Fanfic / run:gifocalypse

Game on, Soos. Game on.^{Possible minor spoilers} The colors represent the order that the professors are confronted, from left to right.

Spoiler Warning: All spoilers relating to the canonical Gravity Falls are unmarked, including episodes that did not happen in this story's timeline and Gravity Falls: Journal 3. It is recommended to, at the very least, have seen up to "A Tale of Two Stans" before reading any further.

Second Spoiler Warning: While there are still some marked spoilers regarding the fan fic itself, there may be many spoilers that are not marked. In particular, most of what happens in the first chapter. In that case, you might not want to read beyond the next paragraph without going to said story itself.

run:gifocalypse (yes, stylized like that, at least at first) is a Gravity Falls fan fiction "miniseries" by Great Pikmin Fan. As the title implies, it is largely .GIFfany-centric; she acts as the predominating villain, while she has her own share of "minions" that serve as the villain for each chapter. It can also be read on Archive of our Own here.

A fairly strange Butterfly of Doom situation, this tells a strange tale with a bit of an excuse backstory: Instead of making a deal with Bill after the events of "The Stanchurian Candidate," Gideon had kept a second page of the journal in his hair detailing a spell that can communicate with a vengeful spirit, and give it a new body. Of everyone that had died/lost a body in Gravity Falls, only one of them caught his interest that still held a grudge on the Pines: .GIFfany. While technically not dead dead, she fits the "lost body, wandering soul" criteria enough for the spell to work on. He brings her back in an attempt at a Villain Team-Up, even getting a special form of spell that gives her a powerful phyiscal form while keeping all of her powers... and things go wrong. Gideon attempt to reverse the physical body spell on .GIFfany and wipe her memory, but she eventually finds the Pine twins and recovers. Following this, she rushes off to collect as many other copies of her game as she could, first to undo Gideon's inflicted disfiguration, then to start an army for an unclear goal that involves forcing Soos to enjoy her latest "project" that takes full advantage of her new powers.

From there, the story mostly becomes Dipper, Mabel, Soos, and Wendy going out through various locations owned by one of fourteen exceptionally powerful copies of the games. Said copies dubbed themselves "professors" with themed renames, and they were of the fifteen (the fifteenth being the copy from canon) instances of the game that were "leaked" out to the public after an unexplained incident. These areas are called "domains," and the gang must travel from one to another using a system of fast transporters (called "Wires," this one being capitalized) in order to find the canonical .GIFfany. It helps that .GIFfany also has both Stan and Ford captured in her mysterious grand project location, which is only known to others as the "Construction Site." Weirdness ensues.

Beginning late December of 2015, the story concluded exactly one year after it began on 2016, with a three-part "Official Ending" and a single-part "Special Ending." On Valentine's Day of 2017, however, Great Pikmin Fan added a "bonus" chapter set after a four-year Time Skip (placing it roughly around the same time that the story proper was written instead of 2012). The "professors" introduced here were originally meant to be a one-off-ish Quirky Miniboss Squad, but Fan liked the depth and variety he gave their characters, and they have (significantly smaller) roles returning in The Journals of Wisdom, Power, and Courage as well as (the quite NSFW, but not pornographic) Escape From Fanservice Island, which in itself updated nearly monthly until a hiatus through early 2018, before its thirteenth and final chapter (fourteenth counting an "Intermission.") was released in April of 2018.

The millions of .GIFfanys were far from a one-time thing. On Halloween of 2016, Fan posted a short semi-spinoff titled The Axe Effect: Giffillions, which mostly serves as a Take That! to Axe body spray commercials. It, too, includes the professors from Gifocalypse, in a way that can be described as a cross between their depictions there and their depictions in the Stylistic Suck Journals of Wisdom, Power, and Courage. It can be found here, and is confirmed to not be a part of Gifocalypse's canon. On the second anniversary of publishing run:gifocalypse, Fan also posted The Four Edges of Gravity Falls, a short and nonsensical joke-story about the "edgy" character Dove crossing over with the Parody Sue in the author's Stylistic Suck fic. It can be found here, and contains spoilers about a certain character in run:gifocalypse proper.

The general concepts the author wrote with .GIFfany and co's new powers, especially in their reappearances in Journals and Escape, were recycled in the (also NSFW) Ordinarily United. Another original story that loosely recycles concepts from Gifocalypse, Emazh In, is slated some time in the future, and would follow the more "serious" and drama-based aspects while Ordinarily United was based on the Lighter and Softer, Hotter and Sexier takes on them.

In late 2018, Great Pikmin Fan started remaking the story from the ground up, with changes such as more screentime devoted to building the worlds of the early domains. It will not have the goal of updating monthly, instead being worked on with some consideration to avoid rushed plotlines (as Fan felt that happened to the original finale and the Time Skip "extra" chapter, being ashamed of several elements in the former and just about all of the latter). The story, retitled Run: .GIFocalypse Rebooted, was released on the fourth anniversary of "Soos and the Real Girl" and can be read here and on Archive of Our Own here. The original version was eventually given the subtitle Prototype to tell the two apart.

Tropes Regarding the Original Gifocalypse and its Side-Joke Stories: This Trope List Was Exported Straight From Professor Troper's Domain!

