a disappointment in them that runs so deep he verbally disowns them. Three years in Gravity Falls has enabled Dipper to see that his biological parents had a clear favorite between their two children and he wasn't the favorite; he describes his time living with them as "terrible." It's implied he only ever visits his parents' home in Piedmont because he promised Mabel he would, and even when completely in denial over how bad their homelife was for Dipper, Mabel still immediately notices how much less miserable and stressed Dipper looks in Gravity Falls compared to his visits in Piedmont.
• A Hero to His Hometown: The resident members of the Pines family have becomed Loved by All in Gravity Falls over the last three years owing to their laborious role as the town's protectors against the supernatural. As such, it slowly becomes obvious over the story that Dipper in particular, as the most frequently seen of the resident Science Heroes, has become widely admired by the town. This comes out in his interactions with the local townsfolk while performing his investigations, but also in small blink-and-you'll-miss background moments, such as during Pacifica's introductory conversation with Mabel in a local restaurant, during which a waitress quietly delivers Dipper complimentary food without him asking for it. Later, Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland try to convince Dipper to join the police force, making clear in their dialogue that they're aware they don't do much as Dipper and Ford keep the town safe from most dangers. The two officers don't seem bothered by this, though.
• Heroism Motive Speech: He's gained an odd proclivity for these in the years since his sister left; there are times when he gets very serious and monologues about his goals in an extremely passionate and idealistic manner. They'd probably come across as more preachy if they were addressed to anyone in particular; as it is, their sheer passion tends to make Mabel very uncomfortable.
• Horrible Judge of Character: The fact that he's this solely towards his sister is something Pacifica lampshades in her "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Mabel. It later gets played for drama when Bill, who has taken shelter inside Mabel's mindscape, taunts Dipper with the truth of Weirdmageddon and Dipper comes to the conclusion that Mabel has been possessed for three whole years, with a significant portion of his reasoning being his refusal to believe his sister would choose to be so cruel to him—showing that even three years later, he still hasn't really come to terms with the pain Mabeland and "Dippy Fresh" caused him. Dipper loves his sister so much that, like Mabel herself, he's shielded himself from seeing her flaws and therefore actually doesn't know her as well as he thinks.
• Irony: When he and his sister were twelve, Mabel was cheerful and confident and couldn't understand or sympathize with her brother's anxieties or insecurities. Three years later, Dipper is the relatively cheerful and confident twin and his sister is riddled with anxieties and insecurities.
• Like Brother and Sister: His side of his relationship with Star is this, despite Moon's initial assumptions. As the twin of Mabel Pines, Dipper's completely used to helping balance out and support someone with Star's specific type of creative energy and attention difficulties, something that makes him unique from everyone around him, who often have difficulty understanding and showing patience towards Star's eccentric words and behaviors. As Star is very reminiscent of Mabel minus the trust issues that have currently brought the twins into conflict, Dipper and Star get along instantly.
• Living Emotional Crutch: To Mabel, massively. It's implied Mabel developed little self-discipline, behavioral self-regulation, or self-control as a child mostly because she was encouraged to rely on Dipper's balancing act as her Cloudcuckoolander's Minder; Dipper was expected by their parents to help keep Mabel happy, thus sheltering Mabel from learning to manage personal difficulties, and Mabel was taught that as long as she herself was happy, Dipper would be happy. The sudden and immediate dissolution of their previously constant "sibling bond" and perpetual accompaniment of each other everywhere caused Mabel to have to face everything her family had sheltered her from all at once. The result is that Mabel quickly becomes emotionally unstable and even more focused on reasserting Dipper as her Crutch and returning things to as they were before he escaped their toxic home. She's largely in denial of the fact that this is not healthy or kind to Dipper.
• Love Martyr: Formerly a platonic variation. As a child, it's implied Dipper was taught by his parents that he should always be willing to do what it takes to make his sister happy—even if it meant he payed a personal cost. Even after this separation, Dipper didn't realize how harmful this was to him as a person until Mabel returned to Gravity Falls, and her treatment of him was juxtaposed against the more supportive environment to which he'd become accustomed.
• Muggle with a Degree in Magic: He doesn't have an innate ability for magic, but he and Ford understand how magic works better than the vast majority of innately magical characters. Star is extremely impressed.
• Nephewism: He was taken in by his two great uncles the summer of his thirteenth birthday. While he visits his biological parents every Christmas—seemingly out of obligation—he openly refuses to permanently go back, rarely speaks of them in any specific detail, and considers his great uncles to be his real parents.
• The Needs of the Many:
  • Dipper's and Ford's general deciding principle when it comes to making decisions regarding the powerful resources to which they have access. They can get to unsettling extremes, at times.
• Nerd Action Hero: Highly educated in a variety of scientific and medical fields and solves his problems through data collection and analysis, but isn't afraid to get his hands dirty and jump into a scuffle to attain his ends or protect those he loves.
• Official Couple: With Pacifica. It takes until the sequel for them to admit to romantic feelings and formally get together, but the two act like a very trusting, open, and understanding partnership long before this, having long since gotten into the habit of helping each other work through their emotions, divided shared responsibilities in their daily lives, and come to understand each other enough to know when to step in and show support as a unit and when to let each other manage challenges as individuals. The sheer functionality and healthy affection Mabel witnesses between them makes her extremely bitter. The outline for the never-realized conclusion to the story reveals that they eventually get married and go on to have happy and extremely successful lives at the forefront of the Magitek technological revolution.
• Relationship Upgrade: Begins dating Pacifica in Three More.
• Science Hero: His ultimate goal, outside of defeating Bill Cipher, is to accumulate and document scientific knowledge on the supernatural and utilize that knowledge to improve global quality of life. Along with fighting supernatural threats, he and Ford have invented medicines and new technologies; at one point Dipper describes to Mabel a plan to genetically engineer a variety of literally flying fish with unique psychic abilities that will eliminate language barriers in the minds of those in their vicinity.
• Shrinking Violet: One of the alarming signs that something is not right in the Piedmont branch of the Pines family is that newly-thirteen-year-old Dipper turns into this when his parents speak to him. He's not the most socially competent, but he never "shrink[s] into himself" from talking with anyone else. The fact that neither parent is alarmed, surprised, or even vaguely concerned by how clearly avoidant and upset their choice of words makes their own son gives the impression that this is "normal" in their house. Dipper himself doesn't seem to realize this dynamic is abnormal until after the time skip.
• The Unfavorite: Heavily implied to be this to his parents in Piedmont. The only scene in which we see them interact features them belittling Dipper and favoring Mabel even in front of guests.
• Would Hit a Girl: He'll hit any enemy necessary, regardless of gender, but this is notably and dramatically subverted with his own sister. When he believes Mabel is possessed by Bill, he attempts to attack her for the purposes or subduing Bill and forcing her body into the device that will remove him from her. But he as much as he swings his weapon, when he's finally cornered her he can't actually bring himself to land a hit, and instead drops the weapon and curses Bill for his cruelty.
• You're Not My Father: When Mabel asks Dipper how he could leave their parents behind in Piedmont, Dipper flatly tells her that life in Piedmont was terrible for him, that he's surprised if their parents ever noticed he was gone, and that it's always been obvious that they loved Mabel more than him. As far as Dipper's concerned, Stan and Ford are his parents.

