The Reverse Falls timeline

Back in 2018 me and @forever_gf618 ended up trying to retrieve some old Gravity Falls fandom history. After 6 years from the original posts stuff had changed: people moved on, deleted their blogs, cleaned up some old stuff or more simply they changed their blog urls. We slowly moved more and more back in time trying to find the seed that later grew to the most prolific AU in the whole fandom.

Thanks to that we learnt a lot on how to retrieve long deleted/forgotten stuff on Tumblr. In case you need to do something similar have some tips:

You can delete or edit your blog posts but if someone reblogs it then will be preserved even after you delete it. This includes also all the assests like pictures.
If someone reblogs something it’s highly probable that they reblogged something from the same blog or tag. Use the archive to go quickly to the period of the reblog and look for similar posts. This process is higly iterative and can take you to a lot of dead ends but if persevere you will find someone that went on a reblog spree and that’s your jackpot.
The Internet Archive saves almost everything, give it a shot. I found really useful to look at the rss feed archived. They have a lot more stuff than your average blog page but they are harder to read. Just use the CTRL-F in your browser to check stuff quickly.
Google is your friend, use site:tumblr.com or inurl:tumblr.com and it can give you some new leads.
If the Reverse Image Search from Google doesn’t have useful stuff the first time try again the next day. (Don’t ask me why it works sometimes, it still confuses me a lot)
Search the name of the blog on Twitter, it has a good internal search engine and people often connect their Twitter and Tumblr accounts to send a tweet to every reblog. Luckily the name of the OP blog and the url for the reblog is always included.

And this is a copy of what we discovered in case you were curious about old Gravity Falls fandom lore. Originally this was posted on @forever_gf618’s Amino blog but it’s now a bit hard to find because of the admins putting everything on private.

Archived blog post

Ever since I first joined Amino and the GF fandom, I’ve always seen one thing that’s common anywhere you go. An appreciation and craze for an Alternative Universe, by fans for fans.

It’s an AU called Reverse Falls. And it’s by far the most popular AU of this show (dare I say most overrated too). Personally, I find RF to be just plain weird. I’ve never really understood it but given its popularity, I can see the appeal some may have for it. And why they’d vote for it over regular GF whenever some newer member makes a poll asking that question.

But for how popular it is, no one seems to know who made? Reverse Falls origins are as mysterious as Bill Cipher’s. No one knows where it came from. Not even the wiki page has any info.

So, I decided to take matters into my own hands and uncover this mystery once and for all. We know Immortal Pines was made by Tawana Duncan, The Adoption AU by Marehami, Reunion Falls by sailorleo and even that Timestuck was made by dodofiasco. But who made Gravity Falls most iconic AU?

Well, I don’t think I have a solid answer but I feel I may have solved it.

I want to first give a huge thank you to my friend Aniron on Twitter for all his help. I could never have discovered all that I am about to say without him. And if you want a more detailed look at what we’ve found, you can check out the time line he made here.

So, where do you start when looking for evidence behind this AU’s origin? Well, first of all, what is Reverse Falls? It’s an AU that, shockingly, reverses the roles of the main characters. Dipper and Mabel are now Gleefuls and the villains, Gideon is now a Pines and nice, Pacifica for some reason is now named Southeast and Bill is now a pathetic blue cry baby. Yeah, you can tell I’m not a fan of this AU at all, but in the spirit of discovery, I decided to put that aside and look for answers.

The wiki page says that the earliest known mention of RF was in 2013 but I’m not that sure. I knew Tumblr would be the best place to look, but first, I decided to look on fanfic for any older stories under the Reverse Falls name. My search however only leads me to stories as far back as 2013. While AO3 gave older results, it was still not getting me anywhere.

I then decided to try the unofficial Gravity Falls Tumblr account (http://fuckyeahgravityfalls.com) to see if they had anything older. Sadly, the oldest thing I could find was going back all the way to January 2013 from a locked Tumblr account named remmidemmi. And I was looking under the original name of the AU which was Reverse Pines.

My quest it seemed was stuck. Now, I run a GF Fan account on Twitter (@forever_gf618), so I decided to ask the people there if they knew anything (I also asked Reddit but no one bothered to help there smfh).