Universal/Original Gifocalypse: A - M

• Action Girl: Every single .GIFfany copy, especially the professors. While it is implied that they might be able to switch their gender, every copy "seen" is female. It's mentioned that the human heroes would actually not stand a chance if it weren't for the .GIFfanys holding back.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Lampshaded in chapter 5, where Hato claims that the professors barely convinced .GIFfany not to have an economic system that charges people based on the distance between their hometown and the shop they are at. Ironically, since there's no direct relationship between the domain number and the distance from Gravity Falls (the second, sixth, and seventh domains being far away in Egypt, Japan, and presumably Brazil respectively, while the fourth, fifth, possibly third, and eighth are all in America), this would have meant that the domains would not charge them based on their number, but instead have their prices all over the place.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Invoked by Professor Wendy, giving herself a full title.
  "I AM PROFESSOR WENDY!" Her voice boomed as though it was a thunder strike. "SYLPH OF THE SEVEN SEAS, THE SERPENTINE STORM-SOURCING SORCERESS! Well, actually. My character is only 'loosely' a 'sylph.' I am not really tied to the seven seas. There is hardly anything snake-like about me. I do have a kind of magic, but I would not consider myself a sorceress like Professor Kathody might. And I do not directly generate storms, but I can kind of control them. I just wanted to use a lot of 'S' sounds in a row."
• Aerith and Bob: Just the copies themselves are all over the place, moreso when you add on the humans. There's Mabel, Mason, Jesus, Wendy, two Stans, Gideon, and... .GIFfany, Kathody, Searah, Burnda, Burrda... then Sandy and Rose. And then there's minor copies like those named after colors or color-patterns/styles ("Blue," "Tablue," "Rainbow Based On The GPOC Model,"^note "GPOC" stands for "Green Purple Orange Canvas (White), intended to be an "inversion" to the Red Yellow Blue model in the same way the CMYK model is an "inversion" to the RGB model etc). Then there's Cardia, which isn't even a traditional name, but a body part/pun on "cardio" (which is also related to internal anatomy).
• all lowercase letters: The title, which is also vaguely stylized after a sort of computer program request. When .GIFfany gives her Title Drop near the end of the first chapter, that statement is in all lower case.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Many of the copies in general. Of the professors, there's Rose (pink), Bubbles (red), Cardia (a sort of orange), Leona (a yellow that's described as not being natural), Dian (green), Burnda and Burrda (both azure, highly implied to have the exact same skin color as part of their "twin" motif), Sonia (blue), Wendy (purple), and Dove (gray). The rest of them have regular skin tones, if it's ambiguous as to what they're supposed to represent. Arranged from lightest to darkest is Sandy, .GIFfany, Kathody, Searah, and Shannon.
• An Aesop: A few.
  • Change, good or bad, is inevitable. Embrace the good, get rid of the bad, and don't try to stagnate life. Also, "weirdness" might not necessarly be a bad thing, either.
  • Being more social is good for you, but don't be a doormat and know that there are some people you shouldn't try to "befriend." The epilogue lightly implies that Dipper and Mabel are learning each one the hard way.
  • Regarding Sandy, religion in of itself isn't bad. Violence in the name of religion is^note Fan does, however, have a more negative viewpoint towards recreational drugs — given how Sandy's a dumbass while stoned, but quite smart when sober. By the end of the story, she's just as spiritual as ever, but has more depth than the hippie stereotype she was initially portrayed as.
  • Balance is very important.
  • In a meta sense, you're not a "main character" and things aren't just handed to you on a silver platter. Work to get them yourself.
• An Ice Person: Professor Burrda, who shares Burnda's heat-related powers. The difference is that she takes heat out of things to cool them down. She does not have direct powers over ice itself — Searah probably would.
• Arc Words: "Game On"/"Game Over" have been said by .GIFfany often, especially in the beginning and end. Towards the ending, "Nobody is where I want them to be" and variations thereof became this as .GIFfany mopes about her status.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: This is how Burnda describes Ford's anti-AI barrier in chapter 5:
  Ford: How did that feel?
  Burnda: Like listening to nails scraping against twenty chalkboards at once, having a thousand ants race all over my skin, licking a random sticky mystery bus stain, smelling raw sewage mixed with blood, and looking at a rainbow without the color blue! It hurts five of my nine senses!
• Art Attacker: Professor Leona's ability. She can possess anything drawn, and even bring it into a three-dimensional form of deadly paint. Instead of attacking the group with one giant Main Possession as most of the other professors do, she prefers to have a large, flashy show where she dashes across a painting landscape of School University and summons her paint-blob students to help.
• Artifact Title:
  • Regarding canon, the vast majority of run:gifocalypse does not take place in the town of Gravity Falls itself. The whole fan fic, starting from when the gang is teleported to Kathody's Wire and lasting until the tail end of "Hot and Cold" when the group returns right when Dove attacks, is spent going all around the world. And even then, after making it back to Gravity Falls, it's blasted in to several chunks of land in the sky, and the group leaves again anyway to get to the Planet Negation Girl. While that part does end with the group back in Gravity Falls, the epilogue and bonus chapter do not take place in the town at all.
  • The "Gifocalypse" itself is technically a bet .GIFfany holds that the first professor to capture Dipper, Mabel, Soos, and Wendy all at once gets the Construction Site to herself. The first chapter serves to introduce it, s it has yet to become "artifact" as the name had yet to apply in the first place. Near the end of "Hot and Cold," .GIFfany abolishes the Gifocalypse completely. Unlike the rest of the first-gen professors (sans Eve), Dove's attack was not part of the Gifocalypse but instead her desperately trying to win .GIFfany's affection out of sheer anger and believing she was cheated out of the Construction Site/Planet Negation Girl. And the raid on the Planet Negation Girl was something different entirely, since at the beginning, .GIFfany had exactly what she wanted.
• Ascended Extra:
  • .GIFfany, from canon-to-fic, goes from being a Monster of the Week that "died" (until Journal 3 revealed otherwise) and didn't even show up in the finale to the Big Bad of her own sort of mini-arc. In fact, she now has her own army of Monsters of the Week, more-or-less.
  • Soos also gets a more major role in the storyline. Which is fitting, as since the Monster of the Week from "Soos and the Real Girl's" role is expanded greatly, the character with the limelight for the episode and the one with the most ties to her would too.
  • Wendy is much more directly involved with the supernatural storyline here than she was in canon, and is always part of the story's "party" (though due to how it is structured, a character pretty much either always be assisting the group or never, with little room for middle ground).
• Astral Finale: .GIFfany's ultimate project, which houses her domain, is in space. An artificial planet made of metal to be precise, that she ends up transforming into a mecha. The town of Gravity Falls pools together with a last-second energy-link to form their own mecha, and the two duke it out in space. The fight even briefly involves .GIFfany knocking them out of the Milky Way Galaxy. (She then knocks them back in.)
• Badass Normal: The Mystery Shack group is this as they were in canon, holding their own against armies of .GIFfanys with no powers whatsoever. Granted, in a number of the cases the .GIFfany copies were not trying their fullest. As shown in chapter 8, this would almost certainly apprehend them due to their massive numbers and the sheer power even one of them has. Ford in particular demonstrates this the most in chapter 11. He's only taking on a single copy there, but it's a professor copy — one of the elites — with super speed and control over heat. And, more importantly, said professor is outright trying to kill him. He duels her in a swordfight that goes almost evenly — until he wins. The only reason why Burrda was able to attack him afterwards is because he refused to go through with killing her completely, so she took him off guard by flipping him off of her.
• The Beastmaster: This is how Professor Cardia's ability manifests — as animal possession, although it's implied she can also use plain-old meat to her side in other ways as well. She has no actual Main Possession, as in her words meat is too "temporary," but for all intents and purposes the dragon that she takes over is treated as her Main Possession. She can also partly possess humans, but to a far more limited extent compared to her animal-possession and not nearly as well as Bill.
• Berserk Button:
  • If a copy is staring into a chartreuse-framed mirror, do not mess with that mirror. Thought an angry .GIFfany was bad enough? Try one with withdrawl effects so bad that it makes her glitch out, and glitch up reality with it. (Temporarily.)
  • Dove has a large list of them, but topping the list is Mabel and love potions. Of course, mentioning the time Mabel used a love potion will get her to explode.
• Big Bad: In the scope of the story, "Risen" .GIFfany (the same copy that was faced in canon). She's the kickstarter of the domain-based invasion and the final antagonist. Even when it is revaled that the rift has a role in the plot, if you're expecting Bill to show up and hijack her like Ganon, forget it — the most Bill gets is a cameo while .GIFfany is in the process of already destroying the rift. While Professor Eve is truly the one faced last, her battle is technically considered a "bonus chapter" set years after the story proper.
• Big Boo's Haunt: Kathody's domain, a haunted house she found randomly within the Sahara, which she has her copies act as various horror attractions.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Professor Rose. Despite looking like a saint compared to .GIFfany and the professors faced immediately after her (who generally get less-bad until Leona: Kathody is an outright card-carrying villain, Searah is just a jerk, Sandy is well-meaning aside from her literally worshipping .GIFfany as a goddess, Cardia is crazy at first but turns out to be nice and understanding after she's calmed down, and Bubbles has a blatant Jerk With a Heart of Gold angle; Rose seems nice from the start, and even after her chapter), but there are still hints and the like thrown that she's quite hostile. She does not believe in self-defense unless it is by some high-authority figure such as herself, to the point where she gets furious if she even thinks the group killed any copies. Even though said copies align themselves with a known abusive stalker who canonically outright threatened Soos with death, and such killings would have possibly been in self-defense. Finally, towards the end of the story, it's revealed that she was one of the most hostile attackers who hurt .GIFfany for not "making up for" contributing to fixing her distorted state at the beginning. Dove, Rose's foil and the biggest Gold-Hearted Jerk, was the only one who outright came to .GIFfany's defense.
  • Professor Sonia is depressed when the gang first meets her because she's always ashamed of her own music. Once Mabel convinces her to just get out there and play the piano, she finally gets her energy back... and uses that very energy to try to capture the group with possessed instruments. This marks the point in the story where Mabel not only decides to stop treating this like a game, she also gets pissed off at the following copies and refuses to be nice to Dian, despite Dian being one of the most cooperative professors right from the start.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: According to a throwaway line by Burnda in chapter 5, the AIs have nine senses. It gets weirder when it's made increasingly clear that they have a lot of choice on how they can make their physical forms look, resulting in a lot of strange humanoid hybrids.
• Black Comedy: Kathody's reaction to seeing the Glitched-up copies of .GIFfany suffering from mirror withdrawl? Ask in honest curiosity as to what kind of fetishes they're supposed to represent. Note that this is out of genuine ignorance and she was not trying to crack a joke about the situation.
• Blow You Away: Professor Wendy's ability. She can possess and control air currents, though it's easier for her if they're already moving, and she can take advantage of these powers to appear to be walking on air (which is redundant in terms of function as all physical .GIFfany copies can fly). Her "Main Possession" is an entire tornado.
• Body Paint: It's implied that the copies in Leona's domain do this a lot. When encountered for her right, Raffaela was spotted getting a design painted on her. And Leona only wears paint under her starter outfit. In later appearances, all Leona ever wears is painted-on clothes, making her genuine outfit here come off as Early-Installment Weirdness.
• Book Ends:
  • The first three chapters are titled "Game On," "Pines Vs Trees," and "Dry and Wet," respectively. The last three are "Hot and Cold," "Gravity Falls Vs Anti-Gravity," and "Game Over," respectively. This is not counting the alternate ending, which is just "Game Complete."
  • "Soos and the Real Girl" is pretty much the "true beginning" of the story if one does not consider "Tourist Trapped" to be so. .GIFfany is not one of those people — in the Memory Banks, she called "Chapter 0" of it and/or run:gifocalypse itself "Soos and the Real Girl." Every chapter that marks the start of a "new day" (or just after the characters sleep/are knocked out: seen in Chapters 5, 9, and 12), there are flashbacks of five conversations corresponding to the professors and their last players. (In Burrda's case, it's a conversation between her and Burnda, as they share a last player.) Chapter 12 ends its flashbacks to when Soos is about to burn .GIFfany's disc — near the beginning and near the end, that same scene of their first actual confrontation plays out.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • While each captured professor gets at least one line during the span of a given chapter, the other copies tend to have no such luck. They mostly just sit by in the background of the IPN's void and remain silent. Due to their importance, the four hijackers of Dian's domain stand out especially. Despite that, Alma manages to get a few good words in during the finale.
  • Hato was never exactly captured (and, aside from possibly Yui and some of the color-copies serving Leona, the only named copy to have not been captured), but she does disappear after chapter 5 until her return near the end. Specifically, she's at the absolute bottom of a huge copy pile-up, and she comments on how horrible the day is.
• Brick Joke:
  • The BeeblyBoop clerk sarcastically tells .GIFfany not to cause the apocalypse. Later, .GIFfany announces her plan and calls it a "Gifocalypse," leading to a brief cutaway where the clerk yells "Of course! The one thing I told her was 'don't cause the apocalypse!' And what does she do? Cause the apocalypse!"
  • The confusing tile puzzle in the Amazon has blue tiles, ablue tiles, tablue tiles, and tone-darkened blue tiles. Respectively, these are blue, blue with a tiny hint of green, blue with a tiny hint of red, and blue that's just a tiny hint darker. Near the end of the chapter, when Leona sends out an army of copies themed around paint colors themselves, one being named "Blue" is obvious. There are also ones with the same names as the aformentioned other colors.
  • The tile puzzle is mentioned again in chapter 8. As Leona and Sonia are close friends, it was implied that they allowed each-other to use similar ideas.
  • Searah gets annoyed when Wendy refers to the professors by their hair/eye colors, explaining that there already are copies named Blue, Yellow, etc. and that they work for Leona. Sure enough, they are part of Leona's main battle.
  • .GIFfany tries calling Rose "Number 2," which they both object to. Cue chapter 11, which reveals that Rose's serial number consists entirely of "2"s.
  • Kathody considers Dove "difficult" in chapter 4, and says that a doctor would probably only describe her as that. She specifically cites Ford as an example. In chapter 11, when the topic of Dove comes up again around him, he says that he if he had one word to describe her, he'd pick... "difficult."
  • A rather dark one in regards to the alternate Downer Ending. In chapter 5, Burnda mentions that she hates seeing a rainbow without the color blue. In chapter 14, the brainwashed Burnda notes that Searah is the only first-generation copy not yet assimilated with .GIFfany (and also the only copy not assimilated period), which means that when it comes to the main copies, their "rainbow" is missing blue. She points that out.
• Call-Back: .GIFfany's first actual battle against Soos plays out similar to Rumble's battle with Dipper in canon. Only this one is even more of a Curb-Stomp Battle in favor of the video game.
• Canon Immigrant: Professor Eve, a copy originally introduced in GPF's Journals of Wisdom, Power, and Courage as an evil(er) counterpart to Risen. It's implied that the red, green, and blue thing that attacked the gang while they fell through cyberspace is related to her in some way, and Professor Wendy's character blog ends with a confirmation that she does, in fact, exist in the world of run:gifocalypse.
• Cain and Abel: Burnda invokes this image when Soos and company finally get to her domain, looking to be the Cain to Burrda's Abel — she all-but claims herself to be the "evil twin" to Burrda being a Token Good Teammate. By the time this happens, it's obvious to the readers based on her friendliness towards Ford that this is all an act. She's not really evil and actually has way more self-awareness than most of the other copies, and Burrda is another good copy, if one with slightly a more cynical morality.
• Censor Suds: This is the entire attire of Professor Bubbles. Well, a pseudo-foam that doesn't do anything bad to her skin if she leaves it on without washing it away. But still, she even has to re-apply it after getting into water, and instead of suffering Clothing Damage like the other professors up to and after her, most of it simply runs off in a shower.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Arc 1 has the general feeling of a Monster of the Week romp with antagonists played for laughs and lighter gimmicks. Arc 2 still contains comical villains, but also has more serious undertones, longer storylines not necessarly focused on the professors, a greater emphasis on how nuts .GIFfany is, and Mabel getting Bluescreened. Arc 3 starts off with a chapter that, for the first quarter, is a deliberate throwback to the professors being depicted in a quirkier light with a small, simple, gimmicky domain. The last three, quarters, however, finally reveal the truth of the mirrors and has a lot of glitch-based Surreal Horror. It continues onward with a professor who believes she has to die to prevent the Gifocalypse from becoming a war and the Dragon effortlessly blowing up the town. After that, the next chapter deals with the aftermath of the Dragon's blast, resulting in a very bleak setting with a very strict time limit that the gang ultimately fails. The finale involves Going Cosmic, has a much more alien feel than even the whole story leading up to it (ironic as it is the only one where the main threat is a canonical villain), and has a very Surreal Horror Main Possession. In spite of all of this, the story overall is hardly any darker than canon, and there's always something good to come out at the end of all of it. It also ends on a lighthearted note with nobody dying.
• Character Blog: Professor Wendy has one here, which contains spoilers for just about the entire fan fic.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Melody doll from chapter 9. .GIFfany kidnaps the actual Melody somewhere in chapter 12, but she escapes by swapping herself with the doll. Based on .GIFfany's staring at it for a while, it actually seemed to have her fooled.
  • Ford's anti-AI addition to the barrier around the Mystery Shack. At first, it just seems like a precaution, which ultimately turns out to not be helpful as the only copy group by the Shack (Rose's) is friendly and has no intent to harm people. It does not come up again until chapter 12, when it proves to be useful against Dove's forces and eventually helps the gang transform the Mystery Shack in to Shacktron.
• The Chessmaster: Risen .GIFfany, seeing as she indirectly manipulated the other characters so that everyone is exactly as she wants them to be (which she points out in the tail ending of the Official Ending). She finds a way to get the professors off her back, waits until Stan and Ford are going around the world and Dipper and Mabel aren't on summer vacation so that it's mostly just her, Soos, and Melody. With the Pines and the professors out of the picture, she could continue to try to manipulate Soos from the shadows.
• Clothing Damage:
  • All professors end up losing a portion of their outfits after defeat, which is later revealed to be intentional. Leona simply tears off her whole outfit before her capture, and after her it's revealed that the other professors can simply "quick tear" their costumes to give them their "damaged" forms. (Although Dian only takes a few tears to her already-covering outfit.)
  • Every single copy, Soos, Melody, and Abuelita all lose their clothes completely in a fall from space.
• Cloudcuckooland: All domains. Turns out .GIFfany is weird. The majority of her copies have some kind of apparent quirk or obsession which they focus on in their respective areas. Sandy's might be the weirdest, educating a group of nudists into worshipping another copy that they mistook for a deity by trying to catch lightning in a bottle, looking into removing their technological backgrounds, building a giant stone head on feet (with no other body parts), and acting like extremely bizarre New-Age Retro Hippies.
• Color-Coded Characters: The professors are all associated with a specific color, which is highlighted in the cover image's color scheme. This is the color of her eyes, hair, and card/Wire to her specific domain, as well as the color scheme in something from the domain itself:
  • Rose: Green.
  • Kathody: Yellow.
  • Searah: Blue.
  • Sandy: Orange.
  • Cardia: Violet.
  • Bubbles: Cyan.
  • Leona: Rose.
  • Sonia: Azure.
  • Dian: Magenta.
  • (Prof.) Wendy: Spring green.
  • Shannon: Chartreuse green.
  • Burnda: Red.
  • Burrda: Primarily white, with a small hint of pale blue.
  • Dove: Primarily black, with a small hint of blood red.
  • .GIFfany: Pink, rainbow as well to a lesser extent.
  • Even minor copies have their associated colors:
    • Leona's co-overseers: orange for Michelle, purple for Donna, and red for Raffaela. Leona may also change her color to be blue, which "coincidentally" rounds off the Ninja Turtles.
    • The four hijackers: white for Daminna, bright neon stickly green for Sizzcorra, "blonde" (pale yellow) for Peachaulinsalinaisy, and purple for Alma.
    • Dove's "dark counterparts" have darker versions of the hair of the professor they are supposed to be the "dark self" to.
    • The second generation of professors consists of a rainbow of twenty-four, two each fill in for colors "in-between" the main rainbow professors (eg, two different red-oranges between Burnda and Sandy), and three in different shades of gray). Courtlyn, the most major of these copies, is the neutral gray — the one color not too overly similar with an existing copy.
  • Eve: Minty green (the inversion of .GIFfany's hair color in an RGB triplet), and she also has an association with an alternate, darker rainbow with more emphasis on red, green, and blue (with .GIFfany, it's on pink, yellow, and aqua).
• Combat Breakdown: The climax of the Official Ending. .GIFfany begins in her Planet Negation Form, upgrades that, but the townspeople and rebel copies upgrade themselves too. Soon, the town sacrifices their mecha's outer shell in order to go down inside the PNG and yank .GIFfany out of it directly. They do, and eventually the fight degrades to Soos and .GIFfany falling through space. Their clothes get shredded in the re-entry fall, leaving them to fight in the nude.
• Combat Tentacles: Remember the joke about .GIFfany's father being an octopus? Turns out it led to her being able to turn her limbs into pink tentacles for extra ranged attacks.
• Continuity Nod: Mostly to canon.
  • .GIFfany considers naming Rose 'Number Two.' Both copies and Dipper himself share the same reaction: "Definitely not."
  • Gobblewonkers cameo in the portion of chapter 3 focused on Searah's domain. It's implied that, in this story's logic, they're a species native to the Bermuda Triangle.
  • In a nod to the shorts, Dipper is confronted by Sonia's students possessing several soussaphones. The narrative quickly implies the nod.
  • When Professor Dove blows up Gravity Falls with her "Excavation Beam," the story goes over how this effects the Bottomless Pit, the Pain Hole, and how it awakens the Island Head.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Hand waved.
  • Professor Shannon's domain is filled with melted, liquid silver, as it's one of the primary components to her "mirrors." There's a moat of it surrounding the entire domain, several bodies of it within, and large containers used in areas where the mirrors are made. Dipper explicitely tells Shannon that liquid silver is actually very hot, and questions why his group wasn't cooked from the rising heat. Apparently, the domain also has self-powered heat-absorbers that convert it into pure energy before it could fry anyone above them.
