Latest Posts by veiledsanctum - Page 7
Evolution
When I was 13, I loved scrolling through Google for fanart and reading Pinecest fanfics on Wattpad. Eight years later, not much has changed—I’m doing the same thing with Stancest here on Tumblr and Ao3
Rewatching the show made me realize just how many pinecest moments there are. LOOK!
bro got a new voice and decides to wake his sister girlfriend up with it
I like to believe, as A.Square got older, he begun forgetting not only what he saw on the third dimension, but also how the Sphere looks like
Based off a conversation with my gal friends
Whatever, go my brainworm
This will be forever immortalized on my college dorm’s workroom wall
My magnum opus and introduction to the Flatland fandom
Mas joto que un club de gaes no mames
Bonus thing. I have a college to do but also the funnies is more important clearly
HELLO FLATLAND COMMUNITY.
"feeling so many illnesses at once. and a new illness somehow"
-@non-bun-ary
Edwin A. Abbott gave Flatland an unreliable narrator that describes his sexist, classist, racist society with pride in terms of “I am a Square. I have 4 sides. the more angles and sides you have, the better you are as a person. Also you can't change this even though the people in power will encourage you to try,” and he wrote this for Victorian societies in 1884 to the tune of “THIS IS WHAT YOU SOUND LIKE. THIS IS HOW STUPID YOU SOUND.
"You claim to know intimately the nature of every being around you, yet you know nothing. You call yourself a square despite the fact you’ve never seen one! YOU'VE NEVER ACTUALLY SEEN A SQUARE.”
In the book, A Square goes down a rabbit hole of thought until eventually drawing the conclusion that women should be educated. It is after this that A Sphere chooses to teach him about the 3rd dimension, and says it's because A Square “seemed a man of sense.” A Sphere mentions the importance of love and art, something A Square thinks is ridiculous because "love" is for women, and "art" is for socialists I mean chromatists. A Square never really does get it though. He fails to explain the 3rd dimension to his fellow Flatlanders, partly due to comedically terrible political timing, largely due to the fact A Square has always been prone to understanding only what is directly in front of him. He lives out the rest of his days in prison.
And then 123 years after the book was published, Ladd Ehlinger (an incredibly reactionary misogynist and racist) makes an adaptation of the book where he voices the main character. He releases a movie that pathetically mimes the social commentary of the original, and now lives out his days as a sad, angry man crying on YouTube about leftists. He's lived out the plot of Flatland, playing an even worse version of A Square's role. The only thing that's missing is getting sent to jail and that’s bc unlike A Square, Ladd Ehlinger doesn't experience oppression of any kind.
However, exactly like A Square, he didn't get it. He didn't fucking get it.
in which a sphere regrets teaching a square how to write
I love flatland. <3
It's concept and world building is so unique. But one thing I've always found interesting is the concept of a 2D creature actually being able to SEE 3D when it is lifted out of it's plane.
In the book and in most interpretations, The 2D person is finally able to SEE 3D. But in reality it's likely that it would be physically impossible for them to see outside of their regular field of view.
Remember, a 2D person's eyes are also 2D, and because of this, they are specifically only able to see lines.
They're eyes have evolved this way, so when lifting them out of their plane of existence, they still can only see lines. These lines may change when flipping them around in space, but they'd never TRULY be able to see in 3D.
Not that I care too much, because it's a much more interesting concept to ignore the reality. But still an interesting premise....
......i hope at least one person even slightly understands what im trying to talk about.
yellow godlike 3d shape with weird eye/s who kidnaps Some Guy and teaches him about the wonders of other dimensions but theyre doomed from the narrative so they have to die in the end while the guy lives but ends up traumatized
apparently a bunch more people are coming to the Flatland fandom / tags because of gravity falls so PSA:
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, is public domain. It belongs to everyone. You do not need to buy a physical copy to read it. It has no copyright. It belongs to everyone.
It is free to read online. There are free audiobooks.
Here's another masterpost
Here's a link to it on Project Gutenberg where you can read and download it in many formats:
Here's an amazing free audiobook on the internet archive:
Here's where you can read the 2024 translation into modern English on the internet archive:
there are some typos that I need to fix but. I have covid I'm not doing that right now.
You can also read this translation here on tumblr at @flatland-a-2024-translation
There's an audiobook version on youtube as well now.
___
Here’s an animation from 1965
Here’s a stop motion film from 1982 in Italian with English subtitles
Here’s an animation from 2006
___
I do not recommend watching the free 2007 Flatland film which you can find on youtube until you've read or listened to the book unless you want to be really confused. The movie is an absurdist comedy. The book is a political satire. The movie is better appreciated after you've already read/listened to the book.
