This end up

sometimes.

a normal amount id say…

Everything in this chapter about Bill's cult was there long before TBOB gave him some more cults. Higher Dimensional Gate was named before canon gave us Cipher's Gate; both of which, of course, are allusions to the infamous Heaven's Gate.

In 2023 after I read Flatland (where talking about the third dimension can get shapes jailed) and thought about how I wanted to portray Bill's home, I decided I wanted him being the only person who could see Up to be a big part of his history; but Bill being a lone righteous heroic martyr who Knew The Truth in a world trying to oppress him just didn't fit his personality and didn't feel right as the backstory of someone like him. So I decided not to follow Flatland's example: talking about the 3rd dimension was legal, but Bill was preaching inaccurate info and felt persecuted because he acts like anybody who isn't with him is automatically out to get him.

But TBOB, like Flatland, claimed it's illegal to talk about the 3rd dimension; and unlike Flatland, TBOB is actually canon.

For the most part, I try to treat everything Bill says in TBOB as 95% true EXCEPT for the things we're obviously supposed to consider lies, on the grounds that Bill's a liar but Alex Hirsch isn't. Alex regularly signals where Bill's lying even when Bill himself doesn't, and a book that's entirely wrong without any indication of what's wrong would be a waste of narrative breath because it wouldn't ACTUALLY tell us anything new about the character.

So if a writer's aiming for canon compliance (and I am), I feel like it's cheating to casually dismiss things in TBOB that the book itself doesn't make seem dubious just because "oh well Bill's a liar so who really knows~?"

however, i STILL feel strongly that Bill's backstory is weaker as "tragic hero who became the villain" and stronger as "tragic villain who only thought he was the hero." so I'm making a small exception to my own rule here, and I'm not making talking about the third dimension illegal; but I did introduce allusions to to older religions considering the third dimension heretical and tilted Bill's criticism from "scientists who mock what they don't understand" to "scientists who'd rather ban the truth". In later chapters as bill's backstory unfolds i plan to add references to policies being enacted to slow the spread of scientific misinformation like Bill's cult teachings; and Bill can mix all that together to claim that talking about the third dimension AT ALL was TOTALLY illegal! I'm trying to strike a balance here between My Artistic Vision and being canon compliant-ish without feeling like i'm cheating. I will have my cake and eat it too.

I adjusted the math on the eclipse's frequency; it used to be "one year was long enough to learn reading but not multiplication/divison; five years was enough to reach middle age," which would make a Euclidean year around seven human years developmentally speaking. I changed it to "five years is enough to learn multiplication/division" to make five Euclidean years around nine human years; I did this because Bill claims he's been stuck in the Nightmare Realm a trillion years, and he claims/jokes in TBOB that he's a trillion and twelve years old, and so of course it would be fun to say he was twelve when he destroyed his dimension; and so with this new math, if he destroyed his dimension at 12 years old, in human terms he was just over 21 years old psychologically.

In late 20th century Western terms 21 is college kid age—technically an adult but not prepared for the full independence of adulthood—and Bill strikes me as a technically-an-adult kind of guy and I interpret his home as a late-20th-century-Western kind of culture.

You may notice that I never call Bill's home Euclydia in this! That's because I headcanon Euclydia is the name of his universe, not his planet. (And he does have a planet—he shows it to us both in the show and in TBOB.) And people discuss the names of planets a lot more often than than the names of universes. IRL we don't even have a name for our universe aside from "the universe." The shapes are thinking of light as something that, although in a higher dimension, is still part of their universe; so they're talking about its impact on their planet, not on Euclydia as a whole.

In the original draft Bill referenced autostereograms; slipped in a double TBOB reference by mentioning that Bill thinks autostereograms are fake and bringing up holographic trading cards. But the "shadows on plato's wall"/"projector on a movie screen" metaphor is so important to the cosmology underpinning this fic that I decided not to fully switch Bill's universe-is-a-hologram explanation over to the Dennis's trading card imagery. Instead I'll just leave them as contradicting explanations Bill gives of how the multiverse works, since I always intended for it to be a bit ambiguous as to whether Bill's "projector" story is a true explanation of how the universe works or just an extended joke about the fact that they're in a cartoon. Now we get to wonder what's true: the projector thing, the card thing, both things, or neither.

Changed the flashback scene from Bill telling a very excited Ford that the universe is a hologram, to Bill telling a very excited Ford that he's right about the universe being a hologram, since TINAWDC had Fiddleford figure that out in college. Not much change to the scene; Ford's still elated and Bill's impressed that Ford's elated.

But even with all the little details I had to change, this chapter already feels pretty tbobby to me. The cosmology I invented for the fic doesn't totally line up with canon's, but the way Bill explains it—the hostile gregariousness, the condescension woven into his lecture, the strange and sometimes grisly imagery, the constant reminders that humans are so limited and in contrast he's so powerful—I think feels a lot like something out of the book. Considering that pre-TBOB we'd never gotten such extensive dialogue out of Bill before, I'm pleased that I got his lecturing-a-student voice so right.

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