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gfpt-comic · 3 years

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So. Here goes nothing... (1/?)

(Major spoilers for the comic, but since it won’t update anymore (besides PERHAPS some random comic strips/excerpts without context every now and then, but don’t count on it), I guess it doesn’t matter.)

If you read my answer to the ask posted earlier, you probably know what this post is about. I’ll make a list of every important point I wanted to tackle in the comic, in multiple sections. Be prepared for the long post that awaits you below the cut.

Summary of what was left of Chapter 2

Following their first appearance at the beginning of the chapter, Lolph and Dundgren try to question Blendin, who is staying at a hospital and is still under intense care. They discuss what exactly happened to Blendin in the first place: he was assigned what was supposed to be a routine mission to solve a minor time anomaly in the 21st century, but his time machine exploded when he tried to operate it and he was gravely injured. Dundgren mentions that any normal time device should hardly cause this much damage when malfunctioning, suggesting that Blendin’s level of incompetence is so incredibly high, it somehow managed to make something that shouldn’t be able to explode blow up in his face. On the other hand, Lolph starts to wonder if, exactly because it should be impossible, the accident may have had a reason other than just Blendin’s incompetence. Unfortunately, the accident had consequences so grave on Blendin’s physical health, it seemingly also took a toll on his sanity and questioning him only leaves them with esoteric sentences of dubious credibility.

Blendin: “This is very nice of you… to visit me. There isn’t much time left. I was starting to feel alone, before everything disappears.” Blendin: “Time Baby will succeed… He will free us from this time.”

July 13, 2012 again: back in the gift shop of the Mystery Shack, Wendy and Soos have captured Bill and tied him up to a chair. Wendy starts interrogating him, asking him who or what he is-- throwing in her multiple guesses: the Shapeshifter she defeated with Dipper in the bunker, a paper clone... She doesn’t suspect demon possession or a switch-because-of-the-carpet scenario, however. Bill just keeps trying to break free with little success, without answering; and soon, Stan interrupts them when he enters the gift shop as well, followed by the dozen of tourists he took during his latest tour. Wendy and Soos manage to evade Stan’s obvious questions by pretending they were making a new attraction.

Back in Mabel’s Dreamscape, Mabel encourages Dipper to have some fun with Bill’s powers, but he is scared of messing up because of just how powerful he is; having seen Bill’s powers both in the Mindscape/Dreamscape and in Weirdmageddon when he witnessed the alternate timelines, Dipper knows just how far those powers can go and he isn’t sure he can control them. Still, after some teasing Mabel starts a snowball fight with the surrounding ice cream, and gradually the twins have more and more fun starting with the ice cream, then with the tricks Dipper starts to use. When they take a break, Mabel points out that nothing bad happened, and Dipper grows a bit more confident that he can use Bill’s powers in a way that isn’t dangerous.

Dipper: “I guess it’s easy to do exactly what you want when it literally happens in your mind... Huh.”

Dipper notices it’s almost noon, and Mabel remembers that she was supposed to meet William at Greasy’s Diner for lunch. Mabel is unseasy upon thinking of talking to him again after what happened the day before, and Dipper confirms by showing William’s current whereabouts through a peephole that William seems about as worried as she is. Mabel takes a deep breath, makes sure that she will be able to see Dipper whenever she needs (during the night for sure, perhaps earlier if she asks for it). Still, just before Dipper wakes her up... She has a favor to ask him.

Mabel: “Now that you can do lots of magic stuff and all... Could you do something for me?”

Back in the gift shop, the tourists have left and Bill was untied due to Stan’s confusion over the situation. However, he is forced to stay inside and is stuck sitting by Wendy’s side behind the cashier desk. When Mabel goes through the gift shop to go to the Diner, everyone notices that she made a new sweater -- one with a pine tree symbol on it, no less. Bill is enraged but can’t stop her from leaving.

William has his first face reveal. He is a blonde 13-year-old, and is already waiting worriedly at Greasy’s Diner when Mabel arrives. He immediately apologizes for what happened on the day before.

William: “About yesterday, I... I’m sorry I said your brother was a bad influence. That was uncalled for.”

