Harsher In Hindsight / Gravity Falls

At its core, Gravity Falls is a comedy, even if sometimes bad things tend to happen to the main cast. However, as the show gets more serious, certain funny moments don't seem as hilarious anymore, and some dire situations are revealed to be much worse.

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• Stan's short speech about life and death in the "Trooth Ache" segment from "Bottomless Pit!", becomes even more depressing after the reveal of his rough backstory in "A Tale of Two Stans".
  • In the "Voice Over" segment from the same episode, Dipper gets a new voice, and Mabel, upon hearing it, immediately starts attacking him, thinking he's been possessed by a "body-switching warlock." In "Sock Opera," Bill does possess Dipper and tries to use his body to steal the Journals.

• A few from “The Time Traveler's Pig”;
  • In hindsight, Mabel and Dipper become an Unwitting Instigator of Doom pair when they get Blendin arrested for life and he guns for them in Season Two to battle to the death.
  • Dipper's obsessing over Wendy and trying to tell himself not to overthink becomes this when Wendy reveals that she knew all along that he had a crush on her in "Into the Bunker" and lets him down gently, saying she likes him better as a friend. So even if Dipper had gotten the courage and timing right, it wouldn't have helped him win over Wendy.
  • Mabel tries to accuse Dipper of being selfish due to him wanting to keep the timeline where he doesn't hurt Wendy and Mabel never wins Waddles. It becomes this when Bill brings up this particular moment in "Sock Opera" to remind Dipper that he's done a lot for Mabel and she rarely if ever returns the favor. In the Lost Legends story "Don't Dimension It", Mabel is forced once and for all to confront her flaws when she's trapped with thousands of parallel selves after chasing —you guessed it— Waddles and getting trapped in a dimensional rift.

• In "The Legend of the Gobblewonker" Stan trying to bond with the kids because he feels like a lonely and abandoned old man becomes a lot more poignant when it's revealed that he was disowned by a majority of the Pines family and later lost his own twin.
  • From the same episode, the name of Stan's boat (the Stan-O'-War) is a lot more heartbreaking after we see that he and his brother owned another boat by the same name together before their falling out.

• Mabel declaring that she would never speak to Stan ever again in "The Land Before Swine" probably raked up some bad memories with how his relationship with his brother and father ended the same way when he accidentally ruined his brother's science fair perpetual motion machine project.

• In Dreamscaperers, Dipper overhears Stan saying how "he's a loser, he's weak, I just want to get rid of him." Dipper's extremely hurt, but when he finds and views the full memory in Stan's head, he discovers that Stan was actually comparing Dipper to how he himself was as a child. Then we find out Stan was cast out of his family in A Tale of Two Stans.
  • Stan justifies his tough treatment of Dipper by showing that his dad treated him similarly, which taught him to be strong and fight back. But "Not What He Seems" flashes a book called Daddy Issues on his book shelf, and "A Tale of Two Stans" shows that Stan's father Filbrick's rough treatment went beyond just simple "encouragement to be strong", both implying that the way Filbrick treated his sons actually emotionally scarred at least Stanley if not both Stan twins. Knowing this, Stan's calm decision to treat Dipper similar to how his father treated him, even if Stan is just making Dipper do a lot more (admittedly unsafe and grueling) chores, gets a lot more messed up and really makes you wonder what the heck is going on with Stan psychologically.

• Remember how irritable Stan was over the hidden room, and how he spent a lot of the episode moping while looking at a pair of glasses? It's revealed in A Tale of Two Stans that he spent close to a month in that room in a Heroic BSoD, and the glasses are his brother's. He was remembering how he accidentally threw his brother into Another Dimension.

• Remember when Stan said to Dipper and Mabel that it was almost unnatural for them to get along so well? It's revealed that he actually had a great relationship with his own brother, but they spent so long estranged from each other that Stan seems to have forgotten what a healthy sibling relationship is like. Then when he tried to get on friendly terms with his brother, he accidentally started a fight that ended up in him losing his brother for a long time.

