Dipper Pines and the Quest for Manliness (Part 2).
Season 2 does try to keep a lid on the secrets it unveiled at the end of the last season, but that’s used deliberately to build tension, it gives things a much more concrete feel of building pressure than season 1’s slow burn. And mostly they use this time to start giving more dimensions to Soos and Wendy.
Wendy turns pure Action Girl, on the premise of “how else does the lone girl in a family of lumberjacks function”. It works, but also since it means she gets to see Dipper be something other than “awkward dork with an obvious crush on her”, they get to form more of a… I don’t wanna say partnership, but a camaraderie. While Dipper visibly has a small hope in the back of his mind that maybe, y’know, someday when the gap in their ages isn’t so relatively large things could go back in a romantic direction, he’s also managed to internalize the idea that they spend time together without that being the focal point. But more than that, since she gets to do things besides be disaffected at everything, it’s a lot easier to appreciate her dry snark. It’s certainly a great primer for the finale’s buildup at any rate.
Soos… the two big Soos-focused episodes this season are commonly cited as people’s favorite episodes, and they’re certainly not wrong. For our purposes they also tie nicely into the overarching themes of masculinity. Soos and the Real Girl shows a thorough knowledge of some dark, dark corners of the internet, and does a good job of showing both the temptation of those sorts of behaviors and why a good person would never fully fall into it. If anything the trouble Soos has is that he cares too much about the game, making him easy to manipulate for GIFfany. Blendin’s Game now, that’s magical. As a contained story it might be the best one in the series? But despite Soos feeling a bit disconnected from the rest of the cast earlier in the show, mostly since his attachment to Stan is played as pathetic, this one episode moves him fully and naturally into the family. It also brings some subtle cues for how the show views masculinity; Soos is mostly harmless before, but here we see just how deep the goodness at his core goes, and that’s almost entirely him just learning his own form of manhood. Stan certainly had affection for him at some level, but he just wasn’t emotionally mature enough to fill that Dad-shaped void in Soos’ life. They made it work, but Soos still had to be his own guide. And ultimately this is the lesson Dipper has to pick up in the end, and fitting all that road mapping into this one episode is great.
Not What He Seems is the fulcrum point of the series. Everything before is designed to bring us to the moment Mable has to choose whether or not to hit a button and close the portal Stan’s spent most of his life trying to open. Dipper, who’s spent all summer becoming ever more disillusioned with everyone in his life, the repeated failed models for adulthood, and Stan most of all. Or the consummate con man, completely sincere and desperate for perhaps the first time in his entire life.
A man like Stan can’t change overnight of course. He almost immediately reverts to type once this moment is past, but the foundation has been at last shaken. I guess in theory you could say just having the kids around, reminding him of better days, before the only true bond he formed in his life was broken, started that process, but that moment of trust is the beginning of the end. He can’t forgive Ford yet, but the 30 years of stasis running the Mystery Shack and searching for his brother is over, and he noticeably becomes a more complete person in each episode. Still a trouble maker and a scammer, but with a more adventurous spirit, with clearer moral boundaries, and with less and less spite.
Put another way, the Stan Pines in the first episode wouldn’t have even stayed in town once Weirdmageddon began. The Stan Pines in Not What He Seems would never have invited Bill into his mind to be erased. It’s a long road, but he finds something worth caring about again, and even grows enough to try again with Ford.
Since Dipper is, in the end, the focus of the show’s core arc, we’ll talk about Mabel first. Like I said for season 1, Mabel is a character who knows who she wants to be, and instead struggles with whether the world will let her be herself. The idea that people are supposed to change as they grow up, and seeing the ways the world gets worse and worse as you approach adulthood terrifies her, because she can’t see a way of being a good person there. Her sense of right and wrong tells her everything she sees about high school is wrong, and the idea of living that every day is… a lot.
More than that Mabel is basically Kamina. Don’t worry if you don’t know that name, because the relevant comparison is conveniently boiled down to a single quote.
“I was at the end of my rope. But Simon kept on digging away. His drilling let me put on a brave face… whenever I feel timid and weak, whenever I feel like I’m losing confidence, I think back to the sight of his back all hunched over, digging away. I think to myself ‘I won’t be laughed at by that back’”.