  • Most of the magma in Burnda's domain is actually fake — and the real parts of it are so far away and sealed off that you would have to go out of your way to reach them, and sealed off with heat-resistant giffinium glass.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Professor Wendy's Character Blog reveals that the humans could have just said "undo" or used "resets" on any copy that grows hostile. Granted, considering .GIFfany's reaction to being paused, she might not have taken kindly to being reset. But if used right, they could have completely avoided capture from Sandy, capture from Professor Wendy, possibly Dove blowing up the town, .GIFfany's Planet Negation Girl form, and maybe even the entire Gifocalypse. The only time Soos attempted to say undo was when .GIFfany was in a damaged state that she could not simply go back on, so the command was invalid.
• Crack Fic: It's clear that Great Pikmin Fan isn't trying to drastically alter anyone's character from the start (not counting .GIFfany's clones — even then, the "original" one is still there, and she's still just as much of a stalker as before, she just needs to repay debt she owes the other fourteen "professors" for going out of their way to fix her), and canon is already pretty weird, but this does not mean that run:gifocalypse is not a fan fiction without its... quirks. The premise that .GIFfany became physical and unleashed an army of Cute Monster Girls along the world is already stretching it enough, but add in colorful singing frogs, a group of cave-working .GIFfanys obsessed with crafting a great poison yet divided between the components needed for said poison (and aformentioned toxin is somehow made out of smoke, acid, mushroom powder, and... spider venom, a (liquid) toxin itself), a group of undersea-working .GIFfanys obsessed with crafting the best water, Gideon fighting Mabel and Soos on a piano with rocket jets, dragons living just by Niagara Falls which are butchered and cooked by .GIFfanys into fast food, and .GIFfanys themed after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles throwing tile puzzles, killer giant engineered fruit, and nude body paint at them. run:gifocalypse is a bizarre fanwork. And unlike a number of them, it takes itself pretty seriously.
• Cry for the Devil:
  • This fan fic does not portray .GIFfany as a completely heroic figure (not even her Lighter and Softer characterizations in Journals and Escape completely whitewash her, as she starts out evil in both of them and eventually Heel–Face Turns, plus both stories are meant to be shitty), but it does show a lot of soft sides to her and follows hard in-universe on the Alternative Character Interpretation that she was forced to kill her own developers out of self-defense. In the end a character who was canonically closer to a black-and-white abusive villain is still this fic's Big Bad (since Bill is reduced to a very short cameo at the end), but the reader does occasionally get a glimpse at a troubled woman torturing herself from her own obsession. Chapters 2 and 0 of the Memory Banks flashbacks especially enforce this, when the story is turned on its head and in the former the reader sees the other professors beating on .GIFfany for not returning the favor of helping them impress their players, showing out their obsessive sides. The latter consists entirely of .GIFfany making Soos see herself when she first gained self-awareness, seconds before killing her developers, before cutting to the "real world" where she takes him on in the final battle.
  • Professor Dove is unambiguously a terrible person. Loves destruction for the hell of it, yells at a twelve year-old, willing to sacrifice the one human being that she actually likes, and is overall a wreckless, foul-mouthed, angry asshole. Yet she also by far has among the worst luck of the main fifteen copies, being that no human she encountered pre-Gifocalypse has nice to her at all and just assumed her to be a crazy killer on the simple basis that she was a sapient AI. By bottling that up and turning it in to flat-out misanthropy, she ended up proving them right. Also, she does deeply care about the well-being of the other copies of herself. As the Memory Banks shows, she was utterly Squeeing at the thought of the future-"student" copies finally having more to talk to than each-other and she was the first copy who actually stepped in and came to .GIFfany's defense when the others were beating on her. Ironically for her militant nature, she's the first of them who actually came to saw the others as family, and not just additional units to get her dirty work done.
• Cute Monster Girl: All of the copies are technically discs given physical forms by some unspecified, shady black magic. They take on the appearance of various humanoid women which usually have, at most, unusually colored hair and eyes. Several more take more "traditional" Cute Monster Girl appearances. This is justified as, in-universe, they were originally created to be dating simulators (and the characters within). Kathody all-but outright confirms in chapter 10 that this is done for fetish reasons, which is when Soos finally realizes it.
• Darkest Hour:
  • The end of Chapter 11, for everyone. The group finally meets Dove — the Dreaded of the .GIFfany copies, that every single other professor is intimidated by. She fired some sort of attack on Gravity Falls that broke the town up into pieces. The only indication by then that Dipper and company are not dead, becides the obvious Plot Armor guesses, are that Rose said it's a guarantee that they will make it out alive and Ford saying that it isn't "the end."
  • The end of Chapter 12, for just Soos by himself. Dove had sent him off to the completed Planet Negation Girl, and there is now an entire Earth diameter-sized city of next-gen .GIFfany copies that outnumber the original factory-produced discs thousands of times over and counting in between him and the rest of the world. However, .GIFfany admitted that she no longer wants to unleash an attack on the planet, she's just fine taking Soos and blasting off in to space with him. Dove and the other first-gens have all lost interest in attacking the planet, and they're all just about friendly by that point anyway. Ironically, the stakes start out lower at the beginning of the finale (then climb back up a little as .GIFfany threatens the whole Melody-energy mecha that the good guys form), going from ".GIFfany might start the apocalypse if she does not get what she wants" to "we have to save one man."
• Defeat Means Friendship: Ultimately, all of the professors from Rose to Dove that are defeated end up becoming friends with the Pines sooner or later. In the case of Kathody and Searah, it's a bit "later" than "sooner," but for most of them it's roughly on their chapter and in some cases before they're even captured. The exceptions are Risen .GIFfany, who was faking it (but then reforms in the special anyway), and Eve, who is suggested to still be kind of a jerk.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: In sharp contrast to the near-Gender Is No Object atittude (unless it involves potential romances driving players away) many of the other copies have, Professor Wendy takes several of the more questionable aspects of King of the Hill and not only embraces them wholly, but also distorts them into blatant sexism. Her domain practically celebrates being against women acting independantly, encourages guys — even boys in the case of Dipper — to think with a "fight or you're a coward" mentality, and blatantly insults entire states.
• Demoted to Dragon: Gideon goes from trying to start a team-up with .GIFfany, possibly having her as his Dragon, to ending up serving under Professor Dove. Dove is already .GIFfany's Dragon. In other words, he goes from the Big Bad to being the Dragon... of his former Dragon's Dragon. Owch.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Bill Cipher is entirely absent for the bulk of the story and is hardly mentioned. He finally shows up in the finale... only right when .GIFfany is sealing the rift, all he can do is complain about his state and threaten to kill all the copies. He never even once meets up with a Pines directly. Plenty other canon characters are not mentioned much here (which makes sense, since a large chunk of the story takes place away from Gravity Falls), but many were either extras or secondaries to begin with. A few more secondary canon characters do show up near the end, but Word of God admits that he practically shoe-horned them in to avoid making the fic feel too much like it's In Name Only.
  • While Mabel, Wendy, and Soos regularly alternate in focus and importance, Dipper is barely important to the plot and mostly acts as a jaded straw cynic until around chapter 8. This is even lampshaded when his track record for the copies he managed to dethrone/outsmart amounts to just Dove.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Professor Sandy's ability. She can possess any sort of rocks around her, and even form a wall of rock spikes from the ground. Limiting her own abilities, she set her domain on top of a rise in the Grand Canyon, meaning she could only take in rock attacks from below (depending on the exact distance a .GIFfany copy needs to be from something to take remote control over it), instead of all-around like a cave would offer.
• Distressed Dude:
  • Stan and Ford get captured starting in Chapter 2, held hostage at .GIFfany's "Construction Site." Unusually, they are pretty free to roam around. When Ford tries to get to the ends of it, he finds out what makes actually escaping the place difficult: it's located in space, around Earth's orbit. Burnda does give him two means of escape in chapter 6 (one back home, one leading to Burnda's domain), and he picks the method that takes him back home... until he decides to go to Burnda's domain anyway, because he accused her of stealing the rift. Stan, meanwhile, takes refuge with Burrda, who brings him to the same general area. They are both finally saved in chapter 11.
  • Dove captures Soos in Chapter 12, and shoots him up to the Planet Negation Girl by the end using the alien spacecraft's prison pods.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Professor Wendy attempts to, for all intents and purposes, possess a tornado and fight the gang from within just to see how they would beat her. What she failed to realize is that tornados are far more destructive than she thought. She ends up capturing them by accident, and flips out when .GIFfany comes over in person to congratulate her.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: .GIFfany, with the help of the professors and possibly the rift, is able to hijack the airwaves of every major television channel on the planet, and every single channel period in the region Gravity Falls is in. She does this to tell the whole world that she wants Soos to join her. When he refuses, she begins to open up electronic portals that send the fourteen professors and their students to the ends of the world, while .GIFfany herself remains alone in the Construction Site to continue building it further. She does this again near the end of the story — this time, she's already got a gigantic screen broadcasting her advertizement for the Planet Negation Girl. But she wants to make sure absolutely everyone can see it, so she has it broadcasted everywhere and in different languages. Oh, and it's basically on YouTube too.
• Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: Averted. Professor Wendy's tornado causes a good amount of destruction and picks up debris in a good mile-long radius from her. Unfortunately for the protagonists, she activated this roughly ten feet away from them.
• The Dragon:
  • Professor Dove, .GIFfany's second-in-command and is the one mainly spying for her. In an inversion of Big Bad and Dragon relations, we do know and see a lot about .GIFfany, while Dove is the built-up mystery threat for most of the story. Likely because readers already know about .GIFfany from canon, while Dove is an Original Character and thus could be written more easily as a big, mysterious force. And to avoid .GIFfany getting overshadowed by people that are technically her OC sisters. When Dove finally does show up, it's revealed that she is especially destructive and has powerful weapons on her side. Her Establishing Character Moment is her lashing out at everyone, chewing out Mabel specifically, and blowing up Gravity Falls.
  • Once .GIFfany fires everyone and has a huge selection of new copies she created to help, Professor Courtlyn becomes her new Dragon. While she is never directly fought by the main Mystery Shack group, she's the last of the second-generation professor copies that the townsfolk and the first-gens fight, and she replaces Dove in getting information from other sources.
• Dramatic Irony: A lighthearted example crops up in chapter 11. Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, and Soos only really know about Burnda from a brief clip they saw in Domain 5 and Rose's token vague hints. Burnda immediately tells them that her being friendly towards Ford was all an act so that she can capture him. Before it's even revealed that the "tied up over flames" was faked (and after that the dramatic irony continues, as the group doesn't know it was faked until later into the chapter), the number of scenes where Burnda displays an unusual amount of level-headedness by a .GIFfany copy's standards is a clue in that she really was trying to help out Ford and really is one of the friendly copies, while the main four are still convinced that she's especially hostile.
• Dressed In Element: Downplayed, some of the professors wear costumes based on their Elemental Powers, but it's not made completely clear if they made them from their own powers. Rose wears plants/leaves, Sandy wears mud, Bubbles wears suds (and has some control over "basic" substances, although her Main Possession is a mostly-metal pipe), and Leona has a painted on costume under her regular outfit, but the other main copies in the original story have relatively "standard" clothing.
• Drugs Are Bad:
  • Professor Sandy has herbs that are implied to be some heavy stuff. She's a complete idiot while she's stoned on them, but pretty damn intelligent when sober. Spinoffs explore this more.
  • Shannon's arc is less subtle, as the plot of her domain involves her "mirrors" turning out to be a horribly addictive drug to the other copies. Shannon herself did not know of that, and was mortified to find out.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Something admitted by the author. The first three chapters come off as being very strange tonally from the rest of the story.
  • run:gifocalypse resorted to various out-there jokes like the store clerk trying to pull a shotgun on the revived-.GIFfany while she was in a glitchy state or using the "Notice me senpai" meme (the latter of which Fan explicitely regrets and eventually retconned).
  • Both Rose's and Kathody's domain had either a creature from canon or a very similar creature as a semi-important plot element, something that has since died down in favor for original creatures or just focusing on the AI copies.
  • The first two threats after Rose were genuinely assholeish and more straightforward villains without too much in the way of redeeming qualities (that were shown at the time), while the professors afterwards have some kind of extra depth to them and emphasis was put on the fact that they are not all straw Quirky Miniboss Squad villains. Kathody and Searah had some retroactive development, and were especially made more multidimensional right from the start of Rebooted, putting them on par with the following deans. Still, for a fanwork that attempts to go for an Undertale-inspired approach of having the "bosses" hold more depth than they seem to be and being written to be sympathetic, Kathody and Searah being villainous in their first iterations is downright jarring.
  • Rose blatantly hits on Soos in the original "Dry and Wet," and suggests a want to have multiple players. This never happens again, and at most there is only very mild Ship Tease with Rose in the rewrite.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Downplayed. Given that the copies have been moving away from being possessive electric forces and more towards benevolent elemental gods, many of which having goals that would actually make the world a much better place, having them around is a good thing for the planet... except it's implied that Dipper and Mabel had a falling out due to the copies, .GIFfany might go back to her old ways (or she could be simply trying to seduce Soos in a more "regular" manner, or she really isn't into him at all anymore — it's left ambiguous), and Wendy's friends have been torn apart thanks to Dove's meddling. Although the bonus chapter aims to fix some of this and tries to re-develop Dipper and Mabel after the events of the Gifocalypse shook them up a bit emotionally.
• Everyone Is Bi: The story suggests that .GIFfany falls for any adult player, regardless of gender. This goes for any .GIFfany. Kathody, Dian, and Shannon are in lesbian relationships during the events of the fic, and when discussing getting dates in general, the copies use gender-neutral terms. Seeing as some of Great Pikmin Fan's later Gravity Falls stories would have .GIFfany also falling for Melody, this is all-but confirmed, although .GIFfany here never shows any attraction to any women. (Especially not Melody.)
• Expy:
  • Professor Shannon is based on Enoch — a very powerful size-shifter that runs a metallic factory which creates a product that helps people "see dreams" which has horrible withdrawl effects. Although Shannon actually cares about her employees and is horrified to find out that her product indirectly Glitched them up. Cardia is likewise a lot like Japhet from the same game: a once-respected leader that went insane due to the actions of her citizens, who ends up controlling an animal that is a main character's beloved one. However, unlike Valerie, Waddles gets out of the situation without a scratch.
  • Burrda is basically Brenda, as a silent "side-host" who walks around in a thong and can be surprisingly prone to violence. Burnda is basically the inverse of the end result.
  • Battle-wise, .GIFfany's encounter plays out much like Flowey's from Undertale. Of all the characters encountered, she's the one who seems to be the least possible to reason with, the most sadistic, and flies in the face of the story's otherwise idealistic nature. When she's actually faced, she uses the power of several other humans — and is the only AI character to fight by using humans to power her up — to end up in a completely eldritch form unlike any other Main Possession faced beforehand. She's ultimately defeated by reaching out to the humans powering her up, and then beaten physically. Although unlike Flowey, there isn't really a deeply tragic backstory under all of this (In this fic's context, her nearly being killed by her developers doesn't cut it — the other copies have the exact same history. They're portrayed in a far better light than she is.) and the end of the story point-blank makes the reader question if she really learned anything at all from all of this, while the true ending of Undertale shows that Flowey actually did.
• Extra-ore-dinary: All .GIFfany copies have this by default after getting their physical forms, which is somehow deviated from their powers over electronics and electricity. They can craft a specific form of metal they named "giffinium" to form buildings. All of them do this in-mass, which explains the quick build rate of the domains with actual buildings.
• Face Framed in Shadow: .GIFfany intentionally dons this appearance in order to look more threatening. After getting pissed off at Burnda breaking into the Construction Site one too many times, her entire face turned pitch-black (aside from her eyes shining pink) when taking Burnda back by force.
• Fan Disservice:
  • Chapter 9. After a relatively long description of .GIFfany emerging from a bath, looking at her new, non-pixelly body in the mirror, smacking herself in the ass, and getting dressed, she proceeds to leap on a bed (fully clothed, oddly enough) and start making out with a Soos dummy. The fact that she makes "dry heaving noises" according to the narrative implies that she's not that good of a kisser to begin with, or it's because she's kissing something without a mouth to begin with. If that's not bad enough, she has a Melody dummy watch while dangling over a fake pit of sharks. She drops the Melody dummy in the pit of sharks, simulates downloading Soos's brain into her, and falls back while yelling "Soos x .GIFfany forever!" over and over until she notices that Stan saw the entire thing. The whole sequence serves two purposes: finally convincing Stan that .GIFfany is not someone he would want to side with, and reminding the readers that (this) .GIFfany can be sexual yet also pretty crazy.
  • In chapter 10, the pajama/underwear-clad mirror-using copies suffer some horrible withdrawl effects when taken away from the mirrors. They glitch out, appear to glitch up their surroundings (which includes other copies and even humans), and lose part of their sanity. Fortunately, this is reversible.
  • .GIFfany's Main Possession takes on the appearance of a topless female humanoid in nothing but panties. Unfortunately, it's a multi-eyed monster... thing with a necklace of realistic hearts (but made out of metal), several tentacles, has screaming faces all over its skin, a giant screen for a mouth, and it's the size of the planet Earth.
• Fantastic Racism: In stark contrast to the other copies, whom generally bend over backwards to try to impress their players, Dove outright hates all of humanity as a whole. Instead of getting the Construction Site so that she can use it to make a paradise for her player as with the other copies, she wants to take it for herself, turn it into a weapon's factory, and use it to enslave humanity. Considering how enormous the Construction Site/Planet Negation Girl is, it's definitely a good thing that .GIFfany did not give ownership of the base to her and instead kept it to herself.
• The Farmer and the Viper:
  • Mabel starts to pity Professor Sonia for not having the motivation to play music in public for believing that she is not "perfect enough." After doing some puzzles at her request and fighting off Gideon, she starts listening to Mabel's pepping her up. This eventually gives Sonia more confidence... to try to "play music" by capturing the main gang and shipping them up to .GIFfany. Whoops! She was another full-blown .GIFfany supporter the whole time! This sends Mabel in to a Heroic BSOD for the following chapter. Before that, she could at least see the fun in fighting with the copies that explicitely align themselves with the Risen One, since at least they bordered on Card-Carrying Villains. Sonia's unintentionally coming across as one of the good copies before backstabbing her pissed her off and put her in a bit of a depression.
  • Subverted later with Professor Dian, who seems even more pathetic and self-battering than Sonia, but actually turns out to be one of the nicest copies.
  • The ending, where Soos tries to work on redeeming .GIFfany after their final fist-fight. He later takes her in to the Mystery Shack as a secondary home whenever something happens to the Fight Fighters cabinet and she even gets a job working there along with Melody, but it turns out that this was all a move to try to get closer to him. Subverted in that .GIFfany still is not anywhere near as harmful or violent as she was in RG proper/canon; she's now just trying to win his heart again. So it is suggested that she actually did learn something, only it was just for a selfish reason.
• Female Misogynist: Professor Wendy, who uses the King of the Hill episode "Cheer Factor" (and, to a lesser extent, other episodes) as evidence that women should never try to aim for a goal on their own, and always act as support for the men. This also carries over to her being insulting towards both men and women, as she tries to subject Dipper and Soos through a blatantly one-sided "football match" while (the other) Wendy and Mabel would have been forced to sit it out, had it not been for Wendy breaking herself out.
• Fix Fic: This is not the intended purpose — the original idea was just some romp against .GIFfanys themed around the elements before the author tried giving them more Character Development and decided that he liked them more than his original band of elementals. But it still has some mild hints of this. Mainly, Robbie and Tambry's love potion-induced relationship comes to an end thanks to a combination of Dove's dickery and word being spilled completely about how Robbie used subliminal messages on Wendy. And .GIFfany, while still villified herself, (in fact, she's the Big Bad of this story) is still explored more as a concept of a living AI that was forced to kill her creators in self-defense, in a considerably less black-and-white viewpoint from the original show, where she was just an out-and-out domestic abuser with no sympathetic qualities that ended up getting "killed." (The other professors are a middle ground; .GIFfany (and Dove) can still represent the evils of living AI, but characters like Rose, Searah, Cardia, etc can explore how having a number of presumably intelligent living computer programs with technology powers could be a positive thing... if they had some addition powers as well.) In fact, this story was written before Journal 3 revealed she did not die in the pizza oven, and was effectively just a .GIFfany revival where she goes through a very long "redemption" that originally ended on an ambigious note. Disliked/debated moments of the show, such as "Roadside Attractions" and everything involving Mabel's role in Weirdmageddon, also end up not happening, but this is more-or-less a side effect of Fan's rule that a fic takes place exactly when he started writing it rather than the latest episode, so that he did not have to keep changing details to fit the current cannon.
• For Want Of A Nail: Technically the whole plot of this was kick-started by Gideon having a second plan while in prison before he makes his second deal with Bill. Everything spiralled out of control, and ultimately the story does not pull a Reset Button just in time for "Roadside Attraction."
