I keep rotating around in my head whether or not the inherent silliness of being such a serious ass figure saying mundane things would have appealed to Bill just slightly, and how goddammit annoying it'd be for aku that this guy cannot take him seriously. Bill was born on the cob but aku... is not here for a silly goofy ass time like he is. I can't imagine he'd be amused by Bill getting silly in the theraprism closet.
I think the fact that Aku doesn't KNOW how inherently ridiculous he is cancels out the appeal. Saying mundane things seriously is silly, but to Bill, the King Of Silly Guys, saying mundane things seriously just makes Aku mundane & serious. So he's fun... to tease mercilessly.
and no, aku is not a fan of bill's infinite whimsy.
this is what every day is like for him and it's torment
but unfortunately for them both they've got more in common than not—wizard-demons with an unnerving affinity for fire; world conquerors with a tendency to do things that piss off Time Baby; a deep and abiding disrespect for Theraprism as a whole; and a couple of species endlings who know a billion times more about earth and humans than they do about their own homes.
and so they keep ending up hanging out even though they're both like "you're the most annoyingly [silly/serious] person I've ever met."
Hold on 👀 is Bill understanding English and... just not noticing its another language?
sjffskshj god you guys are observant and I'm dense bc I absolutely have a bunch of really important Euclydian/English translation stuff planned out for later in the comic but did not even think for a second about the music needing to be translated. Oops.
So in this case I'm gonna say one of the bits Ford built for the sound system includes an autotranslator, so Bill is hearing the songs in Euclydian! (phew)
Not to continue to be a nerd but something that does concern me about octolings is that the "back end business" is filtered by the same siphon that they use to spit out water. I... Am horrified to say I can only hope they lost this siphon. Or maybe it simply lost all functionality outside swim form.
Oh... oh. Oh. So, bad news, octolings still have the siphon.
It appears as a "creased ear", while the other "ear" is a fin.
I never really knew what this siphon did, but uhm. Yeah. That's certainly a bit uncomfortable.
Wait I have to ask about some of those trans headcanons. Plz tell me about transfem Axel and Bigender Gideon.
(referring to my tags on this post!)
i'm giving you the gideon one first because the transfem axel one is stupid lmao.
When Gideon meets Mabel, he says one of the first things that drew him to her is that she "appreciates the sparkly things in life." So: Gideon appreciates the sparkly things, and this is a high priority to him.
He invites her over for makeovers, and his dressing room—
—is full of very feminine things. It's pink, it's sparkly, there's bows and feathers and flowers and ruffles and earrings and lipstick.
Mabel comes home with lipstick, eye shadow, false lashes, blush, fingernail extensions, curled hair, and a hair bow—which means Gideon had all those supplies. This is presented as his dressing room and we don't see his parents wearing that kind of stuff.
We know from out-of-canon sources that Gideon was unpopular before he found Journal 2, probably got picked on, and that's one reason he latched on to the journal's power. So that's one hint that there's Something Going On with Gideon that other kids twig as bullyable. It might be something else (like, he's fat, that's definitely bullyable), but it might be something queer.
If he's so eager to find a friend (or girlfriend) who appreciates the same "sparkly things" he does, it's probably because he's felt rejected by other kids in town who don't appreciate those things... or who judge him for appreciating them. Add on to that the fact that Gideon's got the speech patterns of a southern woman and steals high school girls' moisturizer, and he doesn't make for a terribly masculine little ten-year-old.
He latched on to Mabel so hard because she didn't judge him for any of those things. She saw a little boy into makeup and jewelry and sequins, and she got excited. She didn't see him as a weirdo... she saw him as someone just like her.
And Gideon looks at Mabel and sees someone just like him.
I headcanon that his crush on Mabel is only half because he wants to be with her. The other half is because he wants to be her: a cool pretty older girl (nearly a teen!) with long curly hair and skirts and headbands and fun cute colorful clothes she made herself and a lungful of bedazzling gems. A girl who doesn't feel constrained by her femininity, but rather uses femininity to freely express her full authentic self. She radiates everything that feels stifled within him. He wants what she has so much it hurts.
And he thinks the only way he can have what she has is by having her.
He's ten. He's grown up around the kind of people that use American flag pins on suit lapels to signal what good wholesome Christian patriots they are—and for y'all that didn't live through 9/11, in the 2000s those flag pins were shorthand for "conservative, or scared of offending conservatives." He's no doubt been taught that boys are boys and girls are girls and you are what you were born, and suggesting otherwise is not only impossible, but insulting.
Gideon's egg is years from cracking.
