Last night’s South Park episode, “Craig x Tweek” was about yaoi. So that happened. Mainstream America has just been exposed to boy love manga images.
In the story, an influx of Japanese girl students to South Park Elementary have an art show which focuses on yaoi fanart that features the characters Craig and Tweek as a romantic pairing. The town believes that the two really are gay lovers and comedy and musical montage numbers ensue. Just a typical episode of South Park. Except that throughout the episode, we’re shown very credible yaoi style art showing Craig and Tweek in romantic situations. (Nothing too porngraphic is shown.)
As I watched the show I thought, “Pretty clever. How’d they get that art so fast?” (South Park episodes are written and animated in a week.) Well, it turns out…it was crowdsourced. On the South Park blog a few days ago, they asked for fans to submit their favorite art art the Craig/Tweek pairing.
Hey South Park Fans!! South Park is looking for fan artwork to include in THIS WEEK’s episode!!
Specifics: Slash/Yaoi/Tweek + Craig ONLY
So for any of you who are into this, submit by this Monday (October 26) at 6 p.m. Pacific Time and tune in Wednesday night to see if your art made it into the show. We will try to use as much as we can!
(Incidentally, you can read the Comedy Central agreement to use the art here and it’s some pretty onerous language and as far as I can see, there was no remuneration, which is a bit shitty, but hey, exposure.) About 1500 pieces of art were submitted, and the rest, as they say, aired at 10 pm edt.
Craig Tucker is a rather confrontational boy who always wears a blue hat. Tweek is a young ADD afflicted caffeine addict who is always twitching. Yaoi is a genre of manga that features romantic relationships between two men, usually young men. It’s mostly created by and for women. So this episode was dead on as usual, with its satire, and if you’ve been following the unusual world of yaoi in the US, this was about as close to mainstream as it’s ever gotten:
https://twitter.com/SouthPark/status/659551102661083137/photo/1
Of course I was hoping to find some of this art online, but I could only find this one image:
However, when I googled Craig and Tweek, I found a goldmine of art like this one:
which I couldn’t find the name of the artist for, unfortunately. But then I noticed it was created in…2011??? What the–?
It seems Craig and Tweek or “Creek” is actually a very popular existing fan pairing based on their fight in the episode “Craig vs Tweek”
The couple is the most popular Crack Pairing and the most popular pairing after Kyman and Style with a rather large amount of fanart and fanfiction dedicated to it. On FanFiction.Net, most stories are dedicated to Style, followed by Creek, then Kyman.
A “crack” pairing is a random and unlikely duo. Kyman is Kyle/Cartman and Style…oh, I think you can figure that one out. It seems that with this episode, the South Park creators were just acknowledging the active fanfic culture of their loyal fanbase! In fact…there are dozens and dozens of South Park fan pairings, and several of them have fanfic.
| Slash Pairings |
| Big Gay Slave | Bip | Bratters | Bunny | Carken | CartCart | Carteek | Cartyde | Chip | Christowelie| Clenny | Clutters | Clyle | Craiman | Cravin | Creek | Crenny | Cromas | Cryde | Cryle| Cutters |Damnny | Deeman | Dip | Dole | Dougers | Dristophe | Dweek | Dyle | Feke | Garrislave |Grestophe | Ikeman | Ikyle | Jiman | Jimed | Jitters | K2 | Kenman | Ketman | Kyket | Kyky | Kyman| Kyrisson | Kystophe | Kyutters | Peek | Ranald | Randan | Staig | Standon | Stanman | Stary |Stenny | Stike | Stoken | Stolovan | Stradley | Stunny | Stutters | Styde | Style | Terrillip | Tim-Jim |Tokeek | Totters | Toyle | Twenny | Tyde |
Truