Gravity Falls

That seems unlikely. You know what would be a great hiding place for a book containing arcane secrets that the human world must never know?

The other side of an interdimensional portal.

Panicked screams of "Help me!" generally mean that a person wants you to help save them from the thing that they are panicking about. Anything else is overthinking their ability to be logical and cool-headed while in the grips of panic. "Help me!" is an emotional response.

That's pretty much exactly what happened. But, like I said, it's not Stan's fault that Ford changed his mind about wanting to be saved.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 10th 2018 at 8:24:02 AM

I'm pretty sure the third option is what actually happened too. I was mainly just showing how people could interpret that scene in different ways. Among many other scenes when it comes to a show like this.

Though you do raise an interesting question: why didn't Ford just take the journal through the portal? Maybe he was afraid of what Bill could do if he found it? Probably not much since it's only one journal and the guy is more or less omniscient anyway, but I could see Ford being paranoid enough not to take the chance.

Well, in the grips of panic, he may have recognized that Stan would need it to save him. And then, on the other side, was like, "D'oh!"

But at the same time, Ford didn't want his Journals gone forever. Stan's enraged choice to light the Journal on fire was actually the best option if the goal is to keep the knowledge out of the wrong hands.

Ford opposed burning the Journal because even though he recognized that the knowledge they contained had to be kept out of the wrong hands, they were also his life's work. His egotism and pride wouldn't allow him to destroy what he'd spent so many years creating, despite knowing how great its potential to harm was.

Note as well that even though he had no intention to ever use it again, Ford would not actually begin disassembly of the Universe Portal until after his thirty year exile. Its very existence was a threat to the world, and yet it remained fueled up and in functioning condition in his basement, waiting for some idiot to accidentally throw the switch in the middle of a fistfight.

Even after he realized that Bill had used and manipulated him, Ford just couldn't put his ego aside. He is his own greatest nemesis.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 10th 2018 at 8:59:20 AM

Yet another trait he shares with Dipper. No wonder they get along so well with each other.

x2

I mean I get that Ford is trash (A well written character, but still a trash person.) but do we know that it was even possible for him to disassemble the portal from the other side?

He could take the portal apart but the 'portal' that it creates would still be there,if anything destroying it would make it unstable

Disassembling it from the other side would have been impossible. What I mean is, he could have taken it apart at some point between "Ford realizes that Bill used him to create the portal" and "Ford gets sucked into the portal".

He constructed hiding places for Journal #3, did whatever he did with Journal #2, somehow figured out where Stan was to send him a postcard, and then waited for Stan to come to him to retrieve Journal #3. And then when Stan arrived, the Universe Portal was still fueled up and in pristine working condition, needing only the pull of a lever to activate.

All Bill would have had to do would be to convince someone in the town to let him possess them and then waddle his fleshy human sack body into Ford's basement and pull the lever. BAM. It's go time for Weirdmaggeddon.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 10th 2018 at 12:28:10 PM

Assuming Bill could get near the portal at all even if he possessed someone

Speaking of Journal #2, was it ever revealed how Gideon got his hand on it?

He found it...

No explanation needed.

The closest thing to an explanation is in the real life Journal 3, where Ford mentions hiding it near the elementary school, assuming that no child could ever be smart enough to find it. Needless to say, he was wrong.

It all depend on how much we trust Stan knoweledge of the portal, he may have though he was gona be able to fix it, we know he did, but Ford was the one who created, if he said it was dangerous, Stan should have stopped to consider that maybe he perfected it for the last run and any mistake could have destroyed the world.

We know that's not the case, but how could have Stan be sure of that? Even if it was a red herring for the twist in not what he seems, the show showed us Stan being unconcerned about the alarm sings, namely when he cut his hand, since when don't know how much Stan knew about the portal, we don't know whether he made calculations for that or was willing to risk the portal making a gravitational brust so strong it could have broken the shack with the kids inside (cartoons physics aside).

I would say it depends more on how much we trust Stan's pig-headed stubbornness and ignorance. Stan isn't a thinker. He's emotionally-driven. Thus, he's not likely to make intellectual considerations like "Perhaps the conditions that allowed the portal to function the first time may not be present for this second, producing a different outcome."

