The final phase of my big planned story would be marked by the reverse polarization of Mewni's dimensional containment bubble by Bill's magic, which severely weakens Hekapoo due to her own power being drained off by the Fearamid arcanomagnet and gives Bill complete control over all dimensional travel to and from Mewni. This is the beginning of the darkest hour, where the Coalition of heroes must both protect the earth from the escalating parade of horrors Bill throws at it while simultaneously searching for a weak point in Mewni's dimensional defenses that can be exploited to destroy the seat of Bill's power and prevent him from cleaving the Nightmare Realm into more and more of the multiverse.
The protagonist team has grown fairly large at this point in order to be able to meet this challenge, albeit just barely. This is the full cast of the Coalition, along with some ideas for character development/dynamics I would be trying to weave into the large scale plot. Basically what some of the character's social links would look like.
-The Pines family; Both pairs of twins are on good, stable terms at this point, though that's not to say the emotional hurt isn't still there or that they've conquered all of their personality flaws at this point, but the core family members are in sync with each other and are the undisputed brains of the operation in terms of both arcane knowledge and deceptive strategy. Pacifica is basically a member of the Pines family by this point as well (there's a very specific MoringMark comic you can think of reference) and the townsfolk of Gravity Falls follow their example in taking the fight to Bill.
Dipper and Marco develop a similar dynamic to what Tom and Marco had going in the later parts of the show, becoming the male, same age friends that Dipper did not have in Gravity Falls and Marco had left behind in Echo Creek. While they are similar in terms of being smart kids with lingering social confidence issues, activate contrast between the two would serve to lampshade how strange and eccentric Dipper genuinely is despite how serious and straightforward he treats most things now, with Marco being a sort of anchor to normal relaxations that Dipper is increasingly forgetful of, like unwinding over a tabletop game (Marco fits in well with the game night group but doesn't attend consistently due to Star always being a higher priority if they conflict) or enjoying a well prepared meal.
Pacifica and Marco bond as friends over being the "normal" ones in their respective romantic relationships as well as the halves of both pairs that are keeping the future in mind and trying to plan for life after the war while Dipper and Star are becoming increasingly tunnel visioned on destroying Bill and saving the multiverse. It's healthy for both of them to have a trusty friend to confide in or just relax around when their significant other's eccentric habits wear a little thin.
Stan and Ford, as a characterization bit that would be interesting to drop as they reminisce, both inherited their mother's pathological lying tendencies, but naturally it got worse in Stan due to his early life as a traveling con artist while young adult Ford had made a very determined, discipline heavy effort to squash that part of himself in college, given the grave consequences academic dishonesty could have on a potential scientific career. This becomes discussed due to Stan being genuinely afraid he's going to die of old age without having been completely honest with the younger twins, and Ford admits this had a lot to do with why he overreacted to Stan turning his house into a tourist scamming attraction.
Soos has unfortunately had to shut the Mystery Shack down at this point, as the property has gotten too stuffed with Coalition business to keep running tours, but while obviously sad about this Soos would never be resentful of it. He's gone under appreciated in this fanfic series, I admit. If I could retroactively improve the earlier parts of this story "More Soos" would definitely be on the top of the to do list. Maybe he could have a sad send-off where he gives the twins his last bit of advice while saying they've grown up enough to protect each other now, and he needs to stay right besides Melody (who could very well be visibly pregnant at this point in their relationship...) and keep her safe now that Bill can invade at any time.
The family is actively taking steps to protect the town at large though, which would be a chance to flex how Ford and Dipper's research has expanded with the variety of magic viewpoints and data they've come in contact with: Potions Students from Hexside can create synthetic unicorn hair that has all the same properties of the real stuff so it's being imported and distributed all over. Weirdness Electromagnets are a culmination of Ford's research into the laws of universal weirdness and have been built across the town in order to create (theoretically) Bill repulsing public shelters that are connected to a quickly constructed emergency siren system, installed to alert everyone if another Weirdmaggedon scenario is occurring.
-Hekapoo and Rhombulus are growing weaker as Bill interferes with the Realm of Magic but Pines science can alleviate the worst of the damage and keep them together. They've gotten less dogmatic and inflexible after being continually humiliated so long and routed by Bill, and eventually hit a vital idea: Rhombulus creates a dome out of his snake-arms crystals and Hekapoo stands inside it, creating a, sort of "scale size model of the solar system" like projection of the dimension that lets her spot incoming dimensional breeches and deflect ones trying to enter within the town. Rhombulus has always had the potential to use his crystals more creatively than just trapping people, but is too stupid to do it on his own.
-Queens of Mewni; The triangle of relationships between Star, Moon and Eclipsa has become increasingly frayed and tense during the conflict, as Mewni's surviving knights and soldiers take the brunt of the Coalition's casualties, which in turn only amplifies their existing difficulties getting along with their steadily growing allies. As the chapters and "episodes" would get more dangerous I figure adding a knight or two with a basic original characterization to the mix and match character teams adds a some flexibility to the plot and is someone the monster of the week can kill/injure to demonstrate what it can do.
Star is growing into something she was always afraid of becoming, and actually turns out to be rather good at; A queen wearing a cold mask, and specifically one of war. In private (and particularly around Marco) the cheerful goofball still exists under it all, and probably needs to in order keep herself balanced, but moments like that are few and far between for the de facto Queen-in-Exile of Mewni. The older two queens are of unfortunately little help with the endless whirlwind of treaty signings, mission updates, science briefings (though Dipper is at least good in focusing on what the newest discovery means they can do instead of wading into technical principals), planning meetings, and so on. Star fully understands the importance of all this leadership early on, but it simply isn't the part of the work that comes naturally to her. Battle, both in person and at her command are as natural as ever for Star, and combined with all that gossip that still lingers about Mewni's troubled heiress creates a ferocious image of her among the Underworld population, who speak in hushed tones of the Destroyer Princess. Combat becomes it's own sort of release, and eventually even something of a joy to Star.
Moon is little help leading due to not adapting well to the actual structure of this informal alliance and mostly contributing healing, buffing people with spells before missions, and targeted Butterfly form magic air strikes in Amphibia; The queenly, faux-British mannerisms of the Mewman traditionalist are not taken seriously by the very backwoods American inhabitants of Gravity Falls, along with a number of mostly younger Mewman refugees and most of the Monsters that are fully won over by the splendor and basic health standards of the earth dimension. No one but her ever diminishing core of knights defers to Moon over Star when they disagree, which is increasingly often.
Eclipsa remains emotionally supportive of Star's leadership position, but the Queen of Darkness, as my way of meshing together her characterization across seasons 3 and 4, is a brilliant magic scientist and supremely dangerous spellcaster, while also being diplomatically inept and disorganized as an administrator. She never acquires the approval of her remaining people but strikes up a number of friendships on Earth: Mabel and her strike up a friendship talking about relationships, matchmaking, and coming to terms with the fact your loving parent is an otherwise awful person. She even thinks Stan is kinda charming, in a sort of "amused by his bravado, sympathetic to his pain" platonic endearment.
