Gravity Falls: Chess Edition

While there are probably a lot of people who could do this better than me, I haven’t seen any posts yet so I’m going to do a chess analogy/analysis of the characters! Wow. I haven’t played chess in a few years, so bear with me here.

Honestly, it’s hard to NOT think of chess symbolism after that last episode…

Anyways. While I’m sure that Bill likes to believe that all of the others are his pawns, he’s wrong. They all play a crucial role in the game, and that’s why Bill has to take them out, one-by-one, to get to the king.

The King: as an anon so kindly pointed out to me, the king is the rift. It’s the most important thing - the protagonists having it VS. Bill having it is literally what will make or break the universe. In chess, if you take out the other player’s king, you win. If Bill gets his hands on the rift, he wins. 

The rift is of the utmost importance and it needs protection, but it’s unable to protect itself. In chess, the king can only move one spot at a time, making it practically useless. It’s up to the other pieces to protect it. All of the protagonists will have to work together to keep the rift safe. 

The Knights: Mabel and Stanley. Based on this chess symbolism site, the moves of knights require both the head and the heart. Mabel and Stan both showed examples of this in DD&MD. 

Only a knight or a pawn can make the first move in a game of chess. By breaking Ford’s science project (and even though most people believe this wasn’t actually the case, they still think it was), he set Ford’s life into motion and, therefore, also set Bill’s plan into motion. Ford went to college on his own, found Gravity Falls, and befriended Bill because he no longer had his brother and didn’t have anybody else on his side. 

Now what makes Mabel a knight? Well, knights are also known for their ability to make a move that not even the queen (the most powerful piece) can make. And since I believe that Dipper is the queen (see below), it’s important for Mabel to be a knight. The twins have very different abilities, but they compliment each other’s very well. What Dipper lacks, Mabel makes up for. 

The Bishop: This one is a toss-up for me, but I believe it’s Ford. The bishop can move as far as it wants in one move, but only in one direction (diagonally). This means that he has a lot of power and is important, but is still limited. Obviously, Ford is very powerful - he’s a genius, a fantastic inventor, and honestly deserves like a dozen Nobel Prizes. But he’s still lacking in social skills. Part of this is from being an awkward kid growing up who never made any friends other than his brother, and part of it is from being out of out this dimension for thirty years.

So obviously, Ford messes up a lot. He told Dipper, a child, about the rift and told him not to tell anybody. He gave Dipper the mind control tie. He gave Mabel a crossbow. Seriously, what adult does that? Not one who’s as great and powerful as you’d like to think. 

Ford needs the other pieces if he wants to accomplish anything. He needs Dipper, the queen, to help him protect the king - the rift. He needs Stan, the knight, to make up for how horrible of an adult he is. 

Plus, you know what an actual bishop, as in the person, does? They worship.

The Rook: Bill. What?! Bill’s not a queen, the most powerful piece? Sorry, no. Like a rook, Bill is limited in his abilities. A rook can move as many spots as the player wants, but only along the four cardinal directions. It can’t move diagonally, like the bishop (Ford) or the queen (Dipper). 

Rooks are known for being the most effective when they’re working with other pieces. 

The Queen: As stated earlier, Dipper is absolutely the queen. While every character is important to Bill’s final plan, Dipper is the most important one - he’s the one who will do the most. The queen is the piece with the most abilities, being able to move straight in one direction for as many spots as the player wants (as long as it doesn’t knock out pieces from its own team). 

Dipper is the one who found the third Journal, making it possible for Stan to complete the portal and bring Ford back. Dipper is the one who makes the plans, solves the mysteries. 

Dipper is the one person other than Ford who knows about the rift. He’s the one who has to protect it with his life, even if that means he loses allies or puts himself at risk along the way.

The Pawns: I believe that the pawns are everybody else in Gravity Falls. Bill explicitly states this at the end of TLM, when he claims that his “next pawn will have to be on the outside.” 

Pawns are simple pieces, only moving one spot at a time. They’re disposable. 

My theory on who will be Bill Cipher’s “Pawn”.

That’s right, I think Stanley Pines is probably the most likely person.

The end credit code in the most recent episode can be decoded to say: “A SIMPLE MAN WITH EAGER EARS MAY TRUST THE WHISPERS THAT HE HEARS”. 

This could of course be anyone dumb or simple minded, Soos, Tad Strange.

But Bill specifically says at the end that his pawn needs to be outside the Mystery Shack, which is exactly where Stanley is going in the next episode, as he has planned a road trip (without Soos, which could rule him out), after the shack has been made Bill-proof. Stanley also seems to have no idea that Bill Cipher exists, as the only time the characters have interacted were when Stanley was asleep, and he seemed to have no memory of Bill.

