Https://www.tumblr.com/sourco0kie/775427187568525312/self-aware-au?source=share

The Morality of Mabel and Dipper Pines

Warning: Dipper Levels of Overanalysis Ahead

I’d like to make it clear at the start that I love both of these characters equally and they’re both good people, just in different ways. But I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Mabel’s flaws and less of Dipper’s, so I’d like to contribute to the discussion of their respective characters by exploring a divide between them I haven’t seen talked about much.

Mabel really wants to be a moral person. She places a lot of intrinsic worth in the concepts of ethics, like kindness and fairness and the wellbeing of others. Being a bad person could be considered her worst fear. It’s definitely up there with her other greatest fears of losing her relationship with Dipper and the inevitability of change, and those fears developed later largely in response to Ford and the baggage he brought with him.

Dipper just doesn’t care about that as much. That isn’t to say he’s a bad person! He's compassionate, selfless, brave and unquestionably heroic by the end of the show. They both are. But it sticks out to me how differently they think about ethics.

For example, Dipper literally killed Wax Sherlock Holmes, while Mabel is so averse to hurting someone’s feelings that she couldn’t bear to break out of a false, one-sided relationship with Gideon. You see what I’m getting at here? But I have more evidence! Buckle up, this is gonna get long.

Compare how they treat their rivals, Pacifica and Robbie. These are ordinary humans with no real authority over them who, age and class gaps aside, they're basically on even footing with in confrontations, so this is a good metric for how aggressive they are when upset and how much they hold grudges in mundane situations.

In “Irrational Treasure”, Mabel is deeply hurt by Pacifica’s mockery to the point of giving up her silly identity, and sets out to prove her wrong that she can be competent. But at the end, when presented with the opportunity to destroy the Northwest family’s fake prestigious legacy that they use to justify putting others down, she declares, “I’ve got nothing to prove” and lets it go. She’s secure in herself. Her motivation is satisfied. Why bother putting more pain and strife into the world? It’s Dipper, who has been only been hurt by proximity to Mabel, who insists on exposing the truth specifically to spite Pacifica and takes away that “Man, revenge is underrated. That felt awesome!” Revenge is arguably a form of justice, especially in this sense of revealing an unfair lie, but still, he takes great pleasure in bringing an enemy down for the sake of it, not to fix the damage they did.

In “Fight Fighters”, Dipper’s vindictive streak returns. He manipulates the ridiculously powerful Rumble McSkirmish into brutally beating up Robbie on the fraudulent charge of murder, threatening Robbie’s life. He didn’t realize Rumble would try to kill Robbie, but he was fine with him severely injuring him. Rumble is a fighting game character, a superpowered master martial artist. Robbie is a normal fifteen-year-old. This is not a sportsmanlike matchup. By the end Dipper learns his lesson and takes responsibility, but so did Mabel about hurting people to try to have a perfect life and people still complain about that!

In “The Golf War”, Mabel is again the twin with a bone to pick with Pacifica, but Dipper takes her rivalry more seriously than her and is more willing to be mean about it. He encourages her to cheat when she doesn’t want to, justifying because Pacifica is “cheating at life”. Understandable, but still underhanded. While Mabel bonds and buries the hatchet with her rival by the end, outright declaring their rivalry to be stupid, Dipper holds onto it, refusing to forgive Pacifica at all and disapproving of Mabel's offer to give her a ride home afterward despite the pouring rain and her parents not showing. He still wholeheartedly considers her “the worst” (and tells her to her face) at the beginning of “Northwest Mansion Mystery”, even though she and Mabel helped and protected each other in their fight against the Lilliputtians and Pacifica thanked Mabel and accepted her apology.

In “The Love God”, Mabel’s compassion is on full display. She makes it apparent that she wants everyone she knows to be happy, to the point of making a chart to show her friends’ feelings with stickers, and goes out of her way to help Robbie just because she doesn’t think any human being should be so lonely and sad. Dipper initially has no sympathy for Robbie’s misery and sees the twins and his old friends leaving him to rot as a net good.

Dipper just invests more emotionally into hating people and is more willing to play dirty. Mabel prefers to see the best in people, forgive, deescalate conflict and turn enemies into friends whenever possible, and has more respect for honour and sportsmanship.

Compare the insecurities they highlight in "Society of the Blind Eye". These could have been their last words spoken with their memories of the summer, so they are fully candid and vulnerable.

