Do you have any more lore regarding Steven and/or Jane that you’re siting on?
At any given time I’m sitting on so much lore lol
I’m gonna do a cut to preserve the dash. Buckle in, I have a lot:
I'll start with Jane since I basically re-wrote most of her lore in light of what I now know about canon thanks to TBOB.
Originally, Jane was basically a proxy oc to ship with Ford. And honestly she still kind of is like that (though I'm flexible and dont need to ship her they could just be pals?), but I've re-worked her a bit more. If you recall her old lore, it basically was the very simple "Ford met this ghost girl before the portal, they had a brief relationship, they reunite after he gets back, she as a tragic backstory that never really gets resolved bc im 19 and cant think that far ahead" This served me well back in the day but now that we know just how screwed Ford's life was pre-portal, He simply wouldn't have had time nor the energy to have a fun little flirtationship with a ghost. He was too busy literally going insane. So her story doesn't begin in the context of the main story until after Ford's return. I think he still met her before the portal in his examination of ghosts, but they likely didn't communicate much, since Jane isn't the type to make herself known to the living. So he has a vague knowledge of her from what other ghosts have told him, and she recalls him as a younger man. This is the extend of their 'relationship'
Jane's backstory hasn't changed that much, though I've kinda given her some ~mystique~ in labelling her as "Gravity Falls’ First Ghost" and the result of "Gravity Falls’ First Murder."
Her story goes that she was an Oregon settler, part of the first wagon trains that followed Quentin Trembley. She was the eldest child in a large farming family, and she had aspirations to be a writer. This of course would be kind of hard, considering it was the 1840s and she lived in a pretty lawless, unestablished place such as Gravity Falls. She resigned herself to just working on her writing while helping maintain her parents farm and helping look after her younger siblings. She never married, mostly because she found most of the men around her to be "incredibly boring" and she would rather focus on her work.
However, she did catch the eye of quite a few men, and her parents had essentially arranged to marry her off to a rich guy in town. Jane was 30 at the time, which was kinda unheard of for the time? She maintained that she wouldn't do it, though. It was a major point of contention with her family. But they werent the only people who were mad. The man she was being promised to had another woman who was very fond of him. Her name was Emily. Her whole deal isn't important apart from one big thing: Total Witch. Big Witch Energy. Basically the kind of woman you DONT mess with.
Emily was furious that Jane was going to marry her beloved (a guy named Isaac) and planned to take violent and horrible revenge. Which SUCKS ecause Jane literally probably wouldn't have gone through with the wedding, she likely would have wormed out of it somehow. But Emily took matters into her own hands. She lured Jane into the woods under the guise of helping a child who was hurt there. Jane had no reason to distrust her so she goes along, not realizing she was putting herself in danger.
When they reached a place in the woods, Jane starts to get suspicious. Emily invites five other witches to appear and they all attack Jane, with Emily dealing a fatal cursed blow to her back, which caused Jane to bleed out and die. She was then left there, and was found a few days later. She was the first person murdered in Gravity Falls. The area of the woods she was found in was dubbed to be a dangerous and evil place, and it mostly remained untouched until a man named David Yearling purchased the land to build a house over a hundred years later….
Anyway, this resulted in Jane not only being a ghost, but thanks to the curse placed on her, she is unable to move on, no matter how many things she tries. She's stuck in between the lands of the living and the dead. She's able to exist in either, but is unable to fully cross over to what is referred to as "The Hereafter." Luckily, the curse also beefed up her abilities as a ghost, making her rather dangerous.
She watched every member of her family either leave Gravity Falls or die and be buried there. She was unable to reach any of them, doomed to an afterlife separate from her loved ones and stuck in a very dull purgatorial state. And that's kind of how she's been existing. She spends a lot of time just. Vibing? Like she's just around, in the cemetery usually. She definitely needs some sort of catalyst to activate her story. That could be anything really, but I've always pictured a ghost hunt gone crazy, or some sort of “the gang visits the ghost realm” or whatever.
Janes been around for so long that most of the other ghosts in Gravity Falls don't actually know what happened to her. So they often lie, or make stuff up. This is because Jane ended up telling them different versions of the story, flexing her skills as a storyteller. This is basically the only form of entertainment she has.
This iteration of Jane is perhaps a bit drier than her previous interpretation. She's pretty straightforward and blunt, though she has a very whimsical side in the form of her storytelling. She's just waiting for something to happen to her.
And now, the boy!!!
With Steven it’s always tricky bc he almost doesn’t feel like he’s a canon character, like I can’t 100 percent commit to him being part of the full “Hexarcana” lore bc the dynamics of the Yearling household change so drastically when he’s around (Part of what really makes the duo of Aggie and Olive is the fact that they're a DUO, ya know?)