The end card puzzle is also interesting, as Stanley’s eyes still haven’t been shown yet. Could they be “Bill eyes” that Dipper had while possessed?

Could the Pines family be forced to fight Stanley under Bill’s possession? 

In Stanford’s dream, Bill burns everything, including the portal, Stan o’ war, and a swing set which were shown in the dream. All things related to Stanley, his brother whom he cares about more than anyone else. 

And Stan ‘replicas’ have been known to burn/melt before…

Not to mention this scene from “The Stanchurian Candidate”:

Where Stanley says; “Kids, if I die, make sure I get a bigger tombstone than ford”

Are all of these just jokes, or maybe foreshadowing?

Could Stanley Pines be the puppet that Bill chooses as his pawn, resulting in a possible death of Stanley in an attempt to save him from Bill?

Of course, I could be completely wrong, but in the words of Romance Academy 7, “anthyding can hadplen”. And after all, this is Gravity Falls.

This guy does, apparently.

Damn your grammatical choices, Stanley!

Dipper's Mind and Stan's Tattoo

Sing along if you know the words, kids: I’VE GOT A THEORY.

Now, there’s been a lot of back and forth about Dipper’s role in the last episode, so that first: yes, even though we as the audience want to side with Mabel and hedge our emotional bets that Stan’s not a traitor (especially Twin Theory believers), Dipper has every reason to be suspicious of and angry at Stan. There’s a lot of evidence against the man, and looking for facts is Dipper’s whole bag. Plus, he’s a kid, and the pride issue of being wrong mixed with the horrible realization that your one source of unshakable trust and protection is pretty shakeable after all is shattering at any age. 

But I think there’s a bit more to it, too.

There’ve been quite a few posts batting about the idea of evil!Dipper, or that he might still be controlled by Bill. A lot of this has been pointing out little animation tricks (sometimes these are coincidence, and sometimes they turn out to be Stanley) - stuff like Dipper taking on Bipper’s angled-arms-on-hips pose or briefly getting elongated pupils when the portal opens. I think we need to go back even further, though.

Remember Bill’s speech in “Dreamscaperers?” If not, it’s cool. I transcribed it for you.

"But know this: a darkness approaches. A day will come in the future when everything you care about will change. Until then I’ll be watching you! I’ll be waaaaaatching you."

Now, the sign over his head points us pretty clearly to the Author: what we now know to be Stanley coming through the portal. But we can’t leave it so easily. There is a LOT of vagueness in those couple sentences. Who is ‘you,’ for example? And “everything you care about,” as it’s constructed, could refer either to the “you“‘s interests changing (they care about different things) or the things changing (the cared-about things no longer have the same properties). And you know who canonically loves deliberately obfuscating subject/object relationships and their deeper implications?

This magnificent, duplicitous little so-and-so right here. Bill is all about giving just enough information (technically true information, twisted in such a way as to benefit him) to prod his pawns into action while holding his hand from view. And like David Xanatos, he seems like the sort to have about six backup plans. The mystery gang chases him out of Stan’s mind in “Dreamscaperers” only for Bill to immediately laugh that fight off when he pops up in “Sock Opera” (“Right, you ‘defeated’ me.”). Who’s to say the Bipper scenario won’t be the very same when he appears again? He does seem legitimately angry at being defeated, but it’s quite possible that’s heated pride more than really being truly desperate (see “Dreamscaperers” again). He wanted to destroy the Journals, by his own word, and that seems like a pretty good A plan. But…what about a B plan? Stanley was deeply insistent on how crucial it was NOT to let Bill into your mind. What are the after effects of something like that?

Nothing, right? Because Stan seems pretty alright, despite having Bill rummaging around in there. Well…

I keep getting stuck on that tattoo. The one that matches the symbol on the side of the portal console. The one that, maybe, symbolizes a ward against evil and an all-seeing eye (or at least takes those images from Native American imagery. And this is Hirsch. He knows his ciphers and symbols). Why have that tattoo? Why have it on the side of the machinery?

To keep a certain triangle out, of course - or at least, to nullify him.

For a being of pure energy with no weaknesses, Bill takes an awfully hands-off approach to finding that code for Gideon. Part of that’s characterization, no doubt - Bill’s a mastermind, and he doesn’t like dirty work…and yet, he’s not above it either, not with the way he scraps as Bipper. It’s strange: he follows Mabel and Soos and snags the memory once they’ve already found it, he doesn’t follow the lost door into any of the other memories, and every bit of damage he causes (before creating an entirely separate time-and-space zone for the big battle) are to the visitors in Stan’s mind (or are whole-cloth illusions) rather than to Stan himself. So maybe it has something to do with that tattoo (we know it’s important - they dedicated a whole short to it even before the Real Plot kicked in), and Stan’s mind was left whole because it was protected by a ward. 

