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picturejasper20 · 4 months

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Looking back the ending of Gravity Falls while thinking about endings of other series like Amphibia and The Ghost and Molly Mcgee, Weirdmageddon has a message that is underwhelming when it comes to Dipper and Mabel's relationship and Mabel's potrayal in the show.

This isn't about Mabel getting tricked by Bill. She is a 12-13 years old that in that context she was feeling really bad and not thinking well what she was doing. That isn't relevant to the topic at hand and honestly it isn't a problem she did that, it does makes sense in the episode it happened.

What i have an issue is how the narrative makes Dipper feel bad about considering staying studying with Stanford. This is something that Dipper was interested in and he was very fascinated by anything that was paranormal related. Stanford himself told Dipper he had a lot of potential and the kid was digging into it.

Mabel lashing out and not liking the idea of Dipper staying with Stanford is understandable in the episode Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future. She doesn't seem to have much friends back in her home and her parents are implied to not be the best. She gets scared of Dipper leaving, that's a reasonable fear for a kid to have.

However, as i mentioned before, Dipper is made feel bad about considering choosing something he wants to do. It isn't Mabel who has to learn that things change and sometimes this brings things we don't like. She doesn't exactly consider what Dipper wants for himself, she mainly cares about how ¨she is going to be alone¨ and making her brother feel selfish for choosing his own path or do something that could make him happy.

Yes, she learns that things can't stay the same forever and they are growing up, that itself is a pretty good development for her and overall a good message to teach.

Yet her being codependent on Dipper doesn't get brought up nor addressed, in fact the series seems to praise this behavior of hers. In how Dipper has to do what she wants if not he is a bad brother. Mabel's clinginess and controlling behaviour to an extent isn't called out, which that itself is a problem.

Small edit: I want to add an extra point here that Mabel does have a short scene near the end of the episode that she tells Dipper that she won't get in his way if he wants to stay with Stanford and she was ¨acting nuts¨ in the dream bubble. This is good for her but it does still feel in part that her issues weren't fully acknowledged and it doesn't help she didn't say this until after Dipper told her that he was going to stay with her and not be with Stanford, which is rather questionable in my opinion. It would have been more appropiate in the episode to have this brought up and getting adressed better than for her to wait for Dipper to do what she wanted.

In contrast in Amphibia, Marcy Wu has a similar arc about change. The series explores how she can take her escapism too far and how she can be very selfish in plenty of ways, something that is potrayed as an aspect she has to learn from and realize that it isn't healthy.

Her being too codependent on Anne and Sasha and their overall friendship is potrayed as toxic and the series explores this relationship a lot, having the girls grow over time and think about different aspects they have to work on.

In ¨True Colors¨ it is revealed that Marcy Wu learned about the Calamity Box the same day she got told by her parents that they were moving away. Very afraid of having to leave her friends behind and having to be alone in a new city, she found the Calamity Box and told Sasha and Anne about it. Worth of mentioning she didn't know if it would work but it was a desperate act of her just to not having to move away from her friends yet.

When Sasha and Anne find out about this they are, not surprisingly, very pissed and push from Marcy away for a moment, making Marcy realize her mistake and eventually apologizes for what she did.

In ¨All In¨ Marcy finally comes to terms with how she can't force Anne and Sasha to be the way she wants them to be and that her codependency on them isn't a good thing. She realizes that has to move away to her new home at some point, that things change but that doesn't mean the three of them have to stop being friends.

As you can see, there is a clear difference between how Mabel Pines and Marcy Wu’s characters and flaws are potrayed in the narrative. While Gravity Falls makes Mabel’s codependency and controlling behaviour to be something acceptable and that Dipper should conform to, Amphibia does the complete opposite and presents Marcy Wu’s actions as flaws she has and that can hurt other people, including her friends. She is the one that has to make a change and understand she has to work on herself if she wants to have new friends and keep these relationships as times moves on.

