bill cipher.

Who is Bill Cipher?

Bill Cipher is the main villain of the Gravity Falls series. He is a demon capable of entering the mind and taking over a person's body. He can be summoned using an incantation found in Book 2. In Take Back the Town he is killed by Stanford Pines, along with the mind of Stanley Pines, who after a while returns to normal.

Bill Cipher's Personality

Bill is a cunning, eccentric, crazy, psychopathic, and physically irreverent demon who finds most things funny. He is outrageous and flamboyant, as well as a quick talker and thinker. Even though he may come across as merely annoying, he should not be underestimated; for when he is angry, he causes his judgement to quickly change with a caring force, as he will unleash his near-omnipotent powers on those unfortunate enough to make him angry. When accused of being insane, Bill agrees with the statement. Bill is not someone who believes in rules. Instead, he follows his own selfish philosophy which means doing whatever he wants without caring about the consequences. He thinks laws and physics are meaningless and displays an irresistible urge to break those rules by causing as much absolute chaos as possible. The lives he ruins have no merit to him and he finds amusement in tormenting and turning people's worlds upside down. He also sees reality as an "illusion" and values ​​its destruction. When possessing Dipper's body, Bill is shown to be rather masochistic, harming himself in various ways for the thrill of it, exclaiming that "pain is hilarious." He seems to have little knowledge about the human body, specifically its physical limits. This comes back to him when he fights Mabel over Journal 3, falling exhausted. In "Weirdmageddon Part 1", he displays sadistic tendencies, such as when he shuffles "the function of every hole in Preston Northwest's face" and in "Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back The Falls" when he decides to kill one of the Pines twins "just for the fun of it."

bill cipher appearance

Bill is a yellow, triangular Egyptian pyramid-like creature with a large, feline-like eye with eyelashes, as it is based on the Eye of Providence, which often appears in Gravity Falls. He floats around and rarely uses his feet. He has thin black legs and hands, his arms don't seem to be in any fixed position, and he can move around the perimeter of his body without any difficulty. He has a tall top hat that floats just above his head. He occasionally carries a small black or yellow cane. The lower part of his body has a brick line pattern and a small black bowtie. He has no fixed size, and has been shown to be as small as a hand and much larger than the Mystery Shack. When he gets angry, he turns red and his eye glows a light red. Despite Mabel calling Bill an "isosceles monster" in "Dreamscaperers", and in the book Dipper and Mabel and the Curse of the Time Pirates' Treasure!: Select Your Own Choose-Venture it is strongly implied in the Axolotl poem that Bill is an equilateral triangle: the first verse says "sixty degrees that come in threes", and equilateral triangles have three internal angles of 60° each.

bill cipher background transform

Trillions of years before the events of the series, Bill Cipher originated from the second dimension. Bill, however, despised living there, describing it as a dimension of "flat minds in a flat world with flat dreams". He liberated his dimension by burning it down along with everyone, including his own parents. He ended up atop a seething, intergalactic froth shifting between dimensions - an unstable, irregular crawlspace known as the Nightmare Realm; however, due to the Nightmare Realm's anarchy and lack of any consistent physics or rules, it was doomed to eventual self-destruction. After coming to know of a prophecy that claimed he could merge the Nightmare Realm with the third dimension, Bill manipulated countless humans over the eons so that he could become a physical being and free that dimension as well. Without a physical form, Bill could only access the dreams of the dimension's beings. In order to facilitate his dealings with mortals, he took the name "Bill Cipher", as his true name would "evaporate him with a look of horror and ecstasy on his face." Among his targets were the natives living in what would become a town called Gravity Falls, Oregon. He asked a shaman named Modoc to build an interdimensional entrance to the Nightmare Realm, but the result was made of branches. After Modoc learned of the prophecy foretelling an apocalyptic event from his interactions with Bill Cipher, he went on a rampage in an attempt to stop Bill's reign. The valley was deemed "cursed land" by the natives, who evacuated around 1000 AD. The natives discovered a way to defeat Bill using a zodiac with ten symbols, and left a painting in a cave of their encounter with the demon, including how to summon him, and more importantly, a warning to never read it.

