okay. okay this is not a serious theory but every time I think about it I come up with new "evidence" for it. basically the gist of it is TAWOG'S SHAPE PEOPLE ARE EUCLYDIANS. maybe refugees? "but didn't everyone in eucyldia die?" ignore that. just pretend they skipped town before the fire or something, this is not airtight. it's not even close. it's basically a joke treated seriously. i know the shows are not in the same universe but
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.
(we also see this squishy rosy-cheeked shaperson baby at one point, make of it what you will).
