Hello and welcome to the biggest analysis you'll ever read on a triangle.
This is the published version of my analysis on Bill Cipher's past from Gravity Falls. It is over 90 pages long in Google docs and took two years to complete.
In this post, I...
Yeah, that's a lot to take in. But we aren't done talking about Bill's horrible life just yet! We get to talk about his family again! Here's a typical house in Flatland
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Take in mind this is A Squares house, so this isn't Bill's family. But Bill probably lived in a very similar setup. Now, what about his actual family members again? There are a few things from the book that gives insight as to what Bill's home life would look like. "In the house of the Working Man or respectable Tradesman (That's Bill's house!) - where the wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband, while pursuing her household avocations - there are at least intervals of quiet, when the wife is neither seen nor heard, except for the humming sound of the continuous Peace-cry." (A-Square)
Unlike many families of the upper class, Bill's father would have probably been much calmer in terms of authority over his wife. As to what else has gone on in his family, it's hard to say. One thing I would like to mention is a direct quote from Alex Hirsh.
"If you think Stan had a bad relationship with his family, Bill's is worse." 2015
Thank you Alex for making literally everything as broad as possible and making my job just that much harder. That quote means a lot. In what way is his family worse? Well, we probably won't ever know specifically. But if what I'm all saying has some truth behind it, then we can assume his family life before becoming a demon was awful.
Schooling is a phase of Bill's life that would have had to happen. A square has a grandson who, during the book, teaches him math. It's actually what leads to A square questioning the world of Flatland, but that's not important right now. So by deductive reasoning, it's safe to assume that Bill was taught some things by his parents, or most likely by his father. However, it's very very very likely Bill went to school. Because that's where he'd go to learn a very special skill, the skill to feel another.
Yeah, sounds weird, but it's really not. Remember, people in Flatland can only see straight lines and they only can recognize a shape by feeling them.
"Let not my Reader however suppose that "feeling" is with us the tedious process that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the class to which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us to discriminate at once by the sense of touch, between the angles of an equal-sided Triangle, Square, and Pentagon."
They feel each other when they approach new people or just, in general, to know what shape they are before they discriminate. And no, they do not feel each other with hands or legs, as they do not have limbs. It's hard to explain just how they do it... Pretty sure they have thin-looking hairs around their shape that do the feeling? Think about it like a cat's whiskers perhaps. They don't explain it well. Either way, it's not that important.
What is important is that Bill would have gone to school to learn what Flatland is and its history (where he'd likely learn the truth about his family and Flatland), and how to feel another. And if you're curious how that's done, it's done by chaining up criminals or isosceles to something in a classroom for all the little children to gather around and practice on! :)
