YMMV / Gravity Falls S2 E12 "A Tale of Two Stans"

• Angst? What Angst?: Ford does not seem to be deeply disturbed after having spent thirty years in what drove Fiddleford insane after five seconds. He's not even ecstatic or overwhelmed upon being reunited to his home dimension; the first thing he does after seeing his brother for the first time in three decades is punch him in the face, and then continue bickering as if he was never gone.
  • Journal 3 would later mention that he's furious, since he was moments away from destroying Bill for good when Stan's Portal whisked him away, so from Ford's perspective, he was prevented from saving the universe by his brother.
• Fan Fic Fuel: Stan and Ford’s reunion scenes have inspired dozens of fanfiction exploring alternative scenarios about how things could have gone.
  • Likewise, there is a large number of fans who believe that they could have told Stan and Ford's backstory better than this episode did.
• Genius Bonus: Fiddleford's gibberish after emerging from the portal is a backwards message encoded with Atbash cipher. ^note  It decodes to "Bill Cipher Triangle".
• I Knew It!: One of the Stan twins' name is 'Stanley'. Although, to most peoples' surprise, Stanley is not the name of the long lost twin, and rather the Stan we've known since the beginning.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: McGucket plays a banjo song suspiciously similar to "Foggy Mountain Breakdown".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Stan and Ford's mother, Caryn Romanoff Pines, seems like a nice character, saying that Stanley is her "little free spirit" with "personality", whereas her husband Filbrick favors Stanford as his "ticket" out of New Jersey. Yet the episode decides to do nothing much with her. Caryn isn't even shown to call Filbrick out on kicking Stanley out of house and home, though considering Filbrick's temper, it's unlikely she could have prevented him from kicking Stan out, let alone changing the story.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: All the tension from "Not What He Seems" is resolved within this episode alone.
• Ugly Cute: The Shape Shifter's larval form◊ — before permanently adapting his strange, quasi-human body and devious nature, he was just a fat, bug-eyed little grub who instinctively mimicked inanimate objects.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Ford gets hit with this a lot for not even thanking Stan for saving his life. He was meant to be viewed as in the right for being concerned about Stan inadvertently causing The End of the World as We Know It, but many fans consider him hard to sympathize with considering that he held bitterness towards Stan for decades from a mishap on his chance to get into his dream college and causing him to be trapped in another dimension for 30 years. What doesn't help is that Ford blames Stan for the latter's poverty and doesn't lift a finger to alleviate it.
  • Given some explanation in Journal 3. He was about to get a clear shot on Bill Cipher with a gun that could kill him...but Stan opening the portal forced him to get through it before others did.
• The Woobie: Ford and Stan suffered a lot throughout their lives.

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