I know I’m a few years late to the Gravity Falls party, but I can’t get over how effectively the Ford reveal flips the switch on Stan’s character. From what little I’d seen of the show on Tumblr before I watched it, I’d always assumed Stan was a pretty one-dimensional sleazy con man. And since it was a series aimed toward kids, I kind of assumed Stan wouldn’t get that much development or story outside of Dipper and Mabel. I figured if he did have an arc, it would be the pretty common “gruff bitter loner guy who doesn’t like people gets kids and learns to love them” storyline.
And for like the first half of the show, this kind of seemed to be the case, aside from the mystery surrounding whatever Stan was hiding in the basement.
And then the Ford reveal / backstory happens and you see Stan in a completely new light.
Stan isn’t a con man because he wants to be. He’s a con man out of necessity - first because he was kicked out of his house and forced to make it on his own at 18, and then because it was helping him work to bring his brother back. He doesn’t just run the mystery shack because he likes to lie to people and swindle them out of their money - he does it because he needed a way to make money and keep the shack while trying to figure out a way to reopen the portal. He has a fake identity because he needed to keep people from snooping around looking for Stanford and the easiest way to do that was to take his place.
All the things that make you think he’s selfish and shady throughout the first half of the series are revealed to be because he’s a desperate, heartbroken man who wants to bring his brother back. He isn’t the traditional gruff guy who doesn’t love anyone until some rambunctious kids come into his life at all - he loves his brother so much that literally everything he does is to get him back. And he lies to the kids in an effort to protect them and keep anything bad from happening to them like it did to his brother.
Great twists / mystery reveals don’t just take the story in a new direction - they cast new light on everything that has come before. And Gravity Falls does that so well.
Just look at one of the first episodes in the series where Mabel makes a wax figure of Stan and Stan appears to fall in love with it and mourns it when it melts, going as far to host a funeral for it. Without knowing Stan’s backstory, this whole storyline just feeds into our view of Stan as a self-centered, ridiculous person. It’s ridiculous he would cherish a wax figure of himself. It’s so egotistical that he would host a funeral for it when it died and get honestly choked up about it.
But then you learn that Stan lost his twin brother and that whole storyline doesn’t really feel like the story of a selfish, egotistical man anymore. It’s the story of a man who felt like he got his brother back again momentarily and then had to lose him all over again.
That’s an effective twist. You can’t learn about Stan’s backstory and then go back and view him the same way you did before it.
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