The Thing I Love About Bill Being A Flatlander Is That He So Clearly Hates The Fact That He Is One But

Ivan: Cowboy, I'm not going to celebrate your satanic holiday, damn it, you're dressing up as some demons and you think I'll treat this as something normal?

Kolyadki

Ivan as a child:

Ivan: Kolyada, kolyada! Open the gates and take out the chests, give us coins, even a ruble (1), even a nickel (5), we will not leave you just like that. Give us a piece of candy, or maybe a coin, don't be a jerk, Christmas Eve is coming soon!

Ivan: On New Year's Eve I wish you an aspen coffin, a stake and a grave, and a sick mare (curse)

_______________________________

Maslenitsa

(Maslenitsa is a pagan holiday still celebrated in Russia. Meaning: people see off winter by burning an effigy symbolizing the Goddess of Winter Morena. People bake crepes. Crepes, at least in Russia, appeared as a funeral food, which is consumed during funerals. At the moment, crepes are a common dish, but crepes are still an important dish for Maslenitsa):

Ivan: Die, Morana (Goddess of Death/Rebirth/Winter.), die, die, die, yes yes yes, die

Ivan Kupala (Kupala Night):

There is very little information in the English wikipedia

The holiday combines two elements: pagan and Christian. Previously, this holiday existed independently, but after the baptism of Russia, the holiday acquired a Christian meaning and elements. The main feature of Kupala night is the cleansing bonfires. Around the fire, people danced, danced, sang Kupala songs, jumped over it: whoever is more successful and jumps higher, he will be happier. Girls jump through the fire "to purify themselves and protect themselves from dumbness, spoilage, conspiracies," and so that "mermaids do not attack and do not come for a year." Evil spirits come to life on this holiday, people performed certain rituals to scare away witches, mermaids and other evil spirits. Also, people wove wreaths of certain flowers, which also carry a magical meaning, women let such wreaths on the water to tell themselves an early wedding or a long life. Also on this holiday it is customary to look for a fern flower, which according to Slavic beliefs, the fern blooms only for a moment, on the night before Ivan Kupala (on June 24 [July 7 in Russia]); it is very difficult to pluck a flower, especially since the evil spirit prevents this in every possible way and intimidates a person, in some cases depriving him of reason, speech, memory. Picking the flower of a fern and keeping it with him acquires unusual possibilities. Man becomes visionary, can understand the language of animals, see all the treasures.

Anyway obviously there's the dreadful implications of Bill's relationship with his family being "worse than Stan's" and the Oracle specifying that he killed his parents while destroying his dimension but I'm also thinking about the specific phrasing being "including his parents and everyone else he'd ever known". Like damn he had nobody to hold onto back there huh.

My brain provided me with

"Fordsy was a pain in the backside even when I didn't have one."

I like the idea of Bill horrendously mishmashing flatland and Gravity Falls sayings.

(Also I like to headcanon that the Bill code we see in the Journal is plain Flatlandese script and Bill got such a chicken scratch handwriting he's automatically a doctor)

I've got a line coming up like "Would you stop walking around at night without turning the light on? It freaks everyone out." "And do you also want me to start doing a peace cry so I can't sneak up and stab you in the back too??" so Bill sprinkling in some Flatlandisms is a go.

Since the code in the Journal would be impossible to write/read in Flatland and since we also see variations on it being used by Ford and being used by aliens in Lost Legends, I assume that it's a common multiversal alphabet, or at least is commonly used in the Nightmare Realm.

For any writing system to be useful in Flatland it would have to visually present as a straight line, since that's all they can see at a time—so I headcanon their native writing system looks kinda like Morse code written out, all dots and dashes. My version of it also uses two different colors/tones, to introduce another element besides just dots & dashes to differentiate each letter.

The somewhat tragic upshot of this is that by headcanoning "no, that code ISN'T Bill's native writing system," it means we've seen him using multiple different writing systems & ciphers but we've never once seen him share anything about his own language. And that's sad! 🎉✨

The US just airstriked Yemen because of the Houthi sea blockade of Israel. This is such horrifically depraved, evil shit on the part of the Biden administration. Almost beyond words.

bill cipher is such a good design hes just a little guy. hes just fuckin like

I already said before that Bill Cipher is literally the worst character to get emotionally invested in but it's true. Like oh yeah I could cry over this silly cartoon triangle. Why? Oh let me just explain Journal 3 lore and tidbits from the Reddit AMA that reference a victorian novela that gives us the best picture of what his past and home dimension was like and also this secret poem that only exists in a spin off book thats otherwise non-canon and goes into how he regrets some of his actions and could potentially become better and also let me explain how all of this recontextualizes all these scenes from the show and his relationship with Ford. Btw all the horrible shit he did only fuels the fire like oil.

Umm..well.. IVAN CHEST PILLOW! GAHH

wait what trauma does bill have?

smiles. I'm so glad you ask, I'm pulling out the extra-canon lore.

We have a few points to get an idea of what Bill's old home world was like, mostly from the AMA and Journal 3.

Edwin Abbott Abbott is the author of "Flatland" a novella about a 2D world of the same name. Flatland is an incredibly bleak world where not only the world itself it a simple plane with no depth, but the dystopia of a social system depends on a hierarchy and the heads of society surpress any information about other dimensions through imprisonment at best and execution at worst and anything that deviates from the norm is shunned and shut down and at worst killed off.

Journal 3 references Flatland with Exwhylia, implying Bill may be from a similar dimension as it.

And looking at all that, it's easy to see how Bill "hates restrictions and loves outsiders and is a weirdo" Cipher grew to hate it all enough so to burn it down, especially considering triangles were low on the social ladder. And suddenly this scene

holds more weight doesn't it.

Additionally, it seems to be implied that Bill had a rather bad upbringing based on Hirsch saying his relationship with his family was "worse than Stan's" on the NYCC 2015 and Journal 3 specifying that Bill killed his parents alongside everyone else in his dimension:

Also maybe not neccessarily trauma but defenetly falls under "Bill has massive issues": The Axololt implying that Bill, despite all this, regrets destroying his dimension so much that he's deeply unhappy about it and his happy over the top jokester personality is somewhat of a persona:

Hope this helps 👍

DO YOU KNOW WHAT SPAWNED YOUR EXISTENCE?

[ID: Two lineless, digital paintings, both with warm, dark gray backgrounds. Both canvases are shaped like exact squares.

Painting one shows an adult Bill Cipher, a bright yellow triangle with a top hat, bow tie, cane, singular eye, and long lashes, reaching out to shake hands with the Axolotl, a pink axolotl with an electric blue tail. Bill is looking at the Axolotl casually, and his outstretched hand is engulfed in blue flames, while the Axolotl is smiling at Bill gently, reaching out to take his hand. There are stylized stars, similar to sparkles, in the top right and bottom lefthand corners of the painting. The painting is textured so that you can see the gray of the canvas very faintly through the brush strokes.

Painting two consists mostly of a short passage from Edwin Abbott Abbot's Flatland, written in light gray over the dark background. The passage is the beginning of chapter 7, and reads as follows:

"7. Concerning Irregular Figures

I for my part have never known and Irregular who was not also what Nature evidently intended him to be-- a hypocrite, a misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power, a perpetrator of all manner of mischief..."

Below the quote, near the very bottom of the page, is a tiny illustration of a very young Bill Cipher. He is drawn completely in grayscale, and is looking down at the ground angrily, fists clenched. He is wearing a pauper's cap and has bandages wrapped around his rightmost angle, which is noticeably longer and more acute than his other angles.

End ID]