Deerington App

2021-02-15T09:04:03Z

IN CHARACTER

Character Name: Mabel Pines
Canon: Gravity Falls
Canon Point: Post-canon

In-Game Tattoo Placement: Back of left shoulder, to mirror Dipper's: reference here!
Current Health/Status: Alive and uninjured
Age: 13
Species: Human

Content Warnings: Bullying, mild post-apocalyptic PTSD, violence towards minors, stalker behavior considered romantic by the character in question (Mabel is the victim here), emotional dysregulation

History: Wiki!

Personality:

At first glance, Mabel is a comical character whose weird behavior is played up for laughs. Rarely seen without one of her bright homemade sweaters and known for such antics as wearing doritos as earrings and eating entire tubes of toothpaste, Mabel possesses very little by way of impulse control and, occasionally, has moments wherein she is totally unable to regulate her emotions -- at one point she is so happy she literally scuttles straight up a wall, cackling. When she meets her best friends, Candy and Grenda, Candy has forks taped to her fingers with which she is eating popcorn and explains that this is an "improvement on human being". Mabel declares immediately that she has found her people. She also seems to have a penchant for body horror, producing such wonders as a centaur comprised of two horse butts, a horrifying dolphin thing with four arms and an additional dolphin mouth in each hand, and, in a mindscape once, giving herself personal hand cannons that allow her to fire off disembodied pink kitten heads as weapons.

Mabel is an extremely strange child. However, underneath her unrepentant weirdness and baffling creativity, Mabel possesses a depth that makes her one of the strongest hearts of the series.

Firstly, for context, Mabel is a thirteen-year-old girl -- twelve throughout the real action in the show. This puts her right on the cusp between childish games and fantasies and the inevitable journey to adulthood, something she is increasingly aware of and distraught by as the storyline progresses. She possesses a typical craziness over boys for someone her age, and an obsession with the trimmings and trappings of romance that is ultimately shallow as all hell, once stating that romance is like chewing gum: "When one loses its flavor, you just cram another one in." Two of her major priorities in life are repeatedly and deliberately eating so much sugar she gets sick to the point of hallucinating and covering everything in as much glitter as possible. She also makes a video of herself stuffing gummy worms up her nose to send home to her mother. This immaturity masks an emotional sensitivity that ultimately makes up the core of her character.

The most obvious manifestations of this are often negative. Rejection and loss of any kind cut Mabel deeply. Being left behind is her greatest fear, and is consistently what leaves the greatest marks on her. She starts off the summer declaring her intent to have a successful summer romance and her string of failures in this regard is a wound that comes up multiple times, to the point that she considers turning a memory gun on herself to erase them from her mind, so that she won't be haunted by them anymore. Being told by a magical unicorn that she isn't a good person has her drawing up a list of her personal sins and going on a spree of good deeds in an attempt to prove herself, and, despite going through such traumatic incidents as getting chased by a demon that literally ate another child in front of her and almost losing her brother to her stalker piloting a giant robot, it's the day she finds out her best friends can't attend her birthday party and Wendy ruins her illusion of high school as a festive musical that she dubs the worst day of her entire life. More seriously, when her brother agrees to stay in Gravity Falls for an apprenticeship to Ford instead of coming home with Mabel at the end of the summer, Mabel is so upset that she takes off and runs into the woods to get away from him, ultimately kicking off the apocalypse when she falls for an offer from Bill in disguise to make the summer last longer. When Stan loses his memory and doesn't recognize her, she has to be physically pulled away from him. She also possesses an incredible sympathy for the pain of others that sometimes gets her into trouble. At best, this results in relatively gentle shenanigans, such as feeling so bad for one of the local teenagers when he's depressed over a breakup that she goes out of her way to set him up with someone else to help him move on. ("Out of her way" in this instance means "literally stealing magic potions from a passing love deity", as one does.) At worst, she hangs out with her stalker far longer than she's comfortable with and ends up having a meltdown over the pressure, all because she doesn't want to hurt his feelings. When Dipper sees her struggling and steps in to break it off on her behalf, she is relieved, but still only turns on her stalker completely when he responds poorly and hurts Dipper.

