It only just occurred to me how important Dipper must have been to Stan’s recovery of his memories.

There must have been a point where Stan’s memories were coming back and he felt a disconnect between the person he remembered being and the person his family was describing to him.

Ford isn’t willing to talk about the unhappy memories they share, so he sticks to rose-colored recollections of their childhoods and praise for how brave Stan was to sacrifice himself for everyone.

Soos has only positive things to say about him. Listening to that guy you’d think Stan was the smartest, bravest, strongest human being whose feet ever touched the ground.

Mabels’ descriptions are a little better–her scrapbook holds memories of Stan playing games with the kids and being attacked by a family of raccoons with equal affection. But she still talks about him in fairly rosy terms.

Dipper is the only one who tells him “yeah, you run this creepy tourist trap called The Mystery Shack. I’ve never met anyone in my life who knew so many ways to rip people off. Once I saw you chase down and tackle a five-year-old over a dollar. A Canadian dollar.”

Dipper’s like Stan in a lot of ways, he’s snide and sarcastic. And he’s insecure and very self-reflecting. I think on some level he’d understand why Stan wants to hear the bad with the good.

Dipper would be the one making remarks about how grumpy Stan is, about how he made him glue dog hair to his legs and dance for tourists, how he got into a fight with a mechanical badger and lost.

Don’t get me wrong, he’d also be telling Stan about how he helped him sort through his feelings about Wendy, how he built him back up after being rejected by the Manotaurs, how the three of them spent a rainy afternoon watching scary movies and how Stan and Dipper laughed at the chintzy looking monsters together.

(Mabel couldn’t see the monsters with her sweater pulled up over her face, but she assured them she was still having fun.)

But hearing the bad with the good would reassure Stan that his family knew who he was. That he wasn’t an impostor who’d conned them into thinking he was a good person. That they wouldn’t leave him if they knew what he was really like. All because Dipper’s a snarky little shit like his Grunkle.