Gravity Falls is a fascinating exercise in censorship, coding, and implication because one of the main characters is an old man who spent 10+ years homeless, in and out of prison, running drugs across borders, doing sex work to survive etc but the main cartoon canon can’t focus on this obviously. it gets spread out across different material. so yeah Grunkle Stan is genuinely one of my favorite characters.
example: we know he was institutionalized because of an aside in a coloring book. we know he’s on some kind of psychiatric medication from an aside in the DS game.
actually, one of the really clever things that makes it into the show is finding out that one of his old identities was Andrew '8-Ball' Alcatraz. it’s a sly coded message (in a show all about decoding messages) that says Stan Was Incarcerated For Drug Trafficking. (8-Ball is a classic unit of measurement by weight for a few different drugs and Alcatraz is a prison.)