I guess as a clarification I should write here that Eclipsa's All-Seeing Eye would be off the table for the rest of this story due to Bill's involvement in its creation and possible influence over it. Hence why they need Belos and his scrying.
Still, Star still has an abundance of support from the wide circle of friends she's made and her loving relationship with Marco; She gets along famously with the Mystery Twins (Star's relationship with Dipper was well established in earlier parts while it's very easy to imagine he her and Mabel being friends, though I always wanted to create a scene where Star sits Mabel down and makes very clear, via threats, that Marco is off limits to her flirting), has Janna hanging around Gravity Falls at this point and makes fast friends with the volunteers from Amphibia. There were also meant to be implications dropped in this part that Star and Marco have become sexually active with each other offscreen in response to the enduring stress of the campaign.
-Lilith Clawthorne is still in good standing with the Imperial Coven despite her crisis of conscience, but rarely leaves the Boiling Isles once Bill is on the offensive, needing to watch over Hexside and keep the flow of magic material on route for earth. Instead I like the idea of Belos sending the Golden Guard at his representative/contribution to the Coalition. Maybe him and Mabel could have some ship tease.
Hexside at this point is the hero team's main source of purified magic, making it possible for humans to temporarily cast spells on missions and for volunteering, non-royal Mewmans to be juiced up into a temporary Butterfly form that gets used a lot to carry out air strikes during the fighting on Amphibia.
The State of Mewni
The reversal of the hermetic dimension bubble is the capstone to a flurry of imperialization work the Underworld has devoted its full focus upon since being sealed. Organized resistance has largely been crushed, allowing the Lucitors to undertake numerous industrial projects without opposition. The Royal Family now resides in Butterfly castle, which itself has been raised above the clouds by Dave and a bunch of warlocks performing a giant pentagram ritual around the perimeter of it, causing a massive pillar/castle in the style of the Underworld to rise to the surface, while Butterfly castle inhabits the mesa on top. In a joke that was intentionally similar to Tom hurriedly "toning down" the Bloodmoon Ball the king would very firmly establish to all his followers not to trash the place with blood and skeletons; Dave has an "artistic appreciation" for the Mewni style. He's inordinately proud of the new castle structure he's created (the tower below is mostly office space navigated by burning elevators) but behind his back everyone thinks it's an eyesore and there's an undercurrent of overcompensation to the whole thing.
Wrathmelior is the public face of the new order, the one most commonly considered their supreme enemy by the now oppressed Royalist Mewmans (as opposed to Imperial Mewni, as the demons call it now) and has been declared a prophetic figure by many adherents to the old religion of the Underworld, which neither of its rulers believe in. She is an active politician as much as her husband but primarily governs internal affairs of the core Underworld and deals directly the section of population that obey her unconditionally out of reverence for her royal lineage, but Dave is the one planning all the real sinister stuff. Plus the Underworld's vast network of ministers and bureaucrats is highly effective and mostly self-regulating, due to being a meritocracy with a lethal turnover rate. Does her best to remain emotionally open with Tom despite her busy schedule. Increasingly distrustful of Bill, but sincerely loves her king and takes a genuine ideological satisfaction in seeing the Butterflies taken down a few pegs.
Tom has honestly found himself a bit lost at this point. His parents have declared victory and are pretty much always busy with government business, but Prince Tom is essentially an adult now, having fought against the enduring rebel factions and so can just recuperate at Lucitor residence until he decides to enter the court of politics, since that's part of everything in the dimension by then. He does spend awhile brooding naturally, has a few bachelor party nights where he adamantly denies that he misses his brief friendship with Marco. He sorta gives up on Star around this period, having let it really sink in how willful and unbreakable her spirit is, and how much she hates his guts by now. Tom is adamantly denying that he mentally braces himself for the day she gets blown apart fighting his parents' armies as well as refusing to admit openly that he's sincerely afraid Star WILL kill him if they cross paths again.
The inhabitants of The Owl House are official guests of the Royal Family following Luz's deal driven rescue of Eda, who is completely cured of her transformative curse through advanced Lucitor soul magic; I'm imagining a procedure that's framed halfway between a heart transplant and an exorcism that literally separates Eda from her transformation state. King has been told he'll be made the Lucitor governor of the Boiling Isles when they depose Belos, and all three are employed to create anti-Coalition media packages being sent across the multiverse to try and curtail their support.
Luz however, despite Bill doing his best to corrupt her while instructing the witch how to complete her training, would steadily grow more suspicious of the Lucitors the longer they stay on Mewni, while King and Eda are more blinded by the sudden luxury of being a royal guest.
One of Bill's other side projects is feeding political undesirables to the Gem crematorium constructed in the Underworld to produce a small corp of Bill-programmed Gem soldiers that are loyal directly to him, have the personalities of Chaos Space Marines in comparison to the Homeworld's Loyalists (who would consider Bill's versions hideous violations of Gem purity) and are only known as "Crystal Golems" to the people of Mewni. The Lucitor elite only refer to the Diamond Authority as "The Aliens" or "Our Foreign Supporters" and their very existence is a highly classified state secret.
While the rhetoric of the new Lucitor Regime speaks of monsters and demons beings equals a clear pecking order still exists in the aftermath, as the Underworld and the other previous allies of Mewni still hold a position of superiority over the disenfranchised monsters supporting the revolution, who are frequently used as canon fodder for Lucitor troops and get press ganged into the hard jobs once all the captured Loyalists and dissidents have been worked to death. Still, the appreciable increase in living standards compared to being beneath the Mewman boot and effective propaganda celebrating victory over their (genuine) previous oppressors keeps most of them onboard with the Lucitors, at least up until the Nightmare Realm stuff starts really getting out of control.
The completion of the Sanctuary Pyramid does deliver on many of King Dave's promises regarding modernization and improvement of living standards, however the new infrastructure isn't being given energy from the Realm of Magic as the official story says, nor the Nightmare Realm that's being magnetically drawn to Mewni; it's coming through a stabilized industrial rift connected to the Gem Homeworld. The horrific experiments that Bill fragment has provided and the potential seen in extra-dimensional colonies has gotten him a higher budget from the Diamonds, most of which he routes back through stabilized dimensional rifts. Bill is powering the industrial revolution on Mewni by tapping electricity (and cable!) off a civilization of von Neumann probes that can build Dyson spheres. The actual Well to the Realm of Magic has been restricted but can still be amplified into an arcane magnet pulling in the Nightmare Realm, which gradually makes the dimension more cursed and spooky overtime, all with Bill's cruel sense of humor as the tone for things. The mission Star and Marco pulled off has caused the process to play out slower, however.
For as long as it still functions atop the Sanctuary, Bill's expanding seat of power and 24/7 party castle gives him full knowledge and control of all who enter and exit the dimension of Mewni. In the aftermath of the big invasion to overthrow the Butterflies the Lucitors don't really have their forces organized to just invade other dimensions for awhile, so to begin with Bill was just throwing horrors out into the cosmos and seeing what sticked.
