For What

Was Caryn Pines a good or a bad mom to the Stan twins?

Stan introduces us to Caryn’s character by describing her in the following words: “Mom was a pathological liar, which served her well as a phone psychic.” She is also, canonically, a kleptomaniac. “Pathological liar” and “kleptomaniac” aren’t the first terms you think of when you picture a stereotypical housewife back in the day, are they? So that’s already proof she can’t be put in a box together with the “women of her time.”

Let’s get this out of the way: she does not fear Filbrick and people should stop using that as an excuse for her actions (or lack thereof). But she isn’t totally uncaring, either. I present you a canon analysis of the relationship between Caryn and her kids under the cut!

Usually, the possibility of Filbrick being abusive towards Caryn is a headcanon born not out of any canon evidence, so to speak, but specifically the need to excuse Caryn not intervening as Stan was being kicked out, even though she watched it happen, just as Ford did. However, this is not what we see in the comics:

Caryn initiating the kiss/affectionate physical contact, and smiling brightly and genuinely to the camera.

And, again:

She’s presumably alone with Filbrick here, again initiating affectionate physical contact, and looking at him with an expression that can only be described as very tender.

In both panels, she doesn’t look afraid of him at all. Not even remotely. She knows the man she married and she loves him. I think this might confuse a lot of people given what we know of Filbrick, but in plenty of relationships irl, a man will hit his children and then turn around and call his wife affectionate pet names; an abusive parent will see their children as beneath them to discipline as cruelly as they please but see their spouse as much more of an equal in the family structure.

I know a few of you might be thinking that these two panels don’t represent the totality of their home life/the relationship between Filbrick and Caryn. After all, there is abuse in “loving” marriages as well, right? It’s a complex situation. And I would agree with you, if we were talking about real life instead of a cartoon. Gravity Falls is a cartoon and all its characters are fictional and 2D, lacking the complexity of real humans—what we know about them is what is shown to us by the writers, and what is shown to us is intended to represent the characters in their totality and dictate how the audience should interpret them. We’re meant to fill in the gaps using what is offered to us as a basis. While you are free to headcanon Caryn as being abused by Filbrick, it doesn’t have any canon evidence to back it up, simply because the writers did not mean to imply that. If they did, she would have been written differently.

Take as an example Mrs. Gleeful (Gideon’s mom), who, despite not being abused, seems plenty terrified of the events happening around her:

The GF Wiki describes her as “paranoid, traumatized and disturbed” right off the bat. It isn’t subtle at all, because it’s a cartoon. Caryn, on the other hand, doesn’t show the barest hint of fear. On the contrary, they make a point of showing her happy with her husband and her family, overall.

When I focus on a Watsonian approach, I sometimes wonder if Caryn might not have been intended as a questionable mother, but that a questionable mother was simply the woman we ended up with given the writers’ lack of thought about their side characters and/or struggle to write female characters compared to male ones. I’m not entirely sure about that, though; a friend once pointed out Filbrick and Caryn are exactly the kind of parents you would expect the Stan Pines you knew up to AToTS to have, intended to sort of explain the two sides of his personality to the audience: a father packed to the gills with toxic masculinity and a lying, cheating mother. One thing I’m certain was intended, though (and if Alex ever releases canon material retconning this fact, it will be just that: a retcon), is that Caryn does love Filbrick.

In conclusion, she probably didn’t want to leave or divorce Filbrick, either. Not because she couldn’t or was afraid to, but because it was her choice to stay with him.

Now, can we blame her for that? That’s complicated too, I believe. I don’t think that physical punishment, even if severe, would be automatically be seen as abuse or anything of the sort in whatever period their lives took place, 1950s or 60s (Alex is insistent on the fact the show isn’t supposed to have an actual timeline, but an “emotional” one). I think this can be applied to a lot of other behaviors. I’ve seen many older adults saying, in my country, that “back in their day” an adult could silence their child with just a single look, just by raising their eyebrow. I don’t know how things were in the USA, but I bet kids were expected to be more “respectful” and “obedient” and a lot of what would be considered abuse nowadays was then considered an acceptable way of raising a respectable citizen. So Caryn, too, might have interpreted her husband’s behavior as his way of “toughing up” the boys.