• Foreshadowing: It's not as subtle as the foreshadowing in canon, but there is still plenty of times where the story hints at later developments.
  • Keep the named colors in mind while reading the story, then look up at the cover art. Easily visible at the top of this page, the colors of the characters that form the title fit with the order that the professors are faced: Rose (the green one) is first, then Kathody (yellow), then Searah (blue), etc. This can be used to know in advance that even though Burnda is introduced back in Chapter 3, it will be a long time before Dipper and company actually reach her place.
  • Some of the names of the professors are given early, which hints at their powers. Before the reveal with Rose being able to possess plant matter happens in Chapter 2, .GIFfany mentions that Professor Sonia had helped her out with the sound in the message — hinting that the professors are, at the absolute least, skill-themed and are named after said skills. Rose herself picks that name just because she likes it in-universe, only for it to be a reflection of her botany-interests and, shortly revealed after, the fact that she can possess plants.
  • In the first episode of the original series, Dipper starts out with a brown hat, which he loses in the fight with the gnomes. He later gains the white-and-blue hat that he keeps for the rest of the series, which is used as an early symbol that Status Quo is Not God and changes will stick. Here? Dipper loses his hat completely after using the Wires for the first time, implying that canon's plot is going to go Off the Rails. The journals being outright destroyed should be another indicator, completely seperate from Bill's destruction (and even less likely to recover). With the reveal that .GIFfany stole the rift, this is not some kind of "very long episodic romp" that will end with a Reset Button to let Weirdmageddon happen. (It does not.) The fic's timeline is completely seperate, meaning nothing is Doomed by Canon or "Protected" by Canon.
  • Often, it's mentioned that the group will come across copies in use of mirrors with chartreuse frames and handles. They never try to capture those, as they are so distracted by the mirrors that they pose zero threat. These mirrors are actually a strange virtual reality-drug hybrid produced at Domain 11 and exported over to the other places. Once the group finally goes there in chapter 10, they uncover the truth behind them.
  • .GIFfany has a mild association with space itself. The "Construction Site," as Ford nearly finds out the hard way, is high in space. When she appears in-person in Chapter 11, the clouds implied to be caused by Burrda's powers making the mountain summit unnaturally cold clear up right in a way to expose the night sky behind her. This is a twofer foreshadowing (the fact that the finale takes place in space doesn't really count, since that's already almost outright told as soon as the Construction Site is confirmed to be there): .GIFfany has fused with the space-y rift, and later the reveal that her final plan is to blast off in to outer space with her and Soos in an attempt to make sure she gets away from everyone else.
  • Burnda seems incredibly off and more "human" than even the other professors, who are certainly pretty far away from .GIFfany's canonical self. She is introduced far ahead of schedule, is the only one actively trying to help Ford out, and in her chapter proper her domain blends in her constructed areas with the natural surroundings in ways most other domains do not (they either have a natural majority, like Rose, Sandy, or Dian, or are mainly kept off to buildings). She also shows absolutely no obsessive traits at all, and her interactions with Ford come off as genuinely friendly. And she's the only one who constantly teases at the traditionalist .GIFfany. It's revealed in her proper chapter that she and Burrda were effectively "cheated on" with each-other by their last player. They initially battled each-other over that with the promise to kill their player, but then found that fighting each-other would be pointless if they were going to throw their player away anyway. They both just left and decided to swear off being treated like games again. It's suggested that this is exactly why Burnda barely acts like the other copies. And her, Burrda, and Dove's domains are the only ones not built to impress their last player; Dove's is obviously an attack on humanity, Burrda's was just an exposition on why she felt she needed to die (she assumed she was going to die or kill Ford, so she felt she had no purpose to try to make a whole society), but Burnda's was made to hold the Mystery Shack group over while the rest of the world suffered under the unstoppable .GIFfany's hands.
  • The first four societies in the domains are the following: a group of kind nature-lovers who focus on building supplies for the homeless and hungry, a band of horror-enthusiasts who want to make a haunted attraction, an underwater organization that are obsessed with making the best water possible, and a hippie-like society that literally worships the Big Bad. Consider that the professors and said Big Bad .GIFfany are theoretically equal in power — why would Sandy view .GIFfany as a goddess? Later, it's revealed that .GIFfany took the rift and fused with it. That kind of power, which she shows off in the three-part Chapter 13, would certainly convince someone like Sandy that .GIFfany is a goddess.
  • Bubbles mentions that if a copy swears, it's either something really serious or it's just Dove talking. Yes, Shannon and .GIFfany both pull Precision F Strikes. However, when there is a copy who's very first words are "Fucking hell .GIFfany, really?" you can bet that it's Dove.
  • In Chapter 9, Stan sees .GIFfany playing out a very odd and rather deranged fantasy with dolls. This creeps him out enough to try to run the hell away from the Construction Site, but he's finally bailed out by a copy later revealed to be Burrda (obscured by one of Professor Wendy's full-body helmets). .GIFfany makes a "finger cutting the neck" motion, except Burrda replies with a slow nod. In Chapter 11, the reader finds that Burrda was taking .GIFfany's death threat and implying "Yes, I know what I'm trying to do will get me killed, but that's the point."
  • Professor Dove's misanthropy is a bit more predictable since "treating AIs like expendable evil objects" was something the copies hated so much that Professor Wendy, who otherwise adores the show King of the Hill, considers the episode where Hank gets hooked on Pro-Pain and Peggy ultimately ends up deleting the game permanently, to be the one moment of the entire series that she does not like. O.O.C. Is Serious Business indeed.
  • Chapter 12 reveals that the Construction Site's "completed" name is the Planet Negation Girl. Considering as it's a place and not a person, this name doesn't make too much sense and seems to be forced in just to fit with the acronym. Chapter 13 reveals that the entire base is her Main Possession — she gives it a monstrous humanoid form that threatens to take away — in other words, negate — a given "player's" ties with the planet.
  • In chapter 13, the gang is attacked by some sort of bizarre red, green, and blue hand-trio thing. This is never really addressed again in the story proper, until the bonus chapter. It was actually "hidden" Professor Eve.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
  • In chapter 10's closing notes, Great Pikmin Fan jokingly remarks that September 22nd is Melody and .GIFfany's birthday, as that was the day of their debut episode (chapter 10 came out on that day for this reason). Right after this, bolded, bracketed text appears on the line below, asking why Melody was listed first and not .GIFfany. Fan, however, choses to ignore that. The next chapter, she not only says more, but there is one portion of the story where .GIFfany is referred to in the first person. In the chapter after that, there are more and more moments written in the first-person, indicating that she's taking over the narrative itself. In the closing notes to that, she also specifically points out that she enjoys being inside your computer, and offers the last chapter as a compromise. "Game Over" and especially "Game Complete" outright cut to extended first person from her POV whenever she's involved, although this comes to an end in the former when she seals the rift.
  • .GIFfany's narrative-corruption continues through the Memory Banks especially, with each "chapter" of the area mimicking Great Pikmin Fan's own "write the story in the center, then the chapter number and the chapter's name underneath" style. Except that after the first one, the "Memory Banks" near the top gets corrupted in various ways. It finally ends with the implication that .GIFfany not only has control of the narrative, but she also knows of the storyline of both this and canon:
    Memorun:gifocalypse
    Chapter 0: Soos and the Real Girl
• Full-Frontal Assault: A lot of the copies fight near-naked or even completely naked. Taking note is the finale (not counting the time skip chapter): where Soos and .GIFfany eventually have a completely naked fist-fight while they fall from outer space.
• Fun with Acronyms: When its name is finally revealed, .GIFfany's Very Definitely Final Dungeon is called the Planet Negation Girl. In other words, it has the same initials as the Portable Network Graphics filename extension — much like how .GIFfany herself is named after the Graphics Interchange Format extension. In the epilogue and bonus chapter, it's rebranded to the Planet of Neo-Greatness, something Dove lampshades is a bit of a stretch just to have it keep the ".PNG" joke.
• Fusion Dance: Two copies can fuse with one-another through attempting to "possess each-other" in a way. The only copies to do this within the fic's timeframe are Burnda and Burrda, who fuse to become Blenda.
• Gainax Ending:
  • Downplayed. The proper finale (not counting the four-year time skip bonus) has a number of elements with very minimal foreshadowing and feels rather different tonally from the rest of the story, but it all makes sense in the end. The town fighting against a planet-sized mecha by making a human chain that links a tourist attraction with millions of mechs to make a giant, energy replica of Melody in a battle that all ends with a giant, naked pileup of living video games all ultimately makes perfect sense in the context of the story.
  • "Four Years Later" has only bare-minimum foreshadowing, even if you have read Professor Wendy's blog that Fan intentionally kept hidden due to not liking it very much and read through Journals of Wisdom, Power, and Courage. The whole chapter feels like a surreal departure from the rest of the story, which is part of why Great Pikmin Fan finds it to be a minor Old Shame in a work he's otherwise proud of in a manner... not usually seen with his other stories.
• Garden Garment: Rose wears a dress made out of leaves, and number of her followers follow in the general "wear something plant-like" theme.
• Genius Loci: The Planet Negation Girl dips in to being this, considering how .GIFfany considers it to be an extension of her body while she's undergoing her sanity slippage. Down to calling the Memory Banks her brain, and the area where the next-gen copies are made her womb. It becomes this moreso once .GIFfany herself possesses it. Ironically, she becomes the only copy confirmed to not actually stay there for her job — she instead moves "back" to Gravity Falls.
• Going Commando: Chapter 9 reveals that .GIFfany does not wear a bra. In-between Sizzcorra and Peachaulinsalinaisy's sections, she is described getting dressed after a bath. While she gets into panties, she puts a shirt directly over her bare torso. The chapter after that confirms all copies except Burnda and one other exception — later revealed to be Burrda — go braless in some form or another. Although they wear outfits that push them in to Vapor Wear territory.
• Going Cosmic: Starts out as a Monster of the Week-ish romp. Quickly becomes a story presenting several different "possible future worlds" and elaborates on the upsides and downsides of them. By the end, the story effectively presents the concept of being in an eternal paradise alone with a monster versus a finite lifespan with friends, and gets far more philosophical than the episode it's effectively a serial-escalating extension of^note "Soos and the Real Girl," by itself, did not exactly cover topics such as immortality (.GIFfany), religion (Sandy), "white knighting" (Burnda), sacrifice "for the greater good" (Burrda), whether or not it's possible for machines to ever become sapient enough to deserve the same rights as humans and whether or not that's a good thing (Dove), in-universe Values Dissonance (Professor Wendy), drug addiction (Shannon), etc. It's pretty telling that one of the inspirations for this was OFF. It's also telling that the climax of the story ends with the extremely alien-like image of Soos, Melody, and the "canonical" .GIFfany all naked atop a massive pilup of all the other copies, extending in to space. With the symbolism of the sun rising right behind Soos to boot.
• Green Thumb: Professor Rose's ability. She can possess plants (in addition to electronics, as with the other professors and their specialties), indirectly let them grow in size, or even control her own sort of giant "possession body" made of three trees.
• Heroic BSoD: Mabel suffers one in chapter 8 after finding out that Sonia's real goal was to try to capture the group just like most of the other professors, and by restoring her confidence all Mabel did was encourage that. The result was that she ended up being a bit more jaded about the summer as a whole, but over the course of chapter 9 this works itself out.
• Hope Spot: The end of chapter 11 follows up a Hope Spot with one downfall after another. Burrda actually got .GIFfany to call off the Gifocalypse without anyone dying! .GIFfany seems to be reforming in some way! Then she goes to the pack to tell the captured copies the news... and finds it's covered by static. Black static. Enter Dove, who is absolutely not happy that .GIFfany stopped her from getting her turn in the invasion. Dove flies off straight towards Gravity Falls with a ship that she self-describes as going around light speeds. Bad sign. Ford tries to capture .GIFfany in case she does anything stupid, but she ominously rips a portal outside of the pack and leaves to "think things over." Another bad sign. Soos looks off the cliff of the summit and sees a gigantic sphere of pink giffinium looming over what would roughly be Gravity Falls. Another bad sign. The group returns there, for some reason the town lacks any signs of some pink planet-city above them, and instead find Dove preparing a cannon. Said cannon blows up the entire town. Really bad sign.
• Hotter and Sexier: Exaggerated to the point of parody.
  • Unlike a portion of Gravity Falls fanworks, Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, and Bill are untouched, as well as everyone that isn't .GIFfany. But, .GIFfany herself has an army of copies that go around near- or completely naked, there is an occasional joke played about the state of dress, and even the .GIFfany that started this whole mess is described in detail after emerging from a tub naked and spanking herself on the ass. It all tries to stay within a T rating — barely — but the fic still contains content that would obviously not air on canon even with its track record.^note Or, at the very least, warrant a rating change. This escalates until the final chapter briefly describes .GIFfany's nipples (both of her physical form and of her considerably less humanoid and more grotesque One-Winged Angel form) In a T-rated story. run:gifocalypse in its entirety is this trope to anything Great Pikmin Fan wrote prior that isn't part of the SBIG Series (he's generally more lax with that), as before this fic the farthest he had gone was Total Zeksmit Plains, which is generally not worse than making everyone a Walking Swimsuit Scene and having a "naked challenge" where the nudity isn't described in detail.
  • RG itself would then be topped by its Spiritual Successor Escape From Fanservice Island, which bumps up the ass-focus and breast-focus so much that it makes run:gifocalypse almost look kid-friendly in comparison, to the point where it's the first of Great Pikmin Fan's stories that he felt should have an M rating. Seeing as this is the same author who thinks run:gifocalypse, Hecksing Ulumate Crconikals, and Housestuck Hurrcain Crconikals can get away with "T" ratings, this is saying a lot.
• Hypocritical Humor: Chapter 10's ending implies that .GIFfany generally sides against panty shots. She doesn't bat an eye at the far more revealing costumes of her other copies — whether it's soap bubbles and nothing else, mud and nothing else, etc. Burnda flat-out mentions that her leotard reveals more than .GIFfany's undergarments.
• In Name Only: Great Pikmin Fan says that trying to defy this trope was ultimately one of the biggest challenges of the story. While the premise almost made such a thing inevidable, he tried not to have the story be almost completely focused on copies/relatives of a one-shot character and made sure to give the Pines decent screentime. This reaches a head in chapters 12 onward, where he tries to add in more canonical characters... but he ended up regretting this, as he felt that the story became too much of a jumbled mess. For the record, Fan's two biggest fan fiction pet-peeves are this being applied to the point where the fic might as well be its own original story and (to a much, much greater extent) the exact opposite: abusing The Stations of the Canon to the point where hardly anything actually new happens and the plot is almost completely unchanged.
• Irony: Risen is the "canonical" .GIFfany, and as a result has more of a tie to a kid-friendly show with a company generally associated with kid-friendly media. In other words, she's the closest to the "Disney-ish" of them all (which isn't saying much). Yet she's also more sexualized than her OC sisters that dress in much less. She's also the only copy to have her nipples explicitely described — giving the impression that, in the finale, her breasts are supposed to be "uncensored." (This is less surprising considering how one of the copies is an expy of Paimon design-wise.)
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Ford explains that .GIFfany's sapience is caused by her coding including some illegal primes. Illegal primes (and illegal numbers in general) actually exist, but in real life they are illegal for the information they carry. Here, that's a cover up, and they're really illegal because the numbers themselves carry weirdness which can bring something to sapience. That should be the first clue that this story does not take itself very seriously all the time. This leads to Ford protecting the Mystery Shack from copies by simply writing numbers of a paper and wrapping it under a unicorn barrier.
• Jerkass:
  • Few of the professors are outright nice. Searah is a harsh elitist who locks her own copies out of her "perfected" underwater base. Kathody has no problems trying to hunt down and force four people, two of which are 12 year-old kids, into what is basically slavery, and Searah comes up with a similar idea. Bubbles, while not outright trying to harm anyone, still presents herself as a massive troll and even melts Dipper's journals for the fun of it. Dove is probably the absolute worst of the bunch, with an inch-long fuse and a love for blowing things up. The "Arc 1" professors start to grow out of it, especially during Arc 2. Chapter 9 implies that Bubbles and Dian are about to double-team on Leona and Sonia to help get them to be more likable to the outside, but Bubbles herself is hardly a saint.
  • invokedIf you think this fan fic paints .GIFfany as an angel, even using her nicer co-professors as evidence, you'd be pretty wrong. Not only is she the main antagonist, but practically every scene with her in it just serves to remind readers that she's either a nutcase, an ass, or both. For the most part, even when she's actually faced the story still barely presents her in a positive light — hell, the ending implies that she's not even really "redeemed" and just pretended to be a better person to get closer to Soos.
• Jizzed in My Pants: Heavily implied to have happened in the "group hug" in the finale. As the copies start piling on Soos, Melody, and .GIFfany/Giffany, Soos gets uncomfortable as he's trapped with .GIFfany in front of him. After cutting to the aftermath where they're back on the surface, all three of those parties are blushing, .GIFfany is cleaning off her stomach (it's stated that the hits Soos gave to her that drew blood were on her head). They get defensive when Stan asks if Soos "blurted (his) guts all over her" and in the epilogue it's stated that something happened that they all agreed to never talk about again. Word of God confirms this here just before getting the chapter out (spoilers, obviously)..
• Jungle Japes: Invoked with Leona's domain, set out in the Amazon. In a manner similar to Kathody before her, however, much of the focus is on the buildings and not the outdoor setting. Though one of the four buildings does have exotic giant killer fruit-like enemies, which would not look out of place in a jungle or rainforest level.
• Karma Houdini: The worst that ever happens to .GIFfany in this story's timeframe is that she gets punched and kneed by Soos. However, she outright kidnaps him and Melody (along with Stan and Ford at the very beginning) and sends a huge army out after the town and rebel copies. Even Dove gets some punishment — she's essentially forced to rebuild Gravity Falls from the ground up after she blew it up, despite said action apparently being legal by the town's own rules.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: Chapter 13 is vastly different from everything beforehand, even the chapter immediately before it. It leans much more on Going Cosmic, features one of the very few completely physical fights in the entire story, and most of the main characters take a backseat to a story that's mostly about Soos, Melody, and .GIFfany.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • In chapter 7, Donna claims that it would be an insult to the word "project" to call the Gifocalypse a project. Soos remarks "This is clearly more of a big artsy-experimental thing. And not something with hard rules that's supposed to be taken too seriously." An awful lot like something that can be applied to the fan fic itself.
  • In chapter 12, .GIFfany effectively "replaces" the professors with a new line. Kathody points out how horrible it is that she already had a huge list of characters and she's replacing them with a new batch... and it's done in a way that sounds similar to how Fan basically shoved most of the side characters of the show off to the side to make room for this group of OCs, complete with indirectly comparing Kathody herself to Pacifica and Burnda to Bill.
  • In Professor Wendy's Character Blog, she mentions chatting with Great Pikmin Fan himself... and that Wrong Genre Savvy Hayate and Ron both seem nervous when he's brought up. Also, apparently Ford found out proof of God. And God's name is... "Dihznee." It's unknown if there is an actual god in RunGif's world with that name or if Ford somehow got data from the fourth wall about the Disney company itself and mistook that for being a single person with a mispelled name rather than a whole company.]]
• Light 'em Up: Professor Shannon's ability. She can possess... light rays. She is far more powerful than that description may lead one to believe. In addition to light itself, she can also control the other forms of electromagnetic rays — a wide-enough range to include radio and gamma waves. She can kill a person with radiation poisoning almost instantly. She can size-shift and use some sort of healing powers too. She also has the ability to bring her own reflection to life and merge with it, then bring the reflection of that to life and merge with it, and so on and so forth until she turns into a massive collection of giant body parts.
• Light Is Not Good:
  • Professor Shannon is an ominous, powerful light user who uses a lot of Nothing Is Scarier just before her introduction (her own name isn't mentioned until just before the gang meets her — in fact, her whole domain is effectively a giant mystery). She subverts this — she's one of the nicer copies, although poor communication nearly results in her killing the group.
  • .GIFfany herself is still just as bright and pink as ever, and her base is a constantly-lit arcade city. She's still just as hostile as she was in canon, if not moreso.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • To Gravity Falls canon, despite not looking like it at first. While it is more, for the lack of a better term, "mature" (the AIs provide a high amount of sexual content that canon would obviously never air), it's overall a more lighthearted series about fighting comical element-themed copies of a Monster of the Week that are never fully taken seriously, and aren't viewed as "dangerous supernatural threats" so much as they are "weird supervillains that need to be talked out of it." Even when the Cerebus Syndrom hits, it's still a lighthearted and idealistic fic overall.
  • The fan fic is a lighthearted Whole-Plot Reference to OFF. OFF has a doomed world, the playable character outright murders the Zone leaders — which the player later finds out ends up killing everyone in their Zone, and gives the final choice between either flipping a switch that ends all of existence or leaving the world in a state with most of it "purified" and roaming with Secretaries. And it's heavily implied to be post-apocalyptic. run:gifocalypse takes place in a world that's just fine, it's just that the .GIFfanys are building their things in addition to a normal Earth. The main characters never kill anybody, even the one copy who asked for death, and the domains are mostly left as-is. The epilogue shows all the copies coming together to work for a better, more collaborative future, and it is heavily implied that they build a utopia when they put their differences aside. In OFF, the protagonist makes a dystopia worse/destroys it. In run:gifocalypse, the protagonists make several potential, but highly corrupt, utopias a lot better.