So too with Mabel and Dipper. His stodgy persistence is the mechanism by which Mabel’s sense of justice steers itself. Without him, she can keep going out of sheer momentum, but eventually she’ll dash upon the rocks. But his mere presence let’s her be Mabel, one who won’t let down that nerd.
Ford is very much set up as the role model Dipper has been looking for. A man with the same dedication to truth and knowledge as Dipper, who can actually teach him how to turn that part of himself into a life. It’s very likely the first time in his entire life Dipper sees a way to become his own person, someone he would even want to be. And that sort of thing can really blind you to the growing they still have to do.
Ford is exactly as self-centered as his brother, it just manifests in a completely different way. He loves the idea of solving the world’s big mysteries, of changing the world and human understanding of it, which can be noble. But mostly it just means that he did it, he fulfilled his destiny, the destiny of all smarty pantses; he did a great thing, and everyone will know he did it. Now, Ford is still more emotionally mature than Stan. It might be a bit abstract for him, but he knows that it’s important to make sure people like and respect you overall, life’s easier that way. And certainly if there’s a risk of ending the world you won’t really accomplish much by letting that go down. But like his brother he only truly connects with other people again once he meets Dipper and Mabel. An emotionally aware person wouldn’t go 20 plus years without realizing his brother was devastated and made a rash decision in weakness before making contact again, y’see.
So Stan and Ford’s arcs don’t conclude until well into Weirdmageddon, because how else could things go. But more generally because it was important for the ritual to fail, because showing the depths malformed masculinity go is key to putting a proper bow on the show’s broader themes. There’s a nice layer of having the first bond formed between members of the circle be the last to heal, of showing just how profound the break between the brothers was, but under that is where the show comes together. Stan and Ford are old men, who became men in very lonely, misinformed ways. For men like them, problems aren’t prevented by communicating dangers between people. And they aren’t solved once problems rear their heads but before they become catastrophes through the cooperation and affection between different peoples. They’re solved at the last moment before the end, through the sacrifice of ‘disposable’ men.
How much of world history has gone that way? Most? All? I feel like we’re living through several of those scenarios right now, except the sacrifices are 20% of the world’s population living in coastal regions. But depressing comments on the nature of humanity aside, it also sheds some light on reversing Stan’s sacrifice in the end. Stan’s stubborn masculinity doesn’t have to be the way. We don’t have to accept that such sacrifices are necessary, because we’ve learned better ways. And dipping back into the show’s weirdness? If Ford learns those lessons, well, of course Stan learns them by proxy, no? I mean, what human ‘magic’ goes further back than twins?
So what sort of man is Dipper Pines? Well, he’s not one, because he doesn’t have to be just yet. I think he learned, more scientifically of course, the lesson Soos accidented his way into: don’t be any one man. Look at the examples of others, see the pieces that feel right for you, and weave them into your life. And really the twin magic strikes again, but fittingly as inverses for fraternal twins. Mabel has a sense of right and wrong, but not always the courage to trust it. Dipper always trusts his instincts, but doesn’t always have his right/wrong compass calibrated. The bond between them not only makes them better, but each of them can’t steer a proper course without the other.
So let’s touch on the everything else before wrapping up. Because the internet has a lot, and I mean so much, of content touching on the quality of the show’s animation and homages or the way it weaves mysteries into the show. And that stuff’s great, but I haven’t invested the time or energy to really catalogue it better than others.
The way those things interact with the extended cast is worth noting though. I usually walk into a series knowing the broad strokes of its story, but even with that there’s a lot of satisfaction to stuff like McGucket finding his identity, and seeing all the pieces falling into place as the story goes. The show admitting outright that Blubs and Durland were lovers in the end is nice and feels like rewarding the viewer for paying attention the same way the mystery clues did. There’s a few others I’ve forgotten between watching and writing, but the show taking the cast just as seriously as the mystery gives the show a much stronger feel than a lot of this type.
Rating- 9/10. In the end I do feel kinda disconnected from the show, and never quite got the huge feels from it, but damn if rating it any lower doesn’t feel like an immense disservice.
PS: Oh my god the Mabel shorts are SO GOOD. Just so good you guys.
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