RandomThoughts

🔺 Their fictional squishy medical condition doesn't just accidentally make shapes cute. It's the kind of condition that affects just about all parts of the body: sides won't stay straight, poor muscle tone resulting in instability & weakness, poor motor coordination & clumsiness, back aches & pains (well, triangles don't have "backs." side aches?), easily dislocated joints, and increasingly skewed sides with age. Just about everyone in Scalene's family is born equilateral and ends up extremely scalene after young adulthood. The rest of her family have normal relationships with their condition, she's the only one who's weird about it

🔺 She was very rough on her body in pursuit of pageantry success, but her physical symptoms & associated chronic pain got a lot worse due to having a kid; she had to retire from pageantry for good. She doesn't blame Bill for this at all. Out loud, to his face. (If she hadn't been so rough on herself in pageants, having a kid probably wouldn't have impacted her health this much. She doesn't consider this.)

🔺 She's weirdly intent on seeing Bill become the success she wasn't. He's her little golden child, he deserves to be seen as the greatest! He'll show them how great he is for mommy, won't he? He won't let mommy down, will he? When he's very young, she takes him to child pageants—he'll appreciate the lessons they taught him when he's older—and this lasts until he finds out he can get out of it by pyrokinetically setting the stage on fire.

🔺 She jokes ("jokes") that she didn't realize that when she was having a kid, she was firing herself from the pageant circuit so she could hire & train her own replacement. These jokes had no long-term impact on Bill at all!!!

(Compare/contrast: how we're told Stan's "You watch the movie, you scare the girl, the girl snuggles up next to you, next thing you know you gotta raise a kid, your life falls apart" is repeating something he heard his dad say.)

🔺 Did you know that squeaky baby shoes are sometimes medical devices? Squeakers help children with poor muscle tone and delayed motor skills learn how to walk correctly: it makes them want to walk on their heels instead of their toes so they can hear the squeak. Did you know sometimes oversized squeaky baby shoes are worn by young kids who need ankle braces? Did you know that kids with poor motor coordination can take a longer time to learn complicated motor skills like tying shoelaces rather than using shoes with velcro straps? It sure is interesting that baby Bill's most defining visual feature is oversized squeaky sneakers with velcro straps and that he kept wearing velcro shoes until he was 16!

🔺 As a baby, Bill's angles were technically supposed to be equilateral,* but thanks to his inherited condition, his angles were so loose his top corner practically formed a right angle. Not good: the closer a triangle creeps to being obtuse, the more likely he'll have muscle strain and medical issues from his organs being squished out of place by his own exoskeleton.

(*supposed to be equilateral: but after receiving treatment, they discovered his angles were still 60º, 60º, and 60.1º, which is mathematically impossible for a triangle... on a euclidean plane. But on a non-euclidean 3D plane, such as in spherical geometry, a triangle's angles can add up to more than 180º... and it's this slight 3D flex to Bill's body that lets him see up into the third dimension.)

🔺 For his first few years of life he actually had a hypotenuse, until physical therapy and side braces helped him improve his muscle tone. Sometimes he still reflexively refers to his base as his hypotenuse. It's fine, sweetie, it's nothing to be embarrassed about, mommy had a hypotenuse too. Don't tell anyone.

🔺 Scalene took baby Billy to a lot of doctors as a kid, just like how she was taken to a lot of doctors! Doctor for his side braces, doctor for his physical therapy, doctor for his shoes... doctor for his eye when he started talking about seeing white glitter at the edge of his vision. Scalene didn't have that symptom, but the eye doc said their condition does occasionally come with visual problems—blurred vision, lazy eye, visual field defects... It sounds like Bill's main field of vision is unobstructed, but if the visual snow he's getting in his peripheral vision is distracting him and confusing his little toddler mind into thinking it's something real, they can give him a medication that'll narrow his field of view. From the sound of it, he's not seeing anything important at the edge of his vision, anyway.

And she only wants what's best for her golden child.

🔺 Scalene's "bow" is actually a medical device: sort of like a medical corset, it helps tug and press her anatomy into place to reduce pain. Bill started wearing one preventatively—if he can keep everything in place when he's young, it'll take longer for his angles to skew when he's older. Like wearing a retainer when you get your braces out.

🔺 He has a cane for the same reason—he doesn't need it NOW when he's young, but he might as well keep it on hand, by age 35 he'll probably want to stand more often than float and when he's standing he'll probably want the extra support! Even if he doesn't need it by 35, he will eventually!!

🔺 Bill doesn't medically need a bow tie in the third dimension either; but he adapted it to help tie his 3D exoskeleton on.

🔺 A trillion years later, Bill suspects that his mutation to see the third dimension came, at least in part, from his mom's medical condition. Except, she didn't have that vision. Nobody else with the condition on her side of the family had that vision. It's not a known symptom of the condition. His dad had stuff going on with his eye too, did he get it from his dad's side? A mix of both? Just a standalone random mutation? He doesn't know; and with the rest of his species dead, there's no way for him to find out.

But back to Scalene!

🔺 She's not quite red, she's rose gold. However she doesn't like it. She thinks it's a sort of pinkish brown and very dull. She uses makeup to make herself look redder. Note how bright red her sides are: in a species where only your edges are visible, body paint is the most common form of makeup+fashion. She's pleased her baby came out gold-gold, it's much cuter. Bill knows she's rose gold, but he only saw her with her makeup off when she was tired or sick; he remembers her painted red.

🔺 She adores her Billy; but she somewhat sees him as an extension of her will. She thinks he's just perfect and will tell anyone who asks; but she also demands he be perfect and is furious when he isn't. She'll protect him from ANY perceived external threat; but she'll tough love him into being the kind of success she thinks he should be. He learns early that when he screws up, he can often redirect his mother's anger by pointing his finger and saying it's someone else's fault, and she'll bring the wrath of heaven down on them. Woe to the teacher who gives Bill an F on a test.

🔺 I'm on a quest to write Bill as a foil to the entire cast of Gravity Falls, and that extends to writing his family as a foil to the entire cast's families. Scalene's a blend of Pacifica's mom and Caryn: beautiful, proud of her beauty, afraid of losing her youth, self-aggrandizing, quick to lie about her & her family's (false/exaggerated) accomplishments—and very aware of the fact that you can say anything about woo-woo mystical matters and nobody can prove you wrong.

🔺 So she takes it great when they figure out Bill is, like, legit psychic. And by "takes it great" I mean "starts a cult."

There's what I've got on Scalene. Fortunately, I got to keep all my pre-TBOB headcanons about Bill's mom, I only had to change her shape & color. I already had medical trauma baked right into the family!