Since we are on topic, one thing that really bothered me is how Mabel created a version of Dipper that is ¨cool¨ and says yes and goes along with everything she wants to do. (Weirdmageddon Part 2)

This has… interesting implications of how Mabel believes that relationships should work, or at least with her brother twin Dipper. A lot has to do with how she and Dipper have very different personalities and she maybe wishes that he was more like her, but expecting someone else to say ¨yes¨ to everything you want is a toxic mentality to have. And the episode itself doesn’t address this enough, it doesn’t bring up to Mabel she can’t expect people to work like this and she should try thinking more about what others wants.

Lets talk about The Ghost and Molly Mcgee. In this series Molly Mcgee often has episodes where she has to learn certain lessons. One of them she learns over time is that often she has to give up control and let what others want to do instead.

A good example of this is ¨Ready, Set, Snow!¨ in which she is constanly trying to make Libby and Scratch to go and play outside in the snow with her without considering they would rather stay inside and sit near the fire for the moment. She spends most of the episode trying to find ways to make them go outside until she gets angry and goes out on her own. She has… quite of a mental breakdown in a sequence song. Scratch goes to check on her but he tells to her that she can’t do always what she wants and what it is important is for her to be spending time with her friends. Molly realizes she was wrong, goes back to the house and she apologizes for how she acted.

Molly has quite a lot of episodes like this, and all this becomes important in the series finale ¨The End¨ when she sees that Scratch has to go back to be Todd even if that means forgetting the memories he got as a ghost, her included. She tells Scratch that she is going to miss him a lot but she knows that forcing Scratch to stay wouldn’t be right. She encourages Scratch to go and ¨live his life¨ because she cares about Scratch being happy.

Similar to Marcy Wu, Molly learns that she can’t force people to do what she wants and she has to let them choose for themselves. She knows that encouraging Scratch to do what he always wanted to do as human is the right thing to do, even if it means saying goodbye to him.

I do understand the idea that Gravity Falls was doing at with something among the lines of ¨Dipper and Mabel not repeating the same mistakes that their uncles did¨ but that doesn’t mean Dipper has to give up his dreams at expense of what Mabel wants. As Dipper said in VS The Future episode: he can still visit and they can still talk to each other. They don’t have to fall apart the same way Standford and Stan did. Just like in Amphibia, if Marcy still was able to remain friends with Anne and Sasha over the years, the same can be applied to Dipper and Mabel as siblings.

If not, it could be rewritten in a way that makes Dipper reconsider that he would like to wait a few years before joining Stanford in his adventures. That he is still a kid and wants to spend a while longer figuring himself out and be with Mabel before making a decision. That way it feels more like a decision he wants to do for himself and goes along with his character arc that he doesn’t have to rush to grow up.

As for Mabel, she has a lot of growing up to do. She has to learn overtime that Dipper is his own person and he can take is own path. That if she wants to have friends or have in general healthy relationships with others, she can’t make it always about herself and people have their own needs as well. She would have to work on her codependency and clinginess she has on others, specially her own brother. This would help her with being a more mature capable individual when she grows up.

This post on itself isn’t me hating on Mabel’s character since she has moments she can be good and i feel a lot of her behaviour comes from not being taught properly and being a teenager. The problem is that the series doesn’t address this behaviour enough and, as result, it comes off as the series giving an unintentional underwhelming message of potraying Mabel’s issues as something that should be acceptable and not her having a dynamic with Dipper that comes off as toxic. It is important to understand to learn to support others and not always make things about ourselves. That sometimes relationships change and we can’t force people to be in a specific way.

