Not So Normal Teacher

it is time.to draw fnati

Well, this is interesting.

Inside Falls 2

Meet the Inside Falls team:

The one on a scooter is Gideon, he has a complex with his height and that's why he always rides that flying scooter. I think the role of a fungus-like psychic organism from a hive mind deep in the Hollow Earth.

Below this, looking wonderful as she checks her phone is Pacifica Northwest. She got her job thanks to a surprise selfie, where the background of it was Taylor Swift in her reptilian form. However, she has proven to be a perfect director of Cognito's Media Manipulation and Subliminal Messaging.

On the other side of the picture we meet Candy, although I'm sure in this multiverse it's because she experiments with a variety of unusual narcotics. Because of her work as a biochemist.

I'm sure you've noticed Grenda, she signed up for the super soldier experiment and is now a hybrid between orangutan and human. But that doesn't stop her from flirting and she is a supporter of the Januhairy movement.

And last but not least, Dipper and Mabel pines. Their great-uncles are the bosses but since Stan divorced his wife, Edalyn; things have changed (u know). Dipper was supposed to move up in his position, but due to being a social klutz; his uncle Ford has seen fit to hire his sister Mabel to increase the charisma of the team. They like each other though as siblings, they will fight but then reconcile.

The Morality of Mabel and Dipper Pines

Warning: Dipper Levels of Overanalysis Ahead

I’d like to make it clear at the start that I love both of these characters equally and they’re both good people, just in different ways. But I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Mabel’s flaws and less of Dipper’s, so I’d like to contribute to the discussion of their respective characters by exploring a divide between them I haven’t seen talked about much.

Mabel really wants to be a moral person. She places a lot of intrinsic worth in the concepts of ethics, like kindness and fairness and the wellbeing of others. Being a bad person could be considered her worst fear. It’s definitely up there with her other greatest fears of losing her relationship with Dipper and the inevitability of change, and those fears developed later largely in response to Ford and the baggage he brought with him.

Dipper just doesn’t care about that as much. That isn’t to say he’s a bad person! He's compassionate, selfless, brave and unquestionably heroic by the end of the show. They both are. But it sticks out to me how differently they think about ethics.

For example, Dipper literally killed Wax Sherlock Holmes, while Mabel is so averse to hurting someone’s feelings that she couldn’t bear to break out of a false, one-sided relationship with Gideon. You see what I’m getting at here? But I have more evidence! Buckle up, this is gonna get long.

Compare how they treat their rivals, Pacifica and Robbie. These are ordinary humans with no real authority over them who, age and class gaps aside, they're basically on even footing with in confrontations, so this is a good metric for how aggressive they are when upset and how much they hold grudges in mundane situations.

In “Irrational Treasure”, Mabel is deeply hurt by Pacifica’s mockery to the point of giving up her silly identity, and sets out to prove her wrong that she can be competent. But at the end, when presented with the opportunity to destroy the Northwest family’s fake prestigious legacy that they use to justify putting others down, she declares, “I’ve got nothing to prove” and lets it go. She’s secure in herself. Her motivation is satisfied. Why bother putting more pain and strife into the world? It’s Dipper, who has been only been hurt by proximity to Mabel, who insists on exposing the truth specifically to spite Pacifica and takes away that “Man, revenge is underrated. That felt awesome!” Revenge is arguably a form of justice, especially in this sense of revealing an unfair lie, but still, he takes great pleasure in bringing an enemy down for the sake of it, not to fix the damage they did.

In “Fight Fighters”, Dipper’s vindictive streak returns. He manipulates the ridiculously powerful Rumble McSkirmish into brutally beating up Robbie on the fraudulent charge of murder, threatening Robbie’s life. He didn’t realize Rumble would try to kill Robbie, but he was fine with him severely injuring him. Rumble is a fighting game character, a superpowered master martial artist. Robbie is a normal fifteen-year-old. This is not a sportsmanlike matchup. By the end Dipper learns his lesson and takes responsibility, but so did Mabel about hurting people to try to have a perfect life and people still complain about that!

In “The Golf War”, Mabel is again the twin with a bone to pick with Pacifica, but Dipper takes her rivalry more seriously than her and is more willing to be mean about it. He encourages her to cheat when she doesn’t want to, justifying because Pacifica is “cheating at life”. Understandable, but still underhanded. While Mabel bonds and buries the hatchet with her rival by the end, outright declaring their rivalry to be stupid, Dipper holds onto it, refusing to forgive Pacifica at all and disapproving of Mabel's offer to give her a ride home afterward despite the pouring rain and her parents not showing. He still wholeheartedly considers her “the worst” (and tells her to her face) at the beginning of “Northwest Mansion Mystery”, even though she and Mabel helped and protected each other in their fight against the Lilliputtians and Pacifica thanked Mabel and accepted her apology.