Stan goes by gut instinct. He has very little patience for logical argument. Shit, he even yells at the book to shut up when he gets frustrated with its warnings in "Not What He Seems". Stan's anti-intellectual perception of reality is shaped by what he sees and hears with his own eyes and ears.

It's entirely fair to say that Stan is too belligerently stupid to be trusted with operating complex machinery like this. It's the equivalent of having a stereotypical angry trucker behind the controls at NASA. He has absolutely no idea what he's doing, his mistakes could get a lot of people hurt, and he's going to try to punch you in the face for explaining that to him.

But it's not fair to say that he was willing to endanger the universe or even just Dipper and Mabel when, in his mind, that was likely never a possible outcome in the first place. His eyes have shown him that the portal works fine, so he dismissed his brother's written warnings as stupid intellectual wankery from a stupid intellectual wanker.

Anti-intellectuals always think that intellectuals are worrying too much. Stan's basically going, "Climate change? Pfft. It's SNOWING. Dumbass."

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 11th 2018 at 7:14:32 AM

A lot of things about Stan's character make sense when you realise that he was the Mabel to Ford's Dipper.

A person like Stan or Mabel has no rooms for cold, calculated logic in their life. They think with their heart, not their head. And they are very, very devoted to people they love.

Edited by Nightwire on Aug 11th 2018 at 11:28:20 AM

"Streetwise" people like Stan have a way of convincing themselves that what little they know is really all that's important, and that their gut instinct is superior to any further study of the subject. And they never realize that a gut instinct based on limited knowledge of a subject isn't worth much at all.

If this is meant to be a moral defence of Stanley, it's not a very good one. Following your gut does not give you a blanket excuse against being criticized for your actions. If that were true, it'd be literally impossible for unintelligent people to ever be in the moral wrong, which is a notion I really don't subscribe to.

TBH, I'm not all that mad at Stan for the portal thing, all things considered. The much bigger dick move that the show basically immediately absolves him of is when he refuses to get in the magic ring to stop Bill and then ruins it by getting into a fistfight with Ford. Stan basically doomed the entire world, including his precious family, because of his wounded pride. Yeah, he later sacrifices himself to defeat Bill, but 1) He wouldn't have had to do that in the first place if he'd just gone along with Ford's plan, so it basically amounts to cleaning up his own mess, and 2) He didn't know he could do that when he broke the magic circle, so it doesn't make his earlier actions — which, as far as he knew, would have led to Dipper and Mabel's deaths — any less reprehensible.

"But," you might say, "Stan wouldn't have done that if Ford hadn't called out his grammar. It was Ford's fault, too!" But, no, it really wasn't. Ford was being kind of a dick, sure, but being condescending to Stan, is not a dick move of remotely the same calibre as dooming all life of the planet because of your wounded pride. And the fact that Ford's dickish remark prompted Stan's far more despicable reaction does not make Ford somehow morally culpable for Stan's decision.

I really hate this idea that level-headed people have some sort of moral responsibility for things that impulsive people close to them do, and that if said impulsive person does something massively selfish and destructive in retaliation for something they did, it's also or even mostly the level-headed person's fault. The show implies the same thing with Dipper and Mabel, when it suggests that Dipper somehow is responsible for Mabel endangering herself and others in retaliation for him wanting to stay as Ford's apprentice, which is just fucking absurd.

Edited by DrDougsh on Aug 12th 2018 at 10:46:44 AM

She didn’t do anything out of retaliation. She wanted some more time to have fun before her world changed forever.

Mabel legitimately didn’t know, nor had any further context to know, what she was doing by giving the orb to Billdin. She saw a time traveler, who’s job is to protect space time, give her a temporary time stop. That might be a bit selfish, but it’s not like she doomed the world out of spite.

And no one really blamed Dipper for that, like at all.

Edited by RhymeBeat on Aug 12th 2018 at 1:50:37 PM

It's not so much that any particular character blames Dipper for it, and more that the show's narrative seems to imply that he's responsible and needs to learn from it, since what follows is Dipper being convinced not to accept Ford's apprenticeship while Mabel's part in causing the Weirdmageddon isn't even acknowledged, and she learns absolutely no lesson from it. If we were meant to take it as being Mabel's fault, then it'd make sense for her to reassess her actions, not for Dipper to backpedal on the actions that prompted her decision.