• Remember when Stan told a light-hearted story about Waddles becoming sentient, leaving Mabel behind to build an intelligence-enhancing machine with Dipper which insides looks like the portal? And that Waddles eventually gave up his intelligence to restore his bond with Mabel, unlike Ford? It's a retelling of what happened between Stan and his brother, with Stan as Mabel and Ford as Waddles with the ending altered to the one he favored.

• In "Dipper and Mabel Vs. The Future", Ford asks Dipper if being a twin was suffocating for him. Immediately after this episode aired, the game Gravity Falls: Legend of the Gnome Gemulets was released, implying, among other things, that Dipper almost died of asphyxiation at birth, nearly strangled by one of the two umbilical cords in the womb.

• This is not the only time Wendy Corduroy experienced a loss caused by a snap of the villain’s fingers. Come Avengers: Endgame, Laura Barton gets erased by a snap of another villain’s fingers. Who also has power to control time and reality.

• Stan's idea to burn Journal #1 in the flashback of "A Tale of Two Stans" becomes this when Bill ultimately burns the three journals in "Weirdmagedon Part 1".

• In the episode The Legend of the Gobblewonker, Park Ranger McGucket ignores his crazy father Fiddleford "Old Man" McGucket, who makes a big show to the citizens of the town that a lake monster, the Gobblewonker, had destroyed his boat. Nobody but Dipper, Mabel, and Soos believe him. When Dipper finally manages to get a picture of the Gobblewonker, Old Man McGucket reveals that it was just a robot he built to get the attention of his son, who had been ignoring him. This was already sad, but in "Society of the Blind Eye" it was revealed that Fiddleford used to be sane, but slowly went crazy wiping his own memory to un-see terrifying things, which would have happened while his son was only a small child.

• The reveal in "Blendin's Game" that Soos has such Undying Loyalty to Stan because Stan is his Parental Substitute for his Disappeared Dad is sad enough to begin with, but then Soos has had that trust and loyalty shaken by the events of "Not What He Seems". Thankfully it all worked out.

• Louis C.K.'s guest appearance cajoling people to climb into his mouth picked up some very uncomfortable parallels when he admitted to several cases of sexual harassment a couple years later. The monster C.K. voices being named "The Horrifying Sweaty One-Armed Monstrosity" is especially uncomfortable considering multiple allegations of unwanted masturbation around women. Alex Hirsch was even driven to re-record the lines himself for reruns.
  • Robbie's voice actor T.J. Miller was also accused of sexual assault, which makes Robbie's creepier behavior towards Wendy even harder to watch.

• The fireworks sequence in "Not What He Seems" and the ease with which Stan deflected Blubs' asking for a permit is this for Oregonians after the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire, which was started by fireworks being lit off during a burn ban due to high temperature and extreme fire risk.

• In "Headhunters", Stan's horrified reaction, followed by his attachment to the wax replica of himself comes across as humorously narcissistic. With the reveal that his whole backstory involves him losing his twin brother to an alternate dimension, this being the reason why he came to and stayed in Gravity Falls all this time, it makes him clinging to the wax dummy like a Replacement Goldfish and the funeral he gives it a much more tragic edge.

• Remember at the end of "Dipper & Mabel vs. the Future" where they showed that Blendin Blandin was possessed by Bill Cipher? Well, a secret message hidden in Journal 3 revealed that Blendin made a deal with Bill to stop Time Baby and the Time Police from teasing him for losing in Globnar. This was how Bill was able to possess Blendin.

• Old Man McGucket's crack about his inventions being a catastrophe probably being the reason he's living in the dump becomes this when "The Society of the Blind Eye" reveals that's exactly the case due to his memory wiping device.

• In "Mabel's Guide to Dating", Soos mentions that he wants to have 7 kids so he can "have one to love every day of the week." After watching "Blendin's Game", and learning about Soos' own Disappeared Dad, this statement suddenly becomes a lot more bittersweet.