As such, the first "phase" to the end of the trilogy would feature the Coalition on defense, trying to discern a weakness in Bill's great dimensional shell while small sized character teams have to go out and defeat his monsters of the week, both on earth and abroad. Some ideas I had for "episodes" of this format are:
-Creepy Clown sightings break out in suburbs alongside people and pets vanishing, so Dipper and Janna investigate. The Clowns are flesh eating monsters created by Bill Cipher naturally, and in the process of destroying them the two humans learn about the Nightmare Carnival that the Cloud Kingdom is being converted into.
-Crushed to powder Gems are treated with Lucitor necromancy to create a highly infectious, airborne "biological" weapon that turns humans who breathe in the aerosol powder in violent rage zombies that alter between begging for death and shrieking Homeworld propaganda as a result of the broken particles trying to fuse-bond with the incompatible organic tissue, which is agonizing for the both.
To attack the earth (and to give the Pines the dreadful realization that a new Weirdmaggedon is underway on Mewni) Bill sends a trio of original Henchmaniacs to release the powder weapon upon the train passengers of the London Underground, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, and the Tokyo Subway, forcing three teams to mount a simultaneous response.
-Agents Powers and Trigger have discovered that a corrupt human politician/Lovecraftian cultist intends to become a collaborator with the otherworldly power that is menacing the earth so the Coalition's two most morally dubious members, Sasha and Hunter, set out to perform a magical assassination.
-Rapidly circulating spam emails devised by Bill are spreading like fire across social media, where if you click the link to try and claim some unrealistically generous prize the dark magic activates and sucks the person through an arithromancy generated micro portal, dumping them into the bloody amusement park Bill has turned the Cloud Kingdom. The depraved elite of the Lucitor Kingdom and other guests of Cipher watch and wager on how long the game victim's will survive or what will kill them.
Meant to be a dark comedy deconstruction of teenage battle royale young adult novel kind of stuff, where the game doesn't even pretend to be fair or offer a way out, since reaching the exit just means you fall off the Cloud Kingdom and splatter against Mewni. Seems like the kinda topical thing the source show would make a parody episode of.
Princess Ponyhead would end up enabling a one time private dimension crossing on the part of the heroes to shut down the death game, and would end up being killed, along with the rest of her family and possibly species, in retaliation from Bill.
-As part of this AU being a massively over ambitious crossover setting, I had rough sketches for a "three parter" where the Lucitors try to hijack the Infinity Train, which if they could learn to pilot would essentially let them deliver a full size and fully equipped (complete with supermassive rail canyons the Lucitor Noble in charge of the hijacking wants his arms company to get a contract to build after the mission's inevitable success) invasion to anywhere in the multiverse. I imagine this being the first field deployment Bill's Chaos Marine Gems see, where they make short, Gordian Knot-inspired work of the various puzzle cars.
I also had a different plot that needed to be an episode where Eclipsa, who I can admit has gotten a very positive depiction in this AU due to just how much I like the Queen of Darkness, takes a very selfish risk in a moment of weakness to try and rescue her husband Globby, who the Lucitors have made promises to publicly execute in order to win the Allegiance of the Spiderbites. So, now that I type this I feel this would be the plot to attach that to: After taking out the Lucitor hijacking crew (another fun exercise in seeing a bunch of different ways Gems can break most likely) Eclipsa would override the team's objections and use her dark magic to reanimate the Lucitor team leader and use him as a zombie sock puppet to get the train back on Mewni, and which point she comes out blasting to try and grab Globgor and flee on the train.
The coincidental timing of the train hijacking and public execution would have been an intentional gambit by Bill to manipulate his previous student into bringing the train to him, and the Spiderbite Kingdom event is reinforced by Lucitor Royal Guards provided to make it a surprise two for one offer: Shatter one imprisoned Prince of Darkness and burn a Witch Queen at the stake absolutely free!
Globgor's size shifting abilities and Eclipsa's raw determination would let them effect a narrow escape but at significant cost: several cars off the Infinity Train being detached to escape (significant loss of innocent life and letting advanced extra dimensional technology fall into Bill's hands, if in a non-functional state) and King Dave would still have the Spiderbites as enthusiastic supporters, seeing as Eclipsa gate crashed their big execution public festival with a massive train and massacred a bunch of their soldiers and nobles in the process of rescuing the prisoner. The Spiderbite Princess and her Slime boyfriend end up as figureheads for the Lucitor program of a "Co-Monster Prosperity Sphere."
Also, maybe Eda could get an appearance in here? Sharing some of Luz's growing misgivings about their new hosts, the old witch could opt to visit the Lucitor's public execution out of anxious curiosity that it isn't anymore just than hers was. The Infinity Train crashing the party and killing a big chunk of the crowd would temporarily banish these doubts and of course, this plot line's climax is a fucking sick witch's duel between Eda and Eclipsa, since if Star and Luz end up dueling in this AU we gotta see these two fight. Ends inclusively after a lot of dirty tricks, but perhaps Eda has a moment of doubt where she could have shot the withdrawing Eclipsa in the back, but is struck by what she's really seeing: a young woman genuinely ecstatic at having rescued her loving husband from the gallows, running off hand in hand.
Eclipsa gets chewed out for this of course by prominent members of the Coalition, being someone who has risked the fabric of the multiverse to save someone personally important to them, but between Stanley stepping in and giving Eclipsa a passionate and stubborn personal defense and the others more or less have to leave it at a stern talking to since Eclipsa is one of the team's heaviest hitters. For whatever it's worth she herself knows it was stupid to do and, well, has no other missing family she needs to rescue with this. This event greatly adds a lot of growth to Mabel and Eclipsa's social link, and now Globgor joins the party!
As a backdrop to all of this the general public is becoming increasingly aware of the globally increasing levels of Weirdness, despite certain sections of the population decrying it all as hoaxes, and a world where magic and other dimensions are common knowledge is becoming increasingly impossible to avert.
-Then, the important mission drops: Somehow, an opportunity emerges to sneak back onto Mewni and meet an informant who wants to spill something crucial about Bill's source of power. At a lot of risk and consideration, a team is put together and portal travels to Pie Island as the meeting ground. This team would have to include Grunkle Stan, since I wanted a chapter where him and potentially Janna take all the thieves and scammers on Pie Island to the cleaners.
However, the informant, and the reason they can even have this meeting under Bill's notice (hopefully) is none other than Flying Princess Pony Head and possibly her new friend Luz, if she has enough reason to doubt Bill at this point and has already gotten her protag vs protag rematches with Star and the Pines, because those definitely have to happen. Otherwise I just like the idea of Luz and Pony Head ending up friends, is kinda funny. Some kind of thriller action sequence happens after the data hand off, probably from someone on Pie Island selling them out, and the good guys escape by the skin of their teeth and with a very narrow window of potential to bring Bill down, based on what they learn.
Thus, perhaps somewhat fittingly since Disney owns Star Wars now, the Coalition discovers that the superstructure lynchpin of Bill's evil plan has a power systems-related weak point... that can only be damaged on the Gem Homeworld due to Mewni's dimensional bubble. Thus the next phase of the story becomes about gathering information and materials in order to plan an attack that can hit it. This is where Bill's alien allies fully enter the plot, and the story returns to the "Galactic Conflict" timeline first visited by Ford, Dipper and Pacifica when they were chasing Bill way back in the beginning.
