Travels with Stormcrow into the Internet

They both made beautiful paintings depicting a similar street-scene! One is not inherently "better" than the other; it comes down to a matter of taste!

incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go

correct response:

(you’re not stupid. I posted this thinking it would amuse a handful of mutuals who all knew the context and that would be about it, so I didn’t think about providing any other explanation. I had no idea it would spread this far.)

I’ll start from the very beginning just to be thorough. so this is Alex Hirsch, creator and head writer of Gravity Falls, a show which had a big focus on mystery, conspiracies, codes and ciphers, etc. the whole plot is kicked off by one of the main characters finding a mysterious old journal in the woods, which detailed all kinds of weird and supernatural things, but then ended abruptly with the author saying they had to hide the journal because they were being watched. the central driving mystery of the show, therefore, was the question of who wrote the journal and what happened to them.

now, the thing about Gravity Falls is that, while it must be said that the writers weren’t always quite as sure of their plans as we tend to like to think they are, it is very much a fair play mystery, with legitimate clues to what was going on. but the writers were caught off guard by how quickly the show attracted a dedicated audience, including a lot of people outside the primary presumed demographic, who started solving the clues faster than expected. so some of the fans were able to correctly guess who the author was before it was revealed in the show, and the theory started spreading. this put the writers in something of a panic, because this was THE mystery that the whole story revolved around, with ¾ of the show building up to the dramatic reveal in the middle of season 2. they wanted it to be a mystery that could be figured out, sure, but they weren’t prepared for people to solve it so far in advance of when it was planned to be revealed, which would have really taken away from the big moment. they weren’t going to change the main story itself, but having been caught unaware by how much attention the fans were paying, they wanted to up the ante and make the mystery more complex to solve going forward–but first they needed to buy some time and throw the fandom off the scent for a little longer.

hence, Alex’s plan as described above. they whipped up a fake shot that appears to give away the identity of the author as being another character in the show, put it on a screen in the studio as if it was a real animation frame, took a picture of it, and ‘leaked’ it online. it was initially decided to be a hoax (albeit, I think, presumed to be a hoax originating from outside the production team), until Alex posted this tweet:

…before quickly deleting it (though not so quickly that it didn’t get seen, of course).

it worked well enough to distract most people for a while, and wasn’t revealed as a hoax until a year later, when an episode aired that definitively proved that the supposed screenshot could never have happened, at which point Alex owned up to the whole thing as seen in the tweet above. by then the episode with the real reveal wasn’t far off, and while people did still work it out ahead of time, it was more of an “OH MY GOD I KNEW IT!” moment than a “booooooring, we’ve known that for ages” moment, which of course was what the writers wanted all along.

personally I find this a fascinating approach to dealing with the problem of spoilers, because it doesn’t affect the story itself at all; if you watch Gravity Falls today–or if you were watching it when it aired without any significant contact with the fandom–you’d never know about it. ultimately, the problem the writers were facing wasn’t that some people might guess the answer to the mystery–they never wanted to make it completely impossible to predict–so much as it was that they hadn’t designed the story to stand up to so many people working on the puzzle together, which resulted in a sort of total output of puzzle-solving ability that far outstripped the capability of any one solo human being. so their solution is something that’s very much targeted toward delaying that group problem-solving, without actually affecting the experience of any individual person watching the show.

plus, it’s very in keeping with the overall tone of the show.

don’t:

change the ending

do:

Carleton Carpenter as flamboyantly gay photographer Russell Paxton tells Ann Sothern (as Liza Elliot) and Luella Gear (as Maggie Grant) all about the gorgeous male model he has in his studio in the television adaptation of Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark, originally broadcast by NBC on September 25th, 1954. This was a very early example of lgbtq+ representation in mainstream media and Carleton's over-the-top portrayal of the character was daring for the era, leaving viewers with no other option than to accept that his character was gay---not "ambivalent 1950s, is he or isn't he?" gay, but in your face "I lust over men, tra-la-la-la-la-la! I don't care if you like it or not" gay. Carleton, who was openly bisexual, clearly ran with the part, camping it up and having fun while imbuing the character with the freedom he gave himself in his personal life during the buttoned-down 1950s.