In “The Love God”, Mabel’s compassion is on full display. She makes it apparent that she wants everyone she knows to be happy, to the point of making a chart to show her friends’ feelings with stickers, and goes out of her way to help Robbie just because she doesn’t think any human being should be so lonely and sad. Dipper initially has no sympathy for Robbie’s misery and sees the twins and his old friends leaving him to rot as a net good.

Dipper just invests more emotionally into hating people and is more willing to play dirty. Mabel prefers to see the best in people, forgive, deescalate conflict and turn enemies into friends whenever possible, and has more respect for honour and sportsmanship.

Compare the insecurities they highlight in "Society of the Blind Eye". These could have been their last words spoken with their memories of the summer, so they are fully candid and vulnerable.

Mabel confesses, “I only love some of my stuffed animals and the guilt is killing me!” She reprimands herself for not having sincere affection for all her loved ones… who are inanimate objects, hence this being a joke about how immature and overly sentimental she is. But she’s telling the truth! Not being honest about your feelings toward someone who loves you (as toys are assumed to love their kids) is wrong. It’s something a bad, or at least flawed, person would do. We also know that it’s something Mabel can do with real consequences - she loves Dipper unconditionally, but her frequent teasing of him instead of letting this on damages his self-esteem more than she intends and often realizes - and when she does realize as in “Little Dipper”, she’s ashamed of it. Her guilt is that she’s failing morally, that she hurts the people around her despite her good intentions.

Dipper admits, “Sometimes I use big words and don’t actually know what they mean. I mean, I’m supposed to be the smart guy! If I’m not the smart guy, then who am I?” He primarily thinks of his worth in terms of competence. Dipper is generally not that confident, at this point in time. He has an intense drive to prove his worth. He is acutely aware of his physical and social shortcomings. But the one thing he knows that he does well is analytical, deductive and strategic thinking, and so to always have value he’s built his entire identity on being particularly intelligent. He’s the planner, the mastermind, the guy with the specialized knowledge and important big words who people have no choice but to respect and listen to, because a lifetime of loneliness besides Mabel has taught him that given a choice, they probably won’t. Except just like Mabel’s all-loving attitude, there’s an element of performance. He doesn’t know everything; he’s inherently irrational to a degree like everyone else. So he tries to seem smarter than he is. His guilt is that he’s failing intellectually and practically, that he isn’t actually contributing enough to be worth something.

This is where Dipper diverges. He wants to be ethically good less than he wants to be good AT things, and respected for it. But they both beat themselves up when they don’t live up to their self-assigned archetypes of All-Loving Hero and The Smart Guy, when they aren’t good enough by their own unreasonably high standards.

"The Last Mabelcorn" deconstructs Mabel’s fixation on her own moral perfection. Celestabellabethabelle, who I will henceforth call C-Beth for short, manipulates it to keep her out of the unicorns’ way. She makes manifest Mabel’s fear that she isn’t good enough no matter what she does. We see Mabel push herself further and further to try to prove herself, much like Dipper in episodes like “Dipper vs Manliness”, and emotionally unravel until she’s miserable, self-loathing and openly listing her vices in a way never seen before. But this isn’t productive! Wallowing in guilt doesn’t motivate her to be better! She needs to learn that although she isn’t perfect, the virtues she has are good enough to work with to both gets out of and kick C-Beth out of her head. She decides to stop worrying about meeting an impossible ideal of goodness and just focus on doing good, by using efficient (if violent, and therefore immoral under certain paradigms) means to protect her family. Her plot in this episode has its detractors and I understand the criticisms that the message wasn’t handled as well as it could have been. But I think it does okay. Mabel definitely reevaluates her need to feel like a good person here. She switches from prioritizing what’s important to her, the validation of being "pure of heart", to what’s important to others and in the bigger picture, simply getting the unicorn hair to keep Bill out of the Mystery Shack.

Finally, compare the twins’ disastrous errors in judgement in “Scary-Oke” and “Dipper and Mabel vs the Future”, when they both accidentally unleash terrible forces of evil on the town and set in motion a local apocalypse.