I personally headcanon (emphasis on headcanon! I always keep headcanon and analysis neatly separated, and we’ll soon return to the analysis) Caryn as having Stan as her favorite. Most people with siblings seem to think there’s always a favorite one for each parent, and we know of her canonically being affectionate with Stan! She’s the one who says he has “personality,” who calls him her “little free spirit,” who asks about him to the principal when Ford himself doesn’t. She’s one of the only two people who attend his fake funeral, according to the TBoB site, and the other person was an IRS agent. On the other hand, we know virtually nothing about her feelings for Ford in particular/specific, other than the fact she at the very least doesn’t feel negatively about him—no nicknames, no praise, not much of anything. I like to think Ford is not disliked, but Stan is her baby. It makes sense to me because Stan was a talented and creative liar, like her, while she couldn’t relate much to studious Ford. (It’s also fun to give Ford mommy issues, hahah. It would be pretty ironic if, while Stan is confessing to Ford about how upset he feels that Ford is Filbrick’s fave, Ford was internally harboring similar suspicions towards their mom.)

Back to the analysis—these are the two instances in which we see her acting as a mom, in TBoB and the comics respectively:

In the first picture, she’s smiling at the camera with one of her babies crying in the background. In the second, she doesn’t seem very bothered by the fact her troublemaker kids are “sneaking out” (very probably so Filbrick doesn’t see them) to “fight the devil.” She doesn’t even ask for more information or scolds them for climbing down a sheet from their window (when they could easily fall and get seriously hurt), just tells them to be back home by dinner.

I think she did love them in her own way (she wouldn’t have been one of the two people to show up to Stan’s fake funeral otherwise, since there was no benefit in doing that), but that way of hers was clearly not the stereotypical, overprotective, nagging, fussing mother hen way. I see her characterized as some sort of Mrs. Weasley from Harry Potter far too often (probably because people have an idealized concept of How A Good Mother Should Behave in their minds, and with the lack of canon information about Caryn, that’s the default set for her), when truly her style of parenting seems closer to Grunkle Stan’s style of grunkling.

As an example, Stan smiling and reassuring himself as the kids fight like crazy in the background:

Except, of course, that she was a woman and didn’t have Stan’s weird hangups about masculinity, so she wouldn’t shy away from being more openly affectionate, cooing, praising.

Except, also, that she didn’t intervene when her kid was kicked out, while Grunkle Stan, who does everything for his family and is unflinchingly loyal to it (even to his own detriment), absolutely would have intervened in her place.

She sounds confused, a bit concerned, but again, she was not afraid to make her presence known and walk into the scene and ask what was going on as her husband was visibly very angry. Her tone is not of a panicking or scared woman.

Then, Stanley calls for Ford to defend him, not her. Ford, his brother, same age as him, who was at the moment beyond furious with him and very unlikely to show any compassion. Ford, whose attempts to change Filbrick’s mind would more likely than not have been unsuccessful. Not Caryn, adult, who probably had much greater sway over Filbrick. They say a child’s first instinct is to call for their mama. Clearly not in this case!

I’ve seen many people headcanon that Stan kept in contact with her, or else Ford couldn’t possibly have known Stan’s address. I think they might be forgetting the magic omniscient Mailbox! That’s my own headcanon to how Ford managed to get it. (Frankly, I don’t think the writers thought too much about it, so I doubt there’s an official explanation; if there is one in the future, it’ll be a retcon for sure. That’s how GF works.)

Think of Stanford Pines’ character and how he operates, how he always avoids asking for help, how self-sufficient he always attempts to be. He has two options: one involving phoning his mom and asking for his twin’s address and fueling gossip/assumptions that he was ready to reconcile with Stan, and another one than involved just Ford himself and supernatural/magic means, like an old, magic mailbox. Which of the two is more likely to be his choice, especially in his paranoid state? (And speaking of the mailbox, Ford wouldn’t necessarily have had to ask it about Bill’s weaknesses. By the time he needed Stan’s address, he had already tried using many of Bill’s canon weaknesses against him and failed, so he wasn’t struggling due to lack of knowledge.)

