Hi all, and welcome back to So Desensitized! Today we’re talking about the show that shaped my childhood, my view on the world, and my love for all things spooky. There may not ever be a third season, but this show has lived on in the hearts of viewers for over a decade now. You may remember it from the controversial tie my two-year anniversary bracket ended in - that’s right, folks. We’re headed to Gravity Falls, Washington.

Alex Hirch’s masterpiece Gravity Falls shaped a generation. No one knows how it got greenlit by Disney, especially since Hirsch goes absolutely scorched-Earth on the concept of the corporation every chance he gets (and we love him for it), but it did, and we’re all the better for it. In conversations about young people and horror, Gravity Falls must always be brought up, because I could not tell you of a single kid in my elementary school class that didn’t at least know about it. Most were obsessed. All of my friends - even the ones who have since grown up to be typically popular - had seen it. They had Journal 3. They read Dipper and Mabel’s Guide to Mystery and Nonstop Fun and Gravity Falls: Lost Legends. They tried, with varying success, to crack the codes at the end of every episode and within Journal 3. I distinctly remember being afraid of one of my friends being possessed by Bill Cipher, a conversation which dominated many a recess. Not every one of those kids went on to love horror on this masterful gateway drug, but I did. I even got way into Twin Peaks about five years later, which is, effectively, Gravity Falls but for adults. Well, Gravity Falls is Twin Peaks for kids. But we’ve been over this before.

All that to say, Gravity Falls is by no means a cult TV show. It’s a strange, wacky, scary and heartfelt TV show, but it is not cult. Cult status indicates something that wasn’t popular when it came out but gained notoriety, and Gravity Falls was beyond popular when it came out, and in the decade that followed. When The Book of Bill - a new Gravity Falls book for older readers, more centered on the horrors of the cosmos that Bill Cipher inhabits - came out, it was all over Barnes & Nobles’ website, had whole shelves in the store where it ‘infected’ the books nearest to it. It got a deluxe edition with special codes, a whole website with clues and codes and mysteries, exclusive postcards made of human flesh, the whole shebang. But, as we always ask on this here newsletter, why? What had people so enthralled with this fictional, slightly cursed, little town? Was it the offbeat but loveable cast of characters? The unending horrors of the cosmos? Was it the mystery of the journals? The family dramas? The teen and pre-teen dramas? The sibling dynamic? Is Alex Hirsch actually a hypnotist? The answer, it turns out, is all of the above and then some.

The thing is, Gravity Falls is the perfect children’s TV show, in that it’s really really fucking weird and scary. Because kids are really fucking weird, and live in the same weird and scary world as the rest of us. Gravity Falls has no concept of the idea that children don’t understand spooky. It knows, deep in its heart, that kids love spooky. It is perfect in that it is one of the few shows that recognizes kids at the weird, spooky and esoteric little humans that they are. It knows how weird it is being a pre-teen, and how being a teenager seems eons away. It knows that little kids love spooky books and bigfoot and mummies. I mean, who among us didn’t have either an Ancient Egypt or Greek mythology phase growing up? Those aren’t exactly quiet little cute things. There’s a lot of cannibalism in Greek mythology, and kids in their Ancient Egypt phase really bad want to tell you about embalming practices for mummies. I should know. (Did you guys know they took people’s brains out through their noses?) Gravity Falls is such a draw to little kids because they see themselves and their interests in it. They see their own lives, their siblings, their weird little fascinations. Some kids want to go on big grand adventures, others wish that their hometown had more monsters and mysteries in it. Gravity Falls is for the monsters and mysteries kids, and knows just how many of them there are.

But Gravity Falls isn’t just a spectacular kids’ show, though it would still be one of the best out there if it was. No, Gravity Falls endures. The kids who watched it when they were little are all grown up now, and still just as in love with it as they were before. Some remembered it when The Book of Bill came out and went ‘oh yeah, that was great’. Some never left. Some are now old enough to be showing it to their own kids. In Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch created an empire in two seasons, shaped a whole generation of horror fans and monster kids. Because Gravity Falls, unlike Trix, isn’t just for kids. It’s a perfectly written show for anyone and everyone.