He almost feels like he is the centerpiece of a very specific AU since I haven’t really incorporated him into a lot of things, he’s just.. His own guy?? But I’m always happy to include him if folks want him. Here’s what his current like… Entrance to the story is. He’d get discovered sometime during the following summer in GF, after the Stan’s are back and the twins are visiting again. While out exploring, Olive (and likely the twins) are attacked by ~something~ and the thing that ends up saving them turns out to be a very scared little boy living in a cave. The kids argue over who’ll take the kid home and they decide Aggies a safer bet bc Ford *might* want to dissect this literal child. Olive deduces he's a Vampire, though its pretty obvious with the fangs and blood drinking.
Olive takes him home and Aggie pretty quickly becomes attached to him, helping him with her magic and powers of motherhood to help him learn how to do things like read and speak. Initially he could only communicate with her alone using telepathy. This made him pretty dependent on her.
Aggie always wanted a big family, and she especially wanted more kids. And she knows she's an older gal, but she's sure no one could look after this supernatural child as well as she could. It's tricky though. Olive isn't opposed to keeping him (she becomes pretty attached to him, since she's always wanted siblings) but there's some logistic issues with a boy suddenly appearing in someone's life out of nowhere. Luckily, Aggie knows a guy 😉 who's an expert on forging identification documents. So getting him a birth certificate (naming Aggie as his mother) and other identification is pretty easy. Aggie isn't opposed to raising a child at her age. Again, she wanted a big family and lots of kids. She's already basically raising Olive. She was a single mom, she can do it again- but the thing is, especially in our writing, she isn't exactly a single mom.
She has to wrestle with how to explain to Stan that she's doing the whole 'mom' thing again, for a little seven year old vampire. Obviously she doesn't expect Stan to really like? Participate in any way like a ~dad~ would, like she just imagines he'll treat him the same as Olive. There are no expectations from her, bc she’s aware that it would be a pretty massive ask to get any real help in raising him. But inevitably, I think they'd end up bonding and maybe even becoming pretty close.
I've delved into this a bit with some friends on discord, so I'll put some that in here:
Here’ some other Steven stuff, just little facts and things:
-He has a stutter that he will continue to have into adulthood. He does speech therapy and it helps but he speaks pretty slowly and has a pronounced stutter. He isn’t all that insecure about it, eventually being so bold as to comment that “If you didn’t learn to talk until you were seven you’d probably be bad at it too”
-He was born to two visiting vampires who ended up leaving him behind when they got chased off by vampire hunters. He was probably three when they left. He was able to look after himself, remarkably. He survived on a diet of mice, frogs, and one gnome that he REALLY felt bad about. To this day he can’t see a gnome without getting very sad and also hungry.
-He is VERY shy, HATES violence and hurting things, and cries VERY easily. He's a very sensitive little guy who hates the fact that his species relies on killing things to live. If he could, he'd stop being a vampire forever. He'd love to be a normal human boy. Aggie alleviates a lot of this by getting blood for him, usually via theft from the local hospital.
-He CAN eat and drink foods that aren't blood, though if he doesn't balance it with the right amount of blood intake he cant get kinda sick. His favorite food is cherry flavored candy since its the first thing he ever ate that wasn't a mouse or frog. (Olive gave it to him when she found him)
-He's got a lot of cool vampire powers. He possesses enhanced strength, speed, sensory skills (especially smell and hearing), telepathy, small scale telekinesis, can hypnotize people into doing his bidding and the ability to turn into a bat (though he has NO idea how this is done so he has no clue its part of his powers)
-Regardless of how Stan feels about him, Steven likes him. He thinks he's funny and he likes that he makes his mom happy. He does NOT like Ford, though. Ford scared the bejeezus out of him by talking about dissection or conducting research on him. I'd put money on Ford almost going through with it until Aggie literally knocks some sense into him.
-Being younger, he doesn't pal around with the twins or even Olive that much outside of at-home activities. He spends a lot of time by himself or keeping Aggie company. He likes playing with the dogs and climbing trees. He will join up for adventures where they need extra muscle, bc even as a seven year old he's stronger than your average adult man.
-As a teeanger he's a sports STAR at GF High School. I'm talking Captain of the Varsity Football team, playing baseball and soccer, running track, etc. He's very athletics and uses sports as a way to channel some aggression issues that came up as he got older. He ends up being pretty popular and well liked.
**Like Aggies status as a witch, him being a vampire is technically a secret but anyone who looks at him would probably conclude that he’s a Vampire. I’m sure early on in his stay in GF there’s some like??? Uproar about him but he’s such a little baby who couldn’t and wouldn’t hurt a fly that he kind of gets a free pass and people just kinda forget or ignore what he is.