Become The Omnipotent Narrator Of Your Own Life

Visiting the lake in Gravity Falls? Guess what I have right here?

Instead of a cutesie reference to film censorship it was an explicit statement of defiance of Maryland's criminalization gay sex, which was not repealed until 2002. This wasn't a guy saying "Oh they can't put what I do in the movies according to a completely voluntary industry code" he was saying "The State of Maryland wants to put me in jail for being gay and having gay sex."

Oh the confusion of being lovingly kissed on the shoulder by your situationship from hell

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (2026) dir. Travis Knight

Paris - July 3rd, 2011

So glad you asked this question!!

I can’t speak for everyone in the community, but in my case, it started off as a “lol what if” crackship, and then I fell into a deep rabbit hole I haven’t crawled out of for nearly two years now.

After I started to dig deeper, rewatching the show, reading through TBOB and the wikis for THISISNOTAWEBSITE, I realized that Bill and Stan are actually incredibly similar. 

There was already a thing floating around, the same coin theory from the early days of Gravity Falls where it was believed that Stan and Bill were the same person (or something along those lines).

People already noticed that Bill and Stan are potentially meant to be narrative parallels: they both like gold, they’re conmen, they wear a suit, they have a similar (kinda inappropriate) knee slapping sense of humour, and so on. In TBOB, you can notice how Bill even twins Stanley’s outfits, which makes you wonder: is is out of spite to mock him, or because he likes them too? 

But what I like most is the energy in their dynamic that is present in the canon: Bill hates Stanley with such passion, it’s almost poetic. 

To an extent, it’s because he can see his own flaws mirrored at him through Stanley. He tries so badly to make Ford believe they are alike when in reality he is a lot more like that ‘lesser’ twin if his. But on top of that, Bill is jealous of Stan, since in the end, Stanley out-witted and out-conned him, and still had a home and a family to return to, which is arguably the one thing Bill can’t have.

Furthermore, if Bill doesn’t consider Ford a threat to his intellect, praising his scientific genius, he doesn’t feel very moved by him either. While he seemed to have something ongoing with Ford, their chemistry wasn’t strong enough to sway him in any way. 

Sure had a breakdown at O’Sadleys and manufactured a fantasy of him and Ford sharing a karaoke night, but that’s about it. Bill may be yearning for him and may wish he had something more with Ford, but he still views him as a pawn in the end. On the website especially he stays reserved when speaking about him, claiming he doesn’t care (yes you do Bill, yes you do.)

On the other hand, he can’t seem to shut up about Stanley, whom he severely underestimated and now hates with a vivid passion. 

I’m sorry, what do you mean you can barely say anything about Ford, but you know the confines of Stanley’s mind, you know what he likes, what he fears, and on top of that you wrote a whole poem about him? Even in TBOB he crashes out in the end because he assumes Stan is the reason our ‘psychic link’ with him is weakening…like GIRL, who said anything about Stanley ?!

Aside from that triangle’s delusions, it’s clear that Stan is a worthy opponent for him in a battle of wits. Stanley can read through Bill easily and he doesn’t take any of his crap—this is shown as much in show as in TBOB and even in the material that didn’t make it into the show itself. The best kind of enemy is the one that knows which buttons to push to keep it interesting, Bill and Stan would ragebait each other if put in a room together.

Their likeness of mind could easily have made them get along had they met much earlier. Under different circumstances, they really could have been good friends or partners in crime.

TL:DR: Here’s a summary in a few points why they had ship potential:

-they’re narrative parallels (lots of likeness)

-Bill is fricking obsessed with hating on Stan (and that’s kinda gay if you ask me)

-they are worthy rivals in wits 

-enemies/rivals to lovers potential

-in a different world, if they became pals, they would’ve been nearly unstoppable 

Bill Cipher is a character so deeply entrenched in his own lies that he needs to believe them in order to keep going. And he’s so powerful and disconnected from reality that he gets away with it—most of the time. Not when it comes to Stanley Pines, though.

The Shaman, the Oracle, Ford, these are all people that Bill has (as much as he denies it) cared for in the past yet couldn’t keep due to him being, well, him. And yet he continues the same patterns, adheres to the same mindset, and remains the same static being over the course of a trillion years. The cycle repeats over and over until Stan forcibly breaks—or rather punches—it to smithereens. And the formally untouchable demigod dies, tricked by a conman who bears all his own ugly insecurities yet fashions it into a strength he can’t overcome. It feels like destiny, and it is.

Personally, I think that if Bill were to ever truly have an equal partner, it has to be someone who challenges him. Someone who sees through all his bullshit and forces him to confront himself. And when Stanley Pines is his better mirror, all Bill can see is himself. No more hiding. No more lies.

I think that can be something beautiful, in some twisted way. Or maybe I’m wrong and have looked too deeply into something that isn’t there. But I have tried to explore such themes in my own long Billstan fic, and it seemed to resonate with some people, so who knows for sure.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.