Unlike my admittedly overambitious efforts to add Amphibia and The Owl House to this "epic" fanfic narrative (no offense taken durrendurrendol1993, I agree with you) this stuff with Steven Universe and the Diamond Authority was planned for much longer and comes from the same place as the original basis of this fic when it was just about Gravity Falls, somewhere I'm realizing was maybe not the best place to base a massive fiction writing project atop: Disappointment and a bit of spite, I'll admit it.
This AU was planned to showcase an alternative take on the Diamond Authority that lives up to all the thematic potential they had as horrifying space nazi villains, which is a fantastic idea for an animesque western action series with strong LGBT themes that SU executed in the most naive and flaccid was possible despite all the brilliantly awful things they got under the radar through Gem physiology. I genuinely think the Diamonds and the Homeworld could have become as iconic as the Daleks if the show had just been capable of treating the threat of racial extermination and social eugenics seriously.
So, in this AU the Gems of the Homeworld would have been depicted as far more overtly fascist and dangerous, actually killing people and displaying more vocal fanaticism for the regime. To demonstrate my point, here are some Dalek quotes that I barely had to modify to make about the Diamond Authority, and which I liked the idea of scattering through the story, just being chanted by a bunch of Gem soldiers as they're getting pumped for battle or shouted at our heroes as responses to their questions.
"Our programming does not permit us to acknowledge that any creature is superior to the Diamonds!"
"All inferior creatures are to be considered enemies of the Diamonds and destroyed!"
"The Diamonds cannot, will not be destroyed! The Gem race will live and rule forever!"
"This is not war! This is pest control!"
"There is only one form of life that matters! Diamond life!"
I was also hoping to work in a line, possibly from White Diamond herself, that the extermination of all organic life is what Homeworld considers the "final solution" to the problem of an imperfect universe.
In short, the cast that's been assembled to explore this universe have none of Steven's (inherited) advantages that make the Diamonds personally invested in his well being alone, and so the Homeworld Gems my cast encounters simply consider them more organic filth that needs to be eradicated to make way for the universe's master race.
Mission ideas for the first phase included visiting a Gem colony planet, a diplomatic meeting with the Galactic Federation that's just trying to stay alive between the Gems and the Irkens (and can't provide much help) and maybe a semi-funny levity chapter where some of the humans abduct an alien through a portal and perform the full gamut of "alien abduction" cliches in an ineffective attempt to learn about their opponents that ends in an escape, but these were meant to build quickly to a game changer.
-After a few normal missions to lul the audience into a false sense of security, one would abruptly go horribly wrong into order to start up a few running character plot lines: An attempt to travel sideways and use the security subversion protocols inside Zim's salvaged PAK for a Pines family heist turns out to be a trap planned by Bill Cipher that gets them captured aboard a Diamond Authority battleship. They only escape being thrown out an airlock because an Irken strike force surprise attacks the battleship to try and scuttle it, responding to the distress signal the ever-loyal PAK started transmitting as soon as it was brought back to its home dimension.
The warship's destruction splits up the family members that were captured on it, and would have kicked off the final phase of the story trilogy; The Pines are scattered around the hybrid IZ/SU space opera setting, and have to survive their individual story paths in order to come back together at the last minute with all the pieces to put together a harrowing victory, while Star takes up sole leadership of the Coalition and begins contemplating the use of ever more destructive spells to avenge her friends.
I didn't quite figure out how Stan and Ford fit into this, probably something like them being separated from the kids immediately on Bill's orders and shuttled to a prison camp that they them escape from. However they manage it, I think most sensibly they'd escape from Bill, get back to their earth together and support Star in her increasingly extreme retaliation attacks, with Ford outright beginning work on weapons designed to target Gems specifically.
The younger twins though, their direction I was always clear on. Dipper and Mabel get separated escaping the battleship's cascade failure via Dipper sacrificing the one escape pod they reach for Mabel to use, causing her to rocket towards planet earth while Dipper is plucked from the wreckage by the Homeworld rescue ship and sent to an extermination facility by influence of Bill Cipher, who is terribly curious what will happen if an organic is thrown into the machinery Homeworld uses to recycle defective Gems.
Mabel's arc would have seen her fall to the earth of Steven Universe and integrate herself into the running plot. Emotionally, she breaks almost completely at this, sent into a deep, self-loathing depression as a result of thinking the twin she never appreciated willingly sacrificed his life to save hers. She's pulled out of this darkness by Steven's superhuman empath conversation skills, develops a crush on the half-Gem, and steadily proceeds to figure out all the mysteries of the series ahead of it's native cast, due to actively but discreetly looking for a way home when not battling suicidal thoughts, having her Mystery Twin experience to pull from and generally being more cynical than Steven below their surface level similarities.
Dipper, meanwhile, essentially becomes the Captain Lars of this AU, using his natural intelligence and immunity to anti-Gem security measures to befriend a bunch of Off-Colors (the group from the show, plus maybe a few OCs) and escape with them, stealing a Gem battleship and becoming a Blake's 7 style band of revolutionary space pirates stealing and burning Diamond Authority military assets wherever they can. If I were to ever have the ability to produce a visual of what "Space Pirate Dipper" would look like, I want his hair to change so he's showing off the birthmark at all times and is even proud of it now, as an act of solidarity with the oddities of his crew.
This arc would show that the Gem species can be reformed from the inside, with Dipper liberating various prison facilities and bursting open armories to equip Off-Colors, Pearls and political dissidents with the means to rebel.
Meanwhile on earth, Mabel goes from being simply a human friend of Steven's to an active part of the Gem plotline around the time the CG's capture Peridot, as their little green prisoner is both a way for Mabel to potentially escape to space and find out if Dipper is alive, and a perpetually frightened dork in a strange place that she feels intensely, reflexively protective of, a manifestation of guilt over having bullied Dipper so much. I liked the idea of Mabel figuring out a way to blackmail the main three Crystal Gems behind Steven's back to get involved since I adore the idea of them being dumbstruck at the fact a small human knows so much about the horrible star empire they come from and could work them into a corner by threatening to tell Steven, netting her a lot of inside information about the Rebellion, which all starts to fit together.
The point of this character arc is to complete Mabel's growth to self-awareness, highlight how she and Steven are not actually all that similar despite what a lot of fans think, and to introduce a level of genuine, personal betrayal to a character who ultimately got everyone to listen to him in canon. For example, Steven is unable to kill the Cluster when he and Peridot drill down to, but Mabel is. She and Steven would also come very close to definitely dating instead of him and Connie having their unspoken long term romance, only for Mabel to very definitively choose her twin brother over another crush, even though her connection to him is rather emotionally sincere, what with the whole "talked out of suicide" event.
The betrayal strikes sometime around Peridot making her first communication to Yellow Diamond to try and ask for earth to be spared, which the Gem ruler shuts down even faster due to the actual galactic war they intend to deploy the Cluster into, as opposed to wanting to exterminate the planet out of purely useless spite.
