Misanthropy in the Midwest?

I wanted to make an attempt to clear this up for some folks, as it’s apparently still a topic of debate/discussion.

As quoted by Michael Rianda (writer and creative director for the show):

“In the character design phase, the character designers thought that some characters looked better with five fingers and some looked better with four. They were right, the characters do visually look better that way, but we should have been consistent for various reasons. Our bad. Just pretend they all have five.”

You can find this, as well as responses to various other questions, in this thread on Reddit.

Basically, the overall build of the character seems to determine how many fingers they’re going to have.  As far as I’ve noticed, characters with large/wide arms (relative to their body) and no discernible wrist (i.e., no change in width from arm to hand) tend to always have five, while characters with more slender arms (and no wrist) tend to have four.  In special cases, where the character actually has a defined wrist (where their hands are wider than their arms), it ends up coming down to clothing (Deputy Durland’s arms are visible - he has five.  Robbie’s arms are hidden under a baggy hoodie, which creates a rounded cutoff point at his wrist - he has four).

Animation errors have had these fluctuate, such as Robbie’s five-fingered hands taking out the backmasked CD.  There’s also been the extreme case of two different numbers of fingers on either hand of the same person.

If the character designers were to try and force five fingers on every single character, you would run into what I call the “Kids Next Door” effect, where there ends up being just too much hand, thus throwing off the balance of the design.  They would need larger hands just to fit the lines in.  Now, with a show where the five main characters are addressed as numbers rather than names, this is really unavoidable, but still no less awkward.

When it comes to the idea that only all the “kids” of Gravity Falls have four fingers, it’s really anyone with exceedingly slender arms, because if you were to force another line on a part of a drawing that small, you would just have a black blob rather than being able to tell their fingers apart.

In closing, the only remaining “finger” mystery of Gravity Falls is the six-fingered hand portrayed on the books.  Many of us are already aware of the owner of those hands due to a leak, but then we don’t yet know the context of that leak, and so at this moment, must still consider it unresolved.

Six fingers is the only finger number that is unnatural, and requiring explanation.  Everything else is just aesthetics.