The show very much strikes me as sending the message, intentionally or not, that it's Dipper's responsibility to always be there for Mabel, because if he isn't she might take actions that will endanger herself and others. That she's not responsible for any fallout from her actions because she just follows her gut; that it's Dipper's responsibity to make sure she doesn't do foolish things rather than her responsibility to grow up and be less immature.

Edited by DrDougsh on Aug 12th 2018 at 11:16:47 AM

I suppose if one wanted to be a little more generous (or cynical), this may simply be a consequence of Dipper being the protagonist of the story while Mabel isn't really. In fact it's probably easier to argue that she exist primarily to contrast with Dipper and to facilitate his development as opposed to develop herself.

Given that there is really not the same kind of expectations for Mabel to follow a character arc at all, let alone an arc similar to what Dipper went through. Whether or not that was good direction to take her or if that lack of an arc actually undermines Dipper's own development or the narrative as a whole is another thing entirely.

One of the things I enjoy about the new Graphic Novel is Mabel actually acknowledged she caused Weirdmageddon out of her selfish desire to keep Summer going forever. I'm among those frustrated by the series for never properly acknowledging Mabel's hand in it, or giving her constant Aesop Amnesia to lessons throughout the show. I grant the A-A was vital to the plot, but it always felt the show punished Dipper for his mistakes more than Mabel, even when she really, really needed to pay for it.

Given Alex Hirsch wrote the stories for the graphic novel, I'd say this is his own acknowledgment that they kinda flubbed that with Mabel. Plus I think on a livestream he actually did admit the staff kind of let Mabel get away with too much without the same kind of hard lessons taken to heart like Dipper because she was adored so much.

Either way I'm glad the graphic novel gave us that little moment.

While that is nice it really doesn't change the overall narrative of the show itself.

It's kind of impossible for Alex and the rest of the team to go back and give Mabel an actual coming of age arc without rebooting the series.

I think Alex is a bit too burnt out for that; It wouldn't really work this soon after it either.

Well I at least want to believe that the show wasn't teaching a lesson to Dipper in the sense of "you are being a jerk for wanting to do your own thing", but more in the sense of "you're being a jerk about it and also you don't know what you want"; and that he was being sincere when he said he wouldn't have like sataying with Ford.

He was probably just blinded by the shiny, there's a probability he would have chosen staying with Mabel even if the weirdmagedon didn't happen; remember he is just a kid, the way it was framed looked like Ford was the one giving him the wrong ideas with comments like "isn't it suffocating?".

I don't think he would have changed his mind without Weirdmaggeddon, but I do think he was sincere about it being a mistake. He was able to recognize the importance of having a childhood with Mabel because of the perspective offered by the extreme circumstances of Weirdmaggeddon.

Had Weirdmaggeddon never happened, I have no doubt that Dipper would have stayed in Gravity Falls to be Ford's apprentice and one day grown to regret that decision.

Dipper's trying to grow up too fast. Both his Precocious Crush on a girl three years older than him and his attempt to forego childhood for the sake of a career opportunity are reflections of that. Dipper desperately wants to be older than he actually is.

This is in stark contrast to Mabel, who doesn't want to grow up at all.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 13th 2018 at 11:28:31 AM

Thing is, this is very much Informed Wrongness and really the show's biggest example of Ford having a reasonable point when he's not supposed to have one. Ford suggests that Dipper's relationship with Mabel is suffocating to him... and the show, instead of really providing a counterargument to it, proceeds to completely validate Ford's statement by forcing Dipper to abandon his ambitions because Mabel doesn't want him to pursue it.

You could argue that Dipper would have regretted making that choice. But he never actually gets to choose one way or the other because ultimately he's just forced to backpedal on his decision in order to save Mabel from herself. It's infuriating, and it makes Ford's earlier statement seem way more true than the show gives it credit for.

But Dipper wasn't being a jerk, not even a little bit. Staying with Ford is a decision that's fully within his right to make.

Edited by DrDougsh on Aug 13th 2018 at 10:51:23 AM