When Bill threatens Ford, he says no one would miss him if he died out there in the snow, which implies that, at least from Ford’s point of view, that would be believable (since Bill wouldn’t brag about something absurd and meaningless but something that he assumed could actually hurt Ford):

Bill mentions, in that order: Fiddleford abandoning Ford, Filbrick not wanting Ford to return without millions, and Ford’s lack of friends. No mention of either Stan or Caryn. If you want to be more charitable towards Caryn, perhaps this is Bill refusing to remind Ford of any person that could possibly love him. Even then, Ford’s mind doesn’t immediately go to Stan (presumably because of their fight) nor to Caryn (presumably because of Ford’s estrangement from his family) as a denial/protest against Bill’s words.

Ford also admits he had abandoned their family to become a recluse:

Caryn was very likely included in the “family” he felt like he had abandoned.

I’m not saying that Stan wasn’t keeping in contact with her, but that if you choose to think he was, that’s also a headcanon. I personally can see it, since Stan is a character who always prioritized family above all, while Ford was growing increasingly isolated and estranged from them.

Ultimately, when it comes to Caryn, I think her character depends a bit on Filbrick’s. The worse you headcanon Filbrick to be, the worse it looks for her as a mother. Fortunately for her in my case, I don’t headcanon Filbrick to be a stereotypical monster that beat his sons black and blue all the time. I think he sucked at parenting, but not exaggeratedly so, and in a way that could still be socially acceptable back then.

Meanwhile, in the fandom, I think there’s a tendency to portray Filbrick as Terribly Bad and Caryn as Undoubtedly Good, demonizing one and idealizing the other to the point you stop and wonder: how did this wonderful, perfect woman even marry this man? I believe the black & white extreme contrast is appealing, in a poetic sort of way—a helpless saint stuck with a monster—but not that realistic considering their situation.

It’s also more comforting to imagine her as extra motherly to compensate for the fact Filbrick was so terrible. Shermie also gets this treatment, in a way, being headcanoned as a very protective older brother that would often defend the twins from his father’s wrath. It’s just... sad to imagine our beloved blorbos Stan and Ford didn’t get much protection at all.

I don’t believe they were very protected, but I also believe that Filbrick also wasn’t that terrible. That time in which he attempted to “sell” Stan after he got a bad grade (according to the TBoB website), for example? I doubt he was actually selling the boy. Way more likely that he was humiliating the boy, which is obviously very, very bad, alright, but not to the levels of actual child trafficking.

I actually can see Caryn intervening in certain occasions, telling her husband to chill, that this time Stan (his favorite victim, despite the fact Ford also suffered with his expectations in a different way) was innocent, that they were just kids, but not forcefully so. Not in an “insistently, angrily putting her foot down” way. You could, of course, also headcanon Filbrick was that terrible but threatened the boys so they didn’t tell their mom and Caryn remained blissfully unaware of the worst—if that’s your cup of tea. Even if she were unaware of the worst, though, there are things she surely wouldn’t have missed while living under the same roof as Filbrick and the Stans without plausible justification, so I wouldn’t abuse that excuse.

It’s also possible to me that she knew some of it and started deceiving herself and coming up with explanations to soothe her own mind, perhaps even dissociating a little. She wouldn’t want her Filbrick to be a terrible father, so she pretended that he wasn’t. This hypothesis, ironically, would give her a fitting similarity to her son Ford: the worst liar is the one who lies to herself.

I’m not a great fan of the idealization of Caryn as a mother because that’s somewhat sexist to me. You know, how mothers are definitely treated differently than fathers, and often put on a “can do no wrong” pedestal with higher expectations? Society often forgets that women with children are people first, mothers second. I think it’s possible for a female character that is also a mom to be a good character but not that good of a mom. Caryn, imo, gives off more cool wine aunt vibes than she does motherly momma.

But we know that, despite her shortcomings, she does cherish her family.

Stan and Ford probably have many fond memories of her, such as this one in TBoB:

At least we can assume that, despite her husband’s idea of a Hanukkah present being actual cinder-blocks, which Ford felt the need to mention to the reader, Caryn herself must have gotten them more decent/normal gifts with the budget they had.

Or here, in J3, where we can probably assume Caryn was included in the “family” that attempted to comfort Ford about his extra fingers (I can’t imagine Filbrick being this sentimental):

She is also described as a “caring mother and kleptomaniac” on this Lost Legends website that I believe few people know about the existence of (the same that revealed her full name to be “Caryn Romanoff Pines”), but considering Alex’s acidic/sarcastic tone I don’t know if we’re meant to take the “caring” adjective very seriously. Especially because he has said before, in the DVD extras (AToTS commentary), that Stan attempted to get from the public “the affection he never got from his family and lost with his brother.” (Such statements seem conflicting with each other, so I prefer a middle ground approach.)

