As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance
- Dipper tells Bill that his parents and grandfather were killed in an Orca attack. However, while Orcas can become hostile and aggressive if they feel trapped, there is no known case if them killing a person in the wild; in fact, they're noted to be quite friendly to humans. While it is possible that this doesn't apply to sirens, the lack of aggression to humans would imply that Orcas do not see humanoid beings in general as prey—otherwise, one would expect at least some level of accidental attacks or rogue but rare deliberate attacks, similar to sharks. This reinforces the implication that Stan and Ford lied about the circumstances of their family members' deaths.
- Circumstancially, something else about this is off: judging from Mrs. Valentine's comment about the Mens Scapus sinking off the North coast of Africa, Dipper is a Mediterranean siren. Because Dipper evidently lives somewhere near hydrothermal vents, this limits his home to the Tyrrhenian and Ionian subdivisions—making the former more likely, as its relatively closer to the African coast. Regardless, Orcas are rarely found outside of the waters around the Straight of Gibraltar—the mouth of the Mediterranean. All Mediterranean thermal vents are nowhere near there. Unless the family was traveling—which doesn't seen to have been the case—the presence of Orcas at all near any of the potential locations for Gravity Falls in this world makes no sense.
- Despite Bill remarking on Dipper's inhuman magical sensitivity and ability, Bill's descriptions of magic tend to be quite similar, foreshadowing that Bill himself isn't human. The mechanics of how this manages to be a twist despite the reader knowing Bill's
canon characterization and species in the series are quite clever: Bill's inhuman nature is only a twist because the reader is actually naturalized to Dipper's perspective on magic. Bill is the only land-dweller Dipper has ever met, and he self-identifies as human. Therefore, his magical abilities are treated by the narrative as assumedly within the bounds of this world's humanity, because neither Dipper nor the reader truly knows what is a "normal" level of magical ability for a human and what is not. However, we do get brief references to other magic-using humans, none of which use similar kinds of magic to Bill. - Gravity Falls, Dipper's colony, is probably located off the western point of Sicily. This location would still be relatively near one of the two volcanic zones of the Mediterranean while still being considered near the north coast of Africa, given that that area is one of the narrower points of the Mediterranean. Being right offshore of Italy also helps explain why Dipper's colony has an inherited use of a human language like Latin.