The cast of characters that inhabit the town of Gravity Falls, Washington, are one of a kind. The Pines family - Dipper, Mabel, Stan, and Ford - are, of course, our mystery-solving, supernaturally-inclined family of heroes, but the town has a life of its own that settles in the hearts of viewers. Beloved Mystery Shack employees Soos and Wendy are well-written and complex, with their own storylines and difficulties. Wendy acts as the older, teen crush with a cool emo boyfriend, but is always growing and changing and developing just as much as anyone else onscreen, and given her own life to live. Soos is a loveable, if dumb, sweetheart, and works as the emotional core of the Shack, keeping everyone together and happy. The episode in which the Pines twins travel back in time to make his birthday better will never not make me cry. Not a single character introduced in Season 1 doesn’t get their arc in Season 2. Stan’s creepy rival swindler, the childish Gideon Gleeful, sticks out with his iconic(?) pompadour and gross courtship of Mabel, as well as his obsession with the journals and the Mystery Shack. Pacifica Northwest goes from a bratty spoiled rich girl to one of Dipper and Mabel’s best friends as they battle ghosts and demons and lilliputtians together. Mabel’s best friends, Candy and Grenda, are ride or dies, even to the end of the world. And Old Man McGucket, local crazy, turns up with one of the most tragic backstories ever put on television. And then, of course, there’s the Pines family.

Dipper and Mabel are the best written kids I’ve ever seen. They have their distinct, sitcom-style personalities, but they are never just what’s on the surface. Mabel Pines taught so many girls that their girliness and tendency towards the silly and colorful didn’t make them any less capable than the boys around them, and could, in fact, be used to their advantage. There’s a reason I was her for Halloween in third grade. Dipper Pines is a neurotic mess of a twelve year old boy, obsessed with the mysterious and supernatural. The way he grapples with his place in the world as a man over the course of the show needs to be - and probably has been - analyzed in some kind of class. Alex Hirch’s writing of the younger set of Pines twins is nothing short of genius. He captures perfectly what it is to be twelve and unsure of your place in the world, to struggle with living in the shadow of someone who feels like they’ll always be a little better than you, and to learn to think of something other than yourself in a way that carries all the way into adulthood. And then, of course, there’s the older Pines twins.

The twelfth episode of season two of Gravity Falls is called A Tale of Two Stans, and it is heartbreaking. The reveal at the end of episode eleven that the author of the journals is none other than the real Stanford Pines, Grunkle Stan’s twin brother, was shock enough to beloved viewers, but when followed up with an account of the Pines’ brothers childhood until they grow apart as adults is a one-two punch of writing that had never before been seen on a kids’ show. And not only that, Stan and Ford’s story finally expands on Bill Cipher, demon, and main villain of the show, introducing cosmic horror to me, age eight. A Tale of Two Stans is what officially removed Gravity Falls from the monster-of-the-week style plotlines it had been slowly developing into something spectacular and made it a grand, sweeping story of the cosmos. Now, the untrained viewer might say that kids aren’t ready for cosmic horror. I would point that viewer up to the very first point I made about this show. Kids deserve the respect of writers, and Alex Hirsch has an extraordinary respect for kids. He knows they can handle it, will even love it, because they understand the world and how weird it is. Kids are OK at being scared. They’re pretty good at it, even. But the true mastery of Gravity Falls isn’t just in its characters or plots or small-town vibes or cosmic horror. It’s in how grounded it stays throughout the whole thing.

Even with the introduction of alternate dimensions and the takeover of Gravity Falls by a demon from another piece of the universe, with time being screwed over and a minor apocalypse (Weirdmaggedon) descending upon this poor little Pacific Northwest town, Gravity Falls never once falters in its focus on people. It’s about the Pines family and their loved ones in this town, and it never forgets that. What really speaks to people in this strange little scary kids show is the heart at the center of it. It’s not anything grand, not even when it is. It’s about people helping people get by. Strange people helping other strange people in a strange little town. Bill Cipher and his goons are almost inconsequential to the actual story of Gravity Falls. In the end, when Stan sacrifices his memory, his whole sense of self, it’s not for Bill. It’s for his kids and his brother and the town they all have come to love. 

Gravity Falls isn’t just the perfect kids’ show, it’s one of the best shows ever made. It has near-perfect writing, grapples with real-world struggles in bizarre and supernatural ways, and understands its audience and itself more than anything. It has such great respect for children’s minds and understanding of the world. It knows what the purpose of life is, and I’m not even exaggerating. It’s scary and silly and everyone who recommends it to anyone else does so for a different reason. Gravity Falls did more for horror and culture in two seasons than most TV shows could do in twenty. It also gave us the whole concept of Summerween, which is now celebrated annually and officially (third Saturday in June). There can be no understatement of Gravity Falls’ impact on the media world, and on a whole generation of horror lovers. No one has ever done it like Gravity Falls, and probably never will. So remember who you are, spooky kids. And go watch Gravity Falls, whether for the first or thirtieth time. Trust me, it’s worth it.