Mabel: “Yes. Yes it was.”

William is genuinely apologetic, but soon it is revealed that the reason why he thought Dipper and the Mystery Shack were a bad influence was because he doesn’t believe at all in the supernatural. Even if Mabel told him about her adventures, he assumed they were just stories she made up while playing in the Mystery Shack’s museum and never believed them to be true. Mabel tries to convince him by showing him some episodes of Dipper’s “Guide to the Unexplained” -- a series of videos he used to make and post online at the beginning of their summer break upon arriving in Gravity Falls, but stopped making altogether after Summerween. Sadly, the episodes made up until then did not revolve around exceptionally weird anomalies, and aren’t enough to convince William. The only thing William admits to being strange is the fact that every inhabitant of Gravity Falls is “out of their minds.”

Exasperated by William’s absurdly high levels of skepticism, Mabel eventually dares him to go on a forest expedition with her, Candy and Grenda on the next day, just so they can show him pretty much anything in the forest that is out of the ordinary. William strongly refuses and tries to dissuade her to go into the forest at all; he has been personally forbidden by his mother from going anywhere near the forest, and he has also read on the local news that there is currently a predator of unknown origin or species on the loose, which has been notably attacking sheep from the nearby farm. Mabel teases him about the fact that he believes that this creature is real, and suggests that it might be a werewolf for example; but William doesn’t take her seriously, especially because the creature is supposed to fly.

And... This is the part where my script starts getting wonky. I’ve been trying to fill the holes, but sadly it’s proven to be quite difficult, especially now that I know I won’t be drawing it in comic form anyway. Still, the main plot should be precise enough! The holes are mainly just “there should be some filler and/or foreshadowing to what’s coming here”, with little more than just prompts for what could be happening.

Back in the Mystery Shack’s gift shop, Wendy tries to sneakily question Bill, but when Stan asks them where Mabel went and Bill tells him she skipped her restocking duty so she could spend time with William at the Diner, Stan asks him to get her back. Bill happily takes this opportunity to slip out of the Mystery Shack, and have an excuse to bother Mabel at the same time.

Eventually, William is obligated to accept Mabel’s terms and intends on coming so he can at least make sure that the girls won’t put themselves in danger upon visiting the forest on their own.

Bill arrives at the Diner. William, thinking he is meeting Dipper again, tries to make amends for the things he said the previous day and says that he earnestly thinks they can start again on the right foot; Bill sadistically mocks him instead, all the while pretending to be Dipper, just so he can ruin Mabel’s hopes of reconciling William and Dipper. Bill finishes Mabel by forcing her to leave, saying that Stan expects her to work at the gift shop like she was supposed to since the beginning.

Mabel gone, William and Bill start to have a tense conversation; well, tense on William’s part, while Bill is mostly just having a blast driving William mad. The old fanfic that was the first “draft” version of the story has this chapter, which gathers most of the jokes I intended to keep, and at least some of the plot points. I’ll put a warning for awkward English, though. Oh and also, apparently in the old version it was July 3rd and not July 13th, so in the comic the “tomorrow is July 4th so the forest trip can’t happen anyway” excuse wouldn’t work.

About the Quetzalcoatlus thing: here, have some fun dinosaur size comparisons & history following my latest research on what the pterodactyl from S1E18: Land Before Swine.

William: “And how would you even know all that?”

Bill: “Because I ate Leonardo da Vinci.”

William: “. . .”

William: “… It must have been some VERY cryptic way for you to say that it was one of those conspiracy things mentioned in the old book supposedly written by a genius that you keep reading passionately every day. Right?”

Bill: “Oh, so your brain CAN work sometimes!”

Bill gets bit by a soothquito. His bite marks spell “FHOASE CORECULLY“

Upon leaving the Diner, they both see someone being kidnapped by a member of the Blindeye Society. William insists they immediately go warn the police, but Blubs and Durland prove to be ineffective as ever. Bill slips in one or two facts about the secret society, but William dismisses them completely as other random insane things Bill just happens to say all the time for trolling purposes.