Born in Bennington, Vermont in 1926, Carleton caught the acting bug early after serving as a Seabee in the U.S. Navy during World War II (where he fell in love for the first time with a fellow Seabee named Costello, a relationship which was emotionally intense but never consummated). Arriving in New York City in January of 1944, Carleton soon after scored a part in the David Merrick Broadway play Bright Boy. Instantly grabbing attention in the opening scene when he walked out wearing nothing but boxer shorts with a towel around his neck and stepped across a bunch of beds to look out a window, his long legs carrying his lanky six-foot-three frame across the stage like an Olympic sprinter caught everyone's eyes. Garnering laughs from the audience, his good looks also earned him both male and female admirers, with one wealthy older bachelor offering to pay his way through college. "He kept calling backstage," Carleton later recalled with a laugh. "All the guys would group around and say, 'Your old guy that wants to send you to college is on the phone!' One of them said, 'Well, that's what you get for coming onstage with nothing on but your shorts and a towel around your neck when the curtain goes up!'" Unbothered by the attention, Carpenter (nick-named "Carp") was fully aware that he liked both women and men and already had experience with both under his belt. "I slept with as many women as I did men, I guess," he stated in a 2017 interview with Matthew Rettenmund for the Boy Culture website, adding with a laugh, "I really didn't keep count." Entirely comfortable with who he was, Carleton never attempted to hide his bisexuality. When asked if he ever worried that being open about it would hurt his career, he breezily replied: "Never crossed my mind."

Working in early TV shows, modeling for magazines, and cast in a number of Broadway plays in the late-1940s after the success of Bright Boy, Carp was surprised one night when a famous screen star made a visit to his backstage dressing room. "I was taking my wig off and somebody knocked and there stood Cary Grant! My feet wouldn't move. He's saying how much he enjoyed me in the show and going on and all I could say was 'thank you'. He climbed three flights of stairs and I'm waving my wig at him. He said he would like to take me out and buy me a drink. In the meantime, I'm looking over at my rotten jeans on my dressing table and I thought, 'My God.' And I did have a date. I wanted to tell him I had a date but maybe all three of us could go out, but as soon as he heard the word 'date,' the door slowly began to close and he was gone. I've thought about maybe he wanted a piece of ass — he might very well have. He was a gentleman's man as well as a ladies' man."

Carleton was brought to Los Angeles by producer Louis de Rochemont to play a supporting role in the movie Lost Boundaries in 1949. Signed by MGM shortly afterwards, he made a splash singing the novelty song Aba-Daba Honeymoon with Debbie Reynolds in the musical Two Weeks with Love in 1950, a song which Carlton sneakily introduced to the film's producer and which earned a gold record for the pair when it reached number three on the Billboard charts in 1951. Among his eight films for MGM, one of his leading roles was starring in the 1952 Stanley Donen comedy Fearless Fagan opposite Janet Leigh. Based on a true story, Carleton played a young man who raised a lion cub and tried to hide the full-grown lion on a military base after he was drafted into the army. He also starred with Jan Sterling in the 1952 MGM western Sky Full of Moon as a cowboy named "Tumbleweed" who arrives in Las Vegas and gets caught up in the world of gambling.

After leaving MGM in 1953, Carp continued working in stage, television, and radio productions. He also established himself as a successful songwriter, composing the numbers Christmas Eve, I Wouldn't Mind, Ev'ry Other Day, Cabin In the Woods, A Little Love, and Come Away in addition to writing special material for Marlene Dietrich, Kaye Ballard, Hermione Gingold, and his pal Debbie Reynolds. Remaining lifelong friends with Debbie, he attended events with Reynolds and her children Carrie and Todd after her divorce from singer Eddie Fisher in 1959, and Debbie presented Carleton with his lifetime achievement award from the Hollywood film organization Cinecon in 2012, joking with him onstage by saying: "You know, you and I are gonna be singin' Aba-Daba Honeymoon when we're both a hundred years old!" Devastated by her passing in 2016, he later said: "It was awful. I had over a hundred messages on my machine when I got home, and I was very sick."

During the 1960s and 1970s, Carleton continued to work on stage and in films, appearing in the groundbreaking lgbtq+ play The Boys in the Band in 1968, and starring as "Miss Untouchable" opposite Rue McClanahan, Fannie Flagg, and transgender actress Candy Darling in the gay-themed movie Some of My Best Friends Are... in 1971. He also became a successful author in the 1970s and 1980s, writing the popular mystery novels Deadhead, Games Murderers Play, Cat Got Your Tongue?, Only Her Hairdresser Knew, Sleight of Deadly Hand, The Peabody Experience, and Stumped. His last work as an actor was in a play in 2015, and he published his autobiography The Absolute Joy of Work: From Vermont to Broadway, Hollywood and Damn Near 'Round the World the following year. Remaining healthy and active into his 90s, Carleton passed away peacefully of natural causes at his home in Warwick, New York on January 31st, 2022 at the age of 95. "I just loved the work, honey," he stated about his long and varied career near the end of his life. "That was always the thing with me — I didn’t care anything about all of the glop that went with stardom."

really I think it's gone way too far in all other areas like clothing, but obviously medicine is a whole other ballpark (hell, even in my own life- I wear contact lenses, which were theorized before the invention of plastics but never practical, and my glasses would have broken so many times over the years if the lenses were still actual glass)