Mabel confesses, “I only love some of my stuffed animals and the guilt is killing me!” She reprimands herself for not having sincere affection for all her loved ones… who are inanimate objects, hence this being a joke about how immature and overly sentimental she is. But she’s telling the truth! Not being honest about your feelings toward someone who loves you (as toys are assumed to love their kids) is wrong. It’s something a bad, or at least flawed, person would do. We also know that it’s something Mabel can do with real consequences - she loves Dipper unconditionally, but her frequent teasing of him instead of letting this on damages his self-esteem more than she intends and often realizes - and when she does realize as in “Little Dipper”, she’s ashamed of it. Her guilt is that she’s failing morally, that she hurts the people around her despite her good intentions.

Dipper admits, “Sometimes I use big words and don’t actually know what they mean. I mean, I’m supposed to be the smart guy! If I’m not the smart guy, then who am I?” He primarily thinks of his worth in terms of competence. Dipper is generally not that confident, at this point in time. He has an intense drive to prove his worth. He is acutely aware of his physical and social shortcomings. But the one thing he knows that he does well is analytical, deductive and strategic thinking, and so to always have value he’s built his entire identity on being particularly intelligent. He’s the planner, the mastermind, the guy with the specialized knowledge and important big words who people have no choice but to respect and listen to, because a lifetime of loneliness besides Mabel has taught him that given a choice, they probably won’t. Except just like Mabel’s all-loving attitude, there’s an element of performance. He doesn’t know everything; he’s inherently irrational to a degree like everyone else. So he tries to seem smarter than he is. His guilt is that he’s failing intellectually and practically, that he isn’t actually contributing enough to be worth something.

This is where Dipper diverges. He wants to be ethically good less than he wants to be good AT things, and respected for it. But they both beat themselves up when they don’t live up to their self-assigned archetypes of All-Loving Hero and The Smart Guy, when they aren’t good enough by their own unreasonably high standards.

"The Last Mabelcorn" deconstructs Mabel’s fixation on her own moral perfection. Celestabellabethabelle, who I will henceforth call C-Beth for short, manipulates it to keep her out of the unicorns’ way. She makes manifest Mabel’s fear that she isn’t good enough no matter what she does. We see Mabel push herself further and further to try to prove herself, much like Dipper in episodes like “Dipper vs Manliness”, and emotionally unravel until she’s miserable, self-loathing and openly listing her vices in a way never seen before. But this isn’t productive! Wallowing in guilt doesn’t motivate her to be better! She needs to learn that although she isn’t perfect, the virtues she has are good enough to work with to both gets out of and kick C-Beth out of her head. She decides to stop worrying about meeting an impossible ideal of goodness and just focus on doing good, by using efficient (if violent, and therefore immoral under certain paradigms) means to protect her family. Her plot in this episode has its detractors and I understand the criticisms that the message wasn’t handled as well as it could have been. But I think it does okay. Mabel definitely reevaluates her need to feel like a good person here. She switches from prioritizing what’s important to her, the validation of being "pure of heart", to what’s important to others and in the bigger picture, simply getting the unicorn hair to keep Bill out of the Mystery Shack.

Finally, compare the twins’ disastrous errors in judgement in “Scary-Oke” and “Dipper and Mabel vs the Future”, when they both accidentally unleash terrible forces of evil on the town and set in motion a local apocalypse.

Dipper recites an incantation from Journal 3 that causes the dead to rise as bloodthirsty zombies, desperate to prove to the government agents before they leave that the supernatural is real and warrants their help investigating, driven by both his desire for knowledge (his tool to feel secure in himself) and more immediately his fear of being dismissed as unworthy. He is emotionally vulnerable, but still creates the dangerous situation on his own initiative. Since he doesn’t need a blacklight to read the spell and the beginning of the episode established that he’s already familiar with all Journal 3’s visible entries, he knew what the spell would do. He doesn’t realize how many zombies would appear and maybe how dangerous they’d be. But he was aware that there were risks. Plus, the Shack is hosting a party full of innocent civilians and Mabel has explicitly asked him not to interfere with weirdness. The one thing she told him not to do that night was raise the dead! And what does he do? Raises the dead.