Mabel is back in the Mystery Shack and starts her restocking duty, but her mind is clearly elsewhere. She starts mumbling to herself, but is interrupted by the decapitated head of Larry King who just happened to be in the vents nearby. Mabel isn’t surprised at all to see he survived, and when Larry King starts "interviewing” her about the issues she was mumbling about, she complies. Some time later, while Soos is cleaning up the floor, he overhears Mabel complaining about Bill being a jerk on purpose and making Dipper seem like a terrible person, and ends up hearing pretty much the whole story that way, without Mabel knowing. Soos proceeds to tell Wendy what he heard, helping them putting two and two together-- all the while understanding why Mabel didn’t warn them, and why they should stay silent as well. They decide not to tell Mabel they know her secret; but when Bill comes back later, just as Wendy’s shift was about to end, she has just one thing to tell him:

Wendy: “Tomorrow 6PM. My place.”

Night time; Bill is annoyed, but not very surprised by the fact that Soos is sleeping with him for the night, in the room on the ground floor where Dipper had relocated. Bill is at least glad he no longer has to pretend to be Dipper around Wendy and him.

Soos proceeds to ask Bill what his intentions were; not just in the present times now that the switch occurred, but also before it.

Soos: “So you really are that triangle guy from two weeks ago?”

Soos: “Now that I'm thinking about it… A lot of things happened two weeks ago. That's when it began to get all wrong. Well, it was already wrong before that, but… That's really when you came that everything started to get all weird and… bad.“

Soos: “It all started because of that Summerween night. What did you want with us?”

Soos: “Why did you tell Dipper that Gideon summoned you?”

Bill: “It was just a job. Jobs are boring. There’s no fun in it if nobody’s trying to stop you.”

Bill: “Oh, and you wanna know the best part? If you’d taken Shooting Star along with you instead of going just the two of you, perhaps you would’ve had an opportunity to beat me.”

Soos: What did you do with Gideon two weeks ago? Dipper and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that those government guys showed up just the next day.

Bill: “Something that neither Pine Tree nor I want anybody to find out, I bet. Also if I were to tell you, you'd either faint or spend the next fourteen hours trying to explain it all to Red. Funny, but not worth it.”

Soos is disturbed by Bill’s attitude, because of course he tries to both troll and traumatize at once, and given how Soos was already terrified of Bill because of the Summerween night (”I’ve had nightmares for weeks!” from an earlier comic page), it doesn’t help. Soos tries to ask Bill about the deal he made with Gideon -- more specifically, he asks what Bill wanted in return for stealing the code from Stan’s mind. However, Bill doesn’t answer and instead opens the bedroom door to reveal that Mabel was trying to eavesdrop.

Mabel was mostly there to make sure that everything was alright, and deduces that Bill hadn't slept at all during the first night and that he intends to never sleep at all, even after she tells him that humans need sleep to survive. Thankfully she came prepared with a “surprise gift from Candy and Grenda”, and sprays Bill with Fairy Dust.

Mabel: “There’s probably enough in that bag to knock out a gremloblin in an instant, so I think he’s good for the night. :p”

Once Bill is asleep, Dipper takes this chance to come to his Dreamscape and talk to him one-on-one; and, he is not happy at how Bill treated Mabel so far. Still, after a certain point the conversation gets to a more pressing topic.

Bill: “You saw it happen, didn’t you?”

Bill: “Weirdmageddon. You saw it, right?”

Dipper: “. . .”

Bill: “Oh-ho, even better! There’s a timeline in which YOU make it happen, isn’t there?”

Dipper: “That’s not gonna happen.”

Bill: “Look kid, take it from me. The more you try to actively prevent a specific outcome, the more likely you usually make it happen.”

Dipper: “You can’t make something happen if you specifically stop everything that can lead to it from happening first.”

Dipper: “Even if it includes lying to Mabel… I saw it. If she learns there’s a way to get me a physical form, she’ll try anything to make it happen and disregard the consequences. I bet she trusts me to keep things under control, but everything else? There’s just... There’s too many variables. We can’t let her know anything about the portal. Or Weirdmageddon.”

Bill: “Well, that doesn’t change anything from my original plan anyway.”

