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fic writer | #kyman #creek #style

They’re so terrible. They should kiss.

The key is not making him “stupid.” Mild ID often presents as exactly this kind of scatter: islands of real competence (especially social and practical) next to genuine deficits in processing speed, working memory, or academic abstraction. That actually makes his cruelty more grounded: he’s not a super-genius evil mastermind. He’s a kid with real limitations who has learned to weaponize the strengths he does have (charm, timing, reading people’s soft spots) to compensate for the places he falls short.

It also reframes some of the grandiose narcissism. The constant need to be the most important person in the room and the refusal to sit with inadequacy hit differently if part of the inadequacy is real and lifelong. The disability becomes another thing he has to dominate or deny.

It doesn’t undercut the sadism or the antisemitism. If anything it can sharpen them: the same cognitive rigidity that makes certain concepts hard for him to grasp also makes him less likely to self-correct once he’s locked onto a target or a worldview.

Honestly, he doesn’t know why he chose that as an out-of-department elective for his major. It is ass even if it combines two of his more favorite subjects. The ten page essay on the topic looms heavily on his mind while he lays in bed. On the bright side, the assignment allows the choice of a critique, and he certainly has a lot to say about the subject at hand.

He knows deep within himself it is because he is a contrarian, thank you very much. Otherwise he wouldn’t bother, would risk a failing grade, and would blow off the entire assignment if he didn’t give a fuck about his spotless GPA.

“Why did I take this class?” Kyle huffs under his breath, staring at the darkening popcorn ceiling of his dorm.

Kyle sits up from lying on his bed and looks around the room—clothes are everywhere along with scattered textbooks. He shares his dorm with a slovenly dumbass who got into the university on a sports scholarship. Too bad he isn’t home to catch an earful from Kyle for how messy he is.

Too damn fucking bad his roommate is Eric fucking Cartman who got in only because he’s an excellent linebacker, and plays for the college football team while working on his political science major.

Every time Kyle has to hear one of his long winded, completely out-of-touch, out-of-pocket centrist talking points brimming with bigotry, he wants to force feed Eric his beanie.

Thinking about Cartman for more than two seconds gives Kyle an ulcer-inducing migraine. It’s bad enough that he has to put up with him and live with him, so he shuts the thought of Cartman out of his mind entirely.

The only upside is that Cartman has long curbed his antisemitic commentary. Kyle cannot remember the last time Cartman has called him a “jew” or worse. No, he just chooses some other loaded terms to sling at Kyle during mutual disagreements over how annoying they find each other.

Kyle, in retrospect, had stopped calling him a “fatass.” It wouldn’t be accurate, anyway. The tubby racist boy that lugged behind him and his friends had massively slimmed down and bulked up. He’s now a thick powerhouse of a football player who had shot up nearly six feet in height.

“Eugh!” Kyle exclaims when the revelation dawns on him once more that he is exactly two inches shorter than Eric.

The two had made their growth spurts a contest in middle school with one year, Kyle being taller by a few centimeters and another year, Cartman being taller.

Kyle thought that he would have won that competition in sophomore year when he was 5’9 and Cartman was 5’6, but no.

Nope.

He remembers going to the temple and praying about the shit when Cartman shot up five inches, now standing at 5’11 with Kyle stuck at 5-fucking-9.

Putting off his assignment some more, Kyle grabs his phone off the bedside table and swipes the screen up, unlocking it with facial biometrics. He clicks on the blue Tumblr app and squints when he sees one of the worst possible analyses of Terrance and Phillip ever.

It’s been years since he had watched the show, long past the age of finding farts and edgy jokes funny, but he follows the tags for art and meta — and sometimes adds his own two cents.

The blog he owns is a decade old, and has amassed thousands of followers from Terrance and Phillip edits he made when he was in middle school. Then, he got so much attention that he used to brag about how he was basically Tumblr famous.

Now, his blog has transformed into something akin to a personal slash political blog, primarily with a focus on social justice. The only people who know about it are Stan and Kenny who are both sadly tucked away in some bumfuck college town in Oregon.

Lucky bastards.

They visit on occasion, namely in the summer, with all three of them on Tegridy Farm, lighting up Randy’s weed. Those are the simpler times until Kyle is back on the furthering education grind in an attempt to get both a sociology and psychology degree, because quite frankly, he rebelled against his parents wishes and doesn’t want to take over his dad’s law firm.

No, he wants to be a licensed therapist because Mr. Mackey’s counseling resonates deeply within him, and because he knows he can do so much better than that, in part that he has the misfortune of being acquainted with Eric Cartman.

And unfortunately, even if Kyle doesn’t want to admit it, he is enamored by the idea of treating antisocial personality disorder so there are less Cartman-types in the world.

A notification pops up in his activity — it’s an anonymous message, which Kyle gets plenty of, most of which are pretty amicable and kind.

But this one.

He reads the thumbnail message then taps on it with his thumb.

Immediately, hostility saps into Kyle like poison.

Cast: Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, Kenny McCormick, Stan Marsh, Tweek Tweak, Craig Tucker, Butters Scotch, Clyde Donovan

Plot:

Both are driven by the same core fear: that they are not enough. Not smart enough, not good enough, not significant enough. The difference is in the defense.

Cartman handles the fear by inflating. He constructs a self that is bigger, crueler, more important, more authoritah than anyone around him. Any evidence of inadequacy gets rewritten into proof that everyone else is stupid, weak, or beneath him. Cognitive dissonance is resolved by attacking the source of the dissonance. If Kyle makes him feel small, Kyle must be destroyed or controlled until the feeling goes away. The Scott Tenorman response is the extreme version of this: total annihilation of the person who exposed the inadequacy, followed by locking the vulnerability away and moving on.

Kyle handles the same fear by internalizing and moralizing. He needs to be the good one, the smart one, the one who is right. When he fails or feels inadequate, it doesn’t turn into grandiosity; it turns into shame, self-attack, and then a compensatory need to correct the world (or the people) around him. His version of control is often framed as help, justice, or improvement — fixing the moral failing, forcing the correction.

There is a homoerotic charge fitting here: the act of forcibly improving Cartman temporarily soothes the sense that he himself is flawed.

They generate endless cognitive dissonance in each other precisely because each one is the living contradiction of the other’s defense system.

Cartman’s shamelessness threatens Kyle’s need to be morally superior.

Kyle’s competence and moral framing threaten Cartman’s need to be the most significant person in the room.

So they orbit. Cartman cannot fully discard Kyle because Kyle is the clearest mirror of the inadequacy he refuses to feel. Kyle cannot fully leave Cartman because Cartman is the clearest proof that his own moral framework can be broken, and he needs to keep trying to correct it.