Narratively speaking, I believe she loved her boys and her boys loved her, but not enough to take away Stan’s protagonism in Ford’s life and Ford’s protagonism in Stan’s life. They’re meant to rely mostly on each other, to the point Alex confessed in HanaHyperfixates’ and ThatGFFan’s interview that he didn’t elaborate on Shermie’s character because Stan & Ford were meant to part of a duo against the world and an extra sibling would alter that dynamic:

In terms of Shermie, I remember asking Rob or somebody at some point, like, “Would Shermie be here, logically? Do we have to see him?” I don’t really wanna see him. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in Stan and Ford being—sort of having only each other and then losing each other because of their different life paths.

I think the suggestion was, “Maybe Shermie would be a baby. Maybe that would happen.” And being like, “okay sure.”

That said, I also believe people don’t get that. I’m tired of this being my experience in this fandom:

(Sorry, I had to include a meme.)

She’s excused for not intervening that night even as her seventeen-year-old son, Ford, is not extended the same courtesy. She’s also often put on a pedestal for... being present at her own child’s funeral? It’s ironic how, despite her fanon self being idealized by the fandom as mothers are idealized by society irl, her canon self is treated by the fandom as fathers are treated by society irl: the bare minimum becomes cause for celebration.

It might sound like I’m being too harsh on her, but I didn’t write this to attack Caryn. On the contrary, I think it’s very, very nice that her character is so difficult to pin down, as either a fully bad or a fully good mother. She has nuance, imo, and that’s a very delicate trait for any fictional character to have because the fandom never handles it well. Why? Fandoms in general prefer drama over nuance. (I’ve seen the contrary happening, too: a few fans getting so fed up with fanon Caryn that they decided to write her as completely uncaring.)

Ultimately, my own answer to the question posed in the title is: neither, but at least she (probably) loved them. Reading all of this, different people might have reached different conclusions, deeming her as either good or bad. That’s just proof, imo, of how hard it is to crack her. Good for her.

!!TW BLOOD!!

Wanted to finish this animation for halloween but oh well Huge thanks to my classmate David Rhombus on youtube for helping me get started on After Effects Enjoy

Before the Mystery Shack

Design by:

Ian Worrel, Sun Jae Lee, Alex Chechik, Janine Chang, 

Paint by: Jeffrey Thompson, Matthias Bauer, Samantha Kallis

Art Directed by Ian Worrel

So, for Starters: Book Of Bill Spoilers warning. Another opinion from me below. (Here's my first opinion I shared, if you havent seen it) This new one is about the lost journal pages again, of course.

Originally, I wanted to make a super big crazy essay about all the reasons I think the journal pages in BOB (The Book of Bill’s given name) are fake, and show off my super-cool totally completely sound deductive reasoning techniques in the process.  

Unfortunately, knowing myself I’m not sure I’m actually capable of accomplishing such a feat. You all know how I tend to post things in parts, sometimes out of order, often never finished. However I would like to share something in particular that’s been eating at me that I’ve seen… partially discussed, but only partially. And certainly not the part that I would like to discuss. 

It’s about the rats.

You know, the rats.

I saw these rats being talked about since before I was even able to have a look at the book myself. 

But before I get further into it all, I would like to start off with a joke: 

Why did dead rats, eggnog, a land orca, shrimp colors, It’s a Small World After All, and an Anti-Cipherite Suit cross the road? 

Well, that’s easy. To get to the other side. 

Of the book, that is. 

If you’re anything like me, you probably skipped right to the journal pages upon contact with the book. And if you’re even MORE like me, you were probably left a little confounded by them. Not only did they seem… wrong somehow. But they also felt random. Full of odd choices of subject that didn’t make a lot of sense. Could these pages really have come from journal 3? If so, why do parts of them feel so… completely out of context? 

And this is where the rats come in. As I mentioned before, I saw many people discussing them. In particular, they were noting their connection to this passage from earlier in the book:

Many of the related discussions also felt odd to me. Though I lacked the knowledge to be able to articulate why at the time. UNTIL, I read the book for myself from start to finish. That's when I realized something:  This is not the only time something from earlier in the book connects back to the journal pages. In fact, it happens many, many times throughout the earlier passages. (Here is a small collection of them for your perusal.)

