#postfallfallsfalsestarts

fanart for THE @pfffsfic 🙏🙏🫂🫂💕💕 I've not done a canon form Rob in a hot minute but if yall havent checked this fic out I swear it's SO GOOD 😞

I just finished watching TWWWOG, the whole thing so far. What a ride- my ballpark is usually more "point out funny little details" than "give an actual critique", so I'm not the type to give an actual review, but, to sum it up: Gumball is back and I'm so glad it is! there were definitely some insta-classics in there for me!

Regarding PFFFS (excuse me if you're coming across this through tags and have no clue what that is- it's my long wacky crossover fanfic that this blog is supposed to center on): Obviously a ton of stuff contradicts it... but a ton of stuff is also weirdly close to it. the Awesome Store guy wears a hood, and it looks pretty much like the hood I've been describing & drawing him with for a long while! he's a tough-love father figure for Rob! there's the not-S&P-approved gag, which basically makes that episode a gravity falls crossover already if you have the world's laxest standards. And, if anything, the tenuous Stan&shopkeeper similarity is strengthened by the stuff he says and does in these two new appearances. like that last line about selling junk to people! AND THEY EVEN USED THE WORD "INTERDIMENSIONAL" WITH REGARD TO THE SHOPKEEEEEEPER! Should I be calling him shady guy now?

I know for sure that there were some details/gags that lined up uncannily well with details/gags in PFFFS, but unfortunately I wasn't taking notes, so I'll just have to post them as I remember them:

the thing with Gumball and Darwin getting entangled in the most recent chapter happens several times in TWWWOG, which isn't a major thing but it was fresh in my memory at the time since I just wrote that chapter before watching

there is a running gag in PFFFS with there being a ton of characters named Bill. now we know Idaho has an uncle Bill, which is another one on top of the pile, and brings Gumball's canon-characters-named-Bill-count to 2, or even 4 if you count William and Billy as "potential Bills"! How to get all of these people in the same room in the fic, I wonder...? No, I need to add more of them first. That isn't a joke. (Remember this tag that has been on the story this entire time but hasn't been relevant yet?)

Sarah being freaky strong has actual canon backing now!

there was a chapter called The Survivalist in the fic, and an episode called The Survivalists in the show.

As expected, Elmore's citizens become vigilante chaos-makers and set everything on fire when any incident happens, a pattern that existed in the original show, was referenced in PFFFS, and reoccurred in TWWWOG.

I just noticed that PFFFS and TWWWOG both have acronyms with a triple repeated letter!

Now, so I don't sound delusional: there are obviously a ton of differences, maybe even more differences than similarities when it comes to background stuff that would affect the present in both canon and the fic (obviously the events in the present day are not at all similar because of the drastically different settings). I already accepted as far back as the miniseries that the whole "elmore is still around, but in the void" thing isn't canon, so I'm not worried about that. But how to square the differences? Do I keep going with my version of, say, things like the Shopkeeper's appearance? Do I change it and pretend it's always been canon-compliant? Do I write an extremely meta chapter to make an in-fic excuse for the changes to the continuity? I'm leaning towards this third option, and I have some ideas on how to write it, but nothing that has fully crystallized into a usable chapter outline yet. Much to think about. Maybe the shopkeeper's appearance isn't even described thoroughly enough to justify bringing up the discrepancy, all I said is that he's made of shadows (right) and has a middle-aged man build (wrong). Maybe that was a bad example to use. what about that doll from the cheapmas? I gotta work her in somewhere! But how? At this point, I'm rambling.

hear me out.

Part 1: At face value.

point numnber one: these guys are 2D. the gumball universe has 3D people and 2D people, and the Shape People are 2D, or drawn as opposed to modeled.

point number two: physical traits! other than the obvious 'they are shapes', some or all of the Shape People:

Lack visible mouths (mind you, these Shape People's mouths appear when they speak). Bill also lacks a visible mouth but very occasionally gets one (one page of the Book of Bill, a polaroid in the Weirdmageddon intro).

Can have one eye. the rectangle in the top image is a one-eyed shape person, but there's also this familiar-looking yellow one-eyed triangle Shape Person (who pre-dates Bill's first proper appearance, by the way):

They have noodle arms. little noodle arms

this one is hard to explain but the positions of their arms aren't fixed. this applies to all/most Gumball characters but not to all gravity falls characters. how do I explain this uhh

look at how one of his arms is attached to his bottom plane and one is attached to his side plane. sometimes both of them hang down at the bottom and sometimes both are on the sides. POINT IS-

look at that!

in the rightmost image above you can also see a tiny sliver of a 3D edge like Bill has.

Each Shape Person is also a single color.

Part two: Culture.

note: this one only really applies to the three shapeople i've been using as examples this whole post- Ed the triangle, and his black pentagon and rectangle friends? family members?

I know there are other shapes who look less like them and whom these things don't apply to, but we can blame that on interbreeding with Elmoreans/cultural assimilation or something. okay, let me begin.

point number three: Ed's group is implied to not be from Elmore. when we first see him he's mistaking a bus stop for another shape person:

he also-

point four: the Shapeople language includes one spoken(?) system with colorful squares representing it. on the TBOB website the words of Euclydians are written in colorful square substitution cipher. there are also other shapes for the shapeople, mind you.

back to point 3: not from Elmore. The next time Ed's group appears, they're framed like tourists and ARE HAVING TROUBLE MAKING SENSE OF A 3D (well, i guess 2d but in the other way) MAP.

Gumball tries and fails to talk to them in their language, and ends up making a cultural faux pas. and in Ed's final scene there's an interesting line...

my people? He could be talking about his species, but the existence of a culture implies to me that this line refers more to a homeland. in other words the shape people are from the same place, which we sort of knew because they speak the same language. also has bill ever been seen giving a thumbs up or down? i'm pretty sure he hasn't but maybe I'm wrong, someone correct me here.

point number five: grasping at even more straws.

Despite their origin, the one known named shape person's name is Ed, which falls into the same cultural sphere as Bill.

We know that Ed's type of shapeople are physically capable of speaking English because the black rectangle does so at one point.

one of the symbols in the shapeople language is a skull. we see that Bill's mind has a bill skeleton with a skull that also fits the humanoid-ish template.

final point that does not help the theory but is still weird: Bill's baby photo seems to have a live-action background?? and so does the image of teen/preteen bill? look at these. i'm not implying that elmore IS euclydia somehow, that makes very little sense to me as of writing (though i guess it was destroyed and now Bill has a fear of TV static, which, like, maybe I could phenagle a theory here if I really tried but it seems like even more of a reach than this existing theory.) I dunno, maybe Euclydians would have wanted another 'realistic' dimension to flee to.

Hi there! First post in a while.

PFFFS has aged better for me because it's written. Sometimes when trying to write new content for it I feel like I just can't get into the same groove I was in when writing the earlier chapters; I reread them, trying to capture what made them special, but there was just something about my enthusiasm early on with it. Since drawing the first few chapters of Improbabill, however, my art style has been refined a lot; there's so much about them I would change. So much off-model-ness, weird and inconsistent line quality, bad typesetting, and more! It's probably the sort of thing I notice more than readers do. but I could do better nowadays. I don't want to redraw the old chapters because doing that would probably kill my motivation to make new ones (no timeline on that but I do plan on it along with posts about my monster falls lineup- at some point.)

I have an idea I really want to make for an improbabill chapter about art therapy.