On the other side of the sensitivity spectrum, when she is loved, Mabel notices. After several days spent fixated on composing a sock puppet rock opera in order to impress a boy, she is confronted with her brother having been possessed by Bill Cipher when she was not looking. Her choice is to ruin her own work to save him, or go after what she really wants and leave Dipper to his own problems. Bill taunts her as to whether Dipper would make such a choice for her. Dipper has dropped his own goals for Mabel's sake in the past before and she announces with certainty that he would absolutely do so again. She chooses to save her brother, and after her hard work is ruined, even apologizes to him for breaking her promise to help him with his own project in her panic over her deadline. Later, she and Dipper are confronted with the discovery that their Grunkle Stan is not what he seems, having uncovered fake IDs, a newspaper article covering his own death, video footage showing him stealing radioactive waste, and, most damning, a secret door leading to a secret lab with a sketchy portal device in it, along with the companion journals to the one Dipper has carried the whole series. When the portal is activated, it comes down to Mabel to decide whether or not to turn it off, as she's the only one in reach of the relevant button.

Dipper hones in on all the physical evidence that Stan has been lying to them the entire time, and the fact that according to the journals, the portal could destroy the world. Dipper is not wrong. Both of these things are true. Stan begs and pleads and promises that although some of the bad things they're going to hear about him are true, everything he's ever worked for has been their family -- the sort of emotional appeal that doesn't really stand up in the face of hard facts, and words that may well also be lies. Ultimately, Mabel falls back on one of the aspects of the lab that Dipper did not notice and which Mabel was the one to point out: Stan kept a picture of her and Dipper at the desk in the lab where he worked. This was a completely unnecessary gesture that they would have never found out about if they hadn't stumbled into his lab, and she took it as confirmation that regardless of everything else, his feelings for them were genuine. She based her decision to trust him on those feelings rather than the facts, and so, Stan's ultimate success and the retrieval of Ford falls entirely on the sheer dumb luck that it was Mabel with access to that button rather than Dipper.

As far as Mabel's flaws and weaknesses go, perhaps chief among them is that she gets so carried away with whatever is right in front of her that she doesn't really think of consequences. When this manifests in ways that are relatively harmless, it's usually in the form of things like skipping around without paying attention and slamming herself face first into a screen door. However, this is something that can be dangerous, too -- when she meddles with Robbie's love life using the potions she stole from the love god she ends up breaking up the entire friend group because she didn't consider the way their lives really intertwined otherwise, and at one point, she's so focused on getting her brother to confess his crush to Wendy while they are exploring an underground bunker that she completely dismisses the inherent danger of their situation and locks the two of them in a room together -- turns out there's a vicious shapeshifting monster in there, oops. She also sometimes copes with intense negativity by shutting down entirely, as seen in the moments when she runs away from whatever has upset her and finds a quiet place where she can pull her sweater over her head and rock back and forth. Her strange phobia of stop-motion animation sends her diving into a laundry basket and refusing to come out, such that the others just pick up the whole basket with Mabel inside it when they set out on an adventure to help her. Towards the end of the series, she winds up kidnapped and imprisoned in a mindscape of her own making, which she dubs Mabeland. Everything is literally bright colors "only visible to bees and art students", cute animals, and constant 80's synth pop music. She's even invented another version of her brother, Dippy Fresh, whose sole purpose is to support her in all things. The one rule of Mabeland is that no one is ever permitted to mention reality, and those who do are attacked by Mabeland's residents and put on trial.

However, Mabeland isn't only about denial. One of its main functions links straight back to the primary core of Mabel's personal sense of who she is -- kindness. Her personal moral code is tied up in this trait. Morality is something that is gray in the series overall. Stan is a wanted criminal who keeps his arrest warrants under a certain rug in the shack and no one is bothered by this. There are throwaway references to everyone participating in money laundering, vandalism, and breaking into a movie theater as though it were a proper heist, all as a family. Mabel has literally made herself a "lying sweater" with an image of crossed fingers on the back beneath her hair and sees nothing wrong with kidnapping an entire boyband when she discovers that their manager essentially keeps them in a giant hamster cage and has clones of them waiting to go. "Morality is relative," she declares, after she discovers the unicorn who accused her of being a terrible person was scamming her all along and didn't care about her feelings at all and the entire situation dissolved into a horrible rainbow fistfight.