My assumption was that the original first mention of Reverse Falls came from a Tumblr account that had long since been deleted or lost. Sure enough, some friends on Twitter told me that indeed the original poster is most likely gone and even offered to help me out.

Some very old mentions of Reverse Falls came from NSFW websites. But even they were from 2013. But personally, I felt that this AU is much older than 5 years. Given the Hand that Rocks the Mabel aired on July 6th 2012 and saw Gideon’s introduction, any early mention of Reverse Falls had to have come from then.

Then Aniron, one of my friends helping me out on this found it!

A link to a VERY old fanfic on fanfiction from October 2012.

Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/8616332/1/Role-Reversal

As far as we know, this is the earliest mention of Reverse Falls (I’ll refer to it as RF or Reverse Pines from now on) on fanfic. This means that RF is at least over 6 years old. Doing a bit of digging through old tweets lead us to a very old Tumblr account with many old Reverse Pines stuff from fan art to ideas.

Then we found something unexpected. An AU called Mahou Falls. IDEK what this AU is about and I’d rather not but it gives us the first glimpse of what standard Reverse Mabel looks like.

While it’s not RF exactly, it’s a good start. But of course, the goal of this expedition into the darkness of Tumblr is to yield the first mention of Reverse Pines, not something similar. This is the first thing similar to it. So, in a sense, you can say that the first glimpse of what would eventually become the Reverse Pines AU was from August of 2012.

But we want to find the oldest direct mentioning of the AU. Mahou Falls is like the prequel to what RF would become. So, more digging was done until…

WE DID IT!

Found on a VERY old Tumblr blog by the name of Chiisaicitrouille, was this….

The description though was just what we were looking for!!

“An au where Gideon is the sole child of the pines family and the twins are the nightmare offspring of the Gleefuls (nothing I draw today is good gomen).”

Was this it?! Had we done it!

This was a repost from a Tumblr user by the name of hotdogboyfriend. Like what we had been told, their Tumblr account was no more. We found more stuff made the following day from artwork to even a mini episode layout by user bl1ndg1rl. I can’t fit it all here but I highly suggest reading the timeline I linked above to get the full picture of what we found.

Beyond that we continued to find more art that added in other characters and expanded on the AU into what it is today. Oct 10th brought the introduction of Reverse Candy and Pacifica,

Oct 17th saw the first fanfic on Fanfiction,

Oct 18th saw Reverse Pacifica be brought into the AU properly and also the introduction of Will Cipher (but note this is before Bill was revealed so he’s just referred to as reverse Triangle man or something like that). And all of this leads up October 24th when Time Traveler’s Pig first aired.

So, what conclusions can be drawn from this? Well, we couldn’t find any mention of Reverse Pines before October 9th 2012 (if you don’t include Mahou Falls that is), so that leaves us with the verdict that hotdogboyfriend is most likely the creator of the Reverse Falls concept. Back then it was known as Reverse Pines so that can explain why no one can find the origins (that and the fact hotdogboyfriend’s Tumblr is gone). I guess when the wiki said early mentions go as far back as 2013, they must have been referring to the AU in its current name as Reverse Falls, not its former name as Reverse Pines or RevPines.

So, am I saying that hotdogboyfriend is the creator of all of this? That their one Tumblr blog went so far that now this AU is literally everywhere? When asking the people who helped me find this, they all seemed to agree that we’ve done it. But of course, unless we verify this 100% with hotdogboyfriend or anyone else from the Tumblr blogs that we found, we can’t put this mystery to rest definitively. We still don’t even know how this AU out of all of them was the one that had a popularity explosion. Imagine if instead of this, Mahou Falls became the biggest GF AU instead?

So, to answer the question, who made the Reverse Falls AU, Gravity Falls most popular and most successful (and most overrated) AU? Well, in the end, the answer is still up for debate but personally, I’ll breathe easier knowing that the mystery is now solved rather than not.

The Reverse Falls AU

Created by hotdogboyfriend on Tumblr.

AKA Danielle Nicole.

The creator of Reverse Falls

UPDATE!

A huge thank you to Nova Starlyght for the new information. RF was made by Danielle Nicole (aka as mentioned hotdogboyfriend) on Tumblr. Currently under the name soosramirez.