Tweek x Craig x Love

It took me about a month but I finally managed to finish my first watch of the entire South Park series. Part of the reason for this long journey was to play its spin-off game The Stick of Truth - which was an awesome experience - but I'm more glad that I finally watched South Park. As one journey ends, I found something special in an episode that is now my favorite episode of the show. 

Tweek x Craig (Season 19 Episode 6) came at a pretty bad time for me. This is my last year in school, and because of that I'm leaving a part of my life behind, including someone whom I dearly adore but have no wish to contact ever again upon leaving school. I have always believed that Love is a tricky little bastard who likes to play with our lives. I've had faith that Love will finally get tired of the endless trails it has led me upon, and set me on the right track one day. But slowly I think I'm honestly getting too old for all this shit, these endless cycles of hope and despair, excitement and disappointment, joy and tears, and tears, and tears. In some ways I'm turning into the whiny little emo bitch I was at 17, and I really think anymore of this nonsense with love will simply degrade my character further and straddle me away from the person I want to become.

This episode, alongside the two perfect song cues The Book of Love and Say Something, opened up a lot of things that I have been meaning to say. On one level it is the typical South Park nonsense - a non-issue is invoked and escalates way out of hand because of misunderstanding and confusion, and ends in a non-typical ending that can only be described as 'weird'. The sub-plots, that helped explore different characters' developments by showing their reaction to this issue - Craig's dad, Tweek's dad, Randy, Stan, PC Principal, and Cartman (who struggles with his own homosexual tendencies) - were well placed to balance the plot and bring in other opinions in this conversation on sexuality. I quite enjoy South Park's style of toilet humor, and watching an episode warrants sometimes a chuckle, and sometimes a round of hysterical laughter. Tweek x Craig was the first episode that I cried throughout.

Where friends saw how the two poor boys were forced together as a gay couple by societal pressure in order to showcase and represent South Park's newfound politically correctness and progressiveness, a real love story bloomed beneath this strange twist of events. 'Love doesn't follow a plan', screams Tweek when he was staging a break-up with Craig, and it doesn't. Tweek, a boy who is literally named after his twitchiness and jumpiness who claims everything is 'too much pressure' for him, becomes a confident actor that pulled off a heartbreaking performance in front of the school after Craig told him he could do more than he thinks he could. In retrospect, the Yaoi painters probably got it right, the tsundere Craig who is lonely, strong and nonchalant is a protector, and the twitchy, scared and meek Tweek needs that protection. In a scene where Tweek watched Craig plays Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, Craig is smiling and Tweek is talking normally - a rarity to both of these characters throughout the last 200 episodes.

Love works in the most unexpected ways, some fall in love but regrets it forever, some are forced into an arranged marriage but finds love anyway. What hit me, I think, is the transformation of Tweek and Craig's character from the one dimensional scaredy-cat and emo-boy respectively to the vibrant characters they were at the end of the episode; because that what love does to you, I guess, bringing out who you are, whom you thought you could never be. Sometimes I still wonder what I can become if I do find Love one day; but what the heck, it's really not for me to decide, and I'm starting to stop caring.

Say something, Love, I'm giving up on you.