kenny kyle for the character bingo 🧡💚🧡💚
GOOD PICKS AS ALWAYS!! Here they are, starting with Kyle; I'm putting Kenny in a separate post because I like to ramble but I don't want to squish him in under the cut </3
Everybody knows that I love Kyle. He's my favorite like 60% of the time, and he's my second favorite the rest of the time. I have absolutely endless thoughts on him as I'm sure anybody who's been following me for a while knows, so I'm going to try not to ramble TOO hard and I'm instead going to address the specific squares that I picked on the bingo board to try and keep this organized.
First of all, his default appearance isn't COOL looking, but he is freaking cute, which I feel counts? I just love his design in general, ugh, the hair contrasts so nicely with his outfit, it's adorable, and his Post-Covid look is literally perfect. I was so delighted when I saw how well groomed he is!!! And his fancy shoes... GNC icon Kyle Broflovski lives on into his fifties. I think you'd be very hard pressed to call his TFBW outfit 'cool', but he obviously put SO much effort into it which is charming in and of itself, and his SOT outfit IS actually cool. Elf King Kyle is my favorite character design of his (and maybe my favorite out of the whole series?); it is so good. Regardless of how much SOT content people make (and there is a lot of amazing stuff out there), there will never be enough to sate my SOT heart.
I do think he's deeper than he seems, but I think that applies for all South Park characters? The average viewer is frankly not going to be exploring any character's decisions beyond trying to guess the next joke in an episode, so the fact that meta CAN be written for him (and every other character) implies that he does have depths that aren't readily apparent to everyone.
I am obviously extremely pro fanon interpretation, but that being said, I do think Kyle has been done dirty, though most certainly not because he was turned into an 'uwu twink character' or whatever the most recent, endlessly repeatable claim about fanon Kyle is. Kyle's obviously faced extreme amounts of antisemitism in the show, and that's leaked over pretty noticeably into the fandom; you don't have to look far for someone blaming Kyle for Cartman's actions, or trying to defend Cartman (I will kill someone if I see people try to deny he's a nazi one more time), or bastardizing his character in some other absolutely evil, antisemitic way. This is obviously by far the most severe way he's mistreated by the fandom, but I also have some beef with interpretations from people who claim to like him, and weirdly enough, they often end up being part of the previous category? I fucking love Kyle, and I still think that some people who love him an equal amount are insane, especially when it comes to projection. I have never met a self described Kyle kinnie who was even remotely similar to Kyle. Maybe I just haven’t interacted closely enough with any of them, but it honestly feels kind of like a curse sometimes? In my experience, the moment you decide that you ARE a character, or are so similar to a character that you two are essentially indistinguishable, you lose your credibility in being able to talk about them objectively.
I think Kyle works amazingly on his own, but I honestly DO think he works better as a part of style; both from a viewers perspective and from a character analysis perspective. Style interactions obviously melt my style heart, so I'm extremely biased towards episodes involving the two of them, but the other reason I chose that square was because Kyle canonically DOES function better with Stan around than he does without him. Cue me going into a tangent about Post-Covid etc etc etc, but seriously, it's canon. He is a more functional character when he has Stan to balance him out, and to me personally, he's an even more entertaining character than he already is when he's with Stan. The same thing goes for Stan! The two of them are so irreparably intertwined with each other that separating them truly just doesn't feel right.
And yes. He has not done anything wrong, ever. You'll find that I have this opinion for most of the kids on the show, because honestly, unless they're a legitimate nazi, I refuse to cast moral judgement on these ten year olds who keep getting cast into situations that ten year olds should not be in.
Thank you so much for the ask minty!! <3 I'll post the Kenny half soon!
