My thoughts are reeling about Ford.

 I’m in between trusting him and not now. Many red flags were brought up this episode.

His interactions with Dipper are becoming more and more dodgy. Not just physical safety, but I feel like Ford is using Dipper as this weird ‘replacement’ or even ‘safety blanket’. It’s eerie to watch. Something feels off. I don’t think it’s the writing of the episode because the episode itself was very well written. But it felt like he was manipulating Dipper. It felt like he was manipulating him and projecting onto him and using him as something more than what Dipper is supposed to be, and Dipper doesn’t see it because of his star-struck attitude towards his Great Uncle.

Some red flags include:

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Now that it’s canon that Homeworld has a very strict class system on par with Transformer IDW’s functionism - can we please discuss how painful Rose and Pearl’s relationship must have been?

Pearls as ornamental pets. Pearls as less than labor, less than personal assistants - Pearls literally objectified. The Pearl we know, as Rose’s own ornamental Gem. A being created as a vanity object, whose sole function (according to Peridot and presumably the rest of Homeworld) is to look pretty and obey their owner’s orders.

Originally posted by vahnitr

Rose eventually realizing that this power imbalance is wrong - but also realizing that this is the only way of living that Pearl knows.

Rose tries to tell Pearl to make her own decisions. Rose is, after all, rebelling against Homeworld, presumably for freedom and choice and all that good stuff. She knows that Pearl will follow her because Rose owns her - not just because Pearl loves her. If Rose even recognizes that as love. From Rose’s position, this Gem she has owned for who knows how long (thousands of years probably, if Pearl has traveled through space with her) is devoted to her… but then, aren’t all Pearls devoted to their owners?

Originally posted by oathkeeper-of-tarth

Pearl imagining the life they’ll have together after the war, when castes don’t matter any more, when Homeworld laws don’t tell them what is and isn’t proper. Pearl not daring to voice the hope that Rose will be able to love her like she loves Rose - all while knowing that they can never be equals, because how could they be? Pearl’s own conditioning working against her, dragging her self-worth back down to its “proper place” even after the war is over, even when Rose is no longer a Diamond but just a simple Quartz, please. Pearl has spent so long serving, worshipping, accenting - she doesn’t know how else to be.

Originally posted by themysteryoftheunknownuniverse

Pearl slowly, slowly realizing that the life she imagined will never come to be. The harder she tries to be pleasing, the more Rose pushes her away. Pearl not understanding why Rose looks so sad when she smiles at her Pearl.

Originally posted by rozequart

Because Pearl is still Rose’s Pearl. Rose only tried to tell her she was free, that Rose did not own her, once - and couldn’t bear to see the pain written so plainly on Pearl’s face, not so soon after the pain and loss of the war with Homeworld. Rose knowing that, to Pearl, ownership is her only valid connection to Rose. Rose knowing that severing that tie, as terrible as it is, will only ever cause Pearl pain. Rose can’t bear it.

Every “my Pearl” makes Pearl shiver in pleasure. It’s a reaffirmation of belonging. Every order followed unquestioningly makes Pearl more confident and happy, even as it makes Rose sick to her stomach.

Rose loves Earth. Rose loves humans. And that’s ok, Pearl reasons every time she wants Rose to look at her with a burning need that feels so ugly that Pearl has to meditate to calm herself into serenity again. That’s ok, Pearl repeats as a mantra for 50 years or so, because after 50 years or so the human is dead and rotting - and Pearl would never leave Rose like that. It hurts Rose so much every time. Pearl would never abandon her like that. Pearl is too faithful to die.

Originally posted by queeradorability

Pearl, the lowest of the Gems, looking at humans and feeling good about herself for the first time in her life. Here is something lower than her. She may be just a Pearl, she may be nothing to the Gems or to Homeworld, but at least she’s better than these.

Somewhere, Pearl picks up the idea of knighthood. During the war she flourished under Rose’s careful manipulation, turned into almost her own Gem when she decided that she wanted to be useful and not just pretty.

But she is still Rose’s Pearl. Just… a better one.

Originally posted by misterakio

And Rose can’t bear to be the person she was before, no matter how much Pearl expects it or craves it. She wishes Pearl would defy her, would decide on her own. But Pearl only looks to her for guidance, for orders, for everything, and Rose loves to nurture but she cannot separate Pearl’s desires from Homeworld’s social conditioning. It’s wrong, she thinks, to take advantage of her Pearl’s infatuation.

Because it’s clear to everyone that even if Rose is willing to cast aside ranks and all be equals, Pearl is not. And she might not ever be.

So all Rose can do is smile sadly and nudge Pearl in the right direction, encourage any independence she can. And all Pearl can do is try to please Rose.

But in the end, Rose is gone… and Steven is all Pearl has left.

Originally posted by sardonyxs

It’s interesting that in TOS, Captain Kirk describes himself as having been a super serious youth, “downright grim” in his academy days, meaning that the playful side he displays as captain of the Enterprise is something he had to grow into. 

And indeed, it’s something we can see him growing into as the characterization evolves from the very early episodes through the end of the series and the movies.

Yet the pop culture remembers only the finished product, which is flanderized into Playboy Kirk, which was used as the template for Chris Pine’s wild child Kirk in the reboot.

Taking Kirk’s own account of his academy days at face value casts the infamous Kobayashi Maru incident less as a puckish prankster’s smug ploy and more the act of a desperate straight-A student who couldn’t stomach failure.

On the other hand, we have Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whom Ted Cruz recently claimed was not a “complete captain” because he supposedly “lacks passion”… Cruz was wrong about Picard just as he was wrong about Kirk, but that’s okay as these are two of the least important things he’s wrong about, and he is also talking about the sort of received pop-culture wisdom about Picard, that he’s stiff and stuffy and by-the-books.

But when we learn about Picard’s academy days and his early career, we learn that he was more like Chris Pine’s young Kirk than young Kirk was: a bar-brawler, a womanizer, and all-around hell-raiser. Where Kirk had to learn to cut loose, Picard had to learn the dignity and restraint we associate with him.

And when Q gives Picard a chance to go back and avoid the mistakes of his youth, he winds up destroying his own promising career by turning himself into a middle-of-the-road milquetoast who never takes risks and never shows initiative… he takes back the take-back, having learned that his mistakes made him who he is.

Kirk never consciously gets the same do-over, rebooted timeline notwithstanding, but when alien phlebotinum confronts him with a simulacrum of the upperclassman who made his time in the academy hell, he is content to beat the heck out of him even at the cost of being seriously injured himself. 

Ted Cruz and J.J  Abrams and company both make the same mistake in regards to the most famous Enterprise captains: looking at snapshots of the finished product and imagining that what they are seeing is all that there is, all there ever was, and all there could be. 

Star Trek itself rejects this notion, emphatically. How many times do skeptical superior beings decide to spare the Enterprise—either Enterprise—not because of something the humans on board do, but because of what they might grow into? 

Some of Kirk’s biggest character growth came in the last movie where he was the lead protagonist. Picard’s character was still learning and growing in the final episode of TNG. “The trial never ended,” Q reminds him. It never does. The growth never stops. The lesson never ends. 

To say that Picard or Kirk is “not a complete captain”, not a complete person… it misses the point that none of us are complete in a sense, in the sense that none of us are finished. We may be works of art, but we are works in progress. And if there are mistakes along the way… well, they might not all be “happy little accidents”, but they still must be incorporated into the piece.

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)