wilowby - Tumblr blog

wilowby · 2 months ago

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yes pls go into detail on why u think kyle is gay!!! i am an enabler

🥺🥺🥺 BESTIE…. HERE I GO

this came out RIDICULOUSLY long so i’m putting it mostly under a cut

My canon basis from this theory comes from a few different sources, so I’ll go through all of them one by one to try and paint a coherent picture of what I think is really going on with Kyle’s sexuality!

The initial assumption of the average South Park viewer is obviously that Kyle’s straight, or for most of the fandom, bisexual - I mean, why wouldn’t he be? He’s had more female crushes than most of the other kids in the show (Rebecca, Nichole, Heidi, Leslie, and arguably Bebe), which implies that he’s at the very least bisexual - however, I’d argue that Kyle’s plethora of inauthentic, extremely temporary crushes is far more indicative of a deeper issue - compulsory heterosexuality, and his ongoing desire to fit in with his peers. Let me explain:

Every single one of Kyle’s crushes can be explained by something other than romantic desire, and for most of them, this thing is actually quite obvious. The important thing to note here is that unlike Stan’s feelings for Wendy - the prime example of a heterosexual crush in this show - Kyle’s feelings for a girl never seem to sprout out of thin air. There’s almost always something else sparking it. With that in mind, let’s go over each one of Kyle’s crushes, in chronological order.

Bebe is Kyle’s first ‘crush’ - and by crush, I mean the first girl that’s usually brought up in defense of bisexual or straight Kyle. In canon, whether Kyle has feelings for her is never confirmed, and is actually shot down repeatedly by Kyle, to the point where he explicitly states that he doesn’t want to kiss girls. The only time where Kyle actually expresses any romantic interest in her is in Bebe’s Boobs Destroy Society - but in that episode, both Craig and Tweek are also interested in Bebe, so it can’t be used as reliable canon evidence for the concept of Kyle actually having feelings for her. As if there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that Kyle’s feelings for Bebe are completely non-existent, Kyle even tells Butters in Butters’ Bottom Bitch that a first kiss is supposed to be special, and he pleads with Butters to reconsider paying for his - something that could imply that Kyle regrets the way his own first kiss went.

Next is Rebecca - and admittedly, this one is the hardest to explain, but it’s still relatively easy to come up with a solid explanation for Kyle’s behavior around her. Early in the show, the boys were significantly more likely to get up to classic ‘kid’ shenanigans - just see ‘Clubhouses’ as an example, where they literally play Truth or Dare - and Kyle, as a character who we’ve repeatedly seen craves intellectual stimulation, would understandably start to long for someone who can actually provide that. Enter Rebecca. Kyle’s infatuation with her, even when seen from this light, is immediately understandable - he’s looking for someone with a different set of interests than his friends. This still isn’t proof that Kyle’s feelings for her are anything less than romantic - but the fact that Kyle never smiles after kissing her heavily implies it. This doesn’t look like the expression of a boy who just enjoyed a kiss - it looks a lot more like the expression of a boy who thought he would enjoy a kiss, but quickly came to realize that he didn’t enjoy it at all. It looks a lot like the expression of a boy who realized that he might not like kissing girls at all.

Third is Nichole - the first of two girls where Kyle doesn’t actually realize he has feelings for her until someone else pushes him in that direction. Nichole is especially notable because before Kyle is made aware that Nichole has feelings for him, he has no interest in her at all. Given Kyle’s history of needing validation from his friends and community, it makes sense that he would jump headfirst into seeking out a relationship with a girl who likes him. When it comes down to it, one of the things Kyle seems to consistently want most is to be liked.

Fourth is Leslie - and this starts a trend where Kyle projects his own situations onto the girls he thinks he likes. One of the main parts of Leslie’s character is that she’s constantly the subject of persecution - and Kyle relates to that. In the Leslie arc, Kyle is fully convinced that Leslie isn’t an ad, and that what she’s facing is completely unjust. Of course this resonates with Kyle! Throughout the entirety of the show, he’s constantly been a victim of unjust treatment - both intentionally from Cartman and unintentionally from the majority of other characters in the show. Part of the reason he feels such a strong desire to protect her is because he’s experienced the same thing before. This isn’t the only reason why I suspect Kyle’s feelings for Leslie were inauthentic - it’s also notable that Kyle still doesn’t start having feelings for Leslie until she calls him ‘cute’ and begins flirting with him. It’s another Nichole situation - as soon as someone who seems kind starts to show interest with him, Kyle jumps in headfirst. Him being able to heavily relate to her situation is just a bonus.

And last but not least, Heidi - and Kyle’s reasoning for believing he has feelings for her is essentially a mix of Nichole’s and Leslie’s. Once again, Kyle doesn’t seem to realize that he has feelings for her until the girls suggest that he does - until then, he’s completely oblivious to the supposed nature of how he feels about her, continuing the trend that Kyle never actually identifies his feelings past Rebecca as a crush until it’s explicitly pointed out to him. Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is most often the correct one, and I believe that applies here too - the simplest answer is that Kyle just doesn’t have a crush on her. That’s the reason why he doesn’t view his feelings for her as one. As for what relates his feelings for Heidi to his feelings for Leslie - once again, Kyle heavily relates to the situation Heidi’s in. At this point in the show, Heidi is being heavily manipulated by Cartman, something that Kyle has experienced countless times. Heidi has enough faith and naivete to believe that Cartman could change, and Kyle has felt similarly before! He doesn’t have a crush on Heidi - he wants to protect her from being hurt by Cartman, like he’s been hurt by him so many times before. We already know that Kyle has a very strong fraternal instinct - so why wouldn’t that apply in this situation as well?