It also has a lot of flashing lights and motion-sickness inducing spinning. The timestamps for those can be found here. Please be careful if you have photosensitivity.
do not spend money on Flatland until you already know you like it. you do not need to spend money at all. It's public domain. it belongs to all of us.
Very important edit: The creator of the 2007 film that's free on youtube, Ladd Ehlinger is an extremely racist and misogynistic conservative. He made a political ad so blatantly racist and sexist that youtube has literally resstricted it, so that you can't share the link outside the site. Simply google his name and you will see dozens upon dozens of articles about how bigoted he is.,
Please be aware of what kind of person made that movie when you watch it. His bigotry is baked into the movie, and is why he refused to actually do anything with the original political commentary from the book.
You are not a bad person if you already watched the movie and enjoyed it, but you do need to be aware of what kind of person made it and how that affected the movie, and make sure others are warned.
okay flatland, what the fuck
it was published in 1884 but STILL WHAT THE FUCK
UPD: THIS IS NOT A FULL POST. THIS IS A THREAD OF MY LIVE REACTION TO THE BOOK WHILE I WAS READING IT. I KNOW IT’S A SATIRE, I KNOW IT A COMMENTARY ON THE SOCIETY OF THAT TIME, PLEASE STOP CORRECTING ME, I KNOOOOWWW
'Swap AU' proposal
Random Doodles
Merry Yaoimas!
STANLEY PINES IS IN LOVE WITH FORD PINES HE WOULD RISK THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE FOR HIM AND YOURE TELLING ME THATS NOT ROMANTIC SHUT UP
I had some fun drawing the Big Bro Stan AU!
It’s nice drawing a guilty pleasure of mine<3
This is a Stancest acrylic stand I drew and shared with other Gravity Falls fans at the largest fan convention in China. I personally love this stand because it looks absolutely delicious 🤤🤤. The one next to it is an acrylic stand of Randy's poop from South Park, and the stickers in the background are of Deadpool."
Stancest codependency. They're supposed to be one, one cannot live without the other, Ford is the only person who didn't see Stan as a lesser version of him, Stan is the only person who can truly love Ford. Trying to separate them is tearing one soul into two. Do you see my vision?
i was asked another question on my strawpage that i felt needed a meta to properly explain my feelings, so i'm putting it here. i apologize if it gets rambly and isn't entirely coherent lol.
ford, to me, is selfish, blinded by his own obsession with global recognition, and morally questionable at times (moreso than stan) but not an outright bad person.
i think he's an overall good person with an extremely skewed worldview. he's def not bad compared to people like gideon, preston northwest, or even his own dad, but his motivations are morally ambiguous and he tends to put his own selfish obsession with global recognition, fame, and glory over the feelings and safety of those closest to him.
an argument could be made that much of his behavior can be attributed to trauma and his upbringing (his deformity, his relationship with filbrick, his social ineptitude, his fallout with stan, his violent physical & psychological abuse at the hands of bill, his experiences while dimension-hopping), though that by no means excuses it, nor is it justified. in fact, i think fans who aggressively defend ford's objectively toxic and selfish behavior with "he's been through a lot!! he's traumatized!" do his character arc a huge disservice.
ford wasnt just a scientist that was obsessed with answers for the sheer sake of knowledge and betterment of humanity—he specifically wanted to be PRAISED and officially recognized for his findings, he wanted to be added to history books, he wanted people to know HE was the one who made those discoveries, which is what makes his treatment of fiddleford during their partnership so abhorrent IMO.
he refused to destroy the portal (despite nearly losing his friend and lab partner to it) and likewise refused to simply burn/destroy his journals, both instances bc of his own stubborn pride, not bc of some noble desire to benefit mankind (or save someone ELSE, like in stan's case for restarting the portal).
whether intentional or not, he projected his own feelings and relationship with stan so harshly onto dipper that he was the indirect catalyst for their fallout in DAMVTF.
ford did more than simply offer dipper an apprentice position. he planted the seed in dipper's mind that mabel was suffocating and holding him back (despite barely knowing them or their unique relationship), because that's how he viewed stan.
he didnt just suspect that there may be potential fallout between them, he fully anticipated it, yet still thought he was doing dipper a favor by driving a wedge between them. he couldnt see past his own bitterness towards stan and ended up pressuring an impressionable 12-year-old to make a life-changing decision, one that also drove mabel right into bill's trap.