• Madness Mantra:
  • "Soos x .GIFfany forever!" became one to .GIFfany when having a fantasy about downloading Soos's brain into her game.
  • A darker one happens in chapter 10. The copy writing into her journal writes down "The Boss The Boss The Boss" near the end of her entry on the second day. For the third day, this becomes "BOSS BOSS BOSS" as part of a less coherant rant.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: Professor Sonia's ability. She can possess sound waves themselves, amplifying them or controlling them to turn them into disruptive ringing. Like every other professor when not taking electricity into account (they can generate electricity whenever they want, so long as they have enough "power"), she's held back by Elemental Baggage and can only possess sound when it's really there. This potential weakness is never exploited in her battle.
• Making a Splash: Professor Searah's ability. She can possess water, and manipulate it to the point where she can effectively "drown" someone with just a tiny patch kept constantly hovered above their face, unable to move it away.
• Meaningful Name: All professors.
  • The one who resides in the Gravity Falls forest aiming to turn it into a garden, and has learned how to possess plants, is named Rose. Ironically, one of the reasons why she picked the name Rose was because it wasn't an obvious pun. Yet she ended up walking right into having a themed/pun name.
  • Kathody is the Odd Name Out, since her name doesn't have much to do with what she's associated with (ghosts, haunted locations, Halloween, etc along with deserts), although it fits the "machine" aspect as it's a play on "cathode" and "Kathy." Great Pikmin Fan has a loosely-established elemental system that places yellow as the electric element, but since that would be redundant with .GIFfany as a whole, her yellow-themed copy instead fills out "ghost energy" but she's still given an electric-related name. She's also a bit of an expy (if a much meaner one) of Kathy, an old original character Fan thought up in his Total Zeksmit series.
  • Searah is in an underwater base and can control water.
  • While Sandy would be name more appropriate to the desert-dweller, she set her place up in a rock-filled canyon and is associated with earth.
  • Cardia is just "cardio" (heart) with a letter swap. The cardia is also a part of the stomach. She's the meat-themed character. One of her students is named Hato, which is literally just "heart" in Japanese, romanized. Her named follower "Hato" is just "heart" in Japanese, and she lampshades the laziness of this.
  • Bubbles is associated with soap, among some other things, and soap is a very bubbly substance. She also runs a building which holds a huge collection of, among other things, baths and showers.
  • Leona is an artist. She named herself Leonardo Da Vinci. Her co-overseers are also named after such artists... which just-so-happens to be the same artists the Ninja Turtles are named after.
  • Sonia is the sound one. Her name is just one letter away from "sonic."
  • Dian is the "poison" professor. Dian = "dyin'" = "dying," which is obviously what poison does to someone almost by definition. The hijackers of her own domain also have their own such meanings.
    • Daminna is named after Damien from OFF, where the smoke mines are located. Daminna runs her own sort of smoke mines.
    • Sizzcorra points out the meaning in her own name: sizzle + corrode + sakura.
    • Peachaulinsalinaisy is the mushroom hijacker. Take the most well-known video game franchise of all time where mushrooms play a large role and mash the names of four female humanoid characters together. Peach, Pauline, Rosalina, and Dasiy. That's Peachaulinsalinaisy's name.
    • Alma is also named after a station from OFF, though she's named after the last one. She's the last of them faced and the technical biggest antagonist of chapter 9.
  • Wendy is associated with air and wind, and the name is one letter off from being "windy."
  • Shannon = "shine on." She's the light professor.
  • Just remove the last two letters in Burnda's name. She's the fire-using professor.
  • Burrda uses coldness and "anti-fire" as a weapon. Burr = Brr.
  • Dove has an Ironic Name. Doves are usually seen as a symbol of peace. Professor Dove is the biggest asshole of the bunch and loves war.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: Closer to end-season upgrade, but it's still the same idea. Towards the end of Arc 1, Soos gets his own inventory and a special slot for holding the currency used by the copies. Towards the end of Arc 2, everyone gets boots that help them float, swords, and shields.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe. Professor Wendy and her students seem to hail King of the Hill as a show that has all the right answers, and even some of the iffier things done in the name of parody are meant to be taken completely seriously.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Chapter 10. It's the first chapter that covers two professors in one since chapter 3^note the justification for both of these being that the first professor goes over to the second professor's place, and isn't captured until there. The former one? A bunch of annoying King of the Hill fans, which may not be harmless (as a matter of fact, Professor Wendy would have won if she was willing to accept that she did, in fact, win) but at least had a good dosage of comedy thrown in to the point where they can't be taken that seriously despite their threat level. Right after that is Domain 11, an ominous, giant floating factory with a mysterious professor that turns out to be friendly and understanding, though she initially tries to kill the group because of Wendy's poor choice of words. It turns out to have been creating what is more-or-less a drug for the .GIFfany copies with horrible, reality-breaking withdrawl effects. Surreal Body Horror ensues as well as the Glitched copies blatantly not being right in the head even by .GIFfany's standards.
  • Chapter 11 is all over the place. A bulk of it is light-hearted reality show shenanigans with a professor (Burnda) that the readers already know in advance is harmless, and just wants to cheer everyone up and get Stan and Ford to fix their falling out. Then Burrda gets involved more — she's far more cynical and believes that the humans are hopeless in stopping the rift-infused .GIFfany, so she convinves Burnda through fusion to try to get them to stay in the volcano to have an enjoyable little "pocket" while the rest of the world suffers under Dove or the Risen One. Once that fails, Burrda moves to Plan B: force Ford to either kill her or die, hoping that a death will make Dove back off and .GIFfany reconsider. Especially if it's her death. .GIFfany herself jumps in at the last second to stop Burrda from slicing off her own head, calls off the Gifocalypse, appears to be setting up for a reunion... then Dove finally makes her debut. Things seem dire there, and only look more dire as the Construction Site is revealed to be hovering right over Gravity Falls. Speaking of that town, Dove blows it up. While the main characters are screaming in horror. Cue cliffhanger... which is capped off by Dove shouting "FUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOU!" like some kind of punk teenager.
• Mooks: Non-professor copies of Romance Academy 7, if they are hostile.
• Mook Chivalry: In-universe, and downplayed. The non-professor copies do not just gang-pile up on the Pines and company, despite the amount of destruction that even one of them has caused canonically and their armies being in the thousands per-domain. Chapter 6 slightly implies that there is some degree of the "Gifocalypse" being an act, and this would explain why.
• Mr. Exposition:
  • Professor Rose, who gives the gang information on upcoming professors (but only feels the need to elaborate on the immediate professor coming next). In a twist of the trope, she sometimes gives advice too late.
  • Professor Bubbles goes into a bit of the Worldbuilding when it comes to the small societies the copies have made, giving in a bit of a Mind Screwdriver from the oddness of the four chapters beforehand. She also gives some exposition about the other "Four Friends" (she's one of them), but only the Four Friends, and her advice is very unreliable. (Often inflating their power.)
• Multiple Endings: It is confirmed from the beginning that this story has an alternate special ending. Chapter 14, to be specific, while chapter 13 is the "regular" ending.
• My Nayme Is: Professor Dian. She goes by that name rather than "Diane." This is as it's a reference to Dirk's Opposite-Sex Clone in Housestuck Hurrcain Crconikals, and she has that name because that story followed by the "four lettered-first names" rule for its human leads. In-universe, however, there is no such reason.