In the meantime, he's got his prison pals. They treat Gideon like something precious for being an adorable little child worth protecting, and for caring as they work out their emotional issues, and for doing crafts like friendship bracelets with them—he's found himself playing a rather feminine social role for these men, and they respect and admire him for it. I think he finds many of the same things with them that he found with Mabel: he can express the parts of himself that got rejected by his school peers, and he's celebrated for it.
You could just headcanon Gideon flat out as a trans girl and it'd fit the narrative perfectly. I headcanon bigender because I feel like he's not not a boy—he's just also a girl.
I imagine him as one of those kids who goes through middle & high school feeling more and more like something fits wrong, but unable to put a name to it, until he goes off to college and has a bunch of new life experiences and has a revelation. Does drag once "for fun" and suddenly that egg shell's dynamited apart.
Then she spends the next couple years grappling with "am I a girl? but if I'm a girl why does the thought of leaving behind manhood feel like ripping something out of my ribs? am I just a boy? but then why does the thought of not getting to be a girl feel like dying?" until she figures out she can just be both.
I think she'd tell her prison gang first, even before any of her family. She's sure if anyone will support her, it'll be them. (And they do, 100%.)
I think her parents would be alright with it, but I also think her parents are the kind of people who calmly listen to hateful talk show hosts denouncing trans & gay people because they never imagined they've got a little trans kid sitting right next to them listening too—"Well, sure Gideon asked for all those sparkly clothes, but that don't mean anything, our son's just an artistic little boy, that's all!"—so she didn't know they'd be okay with it.
Mabel would be thrilled for her—after she stops being weirded out that Gideon totally copied Mabel's childhood haircut. But I think her coming out would recontextualize a lot of what happened during Weirdmageddon summer and, okay yeah, not realizing you're a girl doesn't excuse kidnapping your crush and trying to kill her family, but it's easier for you to give a full and sincere apology for what you did when everyone has a better understanding of why you did it in the first place. I think they should both get the opportunity to have the big sister/little sister dynamic that in a perfect world they should've gotten in the first place.
okay and now here's my reason for the transfem axel headcanon, which i warned you is stupid:
years & years back i started a kingdom hearts 2 fic, back when the lore was just "when a person splits apart their heart becomes a Heartless and their body becomes a Nobody"; I think KH's soul alchemy has gotten more complicated since then, but I haven't kept up.
and the premise of the fic was that Axel ran into his Heartless—it was a Soldier—and they went on a quest together to recombine into one person. and I decided to make his Heartless a girl just because. didn't look different from any other Soldier, Axel could just tell it was a girl. it was his heart, so he should know. and that was about as much as it was explored.
years and years later i realized "hold on. if Axel's body/Nobody is male, and his heart/Heartless is female, then you've got a female heart in a male body. that's how countless trans women have described their experiences for centuries. ... welp, i guess she's trans now!"
this was about the same period in my life that i started a fic about orochimaru being a trans woman so it wasn't like i didn't know trans people existed, i just didn't think through the implications of my own headcanon lmao
Remembered i sent you an ask about this ages ago now but i was talking to a friend about the logistics of Bill befriending Dipper in any capacity- (not that I think it'd ever be intentional.) one of of the things i said is Dipper was missing the little weirdo energy Ford and Mabel have. But something Dipper does have in common with Bill? Petty. Not opposed to a little revenge or basking in some dramatic irony. And as a bonus, Ford would resent Bill fostering this in any shape or form/presenting any advice too. Not that Dipper might even take it- he's petty. But in the right circumstances I think it'd be an absolute nightmare. Revenge boarding.
oh my god you're right. galaxy brained.
and it'd be so easy, too. all it'd take would be somebody making Mabel upset. Dipper and Bill would make eye contact across the room and agree, without saying a word, that they will ruin that asshole's life.
I had rough plans for a "Mabel's in trouble and Bill & Dipper have to team up to help her" plot, but turning it into a "Mabel's mildly distressed and Bill & Dipper have to team up for disproportionate retribution" is so much better. (the original plan was "oh no, mabel got a boyfriend but she doesn't realize he's dangerous!" it's so much funnier and so much more Gravity Falls if it's "oh no, mabel got a boyfriend who seems dangerous but isn't, but she doesn't realize he's slightly dickish!")
So many good opportunities! Mabel finds out what they've been doing, yells at them for it, takes a moment to yell at Bill for a particularly fucked up part of the plan—and Dipper has to go "actually that part was my idea" even though he completely could've gotten away with it.
or maybe do it the other way around—Mabel yells at Dipper for something that was his idea and Bill takes credit for it instead—because he still owes Dipper one from the eclipse arc for not telling the rest of the household about Bill's embarrassing little complete mental breakdown.
