All is fair in love and yaoi.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow.
It’s a tale as old as time: Boy meets boy, boy doesn’t like boy, boy and boy are made out to be gay, so they stage a breakup to get the Asian-American students to stop drawing yaoi of them. Classic, right?
Well, as it turns out, it’s not totally unrealistic. In fact, it came to my attention earlier this week that Tweek and Craig yaoi has apparently been going on for years. (If I were to guess, it probably started around South Park: Season 3, following the debut of the similarly titled “Tweek vs. Craig.”) How it took Matt and Trey this long to exploit this fanon (which again I stress is actually a thing) is beyond me, but I’m so very glad they did, because it resulted one of the funniest episodes of South Park for me in recent memory — definitely this season.
Ah, young not-love.
For the keen-eyed, this storyline was a followup to a lead we got in an earlier episode, featuring Wendy and her new Asian-American friend. Through this, we learned just how deep this Tweek/Craig yaoi went, including real-life fan drawings made by real-life shippers and artists. These images alone fueled a lot of the comedy for the episode, especially when paired with Peter Gabriel’s (Trey Parker’s?) “The Book of Love” and A Great Big World’s “Say Something.”
Of course, the main thing that made this storyline so hilarious was the fact that Tweek and Craig were not gay for each other, despite their couple-like feuds throughout the episode. This brought about some great bits, like Tweek making up “another man” to make their faux-breakup seem more convincing. I also got a kick out of everyone sporadically giving Tweek and Craig money, simply for being gay.
At the same time, this episode also had an emotional center with some good commentary. For one, I thought it was interesting how Tweek and Craig eventually gave up on trying to prove they weren’t in a relationship. In a way, it kind of reminded me of Kyle caving in and “admitting” that he thought Caitlyn Jenner was stunning and brave — except that in this case, ultimately, Tweek and Craig were better friends for letting the town believe whatever they wanted to believe, and just ignoring them.
I also liked how each boys’ parents reacted differently to the “news,” with Craig’s dad initially shunning his son, and then slowly accepting him for “who he is” (and then giving him a hundred dollars). Meanwhile, Tweek’s parents and the rest of the town were ecstatic to have their first “gay kids” in South Park — in keeping with their new ultra-PC attitude — which, again, was great, because Tweek and Craig’s romance was completely made-up. That said, Randy’s yaoi investigation was more expository than anything else.
This episode also featured the return of Cupid Me, who popped up to shoot a few love arrows (and pee in some mouths, just for fun). But what started as a funny little gag gradually turned into a hilarious B story for Cartman, who repeatedly turned down Cupid Me’s advances. (“Can’t we just try? Tee tee.”) Luckily, Cupid Me is such a random character that this storyline bizarrely worked — particularly in the end, when we realized Cartman was enjoying his “massage” much more than he thought.
Suffice to say, Tumblr will be aflutter this week, as South Park got about as close to confirming the Craig/Tweek ship as they’ll ever get in tonight’s episode. Of course, we knew that was never actually going to be the case, but it still made for a fun — and funny — episode, along with a surprisingly enjoyable Cartman/Cupid Me storyline. (I’m sure many a Wacom is firing up right now for that romantic pairing too.)