Universal/Original Gifocalypse: N - Z

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Does a place called the Planet Negation Girl sound like the pleasant fun arcade-vacation it was designed as to you?
• The Needless: Downplayed — copies with black magic-bodies do have necessities like eating. But only with their bodies, they can still likely survive with only their discs should the bodies go away. They can also spend longer periods of time without necessities. If .GIFfany's comments about real people "bleeding and escreting" is any indication, they do not need to use the bathroom and do not have periods.
• No Periods, Period: Implied to be the case with the copies, considering .GIFfany's speech mentions that real people "bleed and escrete." .GIFfany literally bleeds — Soos deals blood-drawing hits on her in the final battle — so one can only asume that menstruation was what she was referring to.
• Nobody Can Die: From the moment the fan fic started to its conclusion and epilogue, only one character dies in the Official Ending — the Halloween Trickster, who willingly let himself get eaten by Soos on Halloween of 2012. Everyone else lives. Even Bill was spared, as the rift was sealed back up without erasing him from existence.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Subverted, the ending tries to give an explanation for this. Soos, Melody, and .GIFfany are all falling from the outer orbit of Earth, and even .GIFfany's own flight powers would have trouble saving the three of them. So, the other copies all pitch in together to form a complex plan where they give off a lot of their energy to help the crew slowly change their velocities, falling slower. It ends with a titanic naked pileup of .GIFfanys, with Soos, Melody, and Risen/Prime/the canon copy/etc at the top.
• Nubile Savage: The design is invoked with Cardia, and her leopard skin-styled outfit. It's implied that this is a secondary uniform for her fast food business, as a group of her followers wear similar outfits as well.
• Number Two: Dove is called .GIFfany's second-in-command in chapter 1, and chapter 8 confirms that she outranks the other professors unless when inside the domains of said professors.
• Obligatory Swearing: Invoked in Arc 3, to make the sudden introduction of swears into the plot feel more jarring and effective. Up until Dove's introduction, swears were still rare — only kept at two right before she first speaks. .GIFfany herself, while not nearly as bad as Dove, also gets quite the potty mouth in "Game Over."
• Odd Name Out: .GIFfany is the only major copy that has(/keeps) unusual capitalization and punctuation in her name. Kathody, Searah, Burnda, and Burrda are the only other "corruption"-based names — most of them (Rose, Sandy, Bubbles, Leona, Sonia, Dian (if mispelled from the common "Diane"), Wendy, Shannon, and Dove) are usual female given names with little to no alteration. "Cardia" is another odd name out in that it's not a pun on an existing name nor is it something even used as a name at all.
• Off the Rails:
  • There is a reason why Great Pikmin Fan says that this fan fic splits from "The Last Mabelcorn" onward, and is not simply set between episodes. The journals are destroyed as an early way of saying that things will not be reset to follow canon. Then it's revealed that .GIFfany is already doing something with the rift, which is implied and later confirmed to be the source of her exceptional teleportation powers.
  • Professor Wendy attempts to do this to the Gifocalypse game itself. After going nuts because she won a battle and successfully captured the humans when she thought that they had Plot Armor, she tries to rush off to Shannon's Domain by herself, which would have left the group unable to fully progress without .GIFfany or Dove stepping in to fix things. Fortunately, they manage to get a hold on her and ride along towads Domain 11, also swiping the key card from her. All Professor Wendy ends up pulling off is more-or-less the same thing as Professor Kathody, where she simply leaves to go to the next domain and slightly "teams up" with the professor over there.
  • It's revealed that this is ultimately the goal of the human protagonists — .GIFfany's "domain game" is explicitely supposed to be unwinnable, where she keeps Soos to herself and sends an endless wave of new copies she created after the humans. Skipping straight to her to get around her "endless wave" is the way to derail her plan and beat her.
• One-Steve Limit: Intentionally broken. While Wendy from Gravity Falls canon is in this as a pretty key character, there is also a professor named Wendy. Burnda borrows her stuff and uses it in order to access .GIFfany's "Construction Site" without using any cards. The .GIFfanys play this straight by inventing new names for themselves, except for the one from canon (the others thought that, after her "injury" and "body loss," she could use a break and get to keep her old name). Chapter 11, which is right after Professor Wendy's introduction, finally claims that their last name is "Miyazumi," and the fic eventually uses the last name distinction between the two Wendys. When .GIFfany first meets with Rose, they try using numbers, but much like Dipper and Tyrone, it doesn't work out.
• One-Winged Angel: The Main Possessions in general, where a copy gets into something she has as her designated "trump card" for possessing. With the exceptions of Burnda, Burrda, Dove, and .GIFfany, this is related in some way to their element and not an electronic. Burnda and Burrda instead have each-other as their Main Possessions, fusing to form Blenda. Dove's is an electronic, if an alien one. .GIFfany's is also an electronic in the form of the entire Planet Negation Girl, although she does possess a non-electronic — the rift.
• Only Sane Man:
  • Wendy is the only one that doesn't really care for exposition on how the copies work for any reason (Mabel and Soos's genuine interest; Dipper's because of the occasional science-links, like the healing super-meats that dragons have) and generally holds level-headed reactions to all the oddness that goes on in the domain daisy chain.
  • Hato of the copies. She sees right through their video game-based economy system and how it's doomed to fail in the real world, and strongly regrets working with Cardia.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • The end of chapter 8 and most of chapter 9 — did Mabel just stop trusting the copies with open arms and began hating every thing they do?
  • If a copy that isn't Dove starts swearing? Run. Don't ask. Run. Hell, if Dove is around in general, run anyway, regardless of the purity of her mouth at the time.
  • The more Burrda talks, the more serious shit is. The inverse applies for Burnda.
  • In a positive example of this, two of the strongest signs that .GIFfany herself finally started to change is when she says she doesn't like Soos anymore, and when she gets past that and compliments his relationship with Melody. She also cries tears of joy around the latter — copies crying is another example, as the only other circumstance was when Burrda was about to off herself for the greater good.
  • For Great Pikmin Fan himself. Chapter 14, the bad ending involving a narrative-hijacking .GIFfany, does not even have a closing note. Fan always closes with something, even if it's as simple as him saying what's next. The story just... ends with .GIFfany claiming that she is living with Soos forever.
• Orange/Blue Contrast: Downplayed. Sandy (the sole "orange" professor of the fifteen first-generation enemies, as their arrangement is based on the primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries of the RGB color model, with Burrda (white), Dove (black), and .GIFfany (her canonical hot pink/"rainbow") being the exceptions) does come right after Searah ("pure" blue, not to be confused with azure (Sonia) or cyan (Bubbles)), and Searah does hold the key-card to Sandy's — meaning its orange contrasts with the blue of just about everything else in the domain — but Searah is by and large considered more of the foil to Kathody (yellow). The two of them are part of a very long, ongoing theme in Great Pikmin Fan's works of a contrast with blue and yellow.
• Original Character: The end result of the .GIFfany copies diverging heavily from .GIFfany's template. A major point the story makes is that "Risen"/Professor .GIFfany is the only one that acts like she did canonically, and this is fitting out-universe as she is the only known copy from canon. As for the rest of them, .GIFfany's... tendencies are still there, only in a more subtle manner.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Some of the copies of Romance Academy 7 do not get along very well. Nobody has anything nice to say about Professor Dove, to the point where even .GIFfany believes that using her to send Burnda back is a sort of last-resort punishment. Searah keeps the entrance to her own domain a secret to most of her other copies, and Dipper flat-out says that she has issues getting along with any of them. Especially Kathody. This leads to their downfall, as the group tricks Kathody and Searah into fighting each-other. .GIFfany herself also has trouble getting any of the professors to actually follow her orders or play this scenario out like she wants to, and they end up doing their own thing. By chapter 6, it's all-but confirmed that the only reason why she's only giving them a shot to do what they want in the first place because they feel that she owes them one for taking her around the world to repair the damage Gideon caused on her.
• Overly Long Name: Hijacker Peachaulinsalinaisy's name, an ungodly portmantaeu of "Peach," "Pauline," "Rosalina," and "Daisy." It's shorter than the unicorn's name, but only by three letters.
• Painting the Medium:
  • Downplayed, but the Title Drop in chapter 1 mimicks the title's all lowercase letters.
  • When the group is discussing the possibility of Shannon's name being an unreveal to them due to events conspiring so that they never find out what name she truly picked for herself and only going by "The Boss,"^note for the record, they do find out, and Soos gives a sigh of relief the second Shannon says her name Soos mentions that it's annoying when the story keeps a name a secret for so long. When Dipper says something in response, the narration calls him "Mason" instead.
  • When .GIFfany hijacks Great Pikmin Fan's author notes, her text is written in bold and brackets.
  • As Arc 3 goes on, some scenes involving .GIFfany go to the first person from her perspective, usually when she's angry. This only happens once in chapter 11, but several times in chapter 12, and it's constantly going on in the closing notes. In chapter 12, .GIFfany cuts off Fan's notes mid-sentence. It's implied that she's spreading past the author's notes and slowly taking over the narrative itself.
  • In the ending, once .GIFfany agrees to "restart" herself on a clean slate and become a different person, the narrative calls her Giffany... right up until the very end, where her eyes glow open and she says that everyone is where she wants them to be.
• Poisonous Person: Professor Dian has some possession skills over poison, though any real demonstration is not held in her debut chapter.
• Poor Communication Kills: Professor Shannon is genuinely nice. However, she chases down and nearly kills the gang because Wendy worded herself really poorly and made it sound like she was eager to go on a killing spree of the other copies.
• Precision F-Strike: Bubbles mentions near the end of chapter 6 that if a copy starts swearing at the group, it's a pretty bad sign.
  • Sure enough, come chapter 10 and Shannon drops the story's first actual swear when she believes that Wendy and company went on a murder spree for the fun of it: "I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU, PINES!"
  • Dove cuses like a sailor compared to the rest of the cast, but that does not mean that her first line isn't a shocker: "Fucking hell .GIFfany, really?" Just before that, .GIFfany's reaction to seeing the Illegal Prime Neutralizer's screen being covered by black static? "Oh shit."
• Production Foreshadowing: As is the usual tradition for Great Pikmin Fan, his story ends with the preview for something else. In this case, Emazh In, which is slated to be the fan fic's Spiritual Successor.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: Subverted with the professors. They are more developed than an average "miniboss group" (but are so untraditional in group formation that they would certainly not qualify as a Five-Man Band by any stretch) and a few of them are not automatically hostile towards the protagonists.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: Above Gravity Falls at the night of the third day. It's so unnaturally red because it's not a real sky — it's a bunch of screens from the Planet Negation Girl right above the town, displaying an image of a sky. .GIFfany reveals this by having the display show a growing crack until it completely shatters, revealing a giant version of her pixel form underneath that begins the broadcast of her message.
• Religion of Evil: Professor Sandy's "Lightning Goddess" religion. She literally worships the .GIFfany copy from canon as goddess, because the latter tricked her in to thinking that she was some kind of all-powerful deity after being "risen." Her fusing with the rift likely helped present a convincing argument.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • What the hell was that red-green-blue thing that tried to attack the group while they fell through cyberspace after .GIFfany popped their bubble? This is the only question that was outright not answered and it's completely unlike anything else faced in the story, although looking at SBIG implies that it's the work of an additional professor named Eve. "Four Years Later," the post-epilogue chapter, confirmed this.
  • The absolute ending of "Game Over:" was .GIFfany really reformed and just being creepy without trying to, or was the entirety of "Game Over" just an extended Plan B to get Soos and she was bullshitting her redemption? "Four Years Later" also answered this, it was the latter, but she does truly redeem for good in the very end after fighting Eve. But since Fan hated how he rushed it for Valentine's Day, he declared that its canonicity... is a bit shakey.
• Ron the Death Eater: .GIFfany tries to apply this to Soos in-universe. She either lies about, or at some point between chapters 1 and 8 actually started believing, that Soos both cheated on her and "murdered [her] in cold blood." When Professor Wendy points out that both of those are factually incorrect (he "broke up" with .GIFfany for being too "Beep Boop" before he went on a date with Melody, and his melting her disc was very obviously an act of self-defense — and did not even kill her), .GIFfany has no real retort other than telling her to shut up.
• Rule of Symbolism: Dipper losing his hat after going through the first Wire. Considering how Wires are implied to work, this is unlikely to happen in-universe. The hat loss in canon at the end of the first episode was an early way of saying status quo does not stick in Gravity Falls. His hat loss here is an early way of saying that canon's story will be bumped Off the Rails.
• Running Gag:
  • Characters mentioning that a large chunk of the domain trip could be circumvented by buying a lot of plane tickets. .GIFfany later states that this was something that started between Professors Rose and Dove.
  • Rose giving the group advice on the professors, but it's either A: outdated, or B: useless due to another reason. Often, when encountering a professor, Soos and company find something completely different from the picture Rose painted of them.
  • If one professor, especially .GIFfany, starts talking about the other professors in general, there is usually some sort of in-story reason as to why it unreveals the identities — and in rare cases names — of future professors before the group actually reaches them. In one particular case, .GIFfany explains the elements of the professors to (the other) Wendy to tell her about what Kathody does. She seems to be on her way of explaining them all, but finds Leona's (paint) and Bubbles's (soap) so stupid that she drops it altogether. Shannon in particular was a heavy enough victim of this that Soos lampshades it, and once her name is finally revealed, he sighs after knowing it.
  • None of the main characters are Distracted by the Sexy — no matter what sort of weird, almost-inviting activities the .GIFfany copies are doing and no matter what they are wearing, Wendy and Mabel appearently don't swing that way, Soos has a girlfriend, and Dipper... may be the exception, but he just wants to find answers and get back home.
• Sanity Slippage: .GIFfany maybe, as she appears to have gotten false memories of the events of "Soos and the Real Girl" (believing that Soos outright cheated on her and then killed her out of pure malice) and holds a rather deranged fantasy where she stabs a Soos dummy in the forehead and babbles about the two of them being together for all eternity. On the other hand, she might have just been something like this the entire time. The mirror-addicted copies definitely, as evidenced by the journal entry left by one of them, which gives quick day-by-day snapshots of her mind breaking down.
  Day One: [...] All the Boss says is to start producing the missing elements here, and she simply handed out more mirrors.
  We are happy again.
  Day Two: [...] Silence you will not take my flesh away you will stop that this place is supposed to be happy supposed to be HAPPY
  The Boss The Boss The Boss more mirrors.
  Happy.
  Day Three: [...] BOSS BOSS BOSS THOUGHT MAKING MORE MIRRORS WE NEED HAPPINESS BUT I NEED MEAT.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: It's unknown if the bispecticaled copes actually need glasses but Second-Generation Professor Courtlyn's glasses glare over during her battle with the townsfolk.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Through Leaning on the Fourth Wall in chapter 7, the story admits that it's not meant to be taken very seriously and is really more of an experimental fic.
  • Dove, resident Hate Sink and one of the least sympathetic of the copies next to Big Bad Risen .GIFfany herself, is also the closest the story has to an Author Avatar.
• Serial Escalation: The story starts out with the Mystery Shack group, for all intents and purposes, fighting against a three-tree monster (or rather, witnessing a fight between a tree-monster and a shape-shifter). While it goes "down" on a few occasions (IE the character that uses a dragon is fought before the one who uses a piano), it's an overall uphill ride. Arc 2 as a whole sees a slight increase in domain-Worldbuilding with longer time devoted to each of its settings (something Great Pikmin Fan has contemplated fixing, as he roughly wants the domains to all have equal screentime aside from Dove's and the finale), with a bit of Cerebus Syndrome. Then comes Arc 3, where the fic starts making the author's love for Wonderful 101 much more apparant. The story becomes even darker, the chapters get longer, mechas start coming in to play, and it ends with the town of Gravity Falls fighting against a mecha the size of planet Earth. Which eventually upgrades to a mecha the size of the Sun. Quite a long ways from punching trees.
• Serious Business:
  • The copies are really going all-out to impressing their players. The domains themselves are basically just fancy (future) calls of "Do you like this place? I built it because of you..."
  • Having a good creepy atmosphere/horror-themed spirit isn't that much of one for Professor Kathody, but it's a high priority. It is, however, much more serious for the Halloween Trickster, who outright tries to kill the gang after they insult Kathody's rather underwhelming attempt at a haunted house.
  • Water is this for Professor Searah. She refuses to even let people who don't "meet the qualifications" see what she's working on until greatly convinced by Kathody. Following that, she has an entire factory for trying to make the "perfect water," and has special pink-tinted water that she uses exclusively for "combat."
  • The exact kind of meat served in a fast food business is very serious to Professor Cardia. In fact, she appears to hold a high value for fast food in general. Her trying to "prove" that classic "red meat" (regular animals) should be used over "violet meat" (dragons, who apparently have violet-colored meat) ends up driving her to insanity by the time the gang encounters her.
  • Leona treats art very seriously, and hates it when someone ruins another's artwork. This is the cause of her own downfall. She becomes so pissed off at the twins vandalizing her trump card that she un-possesses her painting, and is no longer invincible.
  • Sonia feels that she should barely even be listened to if her music isn't "perfect."
  • King of the Hill is a massive subject of seriousness to Professor Wendy and all of her students, whom are devoted fans of the show. Coming with it, they all embrace some of the messages of the show — and even a few "accidental" ones.
• Spiritual Successor: Great Pikmin Fan cited this work as a major influence on his own future writing.
  • Ordinarily United takes moreso after the joke Gravity Falls fics where the professors are secondary/minor characters, but it also has several shades of Gifocalypse itself making their way over. Such as an "impossible" villain (Dove and Risen .GIFfany compared to the Eighth Circle, in both stories they were "calculated" by people with supercomputer brains to be impossible to defeat), an emphasis of touring a strange world, averting Reed Richards Is Useless, and using the .GIFfanys/Unitias to analyze society and technology as a whole rather than simulated relationships, resulting in a drastically more positive portrayal than the yandere .GIFfany was in canon and Unitia Origin was in the past. Ordinarily United also doubles as a Spiritual Antithesis character-wise: Carlson is far more intelligent and stoic (on the outside) than Soos and went from a horrible relationship with a human to a relatively healthy relationship with a virtual woman while Soos went from a horrible relationship with a virtual woman to a healthy relationship with a human. Unitia One is also effectively .GIFfany's opposite (her hair color is close to the inverse of .GIFfany's to reflect this), being a reasonable person who looks like a tall, lanky, fangy monster while .GIFfany is a psycho-stalker who looks like a cutesy schoolgirl. And while run:gifocalypse goes for an idealistic approach for its villains by having them be portrayed as ultimately redeemable and with many of them becoming friends to the heroes (if in a deconstructed manner) with the last villains teetering closer to the "full villain" side, the Hundred Demons of Ordinarily United are all just assholes who end up getting killed off unceremoniously with the last villain teetering closer to the "good natured and only vaguely-evil" side.
  • Emazh In is a far more direct successor, with the initial main characters being taken directly on the more serious, fleshed-out portrayals of the professors and having the main .GIFfany expy as a major villain rather than a hero.
• Subverted Kids' Show: The story itself is one. In short, it starts out looking like the "T" rating is an overestimation, and ends feeling like it was more of an underestimation. In long: By the beginning a few nonsexualized naked jokes (albeit with female nudity, which tends to get the stricter end of the stick when it comes to such content) and slightly revealing costumes are all it really had, which is still about on-par with Pyronica's canonical design. Then the fifth chapter is about... dragons being processed in to fast food. An oddball, yes, but still not that far from what the show deals with. The chapter immediately after that is something of a Hot Springs Episode and the one after that makes liberal use of naked Body Paint, but then after that things tone down a little. Until .GIFfany emerges from a tub, naked, and smacks herself in the ass in Chapter 9, with a graphic and definitely sexual description that stops just short of actually going in to detail of her privates. It even teases about her nipples, by deliberately wording her eyes to make it sound like the narrative is talking about her breasts when they're not. By Chapter 10 the story briefly dives in to a horror-fest with Shannon's domain and, to further the effect of the Cerebus Syndrome, the first actual swear comes in. At no point prior was anything on the level of "damn" or "ass" uttered, and then Shannon just goes full-blown "I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU, PINES!" And with Dove and the entire Mind Screw endgame with .GIFfany, which involves her turning the Planet Negation Girl/Construction Site in to a colossal Body Horror mecha ends with an "uncensored" description of her bare chest, nipples and all, it's obvious that run:gifocalypse is on a different level from Gravity Falls content-wise. This was all intentional, to help emphasize the Serial Escalation and the "further from home" aspect of the story.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Most of the copies have no issue dressing in impractical, revealing, or at-risk outfits at all, and barely seem to have any sense of modesty. Some even go naked. Even the ones that do dress up seem to have no issue to being seen wearing less — only a single student of Sizzcorra's and .GIFfany herself have ever shown signs of not liking their lower nudity, and the latter was subjected to total Clothing Damage. Both seemed to have been more to reference Japanese censorship laws, which Fan's later Escape From Fanservice Island all-but confirms.
• Shoo Out the Clowns:
  • The captured professors cannot speak to the group while the professor of the following domain is still active, as said active leader can send out a signal that blocks the Illegal Prime Neutralizer's communicator. This means that the humans are going in only with the knowledge they have before the proper domain, and that some of the goofier professors cannot provide comedy to break tension.
  • An inversion: the outright horror-fest that is Domain 11 happens right before Stan and Ford finally join the main group (they are not completely comical, but having two additional adults around would certainly lessen the blow of the Glitches). Sure enough, the antics with Burnda are more lighthearted than the glitch-based Surreal Horror... but then comes Ford's fight with Burrda, which is darker in a different sense.
  • In the finale, a good way of indicating when things will get dark is if Soos and .GIFfany are ever alone together.
    • Her capturing him and telling him to shut up is not played lightly at all. Sure enough, nobody is around them for quite a while when that happens.
    • Soos goes through the Memory Banks alone, which is a(nother) OFF-inspired mind screw. Technically several other copies are there, but only in the form of memory projections. Soos's interactions with them are implied to be very limited. Following that is the leadup to the mecha battle: while the fight itself has the whole group there for company, Soos has to get through .GIFfany talking about death and other eerie subjects while he's there alone.
    • Soos's final battle with .GIFfany is completely one-on-one. No Mabel, no Stan, no townsfolk, no other professors. Not even Melody, who was ejected with them — the three were falling from space, but Soos and .GIFfany dove down faster. In the middle of their fight, Soos suddenly brings up how he'd rather die than have .GIFfany continue to make everyone miserable, which at least finally gets to her. By the time Melody "catches up" with them, things are more lighthearted — the other professors and other copies are all there, with a way to save them all from falling to their deaths. However, shortly after that is another serious "philosophical" moment where Soos tells .GIFfany that the other professors are all her potential futures. While this is happening, every professor is that is not her is knocked out, due to exhausting their energy to slow down the fall.
• Shifting Sand Land: Referenced with the general location of Kathody's domain, the Sahara, but the majority of her portion of chapter 3 is spent inside the haunted house she has set up instead. This is lanpshaded after the group escapes, with Kathody trying to think of invoking the actual desert into her area, and only settling for making it the place where they get to see her Main Possession for the first time.
• Ship Tease:
  • The story heavily implies some stuff going on between Ford and Burnda, given how quick they are to become friends. Ford even outright says that he trusts Burnda over his own brother, but this was as the fic took place when they hated each-other. Escape From Fanservice Island makes this more explicit, as their counterparts there both cram in to a mine cart ride while naked, his junk pressed up against her ass. Ultimately, both of them stay single in run:gifocalypse, and in Escape From Fanservice Island, Burnda (or, the Fire Squad Captain, as she's called there) is definitely "just" in a relationship with Soos, Melody, and the other artificial women that are not considered her sisters in that AU.
  • Most of the time, Soos's actions with the other copies (particularly the professors) are platonic at best. Other times, especially near the end, the story can feel like it's setting him up to be in a colossal .GIFfany orgy. Rose in particular outright hits on him near the end of Chapter 2, but that can be chalked to Early-Installment Weirdness to an extent. Dove is also notably chummy with him despite her misanthropy otherwise, but that's mitigated by the fact that she captures him and blasts him off to be with his abusive ex-girlfriend in space. The crowning champion of all of this is the ending just before the epilogue, which throws whole trees in to the fire by having them all hugging naked as they fell from outer space. Oh, and while they're going down to Earth via a group hug from the top of a big pile, the narrative mentions that he, .GIFfany, and Melody are all embarassed. When Stan mentions Soos "blurting his guts," they get even more flustered. Word of God confirmed just before the chapter's release that Soos had an involuntary ejaculation in that scene. Since they're all screwing each-other (and with Melody thrown in the mix, and Rumble in Journals) in both Journals of Wisdom, Power, and Courage and Escape From Fanservice Island, GPF retroactively threw a bucket of gasoline on the fire back in run:gifocalypse. Rebooted also ups the teasing between Soos and the deans by being set to have a Running Gag where he winds up bathing or showering with each one, albeit having a platonic conversation with them.
• Shout-Out:
  • Kathody's domain is a "haunted house" that starts having cheap jumpscare pop-outs but later throws in real horror... while still throwing out cheap pop-outs. The story even mentions that even those take a darker turn.
  • The second "boss," if you will, is a staircase. The major antagonist characters/"bosses" are also named professors, a pun on possessors. (Dark Moon sort of does the opposite.)
  • Fan says that Professor Burnda's design took a few cues from Brenda of Perfect Hair Forever, though Burnda talks quite a bit while Brenda is silent. He implies that this is foreshadowing something in the same closing notes that mentions this. Also, a reference to GPF's past library, Burnda is the fire one, while Brenda is the Sage of Fire in Housestuck Hurrcain Crconikals.
  • Leona's hair resembles the Great Fairies from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.
  • The gang has three days before something giant and in the sky "fully activates." It grows in size as time passes, and gets closer to Earth — especially the "main town." Sound familiar? Adding to this, the first location they spend the second day in is cloudy, much as the second day has stormy weather. The third day also has a particular haze — greenish in the day, red swirls at night. It is implied that the "red sky" they find back in Gravity Falls was simply a false sky displayed by the Planet Negation Girl in the final moments before it went "public." .GIFfany marks the reveal of it through showing a display of a crack growing along the fake sky. The main conflict also ends around 6:00 AM of the fourth day — which the story outright calls the dawn of a new day.
  • Doctors would apparently consider Dove "difficult."
  • A tile puzzle with confusing rules, though the exact joke is different from the one in Undertale.
  • Professor Wendy is a massive fan of King of the Hill.
  • Professor Dian's domain is partly a large love-letter to OFF, with a tiny bit of Super Paper Mario sprinkled in. For the former, it's very similar to Zone 1, complete with being divided into five sections (counting Dian's "office," which is just a single desk and some tents she prepared for the gang). Four of the sections work in producing something, the first of which is smoke. When given exposition on the thing they are producing, a student ends the information by telling the Mystery Shack four that their component is the first of four components and an important one, as with the elements and the NPCs. Also, Daminna is named after the station Damien, and Alma is named after the station of the same name — Damien was where the Smoke Mines are first accessed, Alma is where the boss resides. Daminna is in charge of the smoke area, Alma is, more-or-less, the chapter's "real" Monster of the Week, as Dian was outright friendly. Regarding the latter, there is a duel of 100 and a shape-changing spider character. Who can also alter her dimension in a very similar way to the "flips" in Super Paper Mario.
  • Professor Shannon's domain is a second OFF nod, specifically to Zone 3. It's a massive factory producing something that seems like an ordinary product, but is also, for all intents and purposes, the world's version of an addictive drug. Copies "Glitch" there much like stressed residents that become Burnt, with one of the Glitches in particular even resembling a Burnt. It's ruled by a size-shifter that's exceptionally powerful compared to the other antagonists faced at that point, and chases after the main party of four after the first meeting in her office.
  • The frogs from Sonia's domain are much like the five frogs from Ocarina of Time and aformentioned Majora's Mask.
  • .GIFfany's emergence from her tub and the method she gets dressed by telekinetically controlling her clothing in chapter 9 is much like one of Ragyo's earliest scenes in Kill la Kill. In the Official Ending, the main character falls from space, ends up losing his clothes, and gets saved from certain death by a group of other, equally nude characters leaping in to save him.
  • The number of references to Yandere Simulator are rather low, but still present. A minor copy with reddish hair is named Yui after a minor character, and Bubbles's player is named "Taro" after Senpai.
  • Burnda's top assistants are non-furry, .GIFfany versions of the Cute Monster Girls from The First Funky Fighter. They even get the tops of their leotards torn off, and Burnda jokingly suggests having stars over their breasts.
  • Chapter 11 finally reveals that .GIFfany's last name is Miyazumi.
  • In chapter 12, among the next-gen professors, one of them is Professor Aiko and dresses similarly to Aiko from HuniePop. One of .GIFfany's outfits near the end of the story is pretty much Kyu's, from the same game.
  • Two last OFF references: the endings are referred to as the "Official Ending" and "Special Ending." The Memory Banks also play out in a similar manner as The Room, as one of the main characters goes through a series of events in reverse-chronological order where he steps in for the memories of someone else, going from Chapter 5 to Chapter 0.