bill cipher background transform

In the late 20th century, a young man named Stanford Pines, who had spent the past six years investigating the town's plethora of unnatural creatures and oddities, hit a roadblock in his discoveries as he ran out of answers as to how Gravity Falls' improbable aberrations had come to be such. However, the discovery of a cave filled with cryptic hieroglyphics gave him hope of attaining answers, such as the foretold message from an entity containing endless knowledge. Despite warnings against it, Ford repeated the incantation out loud, later summoning Bill into the man's mindscape, who recognized that Ford's brilliant yet arrogant and insecure nature, and his nearly friendless background made him an ideal pawn. Bill tricked him by presenting himself as a muse who chose one brilliant mind from each century for inspiration. He told Ford that the source of the town's anomalies was a dimension of weirdness that had seeped into his world. With Bill's help, Stanford drew up plans to create an interdimensional gateway beneath his house, and recruited his college friend Fiddleford McGucket (the town's crazy old man) and his mechanical process into the project. As construction got underway, Ford furthered his obsession with Bill, collecting memorabilia such as rugs and statues, modeling the architecture of his house in his image, turning his private study into a place of worship, and even allowing the demon to move freely in and out of his own mind. As their partnership seemingly grew into friendship, McGucket grew uneasy about the true purpose and function of the device they had built.

bill cipher background transform

On January 18, 1982, Ford and Fiddleford conducted their first test run with the active machine, which quickly went awry when the dummy placed in the portal dragged Fiddleford along with it. Though his experience within the device was brief (as Ford had rescued him shortly afterward), Fiddleford returned horrified at the visions he had endured while inside (specifically, Bill removing his exoskeleton to feed himself), predicting that an apocalyptic catastrophe would occur if the portal ever reached its full potential. McGucket asked Ford to destroy the machine, but he refused to abandon the pinnacle of his work. McGucket abandoned the project, leaving Ford to his own suspicions. During a confrontation with his former ally, Ford learned that Bill had tricked him into building a portal that would act as a gateway to the Nightmare Realm and allow the demon to bring its chaos and destruction to his universe. Horrified and betrayed, Ford shut down the project and created Project Mentem, a piece of machinery capable of biologically encrypting thoughts and preventing Bill from wreaking havoc on the mindscape. Unfortunately, his fear of Bill's inevitable return grew stronger, leading him to take extreme security measures by abandoning his research and hiding the instructions on how to operate the portal. Bill, however, could not be so easily deterred, and spent the next thirty years waiting for the machine to reactivate. Bill and the symbol he is based on, the Eye of Providence, frequently appear in Gravity Falls. He was the unseen creator of the cryptograms in the online game Rumble's Revenge. His name and existence is deduced by taking all the capital letters in the Rumble's Revenge cryptograms, to form the message: "MY NAME IS BILL".

1st season

A photo of Bill is briefly shown at the end of the opening theme. A similar image is seen in the entry about him in Journal 2. Enclosing him are various symbols that link to various characters in the show. In particular, when he first physically appears, he refers to Dipper, Mabel, and Soos as "Pine Tree, Shooting Star, and Question Mark," respectively. The entry also makes special note of the glasses symbol, the author of the book apparently having been alarmed by this. Below "Name: ???" is the text: "This strange, triangular being has appeared in my dreams every night for weeks." His full name appears in his Journal 3 entry. Behind his name is a message encrypted with a symbol substitution cipher; when decoded it reads: "Liar, Monster, Snappy Dresser". There are several notes scattered across the page, such as "Is he watching me?" and "Bill has proven himself to be one of the friendliest and most trustworthy individuals I have ever encountered. What a guy!, I honestly can't trust him more. He's not bad by any means, Bill is a true gentleman. "However, this last note is crossed out and underneath another note that says "Cannot be trusted!" can be found written in red ink. On the next page is a diagram of a human head and various aspects of its mind, its top part opens up for a drawing of Bill to enter it. In the bottom right corner of the page "DO NOT SUMMON AT ALL COSTS!" is written in large red letters. The rest of the page is splattered with blood from Ford's right eye, which began bleeding after he was possessed by Bill.

