Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27708312-20170202163909/@comment-31166511-20170301133534

Ralphini wrote: What do you mean by "running herself down in exquisate detail?"

Just that, for my personal taste, a Mabel spending a paragraph describing herself as a terrible person and sibling was extremely unpleasant.

Mabel spends a lot more than a single paragraph running herself down.

Don't get me wrong. I entirely agree that this is the character Mabel might grow up to be as she matures. Mabel makes some spectaculaly bad decisions on the show, and has to be rescued by Dipper. But the reverse also happens, so neither appears to be the weaker person. Everyone knows that we've had THOUSANDS of years of stories where the girl screws up and the boy fixes it. It's stupid and unrealistic. Men may have greater upper body strength, but women save the day all the time

Dipper doesn't even have a height advantage over Mabel. But then his strengths are mental, not physical.

Mabel makes a terrible choice to abandon Dipper when she tries to put on a puppet show (can't remember the episode title). Dipper helps with the show anyway and, because they work together, the show turns out pretty good. But when Bill asks "What kind of idiot sacrifices everything for their dumb sibling?" (*cough* StanFixesPortal30years *cough*) Mabel has a sudden realization that she has to make things right. She does so by destroying her show, but in a way that helps Dipper. She did not hurt herself merely as an means to atone, it had a purpose!

Suffering for a purpose is noble. Suffering for its own sake is just masiochistic. Not that I have anything against S&M. How people want to get tied up in their own basement torture chambers, is their own business. But masiochisism is done for thrills, not nobility. And its not the sort of story I'm looking for here.

So I would argue that the Mabel in the story isn't the character as defined on the show, and I don't see that the chapters do the necesarry work to take the Mabel of the show and mature her into the person who explains her feeling in the way that is portrayed in chapter ten. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that these ten chapters didn't do it.

That is the work that needs to be done to support the dramatic conclusion of chapter ten.

Take a look at every single sentence in all ten chaperters that uses one sentence to describe an hour's worth of action, or a shorter period of time with extremly detailed activity.

Every time the story says that Mabel tried out these six forms, it feels that the plot is being rushed along in fast forward. It seemed like chapter ten was the chapter you were really invested in. But the other chapters feel raw and undeveloped, like placeholders. When you lead your readers across a metaphorical stream, each of the stepping stones needs to be solid underfoot.

Stepping back to take in the big picture, I'd say that any of the first nine chapters that are less than half the length of chapter ten, lack the character development required to support the dramatic tension revealed at the end.

At an absolute minimum, you need to add some text to the early chapters describing Dipper's attempt to discover the source of his Sister's unhappiness. He can be wrong several times. In fact, that would be a great way to explore the Twins' relationship as Dipper preceives it.

There are several times (no boy band pun intended) that Dipper out and out accuses Mabel of being shallow.

"Waddles was my soul mate!" "Mabel, you once said that about a ball of yarn!"

But that's an unfair simplifcation. Mabel has plenty of emotional depth, but its often hidden under the antics she engages in to try to get people to like her.

"I thought I was being charming, but it turns out that everybody sees me as a big joke."

(Change one letter in 'big' and you get 'bug'!)

I hope at least some of this is helpful. It doesn't take any effort to dump all over somebody's hard work merely because it isn't tailored to suit your own tastes, but to actually try to help someone improve something, even when it diesn't benefit you directly--that's a sign of maturity.

And now that I think of it, it's also the moral lesson that Alex Hirsch was trying to get across in his show.