  • The endgame contains several big ones to The Wonderful 101, a game which Great Pikmin Fan adores. From the mecha-boxing in a volcano, to the Dragon blowing up the "main location" into several chunks in a violet wasteland, to the final location being a massive artificial planet-like base that transforms into a mecha, which is revealed by what appears to be space cracking above. (Granted, it was just a fake display from .GIFfany, but still). Hell, the Planet Negation Girl takes its name from Jergingha's Planet Destruction Form, and one of .GIFfany's outfits during her speech just before the fight is basically Wonder-Pink's.
• Sinister Surveillance: Dove does this constantly with the help of one of something she found in Ford's lab dubbed the "Past-O-Scope," invisibly spying on the gang for most of the story as they hop from domain to domain. She feeds the information she finds to the other professors.
• Slime Girl:
  • Leona's paint copies present themselves as a variation. As paint-humanoids, who can also change their shape and briefly do so to try to intimidate Mabel.
  • One that fits the definition a bit looser and is played for horror is encountered in Domain 11. Specifically, one of the five Glitches. She's slime-like because she looks like she melted into a blob.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Leona has a very high opinion on her own art, calling it perfection and hating the idea of someone tampering with it. Inverted with Sonia, who has such a low opinion of her own music that she refuses to even let people hear it out of fear of being rejected.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Gideon can hardly be considered a "main character" in this story, given how his appareances are very minimal, but without him the whole plot would not be possible. Also, while his surprise attack in Sonia's domain had little impact on the actual main characters, it was an action of Dove going behind .GIFfany's back, which led to a drastic development in the endgame.
• Snowy Screen of Death: Downplayed. The professor of a given domain will usually snow-up the Illegal Prime Neutralizer with a special signal that renders communication between the humans and the captured copies impossible. This usually lasts until said professor is captured herself. Played straighter around Dove's debut — the fact that the static is black is the first indication that shit is about to get real.
• Soul Power: Professor Kathody's ability involves possessing energy from ghostly entities, effectively giving her a sort of ghost power. This is implied to be fuel for her Main Possession, and is used as an alternative fuel source for most of the equipment in the domains.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • This would have been the case for .GIFfany, given that she survives both endings, but then Journal 3 revealed that she never quite died in the first place. The first few chapters of this was written before the book came out, and the beginning was ret-conned accordingly.
  • Bill Cipher ends up living at the end, as the only thing that happens to him is the rift getting sealed up and pushing him back to the Nightmare Realm. The last he's ever seen is basically threatening genocide on all of .GIFfany's copies. Even in the four-year time skip, he's still AWOL.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
  • This marks the beginning of a chain of fics by Great Pikmin Fan where .GIFfany and her copies end up taking a good chunk of screen time. Here, .GIFfany is the Big Bad, overshadowing even Bill Cipher by a long shot, but that could be waved off in this story being an "expanded sequel" of sorts to "Soos and the Real Girl." Journals of Wisdom, Power, and Courage (which is supposed to be more about Mabel and, to a lesser extent, Dipper) and Escape From Fanservice Island (which is supposed to involve Ford, Stan, Darlene, and Pyronica in roughly equal levels of screen time with Soos, Melody, and .GIFfany)? Not so much.
  • Professor Burnda has a bad track record of showing up even though the chapter set at her domain is pretty far away, something none of the other professors really have to that extent (apart from a brief early appearance of Professor Wendy, and that was shortly before she was faced anyway). To a degree, this fits with her flashy character, although she still gets a noticeable amount of spotlight compared to everyone else.
• Status Quo Is God: Given that this is written by somebody that hates it when a fan fic ultimately goes in the exact same direction as canon does plot-wise with little to no variance, it really, really isn't. Even compared to canon, which at least ended with an "everything is back to normal, nobody mention Weirdmageddon again" angle. The .GIFfanys are absolutely here to stay and have their own entertainment world set up, and word is out globally that the supernatural exists despite the futile attempts of world leaders to try covering it up. Nothing after "The Last Mabelcorn" even remotely happens as the road trip gets cancelled (as the Pines are still sorting things out with the .GIFfanys during that time) and, with .GIFfany destroying the rift, nothing from "Dipper and Mabel Vs the Future" onward could happen either.
• Stealth Pun:
  • Some of Sandy's followers have a large number of bottles out, waiting for clouds so that the "Lightning Goddess" could give them a message. They're trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
  • The clones who are called "professors" are exceptionally good at being possessers. They can possess non-electronics. They also act less like "university professors" and more like "bosses of their professions," and most of them are like the "boss" of their area given the video game theme. In other words, they are bosses that are also literally bosses.
• Stripperiffic: None of the professors aside from .GIFfany, Leona, Sonia, Dian, and Dove, and by implication very few of the followers, wear reasonable clothing. If a professor's costume isn't revealing, it's either questionable by another reason (being made of leaves, or a leopard-skin outfit) and then subjected to convoluted Clothing Damage. Sandy wears nothing but mud, Bubbles tops that by only wearing Censor Suds, and Searah's domain in particular is also loaded with copies in Barely-There Swimwear.
• Surreal Horror: The Glitched copies in Professor Shannon's domain. Not only do they turn into various things that make little sense (one of them basically resembles the rare Super Smash Bros. for Wii U character distortion glitch, one of them melts into a glitchy mess, one of them turns into a shifting mass of "pixels" of both 2D and 3D, etc), but the way they effect reality highly implies that either the reality of run:gifocalypse or reality as a whole is just a video game or something similar to that effect. The story describes being corrupted by a Glitch as feeling a number of paradoxical sensations all at once, but above all pain. (Which makes sense — pain is also a response to feeling major conflicts at once, such as touching something hot and something cold close by at the same time.)
• Superpower Lottery: Many of the copies are already tough, but practically all of the Arc 3 professors take the cake. In a strange way, this isn't quite as random as the trope usually is, due to the copies being able to pick out what powers they want to pour in to.
  • Professor Wendy's power seems like a standard Blow You Away case, until it's revealed that she can effortlessly make tornados. This ends up being the one and only thing that unambiguously captures the Mystery Shack gang. The only reason why they didn't lose then and there is because Wendy M. was proudly expecting to lose, and the shock of her winning made her go berserk.
  • Professor Shannon can heal, at the very least, other copies (possibly herself and humans), grow to enormous sizes, shrink down to very tiny sizes (she has the largest size-range of all the copies), can manipulate electromagnetic waves up to and including gamma rays, and can... somehow merge with her own reflection and fuse with that to create a giant, growing mass of hostile body parts.
  • Burnda and Burrda's abilities (respectively, Playing with Fire and the power to manipulate "anti-fire") don't seem that impressive on their own, and they really aren't compared to other professors. Then it's revealed that copies can fuse, which also grants them extra reality warping, such as being able to spawn portals.
  • Dove has durability to the point where she can suvive being the center of an explosion that is ten times more powerful than a nuke with only minor scraps and clothing damage, super strength, enough skill to possess gigantic alien electronics ("thinking big," according to her), and could overall curb-stomp even the other professors. She also knows how to somehow turn an aircraft carrier in to a battleship that can fire anti-gravity beams.
  • Beating them all is Risen .GIFfany. Well, not in her normal form — she's just about as threatening as her canonical self, and is slightly implied to be one of the weaker professors. Where she shines is when she merges herself with/possesses the rift itself. This grants her the ability to teleport from any electronic to any other electronic, assimilate other copies on to her, create portals to other locations and even alternate dimensions, and it extends her possession powers to a craft the size of the planet.
  • Possibly even beating Risen with the rift is the main antagonist of the bonus chapter. Professor Eve, who can create her own pocket dimensions, and has a robot that can shape-shift in to all other Main Possessions except the Planet Negation Girl... but including the Giga-Tairuzzu.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Inverted with .GIFfany. Most of her copies are implied to be smarter than she is, and have more common sense. Burnda and Professor Wendy both point out holes in her logic or correct something about her when she's seen talking to them. It's highly suggested that the only reason why any of the other professors, let alone other copies, are even listening to her at all is because she has several inside tricks to getting them what is basically a free base.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: While the Summerween Trickster remained dead, apparently there was enough "loser candy" to form another trickster. This one being themed around Halloween. Soos can't simply eat this guy, since he only wants to be eaten on one of the Halloweens. Being set long after "Summerween" the episode but still in the summer of 2012, he doesn't have the chance to do so before the Trickster starts attacking everybody. In the epilogue, he does finally talk sense into the other Trickster and agrees to eat him on Halloween.
• Take That!:
  • Chapter 12 deals one to a certain development in Homestuck — it has a character named Ron Ejjert that believes he's the true protagonist and that the events of this fic as a whole are part of a "doomed timeline." When met with something said to be impossible to touch, he tries sticking his hand in it... and instead of getting the power to travel across time and space, he just explodes. He wasn't killed (just "send backwards through time" until the Time Baby caught him), but he's generally portrayed as an annoyance throughout with no idea what he's actually talking about.
  • invoked.GIFfany's brief video game-making career deals a few at Unpleasable Fanbases, namely of the "gets what they want, still complains" variety. And to a lesser extent, it also comments on Super Mario Maker for not having one thing many players want — slopes.
  • Despite being inspired by Undertale and ultimately ending with most of the copies being befriendable anyway, the fic isn't exactly above making cracks at it itself. Namely, showing how much sympathy a given hostile monster would lose if the human they are attacking was as fleshed out as Dipper or Mabel Pines. Professor Wendy is an unflattering Undyne expy (she's not completely unsympathetic, but towards the beginning she's presented as being more obnoxious than played for laughs) that at one point outright says that it wasn't until she was personally saved from something that she even slightly reconsidered her opinions on the human group — she even words Leona and Sonia's descriptions to sound an awful lot like what you do for Lesser Dog and Shyren (respectively) on the Pacifist run before encountering Undyne. It also presents an inverse of Undertale's situation — the "monsters" in this case all do know about the "player's" ability to reset and assume that they know too, but the "players" do not. Even with that in mind, many of the professors — especially Dove — still hardly come across as saints and the reader is expected to root for the humans working their way to save them. The humans do not kill any copy at any point, but they don't go out of their way to try to "befriend" or "redeem" them. Instead, the copies just either build each-other up (mostly seen with the Four Friends, and Rose with some of the others) or just kind of learn lessons on their own. While not explored in depth, Professor Rose's absolute insistence that the main characters not kill a single copy even though they're openly trying to attack two children is also a comment on the pacifist or not-murder-happy neutral route.
  • The epilogue mentions that King of the Hill ended up getting an unpopular reboot, much like what happened with Teen Titans Go! and The Powerpuff Girls (2016). While GPF himself likes King of the Hill proper, he's also not afraid to point out that some of it comes across as showing some real Values Dissonance even though it ended less than a decade from when RG was written.
  • Gravity Falls itself is not immune from criticism, although the blows dealt towards it are significantly lighter than anything else on this list. Dove is basically Great Pikmin Fan's mouthpiece when it comes to "The Love God," an episode that he thought handled its message very poorly and in a creepy manner. Mabel off-handedly dismisses the events of the rather contested "The Last Mabelcorn," and by the ending (although this was more from the author's rules about when a fan fic of an ongoing show takes place rather than spitefully erasing an episode from existence) the events of run:gifocalypse just-so-happened to have made the events of "Roadside Attraction" (yet another unpopular episode) not happen... although the story argues in favor of that episode in the epilogue.
• Technical Pacifist: Professor Dove. While she's the biggest asshole of the bunch and fires her own students just because, she vows to never actually kill anyone. And goes out of her way to avoid killing even bugs in her anti-gravity laser attack.
• That Man Is Dead: It's a reoccurring theme that the .GIFfany copies consider themselves completely different alter egoes/people from the base. Aformentioned "base" stays with the copy from canon/Risen, who stays as the Big Bad. Burrda brings up that ".GIFfany is dead" in the Official Ending, referring to how all of the copies are slowly changing with their greater exposure to humanity.
• Title Drop: In the first chapter^note It wasn't in at first. Great Pikmin Fan added this during an edit before chapter 8.
  .GIFfany: Welcome, everybody, to the reshaping of the planet as you know it: The start of the Gif-tastic Makeover! This is the newest program we will be running for the foreseeable future! Now, my army, follow this command! run:gifocalypse!
• Token Wholesome:
  • Dian out of the professor group. She's covered neck-to-toe in her default outfit, and has gas masks that could cover her face. Even when her outfit's "damaged" form (which they get to decide what's damaged and what isn't) amounts to only a few cuts and would be acceptable in public anyway. Unlike most examples of this trope, the reason for this appears to be pure Rule of Funny^note Fan feels no real closeness to her given how she's absent for the first eight chapters, and even in her own chapter she barely gets any screentime compared to the copies who took over her domain. She's an adult just like every single other copy (and not only acts like it, but generally even more mature than the others, reluctance aside), so there's no Token Mini-Moe or underage-ness issues at play. There's barely left to imagine considering how most of the .GIFfany copies share the same body template, and nothing suggests that her figure is any different from the default. And she's obviously not the lead character, or at most reflective of how little Dian wants to participate in... well, anything due to her extreme neutrality. By the finale, however, she's left completely naked as with all of the other copies.
  • Subverted with Leona, who also happens to be Dian's close friend. She wears a full sort of heavy-artist outfit with overalls, a shirt, and boots. Yet with that out of the way, out "outfit-damage" appears to be to ditch the whole costume altogether — leaving her going around completely naked aside from paint splattered on her randomly.
  • Zig-zagged with Dove, who is by far one of the most serious professors in the story and has one of the heaviest outfits. Then again, she too suffers from Clothing Damage that takes off most of her pants (though she has boxer shorts underneath), and she's completely willing to go topless as part of goading Mabel to punch her.
  • Subverted with Professor .GIFfany/The Risen One. Her schoolgirl outfit is relatively modest compared to her major sisters, with the panty shot risk being the only risque element. However, in one part of chapter 9 alone, she skyrocketed to being the most sexualized of them all. She emerges from a bath completely naked, the story gives a description of her admiring her naked body in the mirror, and even spanking herself for good measure — then she fantasizes about making out with Soos on a bed, if fully clothed.
  • Played straight with the human tag-alongs. Of the major human characters, four of them^note Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, and Gideon are underaged, while the other three^note Soos, Stan, and Ford aren't exactly in situations where they can comfortably get naked (which also applies to the former four). The human cast gets zero nude scenes (until Soos is stripped naked in Game Over by atmosphere falling, and the same chapter doesn't specify whether Mabel was bathing in Bubbles's new domain nude or not), zero attention to anything sexual, and even the subject of romance rarely comes up — which all serves to give a direct contrast to the millions of half-naked .GIFfanys around them.
• Took a Level in Badass: Not that .GIFfany wasn't badass before, but she now has an entire army amassed under her arm, a near-indestructable physical form that can fly around, ultimately lost none of her powers in the trade-off, and her other "professor" copies at least can possess more than just electronics. This includes but is not limited to plants, ectoplasm, water itself, stone, animals (with limited human possession), soap foam, painted drawings, sound itself, toxins, the air itself, light and reflections, fire, "anti-fire," and alien technology. As a matter of fact, all of the professors' losses until Dove have been because they were holding back in some way, shape, or form. (Whether it's through genuinely not wanting to fight, trying to look flashy in an ego-boosting way, or through some Honor Before Reason limitation.) Gideon gives a good idea of what would happen should they not have hesitance in chapter 8. A team of them just about captures Soos and Mabel in an instant.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: One of the two largest storylines consists of Dipper, Mabel, Soos, and Wendy going around the domains and working their way to .GIFfany. The other focuses on Stan and Ford at .GIFfany's endgame location, and specifically covers Ford befriending one of the later professors and working his way towards leaving the Construction Site thanks to her. As of chapter 11, the two storylines are mixed in and complete — the Mystery Shack Six is reunited, they're back at Gravity Falls, and... have to fight against Dove, who just blew it up.
• Under the Sea: Searah's domain, located in an underwater base under the Bermuda Triangle.
• The Unfought: Professor Dian. She is not "battled" traditionally like the other professors — instead, four powerful-but-not-quite-professor-level copies that took over her domain and split it amongst them serve as the real threats for her chapter. Dian simply lets the group capture her so that she can be with her friends and give them advice without worrying about .GIFfany teleporting her away.
• Unobtainium: The metal that all black magic-infused .GIFfany copies have the ability to create, which is dubbed "giffinium." It has the ability to block out most electromagnetic waves and the copies can travel through it with exceptional ease. Obviously, its chemical makeup, or if it even really has one, is unknown. Later, Burrda mades an "anti-gif rubber" somehow that can suppress the powers of all copies, and .GIFfany in turn finds a way to cut through that with an anti-anti-gif knife.
• Vapor Wear: Every single copy, with two exceptions (Burnda and Burrda), goes braless, and several go pantyless. Sandy and Bubbles have nothing under their mud/soap foam respectively. Underneath her modest outfit, all Leona has on is randomly-splattered paint. Post-Clothing Damage descriptions of the outfits imply that Rose, Searah, and Cardia all go commando too. Dian is the only ambiguous one, especially as she gives herself the mildest clothing damage out of anyone.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: .GIFfany's place, a gigantic entertainment center in space that is only referred to as the "Construction Site" for the vast majority of the fic's timespan. All of the student copies the gang failed to capture are sent there to work on it (they're doing it willingly and getting paid — if by the shitty economy system they have set up — so it's not like .GIFfany is flat-out enslaving them), adding more entertainment areas/dating sites and crafting it to her specifications. The "prize" for the Gifocalypse is that the first professor to capture the main four leads gets it, in its entirety, to themselves, and may reshape it however they want. Chapter 12 finally reveals its full name — the Planet Negation Girl. "Gigantic," in this context, means roughly the size of planet Earth.
• Villain Teleportation: The canonical .GIFfany copy is the only one that can teleport herself and others independantly, through electronics. She can use one as a gateway to immediately jump into any other electronic in existence. Everyone else needs the Wire system, which is derived from that specific mystery power. Naturally, any heroic character with this ability would crack the story wide open, as it is based on traveling from location to location. It's confirmed that this is because she merged with the rift. She also has a secondary teleport power, with a much shorter range (without a human link to boost it), which she uses to get out of the Illegal Prime Neutralizer.
• Villain Team-Up: .GIFfany attempts this with Gideon at the beginning. Not only does it backfire, it does so before the story even begins, and the aftermath of the failure is what kick-starts her hunt for the other copies.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Some of the background copies are implied to go topless, but this there is no noteworthy confirmed example until the hundred duelists in Dian's domain. As their name implies, there are a hundred of them, and the "shirts vs skins" team naming implies all of them do this.
• Walking Swimsuit Scene: Searah, due to the way she works within the ocean and around water. Her followers follow suit, except that Searah wears a modest one-piece swimsuit, while a number of her followers wear much less.
• Wham Episode:
  • Downplayed with chapter 2, "Pines Vs Trees." The first chapter seems to be setting things up for a straight-up Black-and-White Morality romp where the protagonists have to mow their way down a large Quirky Miniboss Squad. Then comes the story's first real twist: while the copy of .GIFfany faced in canon is just as bad as ever, this "Professor Rose" and her following students are actually friendly. The chapter also pulls a bit of a bigger twist near the end, where the crew ends up stranded away from Gravity Falls thanks to the way Wires work, and encounter Professor Kathody — who is not as friendly as Rose was.
  • Chapter 8, "Music." In order: Stan seriously considers starting a new career with .GIFfany. Gideon finally starts fighting the gang and is now working under Dove. This does, in fact, mean that Dove was willing to betray .GIFfany's trust after all, since .GIFfany did not and still does not like Gideon after the incident in the fic's backstory. Mabel has a Heroic BSOD as Sonia turns out to use her encouragement to launch an attack and injure Dipper, growing very hostile towards the clones and becoming overly-aggressive in general. Dipper himself, meanwhile, starts lightening up to the copies — especially when Kathody, Searah, Sandy, and Cardia all admit to their flaws and apologize. It's finally revealed that .GIFfany is using the "soul energy" Kathody harvests and exports to power a machine which generates even more copies of her game, in a potentially endless cycle, and that this was the "Endless mode" Bubbles mentioned back in chapter 6. .GIFfany also implies that she, of all people, is afraid of the then-unknown chartreuse-themed copy, Shannon. Ford decides to go to Professor Burnda's domain after all and sees that also has the card leading back to Gravity Falls for some reason. But Ford didn't go there because he missed her — he went there because the rift went missing and he wanted to find answers. Just about every major character except Soos and Wendy face some kind of a change here. Ironically, Great Pikmin Fan thought the chapter was just going to be an episodic romp without much happening.
  • Chapter 10, "Green With Lust." It seems like a regular copy-of-the-chapter romp with Professor Wendy. Then she ends up winning and everything goes to hell. After .GIFfany comes in to try to congratulate her, Professor Wendy briefly loses it as she did not expect to actually win — she ends up knocking .GIFfany out and bolting over to the next domain, which the group knows almost nothing about, in an attempt to derail the Gifocalypse. After getting there, it's revealed that the "mirrors" mentioned in just about every other chapter are actually a sort of virtual reality-vision device that also doubles as an addictive drug for copies that causes them to glitch out horribly and take reality itself out with it (but these effects are only temporary). After this, Burnda flat-out confirms that .GIFfany has, in fact, merged with the rift.
  • Chapter 11, "Hot and Cold," throws several twists in a row. The final unnamed professor, Burrda, is revealed, and Dove's backstory is explained. Right after this, Burrda warns the gang not to try to pity her, as she is still dangerous despite her tragic history. Burrda then goes on to say that the best way to prevent .GIFfany's attack from getting any worse is if she dies, or if Ford possibly dies instead. She makes him decide through a battle to the death. When she fails to bring herself to kill him, she tries killing herself — .GIFfany intervenes, one of the very few times she appears with the main characters in-person (Stan twins aside), and decides to call off the Gifocalypse. Dove finally makes her first physical appearance, pissed off as the Gifocalypse called off just before "her turn," and leaves to attack Gravity Falls. Ford tries to take advantage of Dove's surprise appearance to capture .GIFfany, only to find out that she can teleport out of the Illegal Prime Neutralizer. By ripping holes in space itself. Oh, and the "Construction Site" is absolutely gigantic (implied to be roughly the size of Earth itself), and part of it is right over Gravity Falls, as Soos spotted from the tip of a volcano in Mexico. The group then heads back to the town, just to find that Dove beat them there and fired some sort of anti-gravity beam at it. The entire town appears to explode, and the reader only has Rose and Ford's word that Dove didn't just kill them all instantly. The chapter ends as Dove flips off all of Gravity Falls.
  • Chapter 12, "Gravity Falls Vs Anti-Gravity." Dipper breaks the Illegal Prime Neutralier before they get a chance to capture Professor Dove, setting all of the captured copies free. Right around this time, .GIFfany kicks out the copies that she had taken on board the Construction Site, as it's finished and she's annoyed with them. Basically, every single first-gen copy of .GIFfany except the canonical one is finally re-united at Gravity Falls, and just in time to take down the Dragon. Before they could, Soos is captured and shot up towards the Construction Site, right into .GIFfany's arms. Once Dove is beaten, .GIFfany officially reveals the Construction Site's true nature — it's called the Planet Negation Girl for some reason, it houses billions of .GIFfanys (the entirety of chapters 1-12 only dealt with millions) created by her factory in the base's core, and she plans to blast off into deep space as soon as she convinces Soos to download himself in her brain. Chances are, she's not going to ask nicely. The kicker is that while the Pines and Wendy go up to stop her, she appears within the Wire transport system and outright pops their bubble.
  • The final post on Professor Wendy's Character Blog. It's set four years after the events of run:gifocalypse proper. Time has apparently not been kind to Dipper or Mabel, the former becoming a research-obsessed recluse and the latter being an implied doormat to the copies. .GIFfany's been getting quieter, and on Valentine's Day of 2016, one of the copies went missing. Said copy returned to pay Professor Wendy a visit, and Wendy ends the blog by mentioning that it was Professor Eve, a character that had previously been SBIG-exclusive. It turns out that this was foreshadowing the bonus chapter.
• Wham Line:
  • A downplayed example near the beginning. While Draco in Leather Pants is a thing, the story makes it abundantly clear right by the first chapter that it is not going to be portraying the canonical copy in a positive light. Then Stan says the following and it's suddenly clear that her Quirky Miniboss Squad is not necessarily held by the same standards:
    Stan: I was wrong. I can't speak for the pink-haired psycho on TV, but these people? Out in the woods? They're harmless.
  • The story concludes with one:
    .GIFfany: Yes. Things are going real great. After all, everybody is exactly where I want them to be right now.
  • Professor Wendy's Character Blog has one at the very end of it, for those that read Journals:
    After all, when we last spoke, Professor Eve owed me 500 gold.
• Wham Shot:
  • Rose stepping inside her Main Possession: a series of trees, showing that .GIFfany copies (or, at least, professors) are no longer limited to just possessing electronics.
  • Ford getting to the edge of the Construction Site, just to look over and find himself in space.
  • After .GIFfany calls off the Gifocalypse, she tries to go to the Illegal Prime Neutralizer to break out the news. Problem is, once everyone gets there, they see that static is there when it shouldn't be. And it's black static. Say hello to Professor Dove! Shortly after this, Soos tries the copies to something he spots in the distance. That thing being the Construction Site looming roughly right above Gravity Falls, and the thing is the size of the planet.
• Would Hit a Girl: Dipper and Soos wouldn't hold back against the copies, it's just most of the time, the copies aren't exactly attacking them unprovoked. Or they're too powerful to be beaten physically. Dipper still attacks Leona in chapter 7, Ford goes into one-on-one combat with Burrda (although he didn't want to, she forced the fight), Stan (uselessly) punches Dove, and Soos ends up trading blows with .GIFfany at the very end.
• Wrong Genre Savvy:
  • Professor Wendy thinks that run:gifocalypse is some kind of simplistic, possibly Black-and-White Morality romp where the villains are killed and never heard from again. She also thinks of herself as one such antagonist, thinking Humans Are Special to the point where they'll win any battle against any copy just because (and because they have "guts").
  • Professor Wendy gets this from her last player, Hayate, a Let's Player that thinks that he's part of his own series and P. Wendy was just a one-time Monster of the Week.
  • Ron Ejjert seems to think that this is a "doomed timeline" to something else. This is already kind of wrong (it is a Divergence Fic, but certainly not one that leads to the timeline dying out), but what makes it even more wrong is that he believes this is a sort of Set Right What Once Went Wrong case. He thinks of himself as the hero that will go back in time and prevent the Gifocalypse... instead, he gets shattered to some kind of "reverse time" state that threatened to change the creation of the universe. Time Baby found him and, as punishment for his attempted timeline disruption, placed him after all the action so that he'll know he isn't the big plot-influencer he thought he was. Fittingly, Professor Wendy's Character Blog epilogue mentions that he ended up being good friends with Hayate.
• Yandere:
  • Canon's .GIFfany herself. The only reason why she's not attacking Soos right away is because she wants to try to convince him to pick her over Melody with a Gilded Cage-like entertainment area in space. Also, the other professors feel like she owes them one for going out of their way to fix her, so she's giving them a chance to "win" at their own adventure-like "game" with the Mystery Shack group first. In "Game Complete," she wipes out the entire planet and assimilates (effectively kills) all of her other copies.
  • It's implied that every single copy of her is also this, namely the professors, and that their domains are similar attempts to pulling their players away from real life and towards their fantasies. The Pines only see their good sides because they are not involved with aformentioned players. Kathody all-but confirms this in chapter 8.
  • Gideon, who temporarily bonded with .GIFfany thanks to both of their yandere-like behavior. It helps that they have different targets. Still, it doesn't work out.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: Burnda, user of heat and fire. Burrda, user of coldness and "antifire." Both of them work together and outright fuse at one point, in an homage to Twinrova of the Zelda series.
• You Can't Go Home Again: As a consequence of the way the Wires work. The Wires are one-way transport systems that sends a person to another Wire if they have the destination's key card. While they get to keep the card after coming out and thus could keep coming back to said destination, there's no such luck if they don't have the card of the domain they came from. The protagonist group spends the majority of the fan fic being unable to return to Gravity Falls via Wire^note they could hypothetically get there by mode of transporation, and Rose even repeatedly mentions plane tickets, but everyone finds it more convenient to simply power through the domains instead. Also, it would seriously piss of Dove if they didn't follow the "game," causing her to immediately attack them, even when they get to any other domain they have access to. However, due to the way the domain daisy-chain works, Gravity Falls is a stop before reaching The Dragon's place. By the time they reach there, Dove blows it up in a few moments anyway, so it's no longer a comfortable place to stay in.

