This Hurts So Much 😭😭😭😭😭

gravity falls thoughts of the week: i've been joking about ford not knowing what's okay or safe to let children do in the past few episodes but that kind of becomes less funny in the show in "dipper and mabel vs. the future", when we see that these missions he's taking dipper along on are actually putting this kid in danger. sure he manages to survive and get them out of the danger but it's kind of concerning that ford's takeaway from this is "see, you can handle it!" and not "maybe i shouldn't invite this 12-going-on-13-year-old to be my apprentice in highly dangerous field research"

but dipper, of course, doesn't realize this because he's a kid getting to do cool stuff with an adult who respects his intelligence and doesn't treat him like a kid, even though that's the problem. this final string of episodes does a good job highlighting the theme of dipper wanting to grow up too fast and mabel wanting to stay a kid forever and how neither of those are realistic approaches, even though most of the time this isn't a show terribly concerned with realism.

(kind of wild to me thinking about it now that there were a lot of fans at the time who genuinely thought dipper was giving up a great opportunity by choosing not to take ford up on his apprenticeship offer by the end. i guess that's the difference between watching kids' shows when you're closer to the age of the main characters and watching them when you're a lot older than the characters. on most shows i wouldn't worry too much over questions like "are these kids who go on fun adventures that appeal to the target demographic who like to imagine getting to do cool things Literal Child Soldiers?" but here the point clearly is that kids shouldn't have a full-time job instead of going to school and having a normal childhood and adolescence, and also more broadly that the adult in this situation is projecting his own issues onto the kids and does not actually know what's best for them. idk i think it's pretty obvious!)

on mabel's side of (not) coping with things, there's a lot to say about mabeland and what it represents. when i first watched this i was a little disappointed that they didn't make the inside of the bubble a perfect recreation of gravity falls with mabel living out her endless summer by pretending nothing's changed, complete with eerie fake replicas of her friends and family, and instead went full fantasy land...but i did ultimately like where they ended up going with it. i like the implication that mabel doesn't actually have fake versions of the other characters there because she's waiting for the real ones to show up so they can be together (or at least that's my headcanon. dippy fresh might count but he's just the "backup" there to agree with mabel when the real dipper inevitably goes against her plans.) i like that bill isn't too concerned about the others getting inside the bubble because it's designed to keep you trapped there by giving you whatever you want, plus it's an obvious "safe" place in the middle of all the chaos outside. i should probably make a separate post for this because i realized while thinking about this episode that i have a lot of thoughts on mabeland and how the bubble works. (originally the title for part 2 was going to be "escape from mabeland" but the crew thought it was too spoilery or would set up a different expectation from the fans, so it became "escape from reality" instead. which is technically the opposite of what the original title meant but it's still accurate because that's what mabeland is! she's trying to escape from reality!)

final thoughts were that a lot of people thought the conflicts were resolved too quickly in these last few episodes but i'm forgiving of it because they are working with limited time for these episodes here and it is still a kids' show. also the long hiatuses between episodes kind of messed with the fandom's sense of time back when they were first airing. i feel like there was so much fanart of the characters becoming hardened post-apocalyptic warriors during this era but the actual apocalypse in the show's time lasts for like, a week. maybe less.

anyway, watching the finale tonight and then i'll reread my copy of journal 3, and finally read the lost legends comics which just came in from the library, and then hopefully get on the long waitlist for the book of bill, aaaaaand then i'll be done and can go back to watching shows that aren't for kids. well i'll do that after running through over the garden wall one last time, it is the tenth anniversary after all.

Those who understand understand.

Stop👏fucking👏tagging 👏ships👏 on 👏ao3👏if 👏the👏 ship👏 isn’t 👏the👏 focus👏 of👏 the👏 story…

wip comic based off a tumblr post i saw the other day

Epic in a nutshell

I got the reference.

Girls don't want boys, girls want the moon. They want to live on the moon. And eat it in a pie. And keep it as a pet. And wear it like a gemstone in their hair.

ᴹᵒʳᵉ ᵒⁿ ᴮᵒᵒˢᵗʸ ᵃⁿᵈ ⱽᴷ ᴰᵒⁿᵘᵗ | ᶜᵒᵐᵐᶦˢˢᶦᵒⁿˢ ᵒᵖᵉⁿ

someone get plagg so i can catacylsm the white men

we've done it again folks