#gravity falls #amphibia #The Ghost and Molly Mcgee #mabel pines #dipper pines #weirdmageddon #marcy wu #anne boonchuy #sasha waybright #molly mcgee #scratch mcgee #Dipper should also like learn to put boundaries better and not go along with what Mabel always wants #He kinda has the opposite problem of Mabel #anyways i remember this rubbing off the wrong way when i watched 8 years ago and rewatching it still does

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silverior968 · 11 months

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Tfp gijinkas (1/4) Dad squad (aka I binged a childhood favorite show in 3 days and the special interest won) Zoom in to the image for more details (especially the faces, that's where I put the most details)

[Image ID: A character sheet with two characters on it. On the left side is a human version of Optimus Prime from Transformers Prime. He's tall and muscular with tan skin and blue-tinted black hair that is visibly grayed. His hair is around shoulder-length and tied into a short ponytail with a red hairtie. His expression is neutral and his eyes are dark blue. There are several scars on his face and hands, and the lines on his face show his age. He is wearing a black turtleneck, a red, cropped bomber-style jacket with white lining and a blue autobots logo embroidered on the left shoulder, blue trousers with gray patches and dark blue combat boots with black soles. He has two swords holstered on his back with connected shoulder-holsters. Placed around him are character design notes, reading as follows: "I turned his eye notches into scars - at first I thought of eyeliner but it didn't feel right". "I tried to simultaneously give him the vibes of a hands-on leader, a father figure and a dignified man in his twilight years - and I have no idea if I succeeded!". "I made both him and Ratchet appear somewhere in their 50s." "He accidentally ended up looking a lot like my design of Anton Shudder". "Making an outfit for him was tough because as a kid I thought his design made him look like he was wearing a cropped jacket and denim short-shorts. But I can't have him fighting decepticons in that, think of the asphalt burns! It was hard to unthink that, though". A tiny version of the Sonic the Hedgehog "my fucking god! these bitches gay! Good for them, good for them!" -meme is placed to his right. On the right side of the page is a human version of Ratchet from the same franchise. He's a stocky white man with pale skin and a few freckles here and there, but not many. His hair is mostly white, with some ginger streaks still visible. It is short and somewhat spiky near the back. He also has sideburns, a beard with no moustache and thick eyebrows. He looks grouchy and he has several facial scars and his face is lined. His eyes are cyan. He's wearing a red-and-white uniform, reminiscent of a first responder's outfit. It consists of a zip-up jacket, a thicker jacket on top, trousers, gloves and boots. The zip-up is white with a red zipper, and the jacket has four pockets and is mostly red with white shoulders and sleeves with heartbeat-reminiscent patterns. The jacket also has a white belt. The trousers are white with similar red stripes. The entire outfit has reflective stripes. The boots are mostly white with red heels and soles, and metal-enforced toes. He's holding a scalpel in one hand. There's a red autobots logo on his jackets over his heart. The design notes around him read as follows "He needs a strong nosebrideg because he's going to be pinching it a lot." "He came out looking like a middle-aged Roskilde paramedic named something like "Fredrik" or "Søren" who claims to have Manchester Orchestra as his favorite band (which isn't entirely false but) spends more time listening to ABBA and Radical Face." "Reflective stripes - safety first!". A meme with the text "Dad: doesn't want dog. Family: gets dog anyways. dad and dog:" and a picture of a man and a dog grilling. /end ID]

#fanart #tfp #transformers prime #tfp ratchet #tfp optimus prime #gijinkas #gijinka #I've got 2 more designs done #but I will post them when I finish the next 2 after that #and so on and so forth until we are done #I mean currently I only have plans for the autobots #so there's only 6 more #I don't know if I'll do Cliffjumper #because I don't think I could top just having him be Dwayne the Rock Johnson in a funky outfit #like I thought of that and nothing I could draw would be as funny #Anyways yeah! binged this show in 3 days including the movie!#It made me feel so many things #I just thought I could casually watch some of it for old times' sake but no!#the special interest from 8 years ago reappeared #I was so right to be obsessed with this show #anyways yippee!!#this actually isn't the order I drew them in #I drew Ratchet first then bumblebee then arcee and optimus fourth #but I decided to rearrange them just so I could give the character sheets funny names #I'm a simple man #I'm actually working on a cosplay of one of these designs #Goal is to have it done by January

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