#flatfalls

[rjalker]

purely from random osmosis, but if bill cipher was born with his eye on his "side" (facing upward in what Flatlanders call their inside), then he'd be blind as a Flatlander because we wouldn't be able to see within Flatland itself at all.

And also no one would even be aware that he has an eye to begin with, because it's literally outside their realm of perception. They'd think he was born without any eye and that he was literally just imagining anything he thought he could see.

[ID: A four way grid with the first row labeled "Bill Cipher apparently", first seen from above, as an equilateral triangle with a round eye in the center of his face, looking up and to the side. He is then seen from the side as a line with a half circle on top to show his eye, labeled, "Cannot see surroundings at all, cannot look in any direction except Up". from his eye radiate three lines to show his area of vision, with a zig-zag line in front of him to show where he cannot see. The second row is labeled, "Regular Flatlander", and shows another equilateral triangle, but this one has their eye on their perimeter at their top point. When they are shown from the side, they are labeled, "Can see surroundings, but cannot look Up", with three straight lines in front of their eye, which points to the size, and a zig-zag above them. End ID.]

So. If you're planning to write a crossover with Flatland where you want it to actually follow Flatland's worldbuilding, Bill should be blind while he's in Flatland. He'd have to navigate purely though touch and sound and would never see anything except whatever is above him.

Edit 3 hours later: also, he would have just starved to death as a baby unless there were some serious and immediate medical intervention, because Flatlander's eyes and their mouths are the same thing. So he'd have no way of eating anything.

So, he would also need the Flatland equivalent of a feeding tube for his whole life, unless he had some guardian angel in Spaceland who was feeding him from above.

[ranmagender]

[ID: A square with purple inner wall and black outlines. with some tiny black tendrils and an eye on the right side. innards are shown floating in a red color. Above the square is an arrow pointing at the square labeled "Flatlander". To the Right is Bill Cipher, a triangle with pyramid brick pattern at the bottom part,, a bowtie, one eye by the center with 3 eyelashes and a top hat floating above him. next to him is a blue square but with brick pattern, one eye in the middle with three eyelashes on top and three on the bottom and a bowler hat with a white stripe floating above. below both of them is an irregular triangle that's blue-greyish color, brick layout throughout, one eye by the center and a cowboy hat floating to the side. Above them is an arrow pointing at them labelled "Euclydians" END ID]

While not all Euclydians look like this, its clear as a fan of both the book Flatland and Gravity Falls that there is a difference.

Euclydians seem almost like they are 2.5D, like they are flat but they have more dimensionality to them, behaving more akin to toon logic.

And yes, that's Tad Strange and Liam by Bill, if you know you know.

[walks-the-ages]

Gravity Falls fans, I have a proposal for you.

If you are making or discussing the Gravity Falls-specific version of "Flatland", or discussing a crossover / etc between Gravity Falls and Flatland, please begin (and edit existing posts) to have the first tag be

"Flatfalls"

To make it easier to both filter and find Gravity Falls x Flatland Content!

This is how the DPxDC crossover fandom stopped driving two+ different fandoms up the wall , and I think it is always good to make a unique tag for prevalent crossovers to have their own tags, because people in both (or more) original fandoms can quickly lose patience at having to block and filter a million people just to find their original Fandom's content for their source material.

I double checked, and "Flatfalls" on Tumblr only has 1 random post in it from 2020 and that's it, so no one's going to have any issue with Flatland x Gravity Falls content being put in it.

Tagging (and editing existing posts) to have the "Flatfalls" tag no only means that its easier for people to filter that tag if they have no interest in Gravity Falls / Bill Cipher, but ALSO means that it will be easier for fans of the crossover to find it in the future :)

[ranmagender]

[ID: An image of bill cipher, a yellow equilateral triangle with brick pattern at the bottom, a bowtie one eye in the center, two legs and a top hat floating above it. Next to him on the right is a square with one eye on its side, inside it is another smaller square. the outer wall is purple and its innards show organs like a pink brain and red heart and other blobs that are pinkish or grey. organs seem to floating in a dark red color. Bill Cipher asks "Did you meet the Axolotl?" with a cutesy small doodle of an axolotl to the left of the word axolotl. The square responds "What?" END ID]

Bill, your experiences aren't universal.

[rjalker]

I haven't watched Gravity Falls but I really do wish Bill Cipher wasn't an Equilateral Triangle. That has clearly held back some people's understanding of Flatland and what it has to say about systems of inequality.

Editing on August 26 2024 to add the larger reblog here:

#Would love to hear an explanation.

Here you go:

Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls –

(aka this dude)

[ID: A screenshot of Bill Cipher from the show Gravity Falls, floating in the air in front of grey trees. Bill is an Equilateral triangle with a single large eye in the middle of his body, a brick-like pattern on his lower side, a tophat, bowtie, and simple black legs and arms. He has his legs out in front of him as though sitting, with one hand on his hip and the other pointing at something offscreen. End ID.]

–was at some point revealed to have come from a world like Flatland, in an in-character Questions and Answer session, when asked about his home dimension, he said something along the lines of “Edwin Abbott has the right idea”.

This led to a bunch of people looking up Flatland, and looking at it through a gaze influenced by their love of Bill Cipher and whatever else Gravity Falls has to say about him / his backstory / his home dimension. (IDK, I haven’t watched it)

This becomes a problem when people who like Bill and sympathize with him for his (apparently?) tragic backstory then fail to understand what Flatland has to say about society.

In Flatland, different shapes represent different social classes.

Equilateral Triangles are the explicit Middle Class. Which means Bill Cipher, before he left his home dimension, was part of the Middle Class.