Pacifica Northwest

Pacifica isn't the same girl she used to be. She spends all her time out on the town, running errands for the Pines. If she can manage, she'll be down in their basement helping with experiments or enjoying game night. She's happy to be almost anywhere, nowadays, besides home.

• Abusive Parents: Her parents, Preston and Priscilla, have actually gotten worse since Weirdmageddon. Preston has gotten into the habit of taking out his miseries on Pacifica, accusing her of being a shame on the family for associating with commoners and beating her when no one else is around. Priscilla, on the other hand, is functionally a non-presence in their lives up to the day Preston murders her,
• Affectionate Nickname: Dipper calls Pacifica 'Paz'.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Played with and largely subverted. She jokes about this trope when she calls Dipper an "intellectual bad boy" for his ruthless and dogged persistence towards his goals, but in actuality it's his uncommon selflessness and strong character that first drew her to him.
• The Atoner: Pacifica has a lot of behaviors that she's learned from her parents that she now considers mean and is trying to unlearn. She still screws up from time to time, like when she flirted with Dipper just to get one over on Mabel during their game of DD&MD, but she deeply regrets these moments and does her best to be better. She's actually quite similar to Mabel in this way, except Mabel's difficulty with facing the reality of her situation and subsequent inability to figure out the right way to fix things means that Pacifica's efforts are so far more effective.
• Birds of a Feather: Star and Pacifica turn out to have a great deal in common, having both been born into the upper class of their society and have experienced stifling upbringings meant to mold them into ideal inheritors to their parents' empires, which both have come to regard as morally questionable, and swiftly become good friends and close confidants.
• The Confidant: She and Dipper have spent a lot of time talking to each other over the last three years—about normal things, but also, evidently, about emotional baggage as well, judging by how familiar Pacifica is with the things Mabel and Stan have done to hurt Dipper. Later, she also shares this role with Eclipsa to Star. A large part of her development over the last three years comes from her attempts to get away from her parents' self-centered philosophies by learning to prioritize trying to understanding others.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Pacifica notably averts this. While she returns Mabel's hostility with disdain, and at one point snaps and lays into the girl for her treatment of her own brother, Pacifica appears to be genuinely trying not to interfere with Dipper's and Mabel's relationship outside of supporting Dipper and does her best to coexist with Mabel for Dipper's sake. She has her opinions—strong ones—but tries to allow Dipper to manage the relationship for himself. Pacifica does slip up and return fire on Mabel's barbs at times, especially when Mabel first returns to the Falls, but Pacifica openly regrets this after the fact because she sees it as giving into a bad part of herself that she's trying to overcome. She's also (aside from her initial sarcasm at Star's introduction) never anything but polite and later kind to Star, despite figuring out that Star is romantically interested in Dipper almost immediately upon seeing the two interact.
• Closet Geek: To Mabel's surprise, Pacifica enjoys scientific research, financial nuance, and playing DD&MD with Dipper and Ford.
• Deuteragonist: For a significant portion of Three Can Keep A Secret, Pacifica is co-secondary protagonists with Dipper, with Mabel being the primary protagonist. Once she, Dipper, and Ford begin journeying into other worlds in which Mabel does not follow, the three of them become co-primaries with Star.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: Averted. Mabel expects this because she built Pacifica up to be this temptress villain secretly trying to poison Dipper against his sister. In reality, Pacifica genuinely loves and cares about Dipper and is sincerely trying to tolerate Mabel for his sake.
• Foil: To Mabel. Both are girls with manipulative tendencies who were raised to think of selfish behavior as the right course of action. The difference is that Pacifica had a self-awareness break through three years ago and has spent the years since actively seeking out her issues in order to deal with them and work to be a better person, while Mabel has slipped further into erratic behavior, denial, and self-justifications. Further, Pacifica has spent that time listening to and trying to understand Dipper, while Mabel had never prioritized doing so. As a result, Pacifica's relationship with Dipper has become healthy and strong, while Mabel's relationship with Dipper has become increasingly tenuous.
• Gold Digger: Subverted, even though she has her own insecurities about this. Pacifica is very aware that the Pines family patents, which will be filed as Dipper's property, are worth potential billions if they can be turned into marketable products. However, she really is in love with Dipper, and it's her parents' insistence that love is the best way to manipulate someone that keeps her from confessing.
• Happily Married: The Distant Finale explained in the outline reveals that she and Dipper are this in the future.
• Hidden Depths: Pacifica is extremely intelligent and well educated. While she doesn't fully understand all the nuances of Dipper's and Ford's research and isn't involved in the actual inventing or formulating of their theories, she has a working conceptual knowledge of a lot of the various scientific subject matters involved and so is able to aid in much of their process. She's also evidently financially savvy and genuinely enjoys DD&MD. Further, she admits to Dipper that while she was trained to be skilled in social politics, she suspects she dislikes actually socializing with large groups almost as much as Dipper.