This is where Mabel abruptly bursts onto the scene, and having figured most of it out, tries to form a deal with Yellow Diamond to exchange everything she (Mabel) knows about the shattering of Pink in return for Dipper, whose she's convinced is either in prison or the human zoo after her talk with the Crystal Gems. Yellow Diamond is naturally furious in response, blows up the communicator and makes a beeline for earth in her warship... and thanks to the various bugs he's planted in the Diamond Authority communications network, Dipper knows about it too, though not why the Homeworld supreme commander is making such an unexpected detour. The Pine Twins are on course to reunite when the pirate crew make the decision to try and assassinate Yellow Diamond as her court, being the military branch of the government, has the strictest standards for physical perfection and euthanizes more Off-Colors than any other Homeworld organizations.
Due to Mabel forcing everyone's hands, all the truth about Rose Quartz comes spilling out all at once, leaving everyone arguing about what to do. Steven is naturally willing to offer himself up to try and mend bridges with Yellow, while Mabel intends to let herself get abducted in order to smuggle a homemade bomb she's spent months constructing (in a parallel to Stan managing to repair the portal over decades) onto the flagship. This leads to them arguing, breaking up and no one being prepared when the arm ship (which I would headcanon name as Fist of Authority) arrives over earth and broad transmission demands they surrender the truth and Pink's real remains or be obliterated from orbit.
Mabel, in a moment of emotional despair, refuses to trust Steven to try and negotiate something that seems impossible, screams at Yellow AND Bill to go to hell for taking her own sibling away from her, and goads the starship into firing by prodding at the trauma of Pink's loss. Due to Dipper infiltrating the warship and sabotaging the weapon system as the attempt before stowing away in an escape pod, the moment of truth stuns everyone by having the warship explode, flaming wreckage and clouds of dust falling over Beach City.
Mabel finds the crashed escape pod and the twins reunite, but an undeniable division now exists between Mabel and the Crystal Gems; as much as she tries to play it that she always knew Dipper was onboard the hand ship to sabotage it (she didn't) the adult Crystal Gems consider her gambling with the fate of the earth to save her sibling completely unacceptable, and Steven is disgusted by the open glee Mabel and Dipper share at having lured Yellow Diamond into a trap using her emotional grief and then blowing her up. Shortly after, the Off-Colors bring the spaceship around and the twins make the offer for the Crystal Gems to help bring about a final end to the Diamond Authority, which they are expectedly conflicted about accepting.
While this arc is happening, Stanford Pines is steadily slipping into grief and seclusion back on earth, believing the twins are dead (while Stanley holds on hope they were able to escape) and now keeps himself going solely out of determination to destroy Bill Cipher and everyone who serves him. To that end, the alternate remains of Pink Diamond, the one that Zim destroyed, become his object of study, revealing some interesting world building and the mechanisms by which they can build a super-weapon.
The powers the Diamonds posses to alter the minds, bodies and emotions of Gems would be directly portrayed as a totalitarian violation of autonomy, something they program into their followers to make them easier to control and exploit. By analyzing Pink's broken pieces using his strongest scientific methods, Ford manages to create a "hacking" spell that can be signal projected from the royal wand or other magic manipulation device, enter Gems through these programming back doors and command them to kill themselves, which all "properly" constructed Gems must obey. The Diamonds themselves are naturally the only ones constructed without such a weakness, and the implication was meant to be made that Steven, while not actively mind controlling other Gems, owes much of his canonical diplomatic success to Gems feeling psychologically compelled to obey him.
However, with Dipper and Mabel alive and returning with a ship full of friendly Off-Colors for the final arc, this magic weapon gets a last minute modification, being turned from a weapon of genocide to a tool of liberation Mabel names "The Pink Factor." During the final battle on Homeworld, Star and Eclipsa release magically charged clouds of the Pink Factor spell all over the Gem population and into the teleported network, which changes their programming to make them capable of independence: In addition to closing the back doors and making it impossible for further Diamond violation to affect Pink Factor Gems, all imposed conditioning and reprogramming (White bleaching Gems to be obedient and Pink putting Pearl under a Geas of secrecy are examples of this) is erased. This does not automatically make every Gem affected by it a rebel, since that'd just be replacing one set of brainwashing with another, but it gives those who want to rebel or who were previously reprogrammed as a result of noncompliance a chance to, and during the human attack on the Authority capital an empire crumbling Gem revolution breaks out.
The attack itself I had never worked out the exact plan for, but two "ways in" occur to me that would potentially work: With the Pines reunited and the Coalition preparing for it's do-or-die attack on the source of Bill's power, a small group of heavy hitters infiltrate the power facility on Homeworld while Hekapoo prepares a mass-portal insertion attack on the Grand Fearamid of Mewni as soon as the power cuts. Think of the two pronged attack to destroy the Death Star in Return of the Jedi.
Of course, direct assault on the fortified capital of the Diamond Authority would be suicide, so the two ways in (possibly used together) are as follows: A large scale diversionary happens essentially by accident, as the Irken Empire recapturing Zim's PAK and connecting it to the control brains for an analysis report immediately drives the Irken command network completely insane and causes the Diamonds to go from being on the backfoot to winning the war in basically a day, so there are less warships guarding the capital than usual, deployed for big pushes into crumbling Irken territory. Other ideas included that the team does end up persuading or just kidnapping Steven into using his Diamond gemstone to bypass planetary security systems, or Peridot leaving earth with Mabel and using her security clearance to get them inside.
The strike team itself consists of the heavy hitters of the group: Eclipsa, Star, Dipper, his Off-Color crew of pirates, Ford, Marco, Amphibian commandos and Imperial Coven spell support. I imagine they'd have to hijack some kind of cargo freighter conducting a routine landing on Homeworld and sneak in that way, with the fighting starting when security discovers them on the landing pad. Star and Eclipsa go full Butterfly form to spread rolling clouds of the Pink Factor across the Gem masses, resulting in the oppressed and exploited lower Gem castes breaking out into rebellion against the military loyalists. Dipper, Ford and their bodyguards meanwhile have to trace energy signatures through the hollow tunnels of the ruined planet to reach Bill's science facility, a house of horrors where dissident Gems and organic prisoners undergo gruesome experiments.
The massive rebellion on her planet forces White Diamond into the open, creating the ending for her I had in mind from the beginning; The towering brilliant colossus fighting a final battle against Butterfly form Eclipsa, the scorching light consumed by the gentle darkness. Symbolically, this is a moment of Eclipsa triumphing over her own hateful heritage, with White Diamond essentially being what Eclipsa's mother would be like if Solaria had reached the peak of her power/madness.
Though, and I was never sure how to work this in, there was one distinction I wanted to give them: Solaria, had she lived to learn about her daughter's romantic dalliance, would not have emotionally been able to bring herself to hurt her granddaughter if Eclipsa made clear she wouldn't allow it, ultimately making herself a hypocrite. White Diamond, on the hand, I wanted to write with a more realistic response to discovering what exactly became of Pink; She would consider the half-organic Steven a disgusting pollution of the purity of the Gem race and the final disgrace from a failure of a Diamond. Were the supreme ruler of the Authority to have survived Eclipsa, her first order would be for Pink's jewel to be vaporized to erase this mark of weakness from the regime's master race, and for a new fourth Diamond to be created in the aftermath of the war off the finest colonies of the defeated Irkens.