The book is very explicit about the fact that the only reason the Middle Class exists is to keep the lower classes in line, by being an unobtainable promise of “reward” if they just work hard enough and don’t cause problems.

The lower classes, who *quite literally do not have a single human right*, are told that if they just keep working hard and be the best workers they can be, then maybe some day they’ll get lucky and their *kids* could be born Equilateral and get to have a better life and get basic human rights. Which I cannot stress enough the lower classes do not have.

The middle class, aka Equilaterals, explicitly only exist to prevent the lower classes from violently revolting against the rich, by giving them a hope to cling to that if they just keep working their kids might have a better future.

But people who are only reading Flatland *because* they like Bill Cipher and already sympathize with him, don’t want to see him as part of a privileged class at all, so they ignore what the book actually has to say about the middle class, and insist that Bill Cipher is actually extremely oppressed and isn’t privileged in any way, because he’s not a billionaire, so that’s the same thing as not having any rights at all.

Which is just completely untrue, for both reality, and the society we see in Flatland.

There is a huge, huge, huge difference in the quality of life between someone in the middle class, and someone in the lower classes. Especially in Flatland, where things are taken to the extreme to illustrate why they’re bad in real life.

But because people don’t want to think badly of their favorite character, they don’t want to understand the ways he was privileged and oppressed others while living in Flatland, so they throw out all understanding of classism and instead just go with the idea that “anyone who’s not a billionaire is all equally poor”, when that’s just not true, and actively erases the struggles of people who are not privileged enough to be in the middle class, and never will be.

in summary:

Bill Cipher being an Equilateral Triangle unintentionally impedes a lot of people’s understanding of class struggles between poor people and the middle class, because they already sympathize with him and don’t want to see him as having a privileged position in society that actively oppresses those under him.

So they instead pretend there’s absolutely no difference between someone who owns multiple homes and goes on multiple paid vacations a year and has full health insurance versus someone who can’t even afford to rent a 1 bedroom appartment.

Because if you compare them both to billionaires, they’re both poor in comparison, so these people want to pretend that means that they’re both equally poor, and the middle class aren’t actually privileged at all and shouldn’t be held accountable, so that they don’t have to think critically about their favorite character and his privileged and oppressive position in a classist society.

Editing August 26 2024 to add a link to a post with many ways to read / listen to Flatland in many formats and styles all for free.

[rjalker]

okay I guess I'm just gonna have to start politely bothering people who crosstag things that are literally only about Gravity Falls and not even pretending to have anything to do with Flatland to stop crosstagging and filling the Flatland tag with things that have absolutely nothing to do with it.

You guys have the Bill Cipher tag. You have the Gravity Falls tag. You have the tag for whatever Bill's home dimension is.

The actual fans of the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, have the Flatland tag and that's it.

Keep your tags straight. It is absolutely unfair for your giant fandom to be spamming our tiny one with things that are completely irrelevant.

It's one thing if your post is actually discussing both things, for real. (no, talking about Bill's canon home dimension is not enough). And even then you should be tagging the post as "Flatfalls" so that it can be filtered by people who do not come to the Flatland tag to see completely unrelated content.

But just tagging any post with Bill Cipher or other Gravity Falls characters in it as "Flatland" is just spam and extremely rude.

(Flatland is Free to read and watch and listen to in many formats if you want to actually join the actual Flatland fandom instead of just mistagging Gravity Falls posts)

Please show some common courtesy.

[rjalker]

i made that one drawing comparing flatlanders to euclydians to point out that like, they arent the same. Frankly seems Euclydia is a later addition to the GF lore to specifically make it so Bill Cipher isnt from Flatland. For one you dont see the insides of euclydians. Euclydians have arms and legs and even accessories like hats or bowtie. They seem to operate under 2.5D toon logic and not the rigid 2D logic of the book. It's interesting and Alex Hirsh was 100% inspired by Flatland but yeah they aren't the same owo

.

[rjalker]

AU where all the people who called their hotline learn what happened and storm the asylum and jail and rescue them and they get to get actual therapy and fight for equal rights together.

(Chromatists putting pride flags on their sides is the best thing ever)

(I seem to recall art somewhere with Bill with the aroace flag...? Might be remembering wrong)

@2d-dreams I love your story and characters. They're so cute.

[ID: A simple, lineless digital drawing of Pollux Codex, an original Flatland character, and Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls, sitting in a bench under a tree and smiling at the camera while saying, "Cheese!". Pollux is a blue hexagon with his left side, which we see on his right, darker blue and covered with scar tissue, with another scar on his lower side. He has a black bowtie, and holds a yellow cane in his right hand. The two of his sides on the right have been painted in the gay flag and the ace flag. The gay flag has stripes of dark green, seafoam, off-white, medium blue, and very dark blue. The ace flag is black, grey, white, and purple. Bill is a yellow equillateral triangle with darker scars on his lower half, concentrated on his right side, wearing a black bowtie and a tall tophat, holding a blue cane in his left hand, which we see on his right. His diagonal sides are painted with the gay, agender, and aroace flags. The araoce flag is orange, yellow, white, light blue, and dark blue, and is drawn upside down here. The agender flag is black, grey, white, light green, white, grey, and black. He has his eye closed while he smiles, and both he and Pollux are reaching out with their hands around the other while looking at the camera. Behind them is a large tree, and below them is green grass. The background is blank white. End ID.]

You should all go read The Arts of Being. You don't have to know anything about Gravity Falls except for the very ending. You can read Flatland here for free for context for that stuff.

They're adorable, your honor.