Dipper recites an incantation from Journal 3 that causes the dead to rise as bloodthirsty zombies, desperate to prove to the government agents before they leave that the supernatural is real and warrants their help investigating, driven by both his desire for knowledge (his tool to feel secure in himself) and more immediately his fear of being dismissed as unworthy. He is emotionally vulnerable, but still creates the dangerous situation on his own initiative. Since he doesn’t need a blacklight to read the spell and the beginning of the episode established that he’s already familiar with all Journal 3’s visible entries, he knew what the spell would do. He doesn’t realize how many zombies would appear and maybe how dangerous they’d be. But he was aware that there were risks. Plus, the Shack is hosting a party full of innocent civilians and Mabel has explicitly asked him not to interfere with weirdness. The one thing she told him not to do that night was raise the dead! And what does he do? Raises the dead.

Mabel is actively deceived and manipulated into giving who she believes to be Blendin Blandin, an expert in time-altering technology, what she believes to be an item of such technology, with the intention of warping time to extend the summer for the town. This is a selfish choice. But on top of how emotionally compromised she is, sobbing in despair after “the worst day of [her] life”, consider her internal logic: the end of summer is going to mean the pains and tribulations of growing up for both her and Dipper, and they won’t even have each other if he gets his way; Wendy is already going through that and has told her how awful high school is; she overheard at least some of the Stans’ conversation at the end of “A Tale of Two Stans”, meaning she might know that Stan will have to give up his home and business once the summer is over; and she and Dipper both have true friends here who they will miss and be missed by, as opposed to their memories of Piedmont where we only see them supporting and comforting each other and never hear of any friends. And it isn’t like she’s the only one having fun! Stan is happier than ever, Ford is back home, Dipper’s come into his own more than she could ever have anticipated. He’ll still get to delve into the mysteries and weirdness of this town that he loves so much. But she’ll be there too. If you want more Gravity Falls, you can see where she’s coming from. She genuinely thinks that “just a little more summer” would be a positive experience for everyone, with plenty of good reason. Yes, she’s recklessly messing with powerful forces she doesn’t understand. Yes, she isn’t nearly as suspicious of this sudden miracle solution as she should be. But she has no evidence that this would harm anyone.

Their responses after making their mistake are also noteworthy. They’re both horrified and remorseful. But Dipper expresses no concern for the agents for the rest of the episode when it looks like they’ve been killed due to his actions and even nonchalantly remarks that he thought they were dead when he sees them again. Mabel, however, reaches to stop Bill and begs him to “wait” before he knocks her unconscious. Then she’s imprisoned in Mabelland, which is designed to make her never want to leave and based on how it only occurs to her that the neon colours and repetitive background music are too much even for her after she renounces it, may additionally have a direct, if subtle, influence on her mind. So she’s a little distracted from her guilt. But by risking her life to fix the repercussions of her actions and save the town, she shows much more responsibility for the townspeople’s lives than Dipper showed for the agents he’d tried so hard to impress. He just happily went about his business for weeks believing he had two people’s deaths on his conscience. Never even looked into whether they survived.

These differences in their personal moral philosophies add another layer to the parallels between the two generations of Pines twins. Typically, Dipper parallels Ford and Mabel parallels Stan. But less so here! Like Mabel, Ford very staunchly believes in abstract moral theory, namely that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. He holds a grudge against Stan saving him from being lost the dimensions through the portal for weeks, because it endangered the rest of the world by creating the Rift. It was a good deed with good intentions… but it didn’t only make life better for everyone. To Ford, that means it isn’t good enough. Hmm, which younger twin has a problem with judging anything short of ‘pure good’ to not be worthwhile? Also like Mabel, Ford’s self-righteousness is often hypocritical, considering his pride, selfishness and willingness to disregard the possible negative consequences of his actions, e.g. trusting Bill and building the portal in the first place.

Like Dipper, Stan is willing and ready to use underhanded methods to win against his enemies, to lie, cheat, steal and leverage assets he doesn’t really have the right to. He’s more inclined to be aggressive, spiteful and smug. As for taking rivalries seriously, even to an unreasonable extent, he personally despised a nine-year-old child even before he knew that the child was a bad person. He would absolutely summon Rumble McSkirmish to beat a rival up for him. He prides himself on his cunning, another form of intelligence, and prioritises being good at what he does best over holding the moral high ground. He is shown to have lifelong insecurities about Ford being better than him in other fields (and thus explicitly valued more by their father); so his pragmatism is his way of trying to always be useful to the people he loves, indeed a key way he shows them his love.

So I was rewatching Steven universe and I really liked to Concept of losing color to turning monochromatic, so- what if the clown!child!reader got told (by most likely Pomni since she probably doesn't know that the reader is an actual child and probably told em in the worst way possible 🥲) that Kaufmo abstracted and the little fella just starts going colorless day by day, not honking anymore because they're grieving in their own way, perhaps the reader starts getting meaner, pulling pranks that are kind of akin to Jax's but they're doing em in a way so others understand the reader's feelings. That they know what happened now, that they feel like Pomni was just Caine's way of replacing Kaufmo since he abstracted.