Thematically, the idea would be that Solaria, while evil and bloodthirsty, was still a human (well, Mewman, you know what I mean) emotionally, and humans are all about personal biases and hypocrisies. White Diamond, by comparison, as the eternal head of a fully committed fascist star empire, is an inhuman monster whose capacity for empathy and love has been completely spoiled, if it ever existed, by living in her personal Homeworld palace and being worshipped as an unquestionable god for eons, far too removed from the peons she commands and callously destroys (Solaria at least lead from the front) to ever be capable of treating lesser Gems or organic creatures as something worthy of respect or consideration. Everything to her is either a disposable pawn, a mirror to reflect her own "perfection," or trash to be exterminated.
The towering ruler of the Gem race being obliterated by dark magic naturally causes the spreading rebellion to go supernova, and amidst the chaos the smaller team reaches the power source. The Bill fragment they expected to fight for it is already dead when they get there, as the Pearl he was assigned (and naturally abused horribly) stabbed him 87 times at the first opportunity and booked it to join the Pink Factor riots.
Dipper and Ford make short work of the unguarded alien machinery, and a shudder travels through Imperial Mewni, with various industrial machines and infrastructure going haywire and exploding as the power source surges and fails, then the bubble pops: Moon the Undaunted has returned to her world with an army of the multiverse at her back. This is the final battle!
Bill's army of horrors, including the landscape of Mewni itself at this point in it's fusion with the Nightmare Realm, go all out trying to keep the heroes of the multiverse from breaching the Fearamid, but it's ultimately not enough. Lucitor Royal Troops are doing their best to protect the palace and critical strategic points, but the monster divisions are deserting, the Henchmaniacs don't care about collateral damage and the Bill programmed Gem Soldiers are just going crazy and killing everyone in reach.
The way I pictured this big battle going down is as massive army to army melee that breaks into more individual fights once the Fearamid is breached, as everyone is pursuing individual objectives at that point:
-The Pines (four twins plus Pacifica) go straight for Bill, who either turns himself into a JRPG final boss trying to create replacement fragments for the ones that have been killed off out of Lucitor magic, or he's genuinely terrified of the family that overcome everything and is reduced to pathetically begging them not to destroy the Devil Machine after they smash all his defenses. Not sure what would be better, but Bill is ultimately a selfish, cowardly bully beneath it all and completely loses his shit when he realizes the Pines have tricked him, and even if he were to succeed in killing them then and there, the Butterflies poisoning the Nightmare Realm means he's going to die no matter what.
-Marco and the surviving knights are meanwhile leading the division that breaks off to attack Butterfly castle, where the Lucitor Royals direct their share of the defenses from. Dave is increasingly in denial that the situation is falling apart while Wrathmelior wants to evacuate and Tom doesn't know what to do. Focusing on his human rival does give Tom the spark he needs to fight again but Marco's growing strength fights him to a standstill, and in the end the prince is nothing but a burned out teenager who doesn't understand what he's fighting for.
Marco defeats Tom one on one but chooses to spare his life, so that he and Wrathmelior can go to the Underworld and evacuate its citizens before the Butterflies cause the whole compromised dimension to vaporize. Dave is losing lucidity as total defeat becomes inevitable, and in his ranting a last bit of motivation surfaces for all his plans, insisting that the Butterfly Kingdom belongs to him, not the empty headed queens he always resented serving as a royal alchemist, while also admitting aloud that he's always seen his wife and child as vapid fools he only ever saw as tools. With the choice between staying to die with her husband or fleeing with her son, Wrathmelior chooses her son, and the two organize a hasty and incomplete evacuation of the Underworld, scattering the Demon race out into the multiverse as their short lived empire collapses.
Dave, in the end, was meant to be a dark mirror to Marco and Dipper, someone of great intelligence and unfair circumstances who desired to make something better of himself but became a ruthless manipulator to get it. Similar to Dipper's problems with Mabel and Marco's initial dislike for Star entering his life, Dave had long resented Queen Comet for the amount of control she had over his life's work (horrible chemical weapons, natch) just because of the circumstances of birth, and worked tirelessly to take control of the dimension of Mewni because he believed he was entitled to it.
-Buff Frog and the Amphibia Volunteers spend the battle trying to demoralize the Lucitor Monster Battalions and convince them to surrender, and after having been treated as disposable canon fodder by the forces of the Underworld a number are willing to listen. Those that do give up the fight turn to evacuating the young and the sick to earth while the window to do so exists. Not everyone escapes Mewni, but these efforts keep a lot of people from dying when it disintegrates.
-Janna and King River lead a team that bursts open the Lucitor political prisons and labor camps, adding a bunch of rioting Mewni loyalists to the melee. River takes charge of the combined army once Moon joins the others in the Nightmare Realm, while Janna continues her sabotage effort by overloading the Gem Building Cremation Oven, causing a massive industrial fire to break out deep in Lucitor territory.
-The Owl House residents would probably break from their Lucitor hosts at this point, probably not to aid the coalition but assisting in evacuating civilians instead.
-The Queens of Mewni reverse the polarity of Sanctuary Well to transport themselves to the Nightmare Realm, which has almost completely consumed Mewni and is even snaking into the Realm of Magic, but that proves a two sided sword which enables them to call the spirits of Queens past into the Nightmare Realm and destroy it at the source, destroying Bill forever but causing Mewni to disintegrate behind them. The red string the Blood Moon tied between Star and Marco's souls becomes the thread Star uses to stitch the surviving pieces of Mewni to Earth, which she has come to see as her true home, and their love proves to be the guiding light that keeps everything left from disintegrating in the darkness.
When everyone comes too on earth, they stand up together and have a moment of celebration at having finally defeated Bill, before realizing the Cleaved bits of Mewni are causing trouble and setting off to stabilize things. The last line of the story would be Mabel jokingly asking Dipper "No rest for the wicked, huh?" as the entire cast runs off to build a better world together.
And, well, that's the end. Bill and the Nightmare Realm are destroyed, Earth and Mewni are cleaved together and the heroes of the Coalition initiate a golden age of human prosperity and stability following the initial tumultuous contact of the worlds. The series epilogue would consist of a dedicated character endings chapter to flesh out how I saw everything turning out long term.
Character Endings, hardly all encompassing or fully complete but here are some rough ideas of where everyone ends up.
Dipper: Mason "Dipper" Pines would go down in history as one of humanity's greatest scientists, even if the man himself would humbly insist his Great Uncle Ford deserves most of the glory. The clarity and understanding he had on Earth's sudden surplus of magic, and the many practical applications of it he invented, made Dipper a respected and acclaimed source of knowledge in an extremely uncertain time, letting the once insecure Pines Twin prove himself to have been right all along on the world's biggest stage, and through his great influence shaped the world into a more inquisitive and understanding place. Dipper was ultimately incredibly proud of the world he and his family built together, and was extremely happy to see his own children grow up in it.