• Soos mentions in "Dreamscaperers" that he wished Stan would love him like a son, and it's Played for Laughs (albeit mildly). This becomes sad after it's revealed that his real dad left him when he was 4 years old and never visited him again. He's also been working at the Mystery Shack since he was twelve years old, and sees Stan as a father figure. Can be shortened and merged with the above
  • Also counts as Heartwarming in Hindsight given at times Stan acts like a Papa Wolf towards Soos, even trying to erase his birthday from all the calendars.
  • In "Not What He Seems" Soos mentions to want "legally get adopted by Stan", thus taking up to eleven the whole father figure dynamic.
  • In a way he got his wish in the finale, by following in his "father's" footsteps and taking over running The Mystery Shack

• Quentin Trembley's eccentric politics were Played for Laughs and depicted as harmless in his so far only appearance on the show, but Word of God has confirmed that it was his "Finders Keepers" law that allowed Gideon to acquire the Shack and evict the Pines with bare theft.

• Many things thanks to A Tale of Two Stans.
  • Upon the reveal of the Stan Twin theory being correct and seeing a young Stanley and Stanford on a swingset together, the fans went into overdrive during the hiatus and made a lot of adorable art featuring the two Stans chasing down the oddities of Gravity Falls together. In actuality, the brothers were bitterly estranged and when they finally reunited they got into a fight where Stanley accidentally caused Stanford to be zapped into another dimension.
  • Also on that same note, the fanart about McGucket and the two Stans working together on big science projects? No Science Bro trio there, given Stan and Ford were estranged and McGucket left the project after seeing "the beast with one eye".
  • Remember when Stan was hilariously overreacting to The Duchess Approves? Specifically, that scene where he sobs "It's just like my life!" as the Duchess ends up disagreeing with her mother? There's a chance it's bringing up painful memories of being disowned.
  • Similarly, in the second TV Shorts, Stan is watching an episode of Ducktective that ends with Ducktective and his human partner having a falling out and Ducktective deciding to leave him ("Just call me duck now!"). However, the scene is so over-the-top dramatic and the Mood Whiplash at the end make it hilarious on a first watching. At the end, Stan turns off the TV, glumly muttering "That's enough of that. Stupid duck..." Again, there's a chance it's bringing up the painful memories of his disowning and his own falling out with his brother.
  • The episode finally reveals why Stan is so greedy. Being cast out by your family while still in high school, told to make a fortune, and spending ten years in poverty will do that to people.
  • The short concerning Stan's Tattoo is hilarious. Learning that's not a tattoo and it's actually a burn (accidentally) inflicted by his brother is not.
  • Stan being responsible for Lazy Susan's eye makes his discomfort around it during their date rather harsh.
  • It seems "Hot Belgian waffles" wasn't just a funny Gosh Dang It to Heck! line, but Stan legitimately bringing up the painful memory of his childhood, given that his family's apartment was next to a place with a sign reading "Hot Belgian Waffles."

• Grunkle Stan singing about 'Storing meat for the apocalypse' is pretty funny when you first encounter it. It's less funny when you realise that he has a strange, secret, powerful machine of unknown purpose beneath the Mystery Shack. Another funny point gets docked when we find out The Author actually has a secret bunker filled with survival supplies. It's even less funny when a clock with a countdown to the apocalypse shows up. And it becomes downright horrifying when, exactly one season after Stan sung this song, the Pines family's own screwed up relationship dynamics accidentally causes it for real. The whole thing arguably comes full circle to funny again, however, when we see Grunkle Stan actually eating Brown Meat during the apocalypse.

• Dipper justifies cheating to beat Pacifica in "The Golf War" by saying that her rich status allows her to "cheat at life." In "Northwest Mansion Mystery", Pacifica gets into Heroic BSoD after her parents use her to hire Dipper to stop the ghost and when she finds hidden paintings of her ancestors cheating everyone at life.

• In "Mabel's Guide to Dating", one of the shorts aired between season 1 and season 2, Mabel advises that if a relationship isn't working out, you should "force it!" Over half a season later, when fearing that her relationship with Dipper is on the brink, Mabel takes up an offer from Billendin to literally force it—by intending to make Dipper and her summer friends stay with her forever by stopping time. Things don't go well.
  • It also becomes more disturbing when you think about how she should really know better, considering how horrible Gideon forcing her into a relationship was for her.

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