the lesson ford was meant to learn at the end of weirdmageddon was that he is NOT the selfless, noble hero he always envisioned himself as. he was a closed-off, arrogant loner who let his delusional perception of himself and who he wanted to be push everyone who mattered away and make it easy for bill to use him for his own evil purposes. ford was so stuck in this headspace that he needed a literal apocalypse and losing the one person who never stopped loving him unconditionally for him to finally pull his head out of his ass and change.
stan was the hero ford always imagined he was destined to be.
yet, despite ALL of this, there was a repressed part of him buried deeep, DEEEEP down that still held stan and their childhood close to his chest throughout his entire life. he wrote about stan in his journal constantly, he wrote that he missed him in college using their bro code (meaning he didnt want fidds to know about stan and he wrote it solely for himself), he saved a polaroid of stan in his journal and memorized his business phone number, and of course, he kept that childhood photo LITERALLY next to his heart throughout all his travels.
this is more headcanon-ish than actual canon, but i feel like ford felt angry at himself for never being able to fully leave stan behind, despite how much he "wanted" to, or how much he believed he SHOULD'VE wanted to. after all, stan was the one who sabatoged ford's future. he's the one who ruined everything between them, yet here ford was, still missing him and having second thoughts about shutting him out of his life, which only made him want to shut stan out even more.
his father and principal instilled in him that stan was a worthless fuck-up that only rode his coattails and held him back.
bill, his muse, the sun in his galaxy, tried to convince him to forget about stan and their past.
and ford tried.
but he couldn't.
even at his most resentful, even when he was fighting god-knows-what in multiple dimensions for THIRTY YEARS, he never let go of that photo. and i think that alone speaks volumes about his character.
When I think about the soft parts of the Stan twins’ personalities in canon and the way they’re buried in layers of toxic masculinity but in very distinct ways, it looks like Stan is more sensitive, while Ford is more sentimental; Stan is more outwardly aggressive, while Ford is straight up more violent.
Stan is definitely more easily brought to tears than Ford, as well as, in my opinion, more easily flustered. He cries about at least (if I’m not forgetting any) four times that we know in the show: at the funeral of the Stan statue, as he watches The Duchess Approves, when he temporarily wins the post of mayor of Gravity Falls, when he says goodbye to the children. (One time in his childhood flashback, too, but I’m giving him a pass because he was just a kid and I don’t fully trust Stan’s flashbacks for many reasons.) In the Lost Legends comics, he also cries twice as an adult: first of sadness, then because he was touched by the little boy’s pick of his book. (One time as a child, too, when he confesses to Ford about his wish to be appreciated by Filbrick, but that arguably doesn’t count.) The interesting thing is that, in the story, Soos comments that he knew those sobs, implying that he heard Stan cry often enough for him to be able to recognize them immediately. And the funny thing is that Stan never, ever admits that he’s crying: he got glitter in his eyes, or campaign confetti, or was simply cutting onions, among other flimsy excuses. To me, Stan is the textbook example of that tumblr post: “I don’t care, I say, caringly, as I care deeply.” No one really buys his facade 😭
Ford, on the other hand, seems to be considerably more stoic. Dipper observes in Journal 3 that Ford finally cries when he loses Stanley, and that it was the first time any of them ever saw Ford crying—just the need to point that out, the fact that everyone was surprised, says a lot. In TBoB, Ford cries after Bill’s utterly terrifying tormet reaches a breaking point. We know he does because he tells us himself that he “wept,” and is not ashamed of it.
The way I see it, a lot of Stan’s macho man masculinity is performative, and exaggerated, as well as his confidence. Stan has a very low confidence, but he acts as if it’s the contrary. Meanwhile, Ford’s egotistical confidence is not faked, it comes from within—I feel like he is so much more secure in his badassery, in his talents and abilities, in his masculinity, that it makes him just act more natural and casual about it. Of course, Ford is insecure too, and has a low self-esteem even as he has high confidence, but his insecurity is rooted in guilt and the feeling of being an outcast, never about his own competence.
Don’t get me wrong, though. Ford’s toxic masculinity is quieter than Stan’s, and very different, but just as present. It’s not performative at all, but second nature to him. It’s mostly about repressing his feelings and being, quote unquote, “distant from himself.” Very highlighted in Dipper and Mabel Vs. The Future, when he tells Dipper to simply not feel fear as if it’s the simplest, easiest thing a human being could achieve, as if you could just turn off that switch in your brain and make a conscious decision to ignore those damn pesky emotions. More than that, he acts as if that’s the right, rational, desirable thing to do.