Looking over Kyle’s list of supposed crushes, it quickly becomes apparent that these don’t seem to be crushes at all, and the fact that Kyle jumps so quickly between them supports that. His feelings for a girl never last more than a few episodes at most, with most of them lasting about half an episode. This doesn’t seem like a boy with genuine, authentic crushes to me - it seems like he’s either mistaking his fraternal instinct for crushes, or just genuinely wants to believe that he does have feelings for them, but he can’t seem to keep up his supposed affection for them for long. It’s a prime example of compulsory heterosexuality. Of course a gay ten year old boy (one with a particular need for validation) with vaguely homophobic friends would jump between crushes! He wants his friends to like him. He doesn’t want to be the odd one out. Unfortunately, that’s almost always what ends up happening. He just doesn’t want a repetition of it.

However, Kyle’s lack of feelings for the girls he claims to crush on aren’t the only in-show evidence for him being a gay character - there are a multitude of other little tidbits in the show that can be dismissed on their own, but come off as eyebrow-raising when put together.

Take Kyle’s TFBW character sheet for example. One thing that’s immediately noticeable on his sheet is how in the Sex/Gender section, Kyle’s response reads ‘Asexual Gender-Neutral Kite Alien’. Kite Alien? That’s strange. It’s almost like Kyle is describing the sexuality and gender of his character, rather than himself - and actually, that’s exactly what he’s doing. The other characters don’t describe themselves that way. Cartman’s character sheet doesn’t refer to himself as a half-raccoon. Mintberry Crunch’s character sheet doesn’t refer to himself as an alien. So why would Kyle specify that the gender and sexuality on his sheet refers only to his character and not to himself, when it would be just as easy for him to put ‘Straight Cis Male’ down, like nearly everyone else did? It almost seems like he has something to hide - that the reason he isn’t putting his real gender and sexuality down is because he’s either unsure of it or ashamed of it. And that would only make sense if Kyle wasn’t a straight character.

Another example of this is the metrosexual episode - an episode which initially seems to imply that Kyle is more confident in his heterosexuality than his friends, but can quickly be turned on its head through a brief analysis. One of the important things to note in this episode is that Kyle is STILL the odd one out. The episode in itself can easily be interpreted as a satire of the opposite issue, with flamboyant gay men and annoyed straight men, and when we flip the episode itself on its head to reflect that, that makes Kyle the gay character among the straight ones. Kyle is still the only one who doesn’t relate. The fact that the only other character to be genuinely upset by this (Mr. Garrison) is canonically gay is just support for this theory.

Even Sexual Healing supports this. Three kids are identified as sex addicts among the class - Butters, Kenny, and Kyle. Wait, Kyle? That doesn’t seem to make much sense. Butters’s reason is obvious - he’s puzzled by the muff - and Kenny doesn’t need much analysis to realize why he’s so obsessed with the picture - but Kyle? The kid who, in ‘The Hobbit’, talked about a girl’s eyes when viewing the pictures, as opposed to the other kids who talked about their bodies? Kyle has never been fixated with female bodies, so what’s the deal with that? It’s never actually explained in the episode, but when you take all of that into consideration, there’s another explanation - the girl wasn’t who Kyle was looking at.

Another thing of note is in Tweek x Craig, looking at the background characters during the breakup scene reveals another neat little tidbit - Kyle, along with Stan and Butters, are the only boys who are upset by the breakup. Stan is understandable, as his struggle with understanding it is the B-plot of the episode, and Butters can also be explained by the episode ‘Cartman Sucks’ - but Kyle? Why would he be upset about this? He was never particularly close to Craig and Tweek, so it seems like an odd detail that he would be upset by two gay kids breaking up. A possible explanation is that if Craig and Tweek stayed together, and the town remained accepting of them, it could give Kyle hope too - hope that he might end up in a relationship like that one day, too.

In conclusion; on the surface level, all of these details seem able to be easily dismissed. So what if Kyle needs a little nudge towards Heidi, or if he seemed a little upset that Craig and Tweek broke up? But if you put all these details together, it seems to paint a much different picture - a picture of another gay kid at South Park, one who’s closeted for what could be multiple different reasons - a reasonable fear of coming out, concern over giving Cartman another reason to harass him, or simply just not knowing it himself yet. Either way, the conclusion of my lengthy ramble is relatively clear - given that Kyle hasn’t had any authentic feelings for girls in the show, dodges the question when asked about his own sexuality, and seems to pay much more attention to gay relationships and gay issues than he has to, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch at all to claim that Kyle is a gay character.

This came out WAY longer than I expected it to, but I hope I explained it well, and I’ll clarify and add anything if need be lol.

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