• Identical Stranger: She is this to Star. They're not completely identical, but the resemblance is enough for certain individuals to be unable to tell them apart when they deliberately invoke this.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: She's hesitant to confess that she's in love with Dipper because she associates love with manipulation and knows that Dipper's already been through a mess like that once before. She also does her best to tolerate Mabel because she knows Dipper loves her, even if Pacifica herself has many not-so-nice things she'd like to say to the girl.
• Impoverished Patrician: Played with. She's not actually poor, but she lives in shockingly poor conditions and sleeps on an air mattress in a furniture-less room in a shoddy, dirty house in clear disrepair because her father refuses to spend the moderately sized fortune they have left on their quality of living and insists with every Get-Rich-Quick Scheme he engages in that they'll be back in their mansion soon enough.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She still has some of this in her personality, though it's significantly downplayed compared to how she was when she was 12. She's very caring and very dedicated, which are good traits—however, they also motivate her grudge against Mabel, and so even when she's actively trying to be civil with Mabel, negative feeling can bubble up in the form of condescension and minor slights. She stands by her negative judgements on others if she feels her reasons are valid, but she's also willing to own up to her mistakes on the ones that aren't, and willing to apologize if her words imply opinions she didn't intend.
• Official Couple: With Dipper. It takes until the sequel for them to admit to romantic feelings and formally get together, but the two act like a very trusting, open, and understanding partnership long before this, having long since gotten into the habit of helping each other work through their emotions, divided shared responsibilities in their daily lives, and come to understand each other enough to know when to step in and show support as a unit and when to let each other manage challenges as individuals. The sheer functionality and healthy affection Mabel witnesses between them makes her extremely bitter. The outline for the never-realized conclusion to the story reveals that they eventually get married and go on to have happy and extremely successful lives at the forefront of the Magitek technological revolution.
• Politeness Judo: She's aware that courtly politics work on this and so acts as the introductory voice of their group to Queen Moon. She even manages to work in a Stealth Insult or two to alter social dynamics in favor of respecting her allies that those against her can't argue without looking paranoid. As much as she's uncomfortable using the manipulative skills she was taught under her parents, she's fully aware that she's the most skilled at subtly socially controlling a group or situation and so voluntarily handles most of their public and multidimensional political maneuvers.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers an absolutely iconic one to Mabel in the third chapter, which at the time launched Three Can Keep A Secret into relative fandom notoriety. By Mabel's estimate, it appears Pacifica hadn't told Dipper of her opinions on Mabel and had been bottling her negative opinions of Mabel up because she knew Dipper loved Mabel and she didn't want to upset him. Mabel's actual presence and continuation of her previous behavior, however, sets Pacifica off.
• Replacement Goldfish: Mabel thinks Pacifica is her replacement as Dipper's mystery buddy. While Pacifica could certainly be seen as Dipper's "mystery buddy," as she frequently accompanies Dipper on his scientific inquiries around town, the idea that she's a simple role replacement for Mabel is... complicated and ultimately unfounded, to say the least, given that Mabel wasn't even fully aware at the time of some of the less-than-positive roles she'd also played in Dipper's life. While Pacifica certainly is Dipper's partner, she and Dipper have an entirely different dynamic.
• The Resenter: Towards Mabel. The more Dipper confided in Pacifica about his insecurities and the more Pacifica came to admire and love Dipper, the more Pacifica resented Mabel for having helped inflict emotional damage onto him. Pacifica hadn't wanted to hurt Dipper by voicing her negative opinion of Mabel while Dipper still thought the world of his sister, and so bottled up her negative feelings as they mounted. However, Mabel's reappearance in Gravity Falls and her apparent lack of growth or change regarding how she treats her brother proved too much of a trial on Pacifica's restraint; the two end up sniping at each other before Pacifica quietly unloads all of her frustration onto Mabel in an infamous "The Reason You Suck" Speech. It becomes downplayed as the story goes on; having gotten her criticisms off her chest and made clear where they stood, Pacifica thereafter treats Mabel quite civilly and leaves Dipper's relationship with his sister for Dipper to manage.
• The Scapegoat: Mabel initially tries to use her as this, blaming all of the distance and issues in the younger Pines twins' relationship on Pacifica's influence, accusing Pacifica of actively trying to replace her and framing Pacifica as a manipulative "hussy" and corporate spy trying to seduce Dipper into telling her research secrets that she can sell to the government. In reality Mabel's just trying to come up with theories for why her and Dipper's relationship has so much distance and isn't yet emotionally ready to accept her own culpability.
• Sucksessor: Mabel views Pacifica to be this for Mabel's role as Dipper's "mystery buddy."
• Twin Switch: Pulls this with Star in Three More when they suspect Tom Lucitor of nefarious plans against Star. They're right.
• Young Entrepreneur: Unlike her father, Pacifica payed attention to her expensive education and is smart enough to realize the potential goldmine that is the Pines family research. She intends to invest whatever is left of her inheritance in into adapting their inventions into marketable products suitable for the public use, and has already created drafts of several product designs. The outline of the last part of the story indicates that she succeeds and becomes CEO of the Pines family's company.

Stanford "Ford" Pines MD, Ph.D

One of Dipper's and Mabel's two paternal great uncles and Dipper's mentor and one of his parental surrogates. Ford is cheerfully nerdy, ready for action, and extremely proud and protective of his family in equal measure.

