Even after its last new episode was released on the 15th of February 2016, Gravity Falls has made its mark as one of the best animated series of the last decade. With its supernatural setting, its narrative intrigue in every episode, its exciting world-building and its compelling storylines, it excels at the delicate art of touching the imaginations of both young and older fans alike.
That goes the same for its beloved characters, whose arcs in the main series go beyond the series’ run on fan theories and story expansions. With that said, let us name all of the ten best characters of Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls.
Pacifica Northwest
Pacifica is the typical popular girl with the blonde hair, the rich family status, and the mean girl attitude. She started as a rival to Mabel. Her attitude is mainly manipulative, as she tended to take advantage of others’ weaknesses for her personal gain.
However, she takes a personal transformation in the second season when she and Mabel teamed up to outnumber the Lilliputtians that interfered with their golf match in “The Golf War”, and when she and Dipper uncovered a horrible truth about her ancestors in “Northwest Mansion Mystery”.
Candy Chiu
One of Mabel’s best friends in the town, Candy is a meek, shy yet joyful and supportive Korean girl. Like Mabel and Grenda, she showed eccentric traits that made the two connect to her. And mutually, they share many preteen obsessions.
Despite being a supporting character, Candy had instances where she stood out, like in “Sock Opera” where she displayed extreme talent on the synthesizer and in “Roadside Attraction” where she saved the gang from demise by a spider-person and reconciled with Dipper after the two seemingly struck a romance.
Soos Ramirez
Every establishment needs to have its most loyal worker and busybody to do the heavy lifting. For Grunkle Stan’s Mystery Shack, he has Soos. As the show’s archetypal gentle giant, he is the shack’s handyman and also the most clueless of the gang.
Despite that, he has proven himself to be competent in other fields, like engineering, disc jockeying and pinball matches. His best moment is on the episode “Soos and the Real Girl”, where he meets a dating simulator named GIFfany and must come in terms of her intentions.
"Li'l" Gideon Gleeful
As Dipper and Grunkle Stan’s main rival, Gideon Gleeful is a worthy foe for the two leads in the first season and some parts of the second season. Li’l Gideon is the owner of the Tent of Telepathy, a more successful competitor of the Mystery Shack, which fancies itself as a site of Li’l Gideon’s fantastic psychic ability.
Unlike other residents of Gravity Falls, the young boy is aware of the supernatural phenomena occurring around the town. This leads him to push forth against the siblings, which leads him to be exposed as a fraud and get sent to jail.
Wendy Corduroy
Wendy is the stereotypical cool girl of the gang. Belonging to a family of lumberjacks, she serves as a cashier at the Mystery Shack. And thanks to her family blood, she has shown a lot of skills that she inherited from her father, like her robust strength, her survival skills, and her tenacity when fighting against foes.
A running theme is her being the object of affection of Dipper. And many episodes feature the boy trying to woo her, to no avail. She is revealed to have past boyfriends, including Robbie, whom Dipper detests. Yet, Wendy cares deeply for Dipper.
Bill Cipher
The central antagonist of the series, Bill Cipher is the destructive demonic force that is behind the supernatural occurrences of Gravity Falls. With a simple appearance of a yellow triangle, a top hat, a bow tie, and a serpent-like eye to resemble the all-seeing eye, Cipher had an intriguing buildup that resulted in his release in “Dreamscaperers” and his rule during “Weirdmageddon”.
While he lent a twisted sense of humor to his followers, the demon maintained a threatening (and often nightmarish) presence, down to his bursts of temper, his reality manipulations and his ability to read and control people’s mind.
Grunkle Stan/Stanley Pines
The third main character of the show, Grunkle Stan is the con artist uncle to Dipper and Mabel and the owner of the shady tourist trap, the Mystery Shack. Throughout the series, Grunkle Stan showed himself as a coarse relative to the twins, complete with his oblivious recklessness, his salesmanship pride, and his relentless get-rich-quick schemes.
As the series delve deeper on town secrets, Grunkle Stan showed a softer side, especially during the episode “Not What He Seems”, where he is revealed to be hiding a highly dangerous device and the three journals to bring back his twin brother Stanford, whose identity he named for himself. Despite this, he aided the twins in their fight against Bill Cipher during “Weirdmageddon”.
Uncle Ford/Stanford Pines
The long-lost twin brother of Grunkle Stan, Stanford Pines (or Uncle Ford) was the secret author of the three journals that were the center of the show’s supernatural mysteries. He once encountered Bill Cipher in the past and befriended him. However, when he learned of his true intentions, Ford tried to stop him by destroying the teleporter, only for him to get trapped in the dimensional rift.
Ever since, Stanley used his twin brother’s identity and attempted to bring him back to their time. On his short screentime, he served as a reliable mentor to Dipper. After their departure from Gravity Falls, Ford asked for Grunkle Stan’s support on them finding similar anomalies around the world, which the latter accepts.
Dipper Pines
Born with a birthmark that resembled the Big Dipper constellation, thus the namesake, Dipper is the now 13-year-old twin brother of Mabel and an aspiring adventurer. After finding a hidden journal in the Mystery Shack and encountering a group of gnomes in the first episode “Tourist Trapped”, Dipper was determined to uncover every mystery and phenomenon present in Gravity Falls. Portrayed as level-headed and perceptive, he was often the subject of scorn by others in the town. But slowly, he showed competence in his detective skills, his leadership stances and his compassion for his loved ones.
Despite that, he is revealed to have vulnerabilities that humanized his character, like his penchant for pop songs, his fear of wearing a lamb onesie, his distinctive clones and his affections for Wendy.
Mabel Pines
Last, but obviously not the least, the best character of Gravity Falls has to be Mabel Pines. As the heart and soul of the show, Mabel is the polar opposite to Dipper’s serious personality; in that, she is happy-go-lucky, random and silly yet optimistic, motivating and sympathetic. Mabel displayed a lot of quirks that makes her standout, like her talent in crafts, her collection of knitted sweaters, her optimism on dating and her love for her pig Waddles.
Even with those qualities, there are times where she is vital to the entirety of the show’s narrative. In “Sock Opera”, she faced Bill Cipher on a scuffle, despite the cost of losing her sock puppets. In “Not What He Seems”, she took a crucial decision to trust Grunkle Stan that lead him to set Uncle Ford free. And in “Weirdmageddon 2: Escape from Reality”, she took a leap in maturity and crashed her reality bubble.
Thanks to her lofty character and affable cheerfulness, Mabel is an endearing character in Gravity Falls.