llttledipper:

13thcat:

Okay, a friend and I were talking about this the other night and the thing that makes Dipper and Bill’s hero/villain relationship so great is that Bill represents Dipper’s greatest sins: his pride, his ambition, and his thirst for knowledge, but its not just any knowledge. He wants to know everything. He wants an advantage over everyone. Dipper literally says in the above contract that he feels he has a ‘higher calling’. He considers himself above the rest of the world.

And pay attention to his words: “We will meet one day and on that glorious day we will show the small-minded doubters we were right all along, and are also really cool, and they should have been nicer to us”. We don’t have Dipper’s backstory yet, we don’t even know his first name, but I’m willing to bet its a past of bullying, getting told that he’s crazy and wasting his time from his peers. Any time Dipper deals with bullies in this show, he is really cold and harsh about it. If you treat him like crap, you’ve lost his respect unless you apologize or prove differently (“Man, revenge is underrated. That felt awesome!”).

And maybe this ridiculing even happens at home from his parents too. One of the first lines Mabel has to Dipper on this show is when he threatens her relationship with Norman and she retaliates by screaming angrily that he needs to get lost with his “CRAZY CONSPIRACIES!” Bill actually plays up to this angle when he’s manipulating Dipper into making a bad deal with him. He first presents the idea of universal secrets, and when Dipper hesitates, asks Dipper when his sister has ever been there for him, when she has ever taken his interests seriously, and when Dipper can’t immediately think of any instance, he’s hurt and angry and feeling very alone because Mabel is supposed to be the only person he trusts, so he shakes Bill’s hand.

Nobody seems to believe Dipper. Nobody takes him seriously, and that’s all that he wants. He wants respect. He wants to prove to “the small-minded doubters” that he deserves to be treated with reverence. So when he finds out all of this stuff actually is real, like he’d always thought, and develops an unhealthy obsession becomes a master from reading the journals, I’d imagine he would get cocky about it, especially after the Society of the Blind Eye is taken down and other people realize that all of this stuff is real like he did, and start to take him a little more seriously the way he wants them to. All of Dipper’s confidence rides on those journals now. He admits that in Gideon Rises and Mabel tries to tell him that he’s done lots of cool stuff without it, but at the end of the day, when Stan takes the journal, Dipper says, “But I still want it back.”

As for this: “This sort of sounds like a supervillain manifesto in retrospect.” This is not the first time we’ve seen foreshadowing like this before. In the episode Fight Fighters, after Dipper lies and manipulates Rumble McSkirmish into helping him beat Robbie and Rumble realizes what Dipper’s done, he asks Dipper if he’s the bad guy and Dipper responds, “I guess I am.” My friend who’s been in the fandom longer than me also pointed out that this was around the time the ominous message “Dipper is playing with fire“ started showing up.

What I’m trying to say is, Dipper has pretty much always been like this, but when he finds that journal and dedicates himself to blowing the top off of Gravity Falls’ mysteries and proving everyone who ever treated him badly or doubted him wrong (“When they say that you’ve been acting really weird since you read that book and they don’t even recognize you anymore, that means they’re jealous/you are like me now”), especially when Bill starts showing up, tantalizing him further with these secrets that are just right out of his grasp, it brings out the worst aspects of Dipper’s personality. And who knows? We’re told right off the bat not to trust anyone in Gravity Falls.

Maybe that means Dipper too.