And now it's not just losing color, they stop attending meals as often, they start changing and for the worst. As time passes the pain starts to dull away, but it's always there. The reader regains some color, but somehow now they look,, older? More tired? It's hard to tell, they start socializing again, but it's not the same, it will never be the same again.

Sorry I got too silly with this one ISPHWIOS 😔

YES YES HES ANGST CONTINUATION RAHH

(Don’t mind the gif it thought it was funny 💀)

(WARNINGS - ANGST, NO READER, BITTER ENDING, ONCE AGAIN KINDA SHORT, MILD BODY HORROR, MILD DEPICTION OF DEPRESSION)

No one ever told you.

They never told you where Kaufmo went,

Where the one you loved like a brother had went.

You spent most of your days in your room, you weren’t allowed in Kaufmo’s room at all.

They even crossed out his face on the door.

Nobody has seen you in quite some time… but the time you did come form your room, they all noticed how discolored your once bright colors were.

“Hey, [Y/N]? Are you okay?” Jax wearily asked, Behr out of character for him; but he could notice the heavy bags under your eyes.

You could only give a slight nod in response.

Ragatha stepped in, trying to cheer you up, “we’re playing your favorite today, capture the Gloinks!” Only to be met without a reaction from you.

“Could we at least get a little honk..?” She asked; but when you squeezed your nose a pathetic, deflated squeak only left it.

“You never told me where Kaufmo went, is he okay?”

You were met with silence.

It was always silence.

You were fed up with it.

Trudging away from the group with your arms tucked to you, Caine explained what felt like the thousandth time of how to play capture the Gloinks.

That’s when Pomni came up to you, tapping you wearily. “Hey.. I heard you wanted to know what happened to Kaufmo..?” She was whispering, not that she’d need to. You were decently far away from the rest of the group.

“Well.. when I got here he… Ragatha said something happened to him called abstraction.”

A wave of horror washed over you.

You had to excuse yourself from everyone, scrambling to your room.

This couldn’t be real, he couldn’t be gone, really.

It had to just be some prank they were pulling on you for all the ones you’ve done on them.

You could feel a buzzing sensation under your skin, it felt like it was trying to eat away at your inner layers.

It wanted to get out. It had to get out.

The feeling would crawl all the way up to your chin, making you feel ill. It was only when you looked down at your hands when you saw the eyes staring back at you while eating away at your skin. It just kept eating. Even when your tried to tear it from yourself it only made it worse. This was your fate.

Destined to the same as Kaufmo. Once to be with him again. Would he recognize you?

Would you recognize him?

The thoughts iver flowed in your mind as the buzzing feeling finally consumed you, leaving no trace of the person you once were.

The once fun, loving prankster of all of them.

Reduced to nothing but a carving agony that would tear you apart gradually.

It was your time.

Goodnight, sweet [Y/N].

More wacky puppets? Count me in!

Been excited for the full release of the game, had fun playing it!

These are one of Norman’s dialogues in the game, and he sounds like he’s about to have a mental breakdown at any second.

(Loved doing the movement and expressions of Norman ❤️)

Wally is internally freaking out about the unfriendly neighbors, he got no eyes to stare at, while Poppy and Pearl are being best bird besties! ✨

Discord's first mistake was in thinking they'll listen to reasons.

I finally got time to finish this silly lil comic!

Not taking credit here btw the ideas came from this post, credit to @pinkvaquita and @groovyfrog420 in particular!

Low-effort scribble comic for a Thing. I still don't know how exactly I want to draw Shamura

Welcome Home actor au

AU credit goes to frillsand on TikTok and also @wally-darling-hyperfixation for their fanfics about it

AHAHAHAHA I am overjoyed to have this out finally OMg,it’s been like, DAYS. Here’s my little OC content because I am smelly stinky @;]

I have been drawing this instead of prepping for a musical (my actual job, whoopsie), and our first rehearsal is tomorrow (double whoopsie)

But I really hope you enjoy, I’m really happy with the lineart!

You fail me...

extra

First post for the new year! 🥳 Wish I could’ve posted this on the 1st, but this piece challenged every single scrap of art knowledge I have 🫠 pls tell me i did good or i’ll cry uwu

That pretty little ring holds a fraction of the Crown’s power, enough to let Narinder summon some strong curses. And if that’s not enough, it can also transform into a wickedly huge scythe (as seen in my prev art post) 😚 Can’t say the Lamb doesn’t know how to treat him right <3

read below to see the ingame shrine I based this on

i’m so fucking normal about him