Tell Me Again About How Peggy Carter Never Taught Steve Rogers How To Fight?

Someone needs to take care of these nerds - Stanley Pines

w-w-we're d-d-driving in a CAR

destination: drug dealers's BAR

pass the mic right over to CHARLES

( we forgot charles :/ )

So on the 27th DeepSeek R1 dropped (a chinese version of ChatGPT that is open source, free and beats GPT's 200 dollar subscription, using less resources and less money) and the tech market just had a loss of $1,2 Trillion.

Source

gravity falls thoughts of the week: i've been joking about ford not knowing what's okay or safe to let children do in the past few episodes but that kind of becomes less funny in the show in "dipper and mabel vs. the future", when we see that these missions he's taking dipper along on are actually putting this kid in danger. sure he manages to survive and get them out of the danger but it's kind of concerning that ford's takeaway from this is "see, you can handle it!" and not "maybe i shouldn't invite this 12-going-on-13-year-old to be my apprentice in highly dangerous field research"

but dipper, of course, doesn't realize this because he's a kid getting to do cool stuff with an adult who respects his intelligence and doesn't treat him like a kid, even though that's the problem. this final string of episodes does a good job highlighting the theme of dipper wanting to grow up too fast and mabel wanting to stay a kid forever and how neither of those are realistic approaches, even though most of the time this isn't a show terribly concerned with realism.

(kind of wild to me thinking about it now that there were a lot of fans at the time who genuinely thought dipper was giving up a great opportunity by choosing not to take ford up on his apprenticeship offer by the end. i guess that's the difference between watching kids' shows when you're closer to the age of the main characters and watching them when you're a lot older than the characters. on most shows i wouldn't worry too much over questions like "are these kids who go on fun adventures that appeal to the target demographic who like to imagine getting to do cool things Literal Child Soldiers?" but here the point clearly is that kids shouldn't have a full-time job instead of going to school and having a normal childhood and adolescence, and also more broadly that the adult in this situation is projecting his own issues onto the kids and does not actually know what's best for them. idk i think it's pretty obvious!)

on mabel's side of (not) coping with things, there's a lot to say about mabeland and what it represents. when i first watched this i was a little disappointed that they didn't make the inside of the bubble a perfect recreation of gravity falls with mabel living out her endless summer by pretending nothing's changed, complete with eerie fake replicas of her friends and family, and instead went full fantasy land...but i did ultimately like where they ended up going with it. i like the implication that mabel doesn't actually have fake versions of the other characters there because she's waiting for the real ones to show up so they can be together (or at least that's my headcanon. dippy fresh might count but he's just the "backup" there to agree with mabel when the real dipper inevitably goes against her plans.) i like that bill isn't too concerned about the others getting inside the bubble because it's designed to keep you trapped there by giving you whatever you want, plus it's an obvious "safe" place in the middle of all the chaos outside. i should probably make a separate post for this because i realized while thinking about this episode that i have a lot of thoughts on mabeland and how the bubble works. (originally the title for part 2 was going to be "escape from mabeland" but the crew thought it was too spoilery or would set up a different expectation from the fans, so it became "escape from reality" instead. which is technically the opposite of what the original title meant but it's still accurate because that's what mabeland is! she's trying to escape from reality!)

final thoughts were that a lot of people thought the conflicts were resolved too quickly in these last few episodes but i'm forgiving of it because they are working with limited time for these episodes here and it is still a kids' show. also the long hiatuses between episodes kind of messed with the fandom's sense of time back when they were first airing. i feel like there was so much fanart of the characters becoming hardened post-apocalyptic warriors during this era but the actual apocalypse in the show's time lasts for like, a week. maybe less.

anyway, watching the finale tonight and then i'll reread my copy of journal 3, and finally read the lost legends comics which just came in from the library, and then hopefully get on the long waitlist for the book of bill, aaaaaand then i'll be done and can go back to watching shows that aren't for kids. well i'll do that after running through over the garden wall one last time, it is the tenth anniversary after all.

they had no reason to be serving challengers realness for hsm promo 😭

I couldn’t help myself....

Okay but imagine Hunter's attempt at showing affection for Willow. Remember how he told Flapjack to "be safe!" and "I love you!" over the walkie talkie in front of Luz? Like I know it's different but like, he knows Willow would kick his ass if he actually embarrassed her in public (not that he could) but imagine him trying to sneak kisses when no one is looking or giving her quick hand signals so he wouldn't have to say things out loud and THEN at some point someone else on the Emerald Entrails catches him doing it and he gets all embarrassed but Willow is like "and??" and as hes trying to hide or run away she takes him right out of the sky with her vines like when they first met and then kisses him on the cheek like "yep i snagged a good one"

so we’re all agreeing now after reading the book that this pic was for ford, right?

What do you think Dana has in store for Hunter and Willow in the upcoming specials from the way she reacting in live Instagram Q and A?

I don't know ow the answer to this any more than another fan would, but it's clearly going to be more than I originally let myself hope we'd get. A lot of people have already registered the parallels between Hunter and Willow, and Caleb and his witch!wife, and how karmically appropriate it would be for Belos- who killed his brother for falling in love with a witch- to know before he fully dies that the last clone he made of Caleb fell in love with a witch as well. And for Willow and Hunter to find the happiness together that Caleb and his wife were robbed of.