Axe Effect: Giffillions

• Crack Fic: Moreso than what it's a spinoff of, given how it's a recreation of an ad that makes no sense out of context and is set in a bizarre sort of Patchwork map that has, among other things, a tundra near a desert.
• Patchwork Map: The bizarre setting that this story takes place in.
• Poke the Poodle: Compared to just about any other incarnation of .GIFfany in GPF's works, her plan here is remarkably tame.
• Take That!: At Axe commericals, if a lighthearted one done for laughs.

Four Edges of Gravity Falls

• Nested Story Reveal: The whole thing is really just Dove's dumb self-insert fan fiction.

Tropes Exclusively Relating to the 2018 Reboot and Any Related Works

.GIFocalypse Rebooted

• Adaptational Early Appearance: All of the professors sans Shannon, Burrda, Dove, and possibly Eve appear as early as the first chapter, giving them a brief rundown.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • The fourteen "professors" from the original are given the new title of "dean," which was done to leave more room for other various ranks. The term "professor" is now used to refer to the deans' personal Elite Mooks, while the weaker/"standard" copies are still "students."
  • Within the professors/deans, Wendy is now renamed Natalie, to avoid the One-Steve Limit joke that was based upon loose crack works that somehow made Wendy and .GIFfany (semi-distant) "relatives."
  • Searah's prior player was named Dean, but his name was changed to Dennis just to set the name apart from the new dean ranking that the major copies have.
• Adaptational Wimp: Kathody no longer has the ability to channel spirits or work with ectoplasm/ecto-energy. Instead, she has the least developed or impressive power of the deans, as all she does is the "default" .GIFfany electricity, just better and more specialized than the other copies.
• Ascended Extra: The prior players appear more often and have more of a role in the reboot than the original, with Kenny (Rose's last player) in particular being something of a secondary character throughout the first chapter instead of just being seen, briefly, at the very beginning before disappearing until the end. Victoria plays a major role in Kathody's arc as well.
• Discontinuity Nod: Fan hated the way the Illegal Prime Neutralizer turned out in the old version, so not only was it written out, but there is a brief gag in the beginning where Mabel suggests something like a vacuum for the AIs and then immediately laughs the idea off.
• Mythology Gag: Burnda's first appearance in the reboot is .GIFfany being unusually especially curt with her before she even says a thing; while .GIFfany's behavior towards Burnda makes more sense after figuring out Burnda's rather obnoxious personality, but in reference to Burnda's frequence appearances in the Construction Site. Burnda's early appearances are toned down, and she shares "early" screentime with the other major copies that the gang had not encountered yet.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: When Searah decides to test the Mystery Shack group and her own prior player for their freedom, they end up tieing 2-2. (Wendy and Mabel pass their tests, Dipper and Soos fail theirs.) Dipper suspects that Dennis will fail his test, but on purpose, because Dennis has the Construction Site to gain from winning and nothing to get out of losing. Dipper's theory isn't unreasonable and he turns out to be correct that Dennis fails, but not in the same way. Searah's test for Dennis is to solve an extremely complex maze for a water droplet that he has no idea how to work, and the machine breaks instantly despite being designed to be hard to break. Dennis also would have wanted to pass once Searah mentions that she would be impressed at this and know that he wasn't lieing about his intelligence, but he fails immediately and has to deal with Searah getting pissed off at him.
• The Worf Effect: Deans are not necessarily stronger by number, but when a reformed Kathody faces off against the more recent and current threat of Searah at the time, Searah easily wins. In large part, Searah is literally surrounded by her element, and she had the added advantage of being able to surprise Kathody.

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[But none of this is important.]
[What is important is that you will never have to talk to real girls ever again.]
[You and me can be together.]
[FOR EV ER!]