Pacifica: The Last Northwest shed the stigma of her family name willingly upon her marriage to Dipper soon after they became adults, working alongside her scientist husband as a brilliant public advocate for the truth of magic and a savvy economics wizard for their various magical projects, though their most beloved invention is naturally the twin children they have together. As opposed to profiting off them like her ancestors did, Pacifica's work served to mitigate and heal the tragedies experienced by mankind, and through the application of magic resource shortages were averted, the environment was repaired and public health was boosted world wide.
Mabel: She took to her newfound celebrity alongside her brother and sister-in-law like a fish to water, spending her adult years as essentially a high flying playboy diplomat, working to smooth over the rough (surprise) introduction Mewni and magic have with the people of earth, and in later years promotes peaceful exchange between different dimensions. Mabel never manages to settle down with a permanent love like her brother found, eventually having more exes than even her Grunkle Stan had wracked up and an extended gaggle of variably-human, sometimes adopted children, all of which she loves dearly and treats equally.
The Grunkles: The two Stans never fully recovered the lost pieces of their broken lives, but they aged to infirmity with an unshaken pride that the younger generation had avoided their mistakes. Stanley had the first heart attack around the time Stanford was becoming senile, and the two initiated the "retirement plan" they'd mutually sworn to each other after a talk about death.
The two old brothers set their affairs in order and said their goodbyes, and walked together through a one way portal to the Realm of Magic, which sang the two champions that had helped to save it from the Nightmare Realm into a peaceful, well deserved rest. They forgot the multiverse, their parents, Jersey, Gravity Falls and even the younger pair of twins in their last moments, able to release these thoughts with confidence that the future was in good hands. Their brains turned off in synch with each other, dreaming of being young and happy again aboard a Stan O'War sailing off into a golden sunset.
Star: As much as she came to crave the idea of leaving the crown behind to be a normal teenage girl, "The Destroyer Princess" Star had many decades of work ahead of her regarding the protection and integration of Mewni's survivors into the rapidly changing Earth, of protecting her beloved adopted home from the perils of the multiverse, and with the consequences of her alliance with Emperor Belos. The fearsome reputation she had accumulated across the multiverse proved a useful deterrent on some occasions, while other times it caused diplomatic issues, but those who knew Star personally could attest she never lost her bubbly enthusiasm for life as she grew up, and remained a deeply loving mother and wife to the family she would build with Marco, made of both their own direct children and many adoptions.
Marco: Echo Creek's Bad Boy proved misunderstood no longer, growing up to be a muscular action hero badass adored by thirsty fans across the multiverse for both his many impressive missions (hostage rescues, subduing abominations, capturing terrorists, etc) and outspoken support for all manner of social equalities. His marriage to Star (conducted according to Johansen traditions) had its ups and downs in line with the exciting life she continued to lead, but their older years saw the two retire peacefully in an exotic dimension, as still in love as ever.
Moon: The Last Queen of Mewni never quite recovers emotionally from seeing her home dimension die and most of her subjects wiped out, and spends the rest of her life in a secluded retirement with River. She never quite comes to peace with her daughter's equal treatment of men and monsters, but between acknowledging how strong Star has grown and suffering her own lingering depression, Moon never has the energy to challenge Star on these things again, and finds a degree of peace living out her days as a melancholy grandmother to Star and Marco's children. Star herself would gradually come to see her mother with a mix of exasperation and pity for how she remained forever looking to the past not doesn't interfere with Moon bonding with the children, outside of making sure she doesn't impress any outdated social values on them.
Eclipsa: The Queen of Darkness finally did what she had always wanted: retired from royalty and raised her family in obscurity, well, as much obscurity as you can get when your husband is giant shapeshifting monster man. They became incredibly close to the Diaz-Butterfly family of course, and Meteora plus Mariposa grew to be children of the revolutionary new world their loved ones had built.
The Irken Empire: Infected with the madness of the lost Invader, the Empire of cybernetic conquerors brutally cannibalized itself even as their ancient enemies were destroyed by their association with Bill Cipher. Certain fortress worlds and fleet commands disconnected themselves from the Irken command pathway to escape this fate, and were gradually worn down under blockades until resource shortages demanded opening trade with other species, beginning a long and painful path to Irken integration with the galactic community.
The Diamond Authority: With an emotionally devastated Blue as the sole surviving member of the Authority's ruling caste the once sprawling galactic empire dissolved into conflicting peace brigades and loyalist military elements. Steven Universe is eventually brought in by the other Crystal Gems to sign a treaty with Blue, wherein she is allowed to abdicate into exile with regular visitation from the only life form she has any remaining affection for ("Pink" in this instance) in exchange for commanding the surviving Loyalists to disarm completely. Many refused to heed this command and become independent pirate warlords that would plague the galaxy for centuries. Blue herself was assassinated via proton bomb four years into her exile, with dozens of groups, including various Pink Factor Gem rebel groups, claiming responsibility.
Pink Diamond: Gemkind was quick to do away with their Imperial Gods after the destruction of the Authority, save the lost youngest: The truth about Pink Diamond proved incredibly complex and difficult to communicate across the crumbling empire, resulting in her being venerated by the Pink Factor survivors as a messianic figure that willingly surrendered her form in order to grace Gemkind with her Factor and liberate them. Steven ultimately lives a much less stressful life on his earth as a result, as the liberated Gem underclasses have no need of his or the ancient Crystal Gems' guidance in the new, peaceful settlements they build with one another.
The Boiling Isles: In the wake of Bill's destruction Emperor Belos returns to his prior machinations, but finds the newly expanding Magical Earth to be a far grander obstacle than he anticipated, and a state of Cold War swiftly came to exist between the Imperial Coven and the newly formed Magic Human Coalition. Luz, Eda, and King, while not formally outlaws on the new earth the Coalition builds, become inhabitants of the fringe but do eventually reconcile with Lilith down the road.
Cutting Room Floor
Before this AU of mine is wrapped up for good, here are some ideas that were charted out/developed to a major extent but ultimately did not have anywhere to fit in the narrative that I found satisfying.
-Back in "Three More" there was going to be one more "Tom tries to marry Star" plot before the Lucitor open invasion became the plan, which would actually succeed most of the way to the point of getting Tom and a hypnotized Star up to a demonic alter, but at the last minute Marco, Dipper and Reverse Dipper according to my notes would have literally crashed the wedding by wiring Rasticore's dimensional chainsaw to the hood of a car and cutting the portal open while it's driving very fast. This was part of a bigger idea about involving a Reverse Falls subplot but that was scrapped completely for being too complex an idea to fit anywhere, which is probably something I should have done more often with this material.
-There should have been a Ford and Mabel DIO adventure at some point.
-A larger subplot in the Boiling Isles was going to be a bit of historical mystery about the realm's demon inhabitants being the source of the Underworld's initial population in the same vein as Mewmans coming from earth, but the Lucitors are trying to create a revisionist narrative where demons originated in the Underworld and established a splinter population on the Isles to justify future aggression against the Coven.