——

• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Takes his teenage great nephew Dipper in and acts as his surrogate father. While Ford's not perfect, he's an infinitely better parental figure than Dipper's parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents, all of whom were unstable at best and abusive towards their children at worst—and the latter of whom raised Ford himself. While Stanley still struggles not to replicate Filbrick's abusive behaviors with how he treats Dipper, Ford has done nothing but validate and encourage not only Dipper but also Mabel and Pacifica. Ford definitely still has flaws, but he does his absolute best to prevent them from affecting the children in his care, and under Ford's guidance Dipper has noticeably begun healing from a lot of the damage his former home in Piedmont inflicted on him.
• Innocently Insensitive: Ford is by far the worst of the cast at picking up social cues and his thirty years away from Earth probably didn't help. Ford often misses the emotional implications of situations he hasn't experienced himself—for example he understands and empathizes with Mabel when Bill reveals her involvement in causing Weirdmaggedon, but doesn't understand Soos' questions about Dipper's emotional health and, in fact, doesn't even seem to realize that's what Soos' is concerned about. He also briefly offends Pacifica when she confides in him about how her greedy relatives are going to want to take her in for her inheritance and he replies by cheerfully suggesting they fake her death, though Pacifica is aware Ford has good intentions and so doesn't call attention to the insensitivity. When it comes to social comprehension, Ford fairs better when interacting in a professional setting—but even then he doesn't catch everything.
• Like a Son to Me: Towards Dipper. His extremely warm and supportive attitude towards his great nephew and pride in his personal growth always implied this, but it was explicitly confirmed in the sequel fic, during which he, under the influence of perception-scrambling magic that, among other things, confuses his ability to remember people, manages to recall Dipper simply as his son. By all indications, Dipper reciprocates.
• The Mentor: To Dipper; it's the premise of the For Want Of A Nail setup.
• Muggle with a Degree in Magic: He doesn't have an innate ability for magic, but he and Dipper understand how magic works better than the vast majority of innately magical characters. Ford particularly likes to use his status as this to show up the Magic High Commission, whose airs when interacting with Ford are typically quite condescending.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Played very subtly. In the first chapter, Stan and Ford are eager to regain contact with the rest of the surviving family and travel to Piedmont with Dipper and Mabel to introduce themselves properly to the younger twins' parents. The next time Ford speaks of family, it's after Mabel comes back, and he comments that every member of the family he's willing to admit relation to has now returned to Gravity Falls. It seems Dipper isn't the only one to develop a low opinion of his and Mabel's parents in the last three years.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Subverted. He may have twelve Ph.Ds mostly focusing on his research in physics and biology, but he also has a medical doctorate. In the sequel, Three More, he's so aghast at the superstitious and frankly medieval medical practices in Mewni that he takes several individuals on as his patients, one of whom is the Princess herself.
• Pet the Dog: In the sequel, Three More, Ford and the Magic High Commission go to confirm or invalidate the MHC's assumption that they had locked Bill Cipher up in a crystal centuries ago, and thus, that Bill can't possibly still be a danger. Of course, the being in the crystal isn't Bill, but a minor smuggler he'd possessed and used to inflict horrible cruelties on others centuries ago. Though he could still be under Bill's influence, upon the smuggler's release from the crystal Ford immediately prioritizes his wellbeing and begins to comfort and medically examine him, completely ignoring the council Ford had previously been determined to prove wrong in favor of providing care to this clearly traumatized stranger.
• The Professor: Extremely learned, with over two dozen academic degrees, and loves to share that knowledge. Because of this, he occasionally slips into Mr. Exposition. In Three More, he offhandedly mentions that he's proud of his talent at lecturing.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • There are few instances in which he and Dipper disagree, but when they do he's willing to hear Dipper out and willing to concede to Dipper's judgement if Dipper can argue his point well or appears to be in a better position to make judgements on the matter. He's also learned by now to be honest and open with his own faults and uses this to empathize with his charges about theirs.
  • When the truth comes out about Mabel's involvement in Weirdmaggedon, he's blunt about the severe consequences of her actions but accepting, unjudgemental, and comforting of Mabel herself.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Far worse than Dipper at this; while Dipper is awkward because he cares too much how others perceive him, Ford is awkward because he generally lacks a desire to socialize very much. For most of Ford's life he seems to have been content with or without companionship. He does deeply care for others, he just doesn't need a lot of social interaction to be happy, and so doesn't seem to have picked up many social cues as a result.
• The Needs of the Many: Heavily implies that he believes the Futurekind deserve the consequences of losing their life-sustaining heat source (i.e. their almost-certain deaths) because they refused to share their technology with the world even when it could help prevent the Bad Future from which they were refugees.

Stanley "Stan" Pines

One of Dipper's and Mabel's two paternal great uncles and Dipper's other parental surrogate. After a short boat trip that on the Stan o'War with his brother that ended predictably, Stanley returned to the Mystery Shack and, as Soos has taken over the primary role of Mr. Mystery, appears to have spent the time assisting Ford in taking care of Dipper.