Bill: “So you’re just gonna stay in the Nightmare Realm forever, is that it?”

Dipper: “That’s not much of a plan so far, but that’s still an effective way to save the world.”

Bill: “Don’t mess with me. You DO know that if you don’t make your way to another dimension eventually, you’re just going to die, right?”

Dipper: “... W-what are you talking about?”

Bill: “Wait. You REALLY didn’t figure that out yet?”

Bill: “The Nightmare Realm is unstable. It’s just gonna collapse one of these days, destroy everything in it. Could be in a billion years. Could be tomorrow.”

After leaving Bill’s Dreamscape, Dipper decides to visit Wendy’s and tell her everything. He confirms her doubts, tells her the whole story with the carpet... And he tells her about Weirdmageddon and what Bill just told him about the Nightmare Realm.

Dipper: “I mean, it’s better this way for everyone, and of course I’m not gonna go with Bill’s original plan to destroy the laws of physics or whatever, but… I-I just don’t wanna die, you know?”

Wendy: “Don’t worry. We’ll find a way.”

> Summary of chapters 3 and 4

#pt comic #pt compilation #pythagorean thoughts

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spaceorphan18 · 7 years

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HI - would you mind expanding on your point about Chris covering the whole Darren thing with Hansel and Gretel in TLOS? I'm still super behind on the series, only on book 2 but would be intrigued as to what you mean. I'm not worried about spoilers for the series, so would love to hear your thoughts. Love your episode ranking and your meta is always great so am always up to hear your thoughts and opinions on things!

Nonny #2 Well, Darren is my fave. But I also adore Lea and Jenna and Dianna tons. And Kevin. And I know some people have said some nasty things about Lea over the years, and I’d hate to see that they’re true because I’ve met her and she was incredibly sweet and generous with her time. Also, if you don’t mind me asking, what Hansel and Gretel thing? I didn’t catch that as a reference to Darren at all. (Chris is also a fave, so pls no one think I’m bashing/attacking him)

Okay. I should start by saying that I really should know better than to half-state things. I really should go all in an explain myself or just not post it.

Before I go on digging myself in a bigger hole because apparently y’all really want to hear about this, I need to clarify one not really related thing but since I’m lumping today’s controversies into one place – With the exception of Mark, who I think is a first class douche bag, I like all of the cast of Glee just fine. I don’t think they’re perfect, but I don’t think any of them are bad people, either. Most of them I don’t have strong opinions on at all. Just wanted to state that’s where I stand on that.

Okay, I may regret this later - here we go.

First of all, I’m assuming a majority of you already know the story of Hansel and Gretel. The two kids who go walking in the woods, and nearly get eaten by a witch and live to escape. Rather popular fairy tale.

Here’s a summary of the story within the Land of Stories mythos.

“Gretel explained that Hansel’s death was an accident, but a welcome one; she had pushed him without knowing they were standing on a cliff. She says she and Hansel were famous after their adventure with the witch, and Hansel enjoyed his fame too much, taking credit for killing the witch and using the story and his sister to get attention. Tired of being a part of “Hansel & Gretel”, she pleaded guilty so she could finally be “just Gretel” in prison“ -TLOS Wiki

Also, two quotes from Gretel that seem relevant.

“No one cared about me. They just cared about ‘Hansel and Gretel’. I just wanted to be Gretel, just Gretel, not no matter what I did no one would let me be just Gretel. It was like my brother had become an invisible ball and chain I was forced to carry around for the rest of my life.”

“The worst thing one person can do to another- besides eat them, of course- is to reduce their identity to being only half of something. When someone is treated as 'half of’ or 'less than half’ of one identity, they are no being treated like a human at all. Everyone should have the right to individuality.”

—

When I first read this, my first thought was, oh, I wonder if this has anything to do with Klaine.