-The much shorter story "Field Work" also on my profile was going to be a place where various little prequel plots about Dipper and company living and learning in Gravity Falls before Three Can Keep A Secret starts. Would have been lots of monster hunts as he and Pacifica grow closer; one idea was for a return to the "cursed video game" plot that would feature Dipper and Pacifica being brought into the world of a Legend of Zelda parody with a bit of Fire Emblem, getting forced into the rolls of rescuing hero and captured princess respectively, and finding their unique ways of subverting these:
Dipper would use a lot of trickery and bug exploitation to get around poorly balanced damage sponge enemies (this entry in the franchise was widely panned for having unpolished balancing and a punishing weapon condition system as well as for sucking the player in and causing them to to die in real life) that he lacks the strength to fight normally, while Pacifica is determined to escape herself and while she never makes it all the way on her own, her numerous escape attempts end up sabotaging most of the final dungeon's bullshit puzzles and platforming traps, allowing Dipper to make it half way and the two to reunite. There's also, of course, be the required gag of Dipper getting an annoying fairy companion helper (who'd be a fairly obvious metaphor for Mabel) and just offhandedly swatting it once he decides to go it alone.
One thing I really found lacking about the original "Three Can Keep A Secret" looking back at it was that there's very little of Dipper and Pacifica actually growing to like each other, as by the time Mabel returns they're both very in love with each other but still have personal issues keeping them from confessing. "Field Work" would have had more sort little stories showcasing this, with a running gag being that the two are always breaking some kind of Northwest Family Curse, since Pacifica's ancestors wracked up a lot of those over the generations. During this part of their relationship Pacifica would also still have had a bunch of her mean girl personality traits that she's still working on phasing out, as I never cared for Dipfica stuff that makes Paz too nice right away, and find their romantic dynamic more interesting when she's still pretty mean and harsh towards a lot of people but has a very deep, very sincere soft spot for Dipper himself.
-Something else I wish I could have worked in, either as a Field Work story or just into the very beginning of the original Three, is a personal chapter dedicated to Ford where he undergoes an evaluation and discovers he's on the autism spectrum, and was never diagnosed previously due to the understanding of the spectrum being incredibly primitive when he was young. Ford always reminded me personally of an uncle I have who wasn't diagnosed until very late in their life, and I see a lot of their traits sort of reflected in Ford and thought it'd be nice to give some representation to a type of traditional social outsiders beyond just the queer sexualities.
-More overt conflict was initially planned to occur between Star and Moon, driven by Eclipsa more deliberately "corrupting" Star, but with how dire the threat of Bill and the Lucitors came to be it seemed stupid and out of character for them to dissolve into outright infighting while that was going on. A fully realized epilogue would have seen mother and daughter's ideals break more peacefully but still somewhat bitterly.
And of course, the story itself suffered massive cuts in presentation when it went from being a fully realized and composed narrative to these rambling fic outlines that I'm glad to finally bring to an end. Completing this epic had simply become an unattainable goal as my irl living conditions, time availability, emotional state and financial status all got worse over time, so I hope this has proved some small token of satisfaction and closure to everyone who has stuck around to the end.
The Final Author's Note
Right, well, that's the end of it. This was a personal fan project I worked on for many years, including some of the worst in my life so far, and in the end it strangely feels both much more grand and more disappointing than I had hoped when it started. Never the less, I am glad to have done all of this; it has taught me a lot of valuable lessons about composition and narrative planning I hope will improve the quality of an original fiction YA pulp sci-fi novel I'm developing now. All of feedback and reviews I've gotten from you the readers has been awesome, and I thank everyone who checked this out to any extent most profoundly. Thank you for wadding through so much of my crap, haha.
As always, anyone who wishes to make use of this AU has my complete permission to, and if there are tons of lingering questions in the review box I might put up one more chapter answering them, but I hope that this wraps it all up.
I had never really expected this story to go so far or get so crazy when it started, just as something I did to vent about how much I hated the entire ending to Gravity Falls while everyone else loved it, and was kinda hoping it would kick off more Apprentice Dipper fan work but I always figured the latter was a long shot. The Star Vs connection happened largely because I liked the show and thought the parallels to Gravity Falls were too good to pass up, and then when that ended I found myself in the minority again, thinking that there's actually a ton of interesting stuff about the Star Vs ending despite it being rushed and choppy, and that people interpret the chain of events in the most unflattering way possible. So then I decided I was going to try and do that ending justice by having the Queens of Mewni kill the Nightmare Realm, and everything just sort of ran away from me and the whole AU became about salvaging the really profound, interesting stuff I found in cartoons I like from all the flaws and dreck that stifled their potential.
If you want to take any closing morals from this story, here they are:
-Family can be great but it still entirely depends on people treating each other with genuine, reciprocated kindness and fairness. If a family member is treating someone poorly or exploiting them then they have just as much right to tell them off or cut out their influence as they would to an unrelated jerkass. Being bonded through the womb doesn't give anyone any kind of right to exploit another human being.
-Emotional decision making is wrong, and the best of actions are those that result from careful planning and thoughtful analysis of all circumstances. Love is a beautiful thing but it has no place ruling the fates of millions, and only science can be relied upon to resolve social inequalities, solve environments crisis or treat medical illness. Listen to and obey experts when they are discussing things related to their field; they know better than you do, that is why they are experts. Climate change is real and vaccines work, if you got this far in the reading but still refuse these facts then go drown yourself.
-There is nothing, good or ill, that coordinated and applied human effort cannot accomplish or understand.
-Never ever give so much as an inch of compromise to the people who champion blind obedience to a strong leader, to the sort of people who want their race to be protected by the law but not bound by it, while everyone else is bound by the law yet not protected by it. Wether they call themselves Fascists, Traditionalists or State's Rights Advocates, this is an ideology of inherently bad faith that can never be reformed or satisfied with appeasement and will always strike again when they have the opportunity to.
The ending to Gravity Falls is what inspired me to create this fanfic since I emphasized with Dipper far more than the writers clearly intended me to and felt he got screwed over in the end, but the resolution to Steven Universe was way more problematic than even that and is what motivated me to finish this, even in this utterly rough state. Anyone else who was pissed off by that ending should check out any given Classic Series Doctor Who serial with the title "BLANK of the Daleks" if you want to watch something with similar themes but much better. I personally think the Diamonds had the potential to become iconic, mold breakingly horrifying female villains on par with the nazi pepperpots themselves, but then the show just made them hysterical, depressed women that pose no real threat to innocent lives and are overthrown by their own emotional instabilities. Bleh.
But, despite being motivated a great deal by spite to write this, I had a lot of good times with it and am ready to move on now. It helped me realize my own strengths and weaknesses as a writer (criticism, action and plot planning come easy, but dialogue is hard) and how to polish them for what I hope will be a real novel one day, and it helped me work through a lot of grief and dark emotions.
And with all that, I have little else to say. Thank you all for reading, keep yourselves safe out there and please, treat the people around you who reciprocate with understanding during this nightmarish period of human history, and try to make the world a better place.