And then it started clicking into place. The reasons the pages felt like they were so abnormally out of context… is because they WERE lacking context!

Now, before you can finish saying “Gin, you’re an idiot.” I would like you to ponder these three questions: 

1) Why, if these pages were taken from Journal 3, should they require context from outside of it to be able to be completely understood?

2) Why is it that this context can be found in what Bill Cipher has been writing in the preceding passages up till now? 

3) If you put food in a mogwai’s mouth at midnight EST but drive it over the CST time zone line back to 11PM before it can swallow, will it still transform into a gremlin? 

Okay, you caught me, that third one is unrelated. But the first two I believe require further thinking. So let’s delve a little further into the idea. Consider this the real third question: 

3) Are we to seriously believe that these, the only pages of J3 still lost to us, just so happen to tie into the new topics from the rest of the Book of Bill over and over like this?  

And since you’ve done so well thinking thus far, I’ll ask a fourth question: 

4) Are you aware of the concepts of Watsonian and Doyalist analysis? 

Assuming you don’t and you won’t google it, I’ll skip to the important part. Watsonian analysis is to analyze a story from within it, as if you yourself were Watson making deductions in a Sherlock Holmes novel.  

Now, from a Watsonian point of view, what happens when we try to answer our earlier questions? Why should it be that the Book of Bill provides so many of these points of reference to the journal pages? 

One possible line of thought could be that Bill wrote the earlier passages of his book *around* the idea of what was contained in the pages, but I think this doesn’t work for a few reasons. For one thing, the purpose of the book is to get the reader to make a deal, not to take a whole novel to set the stage for a 3 day mini Ford adventure. For another, not all of what I described prior is really fit to be called “context”, is it? The rats, the “Small World” cassette, and the Bill-Suit are one thing, but Eggnog? Shrimp colors? Land Orcas? I certainly wouldn’t define them that way. If anything, they’d be better suited to being called “references”. And unlike the more contextual ideas, there’d be no real need for Bill to sneak mere references to the pages into his grand story.  And lastly, there are a great deal of Bill pages that have nothing to do with the content in the journal pages at all.

So what exactly am I trying to say here? 

If we do intend to think of the callbacks outlined above as references, the only logical conclusion within the story is that the journal pages themselves are referencing back to the Book of Bill, not the other way around.

But… how? And why? Something Ford has written in the 80’s shouldn't be able to reference something Bill is writing post-weirdmageddon certainly. 

That’s because “Ford” isn’t referencing it at all!

And as for why… Well, have you ever noticed when you're writing a story on the fly, things you wrote earlier all come crashing back to you as you try to wrap things up? I believe personally that the journal pages are nothing more than a strange endcap on Bill’s crazy train of thought! And the "references" are just fuel that further the pages creation. Almost as if, to quote someone much more knowledgeable than me on this subject…

In the end, all I've described above (as well as other aspects of the pages I've not mentioned here) leave me with the impression the pages are not real.

As I stated only a bit earlier, the idea that these pages, the only pages of J3 purported to be lost, should be so connected to the rest of the book is beyond coincidence to me. Not to mention that in order to take these pages as total truth, you must give credence to several other passages of Bill's book as well. And I'm not too keen on having to trust him that much.

To all who have read this far, even to those who may have scoffed at the ideas in here or think I've only written up nonsense. Thank you for reading and considering my thoughts.

I am not saying anyone must agree with me on this. I know some people have found the pages to be important and meaningful to them, and I do not wish to give the impression that I think my view is the end all be all correct one, or that I think lesser of those who believe in them. I only want to share my own opinions. And to anyone else who found the pages to feel "off" somehow, possibly validate their feelings too.

They're making good use of Ford's eye...

I made this comic 2 months ago I think and I just forgor to post it here LMAOAOAOAO

procreate test...

Exes in Halloween 😒

Witness Ford slowly morphing to his almost canon art style as he gets more and more pissed at Bill!

(I have other toxic couple's costume ideas that was scratched out. I don't think the dark humor is too appropriate for viewing ahahhahaha)

happy friday!

He's really not taking the divorce well