She also declares, however, that "being kind and sweet is what makes me who I am. If I'm not a good person, who am I?" Given the added context of flashbacks to times when she and her brother were bullied, the way she reacts to Pacifica's bullying by smiling and insisting on being friendly to her even while allowing herself to be upset and angry when the other girl is not around, and Mabel's honestly alarming capacity for violence — when a disembodied arm belonging to a sentient wax figure attempts to choke her she immediately turns around and starts slamming its fingers in a door and she cuts off one of Bill's evil monologues by straight up squirting spray paint directly into his eye — it becomes clear that kindness is something that Mabel has chosen for herself, although the way she handles this is certainly imperfect. This manifests in Mabeland as fantasies for her friends that are personally tailored to their greatest wishes, the most emotional of these being Soos seeing a vision of his absent father. The vision acknowledges that they've never met and the form he takes is based entirely on Soos's imagination, and asks him if he wants to play catch. As Soos agrees, he tells the twins that although he knows it isn't real, he can't miss this chance to experience playing catch with his dad just once. When Dipper calls Mabel out on this, asking her if she truly believes these fantasies are good, she tells him: "You can't argue with the results. People are happy here! Does it really matter if it's real or not? For once, stop listening to your head and listen to your heart."

Dipper ultimately encourages her to let go of her fantasies and return to the real world by reminding her that in all the times that reality has been cruel to either of them, the other twin was there to provide unconditional love and support -- Dipper shaving a line into his hair to match Mabel when another little girl put gum in her hair on picture day, Mabel taping all of her valentines into one big heart for Dipper when he didn't receive any at all. Mabel is there for her family and her family is there for her, always, and family is where she finds her greatest strength. Although she overcomes her initial upset and tells her brother that she'll understand if he wants to stay with Ford when it's all over, he promises that he would never miss out on Mabel's awkward teenage years, and the twins are hand in hand as they rally the remaining townsfolk together to defeat Bill.

Abilities/Powers/Weaknesses & Warping: Mabel is, as far as we're aware, a normal human thirteen-year-old girl -- there's some off the cuff jokes about her capacity for eating things she shouldn't and getting away with it, like entire tubes of toothpaste and probably glitter, but that's nothing real. Her "power" is confidence and cunning, in that she's willing to use whatever she has on hand to fight if she needs to, and sometimes that's a fist full of glitter in her pocket that she can then blow into somebody's face. Quite frankly she probably learned this from getting into petty slapfights with her brother during their toddlerhood; it has that sort of vibe about it. No true psychic abilities either, but she takes to mindscapes where her imagination gives her options and control very easily. Her status as an art student probably gives her a couple extra points to her Constitution stat but again, thirteen-year-old girl.

Inventory:

1. Grappling hook: This is the weapon. It is not technically to be used as such, and is instead a device she uses to grab things and take herself to high places, but she can and has hit people with it. Military grade, apparently. Thanks, Stan.
2. Glue gun and one bag of glue sticks: The first glue gun was invented in 1954, so her modern one will be a treasure to her -- "Grenda, get the glue gun. We're making dresses!" -- that she'll have to ration the use of because of limited glue.
3. A walkie-talkie: The match to her brother's.
4. Clothes: Her shooting star sweater, matching pink headband, purple skirt, white socks, and black slip-on shoes.
5. Scrapbook: A festive book full of photographs and stickers chronicling her summer spent in Gravity Falls. When Stan's memory is lost, she uses the scrapbook to help him recover it.
6. Sewing machine: The simple but modern machine she sometimes uses in canon -- a simple beginner machine, nothing computerized, but still a far cry from the chunky metal things prevalent decades ago. ~~Nevermind that she is using it backwards, it is a cartoon and we will forgive them.~~

Writing Samples:

Voice test with Dipper
Test drive

OUT OF CHARACTER

Player Name: Callie
Player Age: 34
Player Contact: plurk is blithering but DMs to this journal preferred for now

Other Characters In Game: None!
In-Game Tag If Accepted: Mabel Pines: Callie
Permissions for Character: Here!
Are you comfortable with prominent elements of fourth-walling?: Yes!
What themes of horror/psychological thrillers do you enjoy the most?: The aftermath bits where characters console and support one another and grow as people -- the comfort part of the good old hurt/comfort trope. Exploration of the ways trauma shapes a personality, and horror that's tailored specifically to an individual's personality. Destroying people is neat and all but the real fun for me is building them back up in both positive and negative ways.
Is there anything in particular you absolutely need specific content warnings for?: I'm typically okay with text and artistic illustrations, but a head's up about photographic imagery of grisly injuries, lots of holes in one spot (trypophobia), and swarming ants would be appreciated, thanks.
Additional Information:

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