Mabel is actively deceived and manipulated into giving who she believes to be Blendin Blandin, an expert in time-altering technology, what she believes to be an item of such technology, with the intention of warping time to extend the summer for the town. This is a selfish choice. But on top of how emotionally compromised she is, sobbing in despair after “the worst day of [her] life”, consider her internal logic: the end of summer is going to mean the pains and tribulations of growing up for both her and Dipper, and they won’t even have each other if he gets his way; Wendy is already going through that and has told her how awful high school is; she overheard at least some of the Stans’ conversation at the end of “A Tale of Two Stans”, meaning she might know that Stan will have to give up his home and business once the summer is over; and she and Dipper both have true friends here who they will miss and be missed by, as opposed to their memories of Piedmont where we only see them supporting and comforting each other and never hear of any friends. And it isn’t like she’s the only one having fun! Stan is happier than ever, Ford is back home, Dipper’s come into his own more than she could ever have anticipated. He’ll still get to delve into the mysteries and weirdness of this town that he loves so much. But she’ll be there too. If you want more Gravity Falls, you can see where she’s coming from. She genuinely thinks that “just a little more summer” would be a positive experience for everyone, with plenty of good reason. Yes, she’s recklessly messing with powerful forces she doesn’t understand. Yes, she isn’t nearly as suspicious of this sudden miracle solution as she should be. But she has no evidence that this would harm anyone.

Their responses after making their mistake are also noteworthy. They’re both horrified and remorseful. But Dipper expresses no concern for the agents for the rest of the episode when it looks like they’ve been killed due to his actions and even nonchalantly remarks that he thought they were dead when he sees them again. Mabel, however, reaches to stop Bill and begs him to “wait” before he knocks her unconscious. Then she’s imprisoned in Mabelland, which is designed to make her never want to leave and based on how it only occurs to her that the neon colours and repetitive background music are too much even for her after she renounces it, may additionally have a direct, if subtle, influence on her mind. So she’s a little distracted from her guilt. But by risking her life to fix the repercussions of her actions and save the town, she shows much more responsibility for the townspeople’s lives than Dipper showed for the agents he’d tried so hard to impress. He just happily went about his business for weeks believing he had two people’s deaths on his conscience. Never even looked into whether they survived.

These differences in their personal moral philosophies add another layer to the parallels between the two generations of Pines twins. Typically, Dipper parallels Ford and Mabel parallels Stan. But less so here! Like Mabel, Ford very staunchly believes in abstract moral theory, namely that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. He holds a grudge against Stan saving him from being lost the dimensions through the portal for weeks, because it endangered the rest of the world by creating the Rift. It was a good deed with good intentions… but it didn’t only make life better for everyone. To Ford, that means it isn’t good enough. Hmm, which younger twin has a problem with judging anything short of ‘pure good’ to not be worthwhile? Also like Mabel, Ford’s self-righteousness is often hypocritical, considering his pride, selfishness and willingness to disregard the possible negative consequences of his actions, e.g. trusting Bill and building the portal in the first place.

Like Dipper, Stan is willing and ready to use underhanded methods to win against his enemies, to lie, cheat, steal and leverage assets he doesn’t really have the right to. He’s more inclined to be aggressive, spiteful and smug. As for taking rivalries seriously, even to an unreasonable extent, he personally despised a nine-year-old child even before he knew that the child was a bad person. He would absolutely summon Rumble McSkirmish to beat a rival up for him. He prides himself on his cunning, another form of intelligence, and prioritises being good at what he does best over holding the moral high ground. He is shown to have lifelong insecurities about Ford being better than him in other fields (and thus explicitly valued more by their father); so his pragmatism is his way of trying to always be useful to the people he loves, indeed a key way he shows them his love.

Puppet fellas.

that's the only reason, really.

He's so cute

Howdy-do! Say hello to the deal of the century! 

That’s right! In partnership with Makeship, we are happy bring you Welcome Home’s very first genuine, one-of-a-kind, top-of-the-line, never to be imitated, never to be replicated, official Wally Darling plush toy! With You by his side, there’s nothing Wally can’t do!

We can’t do this without you either, neighbor! To get this fully-funded, we’ll need to sell 200 of these positively precious, picturesque, and polite little peanuts! Head on over to https://www.makeship.com/products/wally-darling-plush to order one for yourself for $29.99! Don’t delay, this little Darling is a limited-time offer, so order now! Want 10% off your plush? Then test your knowledge with our quiz for a special discount code!

Special thanks and credits below!!

Thank you to Synth for his wonderful voice work as Barnaby and Howdy!