So, let me elaborate -

1. Chris has a tendency to use his books as a way to self reflect? As therapy? As a way to work through is baggage? Look - I don’t know Chris personally, so all of this is educated guesswork, and should be taken with the grain of salt that I’m giving out. I should stress that my opinions should not at any point be taken as facts. Based on interviews, second hand accounts, and the four (brief) times I’ve met him, I find it apparent that Chris self-inserts a lot in his books. This is a thing writers often do. Struck by Lightning was an exaggeration of his high school experience. He’s often stated that Alex and Conner are versions of him. I’m sure Stranger than Fanfiction will have nods to Glee. It’s something he’s mentioned in many interviews. I should add, though, unless Chris mentions it, none of us knows for sure what is and isn’t based on real life events. None of us were there, so none of us have the authority to say what actually did or didn’t happen. It’s all speculation - which doesn’t mean much at the end of the day.

2. I should stress the the influence of real life events can be and usually are exaggerated in fiction. At the end of the day, Chris is writing stories, and whether they were influenced from real life or not, the story on the page should not be taken as what happened in real life.

3. During Glee’s run, Chris had/s been very vocal about being overwhelmed by the phenomenon that was/is Klaine. He also mentioned, several times, that he never wanted Kurt’s individual story to be lost at the alter of Klaine. Independence is an important thing to him (again, taking from context of various interviews), and he didn’t seem to be comfortable when people came at him about Klaine and nothing else.

Anyway, from the excerpt above, I got the feeling that Chris felt that sometimes Klaine was a heavy burden he didn’t always want to deal with. Which is a fair way to feel about the thing.

~So, you think Chris wants to push Darren off a cliff? No. I don’t think Hansel is Darren. (Though, if it is, it’s exaggerated greatly) I do think he might have wanted to push Klaine off a cliff from time to time, though.

~So, you think Chris hates Klaine? No, I don’t. Chris has said a lot of positive things about Klaine over the years. I don’t think he liked, however, his identity being reduced to being only the K in Klaine. And no, I don’t think he really liked being one half of a beloved power couple. (Which I don’t think has anything to do with Darren personally, Darren just happens to be the other half of the equation)

~So, what does this have to do with Stranger than Fanfiction again? As far as I can tell - this Hansel and Gretel thing is the only time anything Darren related (via Klaine) has really stood out to me in Chris’s fiction. Is Darren in other places? I don’t know - I don’t know Chris or Darren, and I don’t know what is a direct reference outside of minimal guesses and what Chris explicitly says.

I do know that Chris is careful not to bring up Darren because he very much does not like the fact that people so vocally (and sometimes harmfully) ‘ship’ he and Darren together. (Darren has mentioned on numerous occasions how much Chris hates that.) And therefore I don’t believe he’s going to bring it up in Stranger than Fanfiction. Again - I haven’t read the book, so I don’t actually know what’s in it yet. And - I could be totally wrong. It’s mild speculation, based on Chris’s trends, that I mentioned he probably wouldn’t bring up reference to Darren in the book. But really, I do not know.

—-

And as an added bonus, because these things always lead down this road and someone will probably ask eventually, the one time I’m ever going to discuss it – What do you think the nature of Chris and Darren’s friendship is?

Well - here are the facts that I know (man, I wish I had my sources ready to go like a good researcher - but I’m too tired to link):

Fact: Chris and Darren have both stated in interviews that they are friends with each other. (My opinion - Glee is a family, and Chris and Darren seem to me, to be good/decent friends, who get along with each other as any family member would with another. I don’t think they are as close with each other as they are other cast members, but they’ve both stated they definitely do not hate each other either.)

Fact: Chris and Darren have both explicitly stated that they are not now or ever have been in a relationship with each other; and both are in individual long term relationships. (My opinion - and it seems to bother the fuck outta Chris that people people ship he and Darren, so he and Darren at some point discussed how to tackle public exposure, which is why they didn’t appear together that often in public settings. How ever they are in their private lives, we are not privy to outside of things they’ve explicitly shared with us.)

Fact: Darren identifies as straight. (My opinion - the only person to who can identify your sexuality is you.)

Whatever you want to extrapolate from that, be my guest. But that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.

Please do not send me wank about this. I will not reply, and you will be automatically blocked.

Hopefully, this rounds up all inquiries well enough.

#man this took me two hours to write #I'm tired #and hopefully I'll piss less people off tomorrow #we'll see...#Anonymous

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