• Accidental Murder: Stan got in a fight with someone during his years as a wandering criminal, then found out that the injuries he inflicted later killed them. He uses the story to show that he can empathize with Mabel's feelings of guilt.
• Figure It Out Yourself: Firmly believes in hands-off learning; he encourages the twins to think for themselves and be resourceful, and is willing to let the younger twins make messes without adult intervention in order for them to learn from their mistakes. However, this doesn't mean he isn't willing to jump in and intervene if their mistakes endanger them.
• Foil: To Mabel. Both are socially gifted and manipulative people who treasure their relationships with their socially awkward genius twin brothers. Both came from terrible home environments that favored one sibling over another, and both are in denial of this. The difference is that Stan was The Unfavorite while Mabel was the favorite, and the distance between that bad homelife and the present means Stan has gotten away with not confronting the issue, while, because Mabel wants to go back to that homelife (and drag her Unfavorite brother with her), she's having to confront the toxicity of their childhood head on.
• Innocently Insensitive: He apparently has a history of making jokes about Dipper marrying into Pacifica's family fortune, which really makes Pacifica uncomfortable, but she does her best to tolerate him because Dipper and Ford have forgiven him.
• The Mentor: To Mabel. It's implied he's this to Dipper as well normally, as Dipper refers to both Stan and Ford as his surrogate parents, but since Mabel's arrival it's Stan's interactions with her that have been focused on. Along with teaching Mabel boxing, he tries to help Mabel cope with the aftermath of her and Dipper's falling out while his brother and hers are off hunting Bill in the wider multiverse, and comforts her with the knowledge that she's not the only person in the world who has to live with having done terrible things. He verges on an Obsolete Mentor at times, owing to his own issues and emotional blindspots preventing him from recognizing certain sources of dysfunction in Mabel's and Dipper's relationship.
• Obsolete Mentor: Tries to give Mabel guidance when it comes to the conflicts she's having with her brother, but isn't entirely successful at addressing the underlying issues because they're closely related to problems in his own past that he himself hasn't confronted after all these years.
• Out of Focus: In contrast to his tritagonist status in the series proper, Stan only has one chapter and a handful of scenes dedicated to his character. His personal arc dealing with his denial over his bad childhood evidently was something to be built on in the third installment of the series, and was cancelled with it.
• Papa Wolf: He rejects Bill Cipher's taunting regarding Mabel's involvement in Weirdmageddon by telling him to never try lying to a con artist with two kids to protect. Ironically, Bill wasn't lying.
• Selective Obliviousness: Though he refuses to recognize it, he's aware on some level just how bad his own childhood was and how his influence has the potential to lead the children in his care astray. When mentally battling Bill for control of his body, the thing that hurts Stan most is an illusion of what Dipper and Mabel could have been like if they had followed Stan's guidance for them and no one else intervened: Illusion Dipper is an emotionally stunted low-achiever who has given up his ambitions due to lack of support and Illusion Mabel is an unmitigated psychopath. The fact that this affects him the most shows that he knows deep down that he's encouraged harmful behaviors and he's at least somewhat aware of Mabel's potentially dangerous mental and emotional instability, even though he's never addressed any of this out loud with the younger twins.

Mr. and Mrs. Pines

Dipper's and Mabel's parents who have raised Mabel alone for the last three years.