But if that’s true, what on earth does Dipper’s mind look like after Bill’s intrusion?

Well….we don’t know. But you know who else let Bill into their mind?

This guy. 

Circumstantial evidence (the fact that the entries extolling Bill are the only ones crossed out, the fact that the invisible entries begin “don’t know who might be WATCHING” - which is preceded by a coded, not invisible “is he watching me?”) leads me to suspect that the invisible entries started after Stanley made a deal with Bill. Whatever the details of that deal were, it seems like it wasn’t permanent - Bill has to be outside Stanley’s head if the man’s worried about being watched (and from Bill’s own words to tapestries to windows to rugs, we can tell Bill’s never stopped watching).

That much we know from clues and context, even if the clues are small (welcome to Gravity Falls, y’all). Now we have to plunge into pure speculation territory.

What does Stanley’s paranoia mean for Dipper?

I started this post by  arguing the validity of Dipper’s anger and mistrust in “Not What He Seems.” While it seems hard to take compared to Mabel’s openness and our own gut instincts (who really thought Stan would be evil?), his reactions are 98% valid based on his age, the trauma of the situation, and the facts at hand. It’s hard to say what rings alarm bells beyond that it just feels…off. Dipper’s felt off for a few episodes now, and that could just be character development (not all development is positive development, after all). 

But, remember too what I said about Bill. He likes to say and do just enough to provoke the mortals around him into action. We can see Stanley deteriorating through the pages of the journal, withdrawing into himself and becoming mistrustful of those around him. Bill wasn’t in his mind anymore, but his thoughts were left just slightly to the left, their negative traits enlarged just-so to push the man down a path to the worst development possible (I don’t know why Bill would want Stanley in that portal, but I trust he had a reason). 

I think we might be seeing the beginning of that with Dipper, reasonable and painful emotions becoming incrementally sharper and more damaging in the long haul (it’s not that Dipper is yelling at Mabel to hit the switch, it’s that I would’ve expected him to plead rather than order up to now - a subtle tone difference, but a crucial one. Even when he gets mad in “Sock Opera it seems more panicked than anything). If Stanley became paranoid, it seems Dipper’s becoming angry. Resentful. 

Which beings us back, at last, to Bill’s words: “everything you care about will change.” Right now Dipper cares about the capital-T Truth, about the Author, and about his sister. He’s always had something of a prideful streak, and he puts on a show when he wants recognition, sometimes to slightly cruel extents (check out “The Love God” particularly). Those are fine, normal flaws…until you get a triangle mucking about in your brain, amplifying your darkest thoughts. 

So what if recognition replaces the Truth as Dipper’s most important quest? He’s found the Author, what’s left now but to outdo him? To solve the mysteries he failed to crack? To find his “higher calling?” And what if the extent he’s willing to go to in that pursuit grows little by little until it seems like everyone’s unfairly against him, and they too become potentially acceptable losses? He wouldn’t do it out of malice, I don’t think.

He just won’t realize how far he’s gone until it’s too late.

So alot of people have been using this picture to say that the glass shattering means Dipper and Mabel are breaking up as close siblings but I don’t believe so. If the picture had broken in half or got ripped on one half then yeah I could believe it meant their relationship falling apart. But the glass broke, the glass that was keeping the picture safe and guarded broke. Forcing the picture from a nice guarded place into the harsh real world. I think this picture is representing the twins being forced to grow up now, being forced to face the paranormal head on in a grown up way. The twins are no longer guarded from the real world the real problems, they have now faced real dangers head on.

I love this interpretation.

Okay but imagine that next episode being nothing but Stan’s back story.

We see them grow up and have their first mystery adventures on the beach. 

We see two twin brothers dreaming about being world famous Mystery Seekers, dreaming that they will stay together forever.

We see them befriend McGucket as they investigate the supernatural. 

We see them start families and look forward to the future. 

Then

We see it all go to hell

Gravity Falls/Twin Peaks by nuu

THIS IS THE CROSS-OVER I NEVER KNEW I WANTED SO BAD UNTIL I SAW IT 

Dipper rides on Agent Cooper (Twin Peaks)

suggestion by visiblebear

when peer pressure strikes just say these words

Soos should run an aesthetic blog, he’d easily have at least 5-6k followers in like a week,