I think that a lot of fans pay far too much attention to Ford’s nerdy, quiet side and end up assuming he can easily be fit into the softer, more responsible stereotype of a nerd. That is, more of a prude, more easily flustered, the kind of man who would be genuinely bothered by Stan’s swearing. That is not what we see in canon at all. When JK Simmons (Ford’s VA) asked Alex how he should sound, he was told to act “loud and brash”; in Journal 3, Ford tells us that he wanted to give himself up to Bill just to curse him right to his face; he consistently doesn’t shy away from weird or freaky or illegal things, but is casually and shamelessly attracted to them. (Not that I don’t think Ford would nag Stan about swearing. Ford is hypocritical like that.)
Which brings us to the aggressive vs violent comparison I used. Stan acts tough and makes threats, alright, but Ford actually means them. Stan might attempt to punch someone; Ford’s trigger-happy hand goes straight to his gun. His bounty poster in the multiverse warns that he is “armed and dangerous.” I wouldn’t want either of the Stan twins as my enemies, but Ford is the one I’d dread to find in a dark alley, so to speak. Beneath the veener of superficial calm and control, lies the truth that he’s (way) scarier than Stan and willing to go even crazier lenghts to get what he wants, be it a selfish, ambitious desire or the safety of his family.
Still, Ford is sentimental—melancholic, brooding, prone to nostalgia, with a penchant for drama. The way he writes about people in his journal is often very reflective and thoughtful, calling Stan the most selfless man he had ever met in any dimension, or Bill as (formely) the sun in his galaxy. A poetic soul, lover of flowery language.
That makes me think about their interactions post-Weirdmaggedon. I can easily imagine Ford suddenly saying some intense truth about the depth of his feelings for Stan in his most earnest tone and Stan predictably trying to play it off as a joke and ruining the mood but evidently (not secretly at all) melting inside. Don’t start acting all mushy, bro, Mabel isn’t even here 🙄 (😳) (he’s almost crying again and Ford knows it)
I’ve been rewatching Gr@vity F@lls (censoring to prevent the antis from finding me) and I’ve discovered how impatient I am. When will my favorite cocky old man show up and kiss his twin brother?!
Chapters: 2/3 Fandom: Gravity Falls Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Ford Pines/Stan Pines Characters: Stan Pines, Ford Pines, Fiddleford H. McGucket, Robbie Valentino, Wendy Corduroy, Tambry (Gravity Falls), Jesus “Soos” Alzamirano Ramirez, Original Child Character(s), Pa Duskerton (mentioned), Ma Duskerton (mentioned) Additional Tags: It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Hurt/Comfort, Teen Pregnancy, Childbirth, Age Difference, Older Man/Younger Man, Obsessive Behavior, kinda dark ford bc you know getting your brother pregnant is wild man, Fluff, the amount of research i put into this is actually apalling the 60s were wild, this is extremely self indulgent i just wanted to see pregnant stan ok, also stan has a pussy i forgot to mention sorry, Filbrick Pines’ Bad Parenting, Past Underage Sex, but its just mentioned Summary:
Stan finds out he’s pregnant at 15 years old. It’s simultaneously the best and worst thing to happen to him.
It’s done! The third chapter will be an epilogue which will be posted later! Thank you all so much for accompanying the process and giving it your attention :)
For @mirrorworldangel and @muchmallows who were the main inspiration for this, you’re both amazing :)
On a random Winter's night in 1978–parked at a shopping center in some dead end town in New Mexico—Stanley stares at the holiday lights strung around the window of a vacuum shop and thinks about Christmas. He doesn't know why it makes him so miserable.
Relationship: Stancest
this is just a little something i wrote the other day while i was stuck at work during a snowstorm while no one else was there, so there's nothing of particular substance here but i had this visual stuck in my mind that i liked a lot. Merry Christmas, have some miserable stangst! ^_^
One of my hc is the dynamic that stan and ford has. Its fun to imagine stan to be like the strict but not strict kinda person, and especially with kids, and ford being like the “good parent” who takes them out on adventures after ignoring the kids for days, and still somehow getting liked more lol
ok i'm curious. to any proshippers that make merch of their Evil Problematic Ships: how do you sell them??? i'm asking cuz on etsy i've seen listings with ship names but none of them have been like. incest or whatever. and i wanna know if you can post stuff with like "stancest" or whatever in the title without it getting taken down or if etsy will take ur shit down FSKDLFJSLKD
'cause if it isn't a problem i'd prefer labeling just so that. well first of all i can possibly have more explicitly romantic things up there. but also i don't want people who are uncomfortable with even fictional depictions of incest buying something i make and then getting mad at me for not telling them
STANCEST IS THE BEST SHIP I WILL FIGHT EVERYONE ON THIS
Inspired by shmisky's post, here's my redraw of Stan and Ford from the iconic scene from Princess Mononoke. I just HAD to get this one out of my system, I was obsssesseddd