• Abusive Parents: They're heavily implied to be this, though unlike the Northwests it's never indicated that the abuse escalated to assault. They did, however, single out one of their children for preferential treatment and spend every interaction with the other child that we see openly disrespecting and demeaning that child regardless of witnesses, even dismissing the validity of his emotions and perceptions. If Mabel's comment on the commonality of this behavior towards Dipper is accurate then it's clear they've pretty much always treated Dipper as if his emotions and judgements are inherently less valid and valued than those of the other members of the family, and have essentially been bullying their own son for years. Further, the behaviors they incentivized and taught as normal and acceptable through this Favorite/Unfavorite dynamic really screwed up their two children. (Ironically, because Dipper, The Unfavorite, managed to escape this toxic household, Mabel, the favorite child, appears to have ended up with the longer-lasting damage—having empathy and treating others' feelings and concerns, especially Dipper's, as equally valid to her own is something Mabel is colossally bad at and correcting for this is the major internal arc of her story).
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: They initially appear to be loving, warm, and inviting. They have Welcome Back decorations and party horns prepared for their children's return, they explain being upset about being lied to by Stanley but still put the past behind them and warmly welcome both Stanley and Stanford back into the family, and they coo over the rejuvenated sibling bond between the older twins. Then Dipper speaks up...
• Cryptic Background Reference: Mr. Pines and Stanford briefly discuss Shermy. Stanford assumed Shermy wouldn't have kids because "the numbers wouldn't work out." Mr. Pines bluntly replies, "They didn't. Things didn't work out between Mom and Dad." When Mabel asks why they've never met Grandpa Shermy, Mrs. Pines says they'll explain when she's older.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child:
  • By the end of the story, Mabel has several personal realizations about her homelife in Piedmont, one of which implies that this was always the case with Dipper because no one in Piedmont honestly cared enough to know or understand him. By the present day this is true of both of their children, however; no one in the family has told Mr. and Mrs. Pines about the supernatural nature of Gravity Falls, and as such, they have no knowledge of most of the huge, character-defining moments their children have undergone there.
  • On a more mundane and less abusive level: given Mabel's self-descriptively delinquent behavior in Piedmont for the past three years, they're either this or Pushover Parents to her; either is likely given that both twins acknowledge that Mabel is Mr. and Mrs. Pines' clear favorite child and it's very clear that the couple were bad at setting down healthy behavioral boundaries.
• Dysfunctional Family:
  • Their toxic parenting drove their son away from them and spoiled their daughter into an incredibly toxic individual herself, and although Stan teaching her the methods with which to do so probably didn't help, their bad parenting undoubtedly also bears significant responsibility in Mabel becoming a delinquent. Further, it's implied Dipper only returns to Piedmont for Christmas to see his sister, as he vocally disowns Mr. and Mrs. Pines in-story.
  • Mr. Pines himself is the product of a dysfunctional family, as his own parents apparently couldn't work out their issues with each other and split up. This implies something of The Chain of Harm, as while we don't know exactly what Mr. Pines' childhood was like, we do know that Shermy, Mr. Pines' own father, was also raised by parents known to have abused and thrown one child out of the family already.
• History Repeats:
  • Their reason for allowing Ford to take in Dipper is that STEM fields are the best way to get ahead and so Dipper will be more successful there—which is a mentality they share with the Stan twins' parents. They don't seem to care whether Dipper himself wants this, which Ford implies was true of his own parents, given his surprise that Mr. and Mrs. Pines didn't know he was a genius specifically because that trait of his was all the family cared about.
  • The favorite/unfavorite dynamic hinting at a childhood of toxic parenting is itself very similar to the childhood home life of the Stan twins, though their parents were repelled by different traits. Filbrick thought Ford's eccentric interests had potential and Stan was riding his brother's coattails; Mr. and Mrs. Pines are implied to think Mabel is creative and adorable and outright state that they think Dipper's interests are creepy. Both sets of parents appear to have treated the latter twin as less important than the former. Unfortunately, there's very little anyone brings up in the story that contradicts the negative implications about Mr. and Mrs. Pines or paints them in a more positive light. At least this generation's Unfavorite managed to escape the household for a more supportive home rather than being thrown out.
• Gaslighting: Downplayed in what we see, but implied to be a bigger issue in what we don't. At one point in their only scene, Mr. and Mrs. Pines do their best to reason away the need to hear Dipper's opinions by dismissively saying that he's undoubtedly mistaken about them. They noticeably don't do this to Mabel, as they instead respectfully request to hear hers.
• Karma Houdini: As far as the reader knows, they never face consequences for their horrible parenting. One would think they probably consider themselves good and successful parents, considering Dipper and his wife Pacifica end up founding a family-owned tech company that makes them all rich. Never mind that Dipper's and Mabel's later success comes from Stan and Ford helping the younger twins out of the bad place Mr. and Mrs. Pines' parenting had put them—physically, intellectually, and emotionally. The only consequence hinted by the outlined ending is that Dipper hates being around them, and the whole problem is that they don't appear to care how he feels about anything, so unless Dipper acts on that hate and actively does his best to stop them from benefiting in any way from their children's wealth—which won't be a good look with PR—that's not really a consequence for them. Then again, given that the family company will produce revolutionary technology that everyone will end up relying on, any fuss the Pines parents make with PR probably won't affect the business much and might even backfire, given Pacifica's social and political savvy—so who knows?
• Locked Out of the Loop: No one in the extended Pines family trusts them enough to tell them the truth about Dipper's and Ford's work and the actual goings-on in Gravity Falls. Initially this is because Stanley is afraid of being rejected by family again, but later it's implied to be because everyone but Mabel has developed a pretty poor opinion of them.
• No Full Name Given: We never learn their first names; despite everyone around them having the same surname, they're still referred to as "Mr. and Mrs. Pines" throughout their only scene.
• Obliviously Evil: They seemingly have no awareness for just how bad their few interactions with Dipper come across, as demonstrated by the fact that they behave like... Well, like all the other tropes here under their file as part of their first impression on long-lost family members and never seem concerned about what the Stan twins think.
• Parental Favoritism: From what little we see and from small implications dropped by Word of God, it appears that the couple spoiled their daughter rotten and were much harder on their son, to the extent that they openly cared more about Mabel's feelings on Dipper's apprenticeship than they did about Dipper's. In fact, while they respectfully ask Mabel her feelings on the offered apprenticeship, they openly disregard Dipper's attempts to tell them how he feels and the only time we see them ask Dipper anything at all is when they interrupt Ford's offer to apprentice Dipper to ask Dipper in a very critical and scolding manner if he'd been using his "silly" nickname over the summer—they seem to have made their decision on whether Dipper would take the apprenticeship entirely without him and only cared to consult Mabel on how this would affect her before doing so, something that clearly disturbs the Stan twins if their described facial reactions are anything to go by. The only chapter they appear in is full of red flags implying that Dipper is The Unfavorite of the household.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: They basically raised Mabel to have this. Mabel is indeed someone who cares a lot about others being happy, especially her brother, but Mr. and Mrs. Pines taught Mabel that the way to make Dipper happy was to ensure she herself was happy. The parents never taught Mabel to think of others' feelings and opinions (especially Dipper's) and encouraged her to assume that the same things that made her happy would make others happy.
• Small Role, Big Impact: They only show up in the first chapter, but the damage they inflicted on their children and encouraged their children to inflict on each other subtly dominates the plot.
• Snub by Omission: Despite initially being eager to meet them in the first chapter, Ford later excludes them from his mental list of family he'd willingly admit he's related to.
• Sugary Malice: There's an element of this in the way Mrs. Pines talks to Dipper. She maintains a sweet tone while agreeing with her husband's dismissal of Dipper's emotions as exaggerated without actually caring to hear out what Dipper's emotions actually are, and further adds that they "won't hear" of anything Dipper tries to tell them that would contradict what they already "know." Later, she talks in the same sugary, almost fawning manner to her daughter while asking how Mabel feels about Dipper going to live in Gravity Falls.
• The Unfavorite:As noted in Snub by Omission, their treatment of Dipper as The Unfavorite is implied to have fittingly made them Ford's least-favorite living family members. However, because of the distance between the Stans and Mr. and Mrs. Pines, this really doesn't seem to have an impact on the latter.
• You're Not My Father: On the receiving end, as Dipper outright disowns them for how much they favor Mabel over him.

Bill Cipher

A dream demon who formerly attempted to take over Earth and whose failed invasion nonetheless ravaged Gravity Falls three years before. In order to survive his destruction at the barrel of the memory gun, Bill divided his 3D form into nine separate fragments, which then took shelter inside the minds of those with whom he'd made deals. If only three of these pieces reunite, he will be restored to his original 2D form.

