And in light of my post earlier today, Gravity Falls can now suck it…
…I didn’t think the focus was on how Robby was unfairly treated- he’s not the main character, not someone I have any reason to care about…
I’ll make sure to remember to keep away from you for the rest of my life. You’re too self-centered for my taste.
...empathizing with the protagonist is (unless subverted) highly imperative. It’s not a matter of personal taste but rather form and function: if the audience cannot empathize with the protagonist, our hearts are not with them, we cannot understand their actions and comprehend both their merits and faults, and the magic is gone...
As far as I can tell, I am the audience as much as anyone else...
I’m fairly sure I never said that you weren’t this show’s audience? Nor did I say that you have to empathize with Dipper or his own perceptions of the world that, as the point of view character, the show displays.
In regards to the parts of my post that you bolded, I am looking at things from a writer’s standpoint, and in the type of story Gravity Falls is (character-driven by Alex Hirsch’s own admittance) it is the writer’s job when working with an “unreliable” narrator to mould the world around the protagonist’s worldview. If any single member of the show’s audience (ignoring “the audience” as a collective for a moment, because if the entire collective audience cannot empathize, then there is a serious problem unless that was the intended result) is not drawn in by that, then that’s that, and there’s not much that can be done.
Rather, when I say “…empathizing with the protagonist is (unless subverted) highly imperative,” I don’t mean that any individual person has to empathize with the character, but instead that any given story should have such a character to be effective (unless, again, the opposite is the entire point of the piece). And it is, as you yourself have shown, a lot harder to like something without that empathy.
I similarly don’t want to turn this in to a mushy exchange of stories, but as someone who is not male and was bullied quite a bit when I was a child, I’m not seeing a lot of the gripes you have. I haven’t noticed Wendy being merely an object for Dipper to assert his male character status on (in fact, in The Inconveniencing, wasn’t Dipper willing to sacrifice his masculinity and pride for the sake of rescuing not only himself and Mabel and Wendy, but all of her friends, including Robbie?), nor seen the twins’ actions at the end of this episode as bullying (petty revenge, yes, but not bullying, and I would argue that those two things carry vastly different connotations), and I’ll be the first to admit that my inability to compromise my moral code has caused me no end of grief in real life.
In other words, you are projecting, which is exactly what the audience is supposed to do and is by no means a bad thing. After all, it’s one of the reasons POV characters are effective in the first place. But in your case it hinders your enjoyment of the show, which again is fine. It’s your life and your opinions and your point of view, and if it clashes with that of the show, you’re allowed to stick with that no matter what others say about it.
A brief admission, though: I spent some time deciding whether or not to write my first response, and decided to do so not because I felt your argument was invalid (because everybody is entitled to their own opinions, and if I said that I had no things that I disliked while other people liked them, I’d be blatantly lying), but because you, so adamant about how you have the right to your own opinion about the show, insulted someone else for theirs. To call someone self-centered because they do not empathize with a character while simultaneously defending your point about not empathizing with a character just left a bad taste in my mouth, that’s all.