( Twitter / Tumblr! )

Thank you to Frankie for his fantastic voice work for Wally! (Twitch / Youtube! )

Thank you to Puzz for helping to organize and direct this bad boy! ( Tumblr! )

Thank you to Rocky for his work co-writing the scripts! ( Twitter / Tumblr / Instagram! )

Thank you to Kmodo for creating the wonderful music found in the commercials! ( Youtube! ) And to you for making this possible! Thank you!!

Fnaf

Rooftop

A kinda follow-up mini-comic of the last one I called Bunny Monday This is all an idea inspired by @starlightcloudbaby 's detective AU, but it is not canon inside of their AU please show them love for their work tho, they have made so many beautiful ocs and AUs! Also is Vanny and Y//N blossoming a friendship with each other? You decide 😳

yaaay update finally :p another slow one. not sure why this one took so long, it looks sort of ugly but i dont feel like working on it anymore. luckily the next one will be more eventful so i'll probably get on it sooner

if youve noticed, alice and julius have not been referred to by name in this comic. in vantablank, theyre just "the director" and "the assistant". i don't want to confuse anyone, so im just prefacing now that they will be called this for the entire duration of the comic.

previous

Toon Fnati Henry the beloved,,,

i was actually thinking about how toon henry would work in oblitus casa and itd be something like, hourglass kidnaps him so they can get the last of henrys body and finally become whole. and jake has to track them down

i have a cute request to make

the tadc gang with a shy and introvert child reader

basically reader is very shy and barely speaks, and when needs to talk they just whisper, kinda like fluttershy!

reader hates loud noises so they barely goes to an IHA with the gang, only if they are bored or someone asks them to go, reader just likes being alone for the silence

but, reader does some cute things for the cast, they make little presents, everytime that the gang is in the IHA, reader is busy in their room making little presents, like paper flowers and stuff and leaves at the gang's doorstep, with cute little messages, like: "ur so cool!" "ur doing so well!" before running back to their room.

Caine, Jax, Pomni x shy!sweet!child!reader who hates loud noises (platonic)

i hope you dont mind me running this through the wheel to select characters </3 i still dont take full cast posts/nm i think imma answer this then maybe write an extra post or two (idk we'll see after i write this one); then thats probably it for today, since i think imma work on more art again.. not really behind on my personal goals anymore, just have some ideas that i want to at least sketch so i have that done

CAINE:

would try to make the IHAs a little more quiet and calm but with caines energy and his thought process of "it needs to be stimulating so the circus members dont lose it to the monotony"... sometimes he slips. i was going to say he descends into the adventure waving around a red card making all the IHA-stuff freeze as a joke... but i can genuinely see him doing that. most of the time watches over the IHA now that you're here. you're like his lil kid!! tries to be a dad, falls into common dad stereotypes because thats all he really knows.. though he himself can be a little loud and all over the place... and perhaps even overbearing every now and then... WILL show off whatever notes and gifts you leave for him to everyone else. will make a wall in the common room to hang up your art so everyone can see it

POMNI:

i wouldnt say pomni is shy, but i do think overall she is an anxious person and in introvert... of which is more prominent due to being in the circus (you know, a place thats stressing her out) so it lets you two relate.. and it kind of makes pomni pull herself together for you.. so in a way youre kind of her reasoning to keep going no matter how many times she fails to find the exit; as grim as it sounds. keeps all your gifts and notes in her room on display because unlike SOME people shes not all the concerned with her image or how shes perceived (jax). will try to take you away from a place if theres some noise, usually this is either the common room where everyone else is hanging out at or during IHAs... probably lets you crash in one of your rooms until you feel better. i think she would probably get someone to get you something (like a toy or snack) while she keeps an eye on you

JAX:

i think he would subtly try to get you to stand up for yourself before being blunt that you need to start speaking up. he WAS going to say something about how hes not going to always be there to talk for you buuuuut in the digital circus theres some.. not good implications with that statement, at least a little more than the irl version. less of a parent figure and more of an older brother one.. does keep your notes, though hes not going to tell anyone and hes going to deny it if anyone ever brings it up. hes an asshole but hes not heartless. tries to limit his pranks that can make loud noises, will also play it off to others that he just doesnt feel like doing those pranks anymore. but everyone knows, you know?

Twisted wonderland Villains with. Disney princesses.

Wonder what are they looking for?

It's time for break !!!

Saw this post by moot and I just had to draw the complete outfit-