• Demonic Possession: His survival method involved dividing himself up and scattering the pieces into the minds of receptive individuals. He couldn't get Dipper or Ford, who'd protected themselves, so the three fragments that stayed on Earth instead inhabited Preston Northwest, Mabel Pines, and the deceased corpse of Blendin Blandin. Played with in that these fragments can only take control if they are allowed it or they sufficiently wear down their hosts' mental stability.
• For the Evulz: His main motivation is simply to do evil because he finds it amusing.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Along with encouraging the use of a Love Potion to set up Tom and Star, Bill also suggests Tom use a rigged "Do You Like Me?" questionnaire, two things Mabel did when she was twelve while playing matchmaker and trying to match boys to herself respectively.
• Walking Spoiler: His existence isn't, but his continued survival and the details of this certainly is.

Characters First Appearing in Three More Can Keep A Secret:

Star Butterfly

The bubbly, open-minded, and very eccentric current Princess of Mewni. Star desires to protect her people but also seeks sincere companionship and struggles with her mother's untrusting policies towards outsiders.

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• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Not to the extent at which she needs a minder anymore, but Star's behavior is eccentric enough that most characters have difficulty understanding her, with the exception of Marco, her Love Interest, and Dipper, who is used to her kinds of eccentricities.
• Horrifying Hero: Has shades of this, being particularly scary and intimidating whenever Marco is in danger, while her Golden Butterfly is reinterpreted as an only mildly controllable Superpowered Evil Side that can intuitively weave the massive amounts of magic flowing through her in some borderline Body Horror ways.
• Smarter Than You Look: Star is actually very observant and and is fully capable of recognizing suspicious details about people, she just continues acting friendly and doesn't bring them up until she trusts the previously suspicious person enough to ask them about it or she's found someone she can trust to confide in about what she observed. She's also capable of following Dipper's explanations on magic enough to learn how to tune the wand to different energy wavelengths despite having never been taught what an energy wavelength is. The point is made that she isn't stupid, she's just uneducated, and teaching her can be difficult due both to her issues focusing and sitting still and her extremely visual learning style.
• Superpowered Evil Side: She sees her Butterfly forms as this and has a lot of issues with the fact that everyone assumed these transformations were fine, unremarkable, and good and no one seemed to care how she was coping with the knowledge that she'd become that. The lustful Mewberty Butterfly form felt like she was possessed by her own out-of-control body and her Golden Butterfly form made her feel like the loose cannon hand of a vicious god. Both clearly altered her mental state in ways that made her question what "states" of her mind are actually a part of who she is and both were clearly invasive and traumatizing experiences, but she never felt comfortable with voicing this since no one else treated it as anything questionable. Part of her bond with Dipper comes from the fact that he's the first to really tell her that he understands this, that her feelings are valid, and that she deserves better guidance if the result of her mentors' teaching has been so much confusion and self-doubt.

Moon Butterfly the Undaunted

The extremely politically savvy current Queen of Mewni. Moon has devoted her life to protecting her people and her family from the fate that met her mother. She trusts very little, but is doing her best to put more faith in her daughter's judgement.

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• Aggressive Categorism:
  • Believes monsters to be any sentient species incapable of forming a civilization (by Mewni's standards of civilization). She's in denial over the arbitrary nature of this label and assumes qualities of the individual "monsters" she interacts with that are manifestly untrue of them, based entirely on the fact that they are a monster and therefore they must be like she assumes, regardless of what's in front of her. On the rare occasion she'll admit individual monsters aren't like her internal assumptions but she just as often tries to rationalize why this specific monster is an exception rather than a demonstration that she's wrong.
  • Subverted with her ideas towards gender roles: the outline reveals she's sexist and believes women are innate leaders and men innate followers, though her generally fair interactions with Stanford (himself an educator and figure of leadership) and the fact that she comes to accept his leadership position as respectable and valid implies that her ideas of gender norms aren't hard and fast aggressively categorical like her ideas towards race. This implies that she understands there are valid and respectable ways of living outside of her idea of gender roles, though she still considers her idea of gender roles to be the proper, standard, and natural way for genders to interact.
• Adaptational Villainy: An... Interesting example. Moon's racism and struggle between political posturing and caring for her allies emphasize her more ruthless and calculating personality, even when compared with this story's more morally ambiguous take on the entire cast. At one point she goes on a condescending rant about how Mewni decides what kinds of creatures are monsters or not and the qualification for monsterhood is whether or not the species lives in a Mewman-style civilization, very reminiscent of the faux-scientific racial categorization of the late 19th century and early 20th. However, Moon also never actually becomes a villain like she did in the show. She's far more morally ambiguous in Three More than in canon right up until the canon's last few episodes, at which point she's actually less villainous.
• The Atoner: She's aware she's made Star feel bad about herself in the past and hadn't been the most supportive towards her problems, so she's trying to be more sensitive and understanding of her daughter. She was planned to backslide in unfinished third story, during which she and Star reveal to each other that they have some very fundamental moral disagreements and Moon becomes convinced that Star's time on Earth radicalized her.
• Noble Bigot: Despite her paranoid, racist, and faithless behavior to outsiders, Moon genuinely has the best intentions of her people and family in mind. She's also genuinely trying to be more understanding of her daughter, and actively puts Star's judgements of the situation above her own despite personal disagreement several times.
• Not So Above It All: Gets swept up in the Rocky Roll Call when the cast discover Eclipsa talking to Star in the garden, even answering Star's question of why everyone is yelling like this with the barely-related "BECAUSE ECLIPSA IS EVIL!"
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Ultimately what she evolves into by the end. She does help save the Multiverse—at great expense to herself and her own kingdom, no less—but she's still really racist, and the difference of opinions between her and her daughter is implied to continue the tension in their relationship long after the Butterflies permanently relocate to Earth. The outline also indicates that she's very sexist, having been raised in a society that sees women as the dominant leaders and men generally as support figures, which is why she never blames Marco for Star's apparent radicalization on Earth—she assumes Marco's just doing his job as Star's man by following Star's lead.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Not as much as Ford, owing to her prejudices, but Moon genuinely tries to listen to and understand her daughter's way of thinking and even when she disagrees with Star or her actions she never wants to make Star feel bad for being herself. She's aware she has in the past, and is trying to do better. She also continues to hear Ford out about Bill Cipher even against attacks on his credibility by the Magic High Commission and listens to and weighs the cautions from both sides to her fairest ability when judging how to proceed. Unfortunately, the events of the story cause her to be increasingly aware of the differences of moral opinion between her and her daughter, which erodes her willingness to extend trust and subsequently causes her to regress away from being this.
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: Moon's racism against monsters largely stems from needing an explanation for her mother's death at the hands of monsters when Queen Comet was trying to make peace between the races. Unable to come up with reasons that weren't inherently insulting to monsterkind, it's implied Moon basically red pilled herself into thinking that "monsters" were dangerous sub-"Mewman" things that only existed in a capacity to hurt others and were thus a danger to the order of the kingdom and all Moon held dear. It's thus completely inconceivable to Moon that Star would consider them people, but Moon is still trying to be more understanding for her daughter's sake.