1st season

The episode "Dreamscaperers" marks the first time Bill is directly addressed and introduced in the series. Gideon Gleeful, in an attempt to take over the Mystery Shack once again, summons Bill. Gideon tells him to steal the safe combination to Stan Pines right out of his head, so that Gideon can steal the Shack's stock. Bill agrees once he knows it's Stan, but in exchange, Gideon would have to help him in his own plans, which are not revealed to the viewer. Gideon immediately agrees and the two shake it off. Unbeknownst to Gideon, Mabel and Soos witnessed the deal in the woods, and were aided by Dipper in following it into Stan's mind. Once inside Stan's head, Bill confronts the trio and boasts that he knows what everyone is thinking. To prove his claim, he summons Xyler and Craz from Mabel's imagination. He tricks Mabel and Soos into searching for Stan's safe combination memory first, knowing that they will lead directly to him. At some point Soos is separated from everyone else, and Bill takes his place. Once they find the right memory, he takes it and nearly runs away with it. But as he reads the phrase aloud to Gideon (to whom it was connected), Mabel blasts the memory into another Bottomless Pit memory with a Nyarf dart. Gideon breaks their deal, much to Bill's fury. Bill turns his anger on Mabel and Soos by bringing their nightmares to life and killing Xyler and Craz. Dipper returns in a timely manner and tells Mabel and Soos that while they are in Stan's mindscape they can do whatever they want. They fight Bill and he is nearly defeated. And just as it seems he will be forced out of Stan's head, he puts an end to it all instead. Shocked, he decides to let them go, and after warning them of a mysterious darkness that will change everything they care about, he tells them he will watch them. He leaves in a representation of the zodiac, almost identical to the one that appears in his entrance.

invocation

To summon Bill, an image of your victim is required. The eyes on the victim must be blacked out and he must be surrounded by eight candles in a circular formation. The following incantation must then be recited: "Triangulum, entangulum. Veneforis dominus ventium. Veneforis venetisarium!" His eyes will turn blue. The sky will turn grey. You will say "Triangle" backwards 5 times (Olugnairt Olugnairt Olugnairt Olugnairt Olugnairt). A triangle appears. One eye opens and then he becomes Bill's normal appearance. However, Bill is shown to have the ability to temporarily pull other beings into his plane of existence if he so chooses, as seen in "Sock Theater".

bill cipher in the books

It is believed that in Book 1 there is a writing about the existence of the creature. In Book 2 there is a ritual written to invoke him. In Book 3, Bill is initially named as a muse who helps fulfill dreams and inspires great minds. After Stanford Pines realizes the deception, the pages that name him are stained with a red liquid similar to blood and he warns that under no circumstances should Bill be summoned, as he is a dangerous creature.

Bill Cipher Fun Facts

On one corner of the -$12 bill it says "Semper vigilantum," which in Spanish translates to "Always watching." It is unknown what he wanted in return when he made the deal with Gideon, but it is possible that this will involve obtaining the power of the portal. Before he physically appears, there were many allusions to him, such as the symbol on the rug and window of the cabin, the image at the end of the song, and elsewhere, until he makes his first physical appearance later. Bill not only appears at the end of the intro, a drawing of him also appears on a page of one of the journals. Bill refers to Soos as "Question Mark", Mabel as "Shooting Star" and Dipper as "Pine" since they are their symbols. Curiously, he did not call Gideon Joy as "Star" or Stanford Pines as "Six-Fingered Hand", despite the fact that it has been confirmed that these symbols represent them. Although in English he refers to Stanford as "Sixer" in some parts. Bill Cipher's name comes from Bill and Cipher, meaning his name means Bill Cipher. In the episode "Wrestler Fights" in one of the games someone appears playing and Bill is dancing. In "Sock Opera" Bill displays a more evil personality seen in "Escaping from Dreams". Bill can appear without being summoned. It is possible that when Gideon summoned him and made him return to Gravity Falls, he managed to get Bill to be free in the town and can appear at will.

Bill Cipher Fun Facts

Bill can connect to the future. Alex Hirsch commented that Bill is a combination of the eye of providence and "Mr. Peanut." When Bill says goodbye to Gideon in Out of the Blue, he mentions; "Reality is an illusion, the Universe is a hologram." This is a reference to the sandbag paradox, which states that everything tends to change its meaning depending on what it is compared to, in this case, that life may be a dream within a higher state of consciousness, and to the Unified String Theorem, which states that the Universe bends and recycles on its own structure based on "strings", so the entire Universe could be a hologram within a higher Universe. From what he said before being destroyed in Stanley's mind (if you play it backwards he says: MY TIME HAS COME TO BURN, I INVOKE THE ANCIENT POWER THAT I MAY RETURN). In Take Back The Town he may not have died. Alex Hirsch confirmed in an interview that Bill was originally going to be green, but because they thought he looked like a leaf they changed him to his current yellow color. Alex Hirsch confirmed in an interview that Bill was originally supposed to enter all of the main characters' dreams, including Mabel and Soos, not just Stanley Pines', in the episode "Out of Dreams." He also confirmed that many of the ideas from that episode were later used in "Out of Dreams." Bill's voice in the US is performed by Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls.