I’ve been thinking a lot about Gravity Falls and the theme they’re working now of the similarities between Stanley and Mabel, Stanford and Dipper.  (I’m just going to refer to Grunkle Stan as Grunkle Stan or Stan, though, because it’s what I’m used to.  Stanford I’ll call Stanford and I won’t abbreviate that to Stan.  Okay?)

The parallels are there and they’re important, and it was really sweet in this last episode to see Dipper and Stanford getting closer, and Dipper having a member of the family with whom he feels a lot of common ground.  When you’ve felt like the odd one out for a long time, as I’m sure Dipper always has, finding that there’s a member of your family who is LIKE YOU makes things seem to make so much more SENSE.  How you are COMES FROM somewhere.  

(I still wish we knew more about Shermy and what he was like, of course.  Being born about 17-18 years after them he must hardly have known his big brothers as a kid; what relationship, if any, did they have?  There must have been some kind of trusting connection with Stanford/Stan-as-Stanford or Dipper and Mabel’s parents wouldn’t have thought of sending them to their grunkle for the summer in the first place.  It implies to me that, after he took over Stanford’s life in Oregon, Stan made contact with Shermy and actually got to know him a little, which is both very sweet and kind of hurty.  Shermy is the brother Stan missed out on having a relationship with because his dad threw him out when Shermy was just a baby, and when he did get to have a relationship with him it was only because Shermy thought he was Stanford, the pride of the family rather than its fuck-up.  It’s also possible that Shermy doesn’t actually know Stanley existed.)  

Mabel and Stan have always had an easier rapport than Stan has with Dipper, not least because Stan took the unfortunate path of being tough on Dipper to try and toughen him up, not recognising that this was part of how his own dad’s parenting of him was kind of a mess.  Either because Mabel is a girl or because she’s already pretty damn tough, Stan doesn’t feel she needs toughening.  He can just relax with her and enjoy her.

Now, because Mabel sees the parallels, she’s worried that she and Dipper may end up hurting and hating each other like their uncles.  I think, though, Mabel isn’t seeing some of the important differences between herself and Stan.

Stan was a pretty feckless youth who doesn’t appear to have been enthusiastic or dedicated to anything except building a boat and planning for a life of treasure-hunting with his brother.  Maybe he didn’t really try at anything else because he figured he had the future planned, or because he too easily accepted the narrative their parents presented, that Stanford was the smart one and therefore he didn’t think of smarts being a path he could or should pursue.

Compare that with Mabel, though, who is full of enthusiasms and really not feckless at all.  She is full of fecks.  She throws herself into projects with a passion.  Look at that sock puppet play she put on - even though the motive behind it was just to impress a boy she liked, that was impressive.  She organised to have it in a real theatre.

I would be surprised if Mabel were doing as poorly in school as it seems Stan did (although it didn’t help at all that he had teachers who compared him with his brother and wrote him off as a lost cause).  I don’t think she would do well in mathematics or in many areas that require a lot of quiet concentration and following rules, but she’s obviously good at art and craft, creative writing and drama, and I think she would shine in any area that lets her use her imagination and that lets her make plans and design things and solve problems.  Mabel might get bored and flounder learning the equations and formulae of physics, but if you assigned her to design an experiment to test a hypothesis, she’d be all over it and would do a really good job.  (More so if she could somehow involve glitter and/or fairy lights.)  If you required her to learn the “boring” stuff before you would let her try the experiments, she would switch right off.  If you challenged her with the experiment and she realised she would need to understand the boring stuff to do it, she’d get stuck in and learn it.  

My point is, I think Mabel makes good science fair projects, and I think they’re crowd-pleasers that demonstrate something interesting both visually and kinetically, while Dipper probably produces something abstract with a lot of careful and detailed analysis of data that the teacher can see is good and awards a high grade but that doesn’t interest or impress the other children.

I’m not saying either of those approaches is better or worse, either.  They both require intelligence and a lot of patient effort.

Like, I think Mabel and Dipper could probably design a perpetual motion machine together.  They work together and complement each other in ways that I don’t think the brothers did, despite loving each other just as much.  

Mabel and Dipper have important things in common with their twin uncles but they are not just a repeat of them, and not just because Mabel is a girl rather than a boy.  I understand Mabel’s worries but the reason she’s worried in the first place is that she’s perceptive enough to notice the parallels and extrapolate from them, a kind of reasoning that I don’t think the younger Stan, at any rate, was capable of.  Mabel has protection against that fate in her own natural qualities.

Not to underrate Stan’s intelligence either, because he didn’t design that portal (which took two geniuses to make it, anyway, Stanford and Fiddleford together) but he figured out how to get it working again, even if it took him years and years.  He didn’t have his brother’s talent, but with the proper motivation (HORROR, GRIEF AND GUILT) he learned more than his teachers would ever have thought possible and became a smarter, sneakier old con artist because of it.

I could totally see Mabel selling junk on late night TV, and Stan’s relationship with Wax Stan could be considered similar to Mabel and Waddles (although Wax Stan was a substitution of Stanley, Waddles was just love at first sight)