Marco Diaz

Star's best friend (and later, boyfriend) and a member of the family who'd houses her during her stay on Earth. Marco is excited by the fantastical but generally practical in conflict.

• Beware the Nice Ones: Marco was not in the story for all that long before it was cancelled, but the writing simultaneously retained his Nice Guy personality while also drawing attention to his surprisingly casual attitude towards violence and killing, attributing it to his experiences in the Neverzone.
• Touched by Vorlons: Queens of Mewni tend to naturally subconsciously protect their partner by channeling magic into them, making them stronger, more durable, and better healing. Star was apparently attached enough to Marco that she'd been unconsciously channeling magic into him even before either of them were romantically interested in each other.

The Magic High Commission

The ruling authority over the usage of magic as a resource in the Multiverse. They answer to Queen Moon when in the dimension of Mewni.

• Failure Hero: For a given value of "hero," as they were intended to be a force of order maintenance but have become as flawed, biased, self-important and corrupt as the kingdom they've made their base of operations. The MHC never once succeeds in defeating any part of Bill, and their negligence and proclivity towards underestimating their enemies is largely what has allowed him the opportunities to gain as much power and do as much damage as he has. If they'd actually caught him centuries ago as they believed, or if any one of them had bothered to check whether they'd imprisoned the right people, none of this mess would have happened. They fail their job of protection and order maintenance at basically every opportunity, mostly.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Based on the outline of the last third of the story they never stop fighting against Bill and would have remained allies of the Butterfly family, and by extension the Pines, but no one is very pleased with their behavior by the end of the story.

Eclipsa Butterfly, Queen of Darkness

A curious and mysterious queen, out of place and out of time.

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• Abdicate the Throne: Before the invasion of Mewni by the Lucitors and the discovery of Meteora's survival, she created a written document that acts as something of a hybrid between a last will and testament, letter of abdication, and signed confession. In it, Eclipsa simultaneously designates Star her successor and inheritor while confessing to the murder of her own mother, Queen Solaria. The Magic High Commission find the document again after the invasion and burn it.
• Cool Aunt: To Star. While she's not always the most responsible, Eclipsa acts as an understanding intellectual maternal figure to Star and treats Star like family regardless of blood. She's also happy to share in the interests and activities of the teen cast.
• Deathbed Confession: Under the assumption that she will soon die, Eclipsa writes a letter of confession to Star and the Magic High Commission explaining that she was responsible for the death of her mother.
• The Horseshoe Effect: Differed so greatly from her mother's murderous agenda politically that she came to believe that the best way to preserve the good things still in Mewni was murdering her mother. Eclipsa had been warned by those on her own political side that such extreme and violent tactics would only make things worse and regrets in hindsight her own lack of understanding.
• Irony: The Magic High Commission spent ages insisting Eclipsa is evil and "proving" this by propagating claims that Eclipsa committed numerous heinous crimes, none of which line up with reality and almost all of which are very easily disproven. Then Eclipsa confesses to the premeditated murder of her own mother, a crime that the MHC hadn't suspected her of at all.
• Mirror Character: Framed as one in comparison to Pink Diamond in the outline of what would have been the third part of the story trilogy. Both are the children of genocidal tyrants who turned away from their heritages, but the writing portrays Pink as essentially a coward who abandoned her revolution and left the galaxy to burn while Eclipsa never backed down from the fight for justice.
• Parents as People: She's a very flawed but well-intentioned woman with a dark history but very nurturing nature, something she employs to not only protect and support her daughter but for the minors of the cast.
• Team Mom: She's very supportive and nurturing to the teens and children of the Pines-Butterfly Coalition. Further emphasized by the fact that, despite trying to sincerely get along with Moon since being released from the Crystal, the final straw that angered Eclipsa was Moon's tolerance and implicit support of St. Olga's, even considering sending Star to the terrible institution. Eclipsa makes clear that Moon's actions have offended Eclipsa's ethics as a mother. Word of God suggest that post-story, Eclipsa supplies motherly support to Star in particular, since Star's and Moon's relationship runs into irreconcilable differences.
• Unscrupulous Hero: While firmly on the side of justice, she has no issues resorting to lying, grave robbing and even murder if it seems the situation calls for it.
• Your Days Are Numbered: It's implied in her signed confession that of the time of writing, her body and mind are nearing their breaking point. This could just be related to the possibility of her execution, but it's also possibly a reference to her "rotting" medical condition; it's never explicitly stated.

The Lucitors

• Adaptational Villainy: In canon the sinister appearance of their Kingdom is played for laughs and Prince Tom is simply a competing angle in the series spanning Love Dodecahedron; the fic series upgrades them into a house of scheming nobles and war profiteers that served as the industrial backbone to Mewni’s imperialism for decades, and in the present are seeking to usurp the dominant seat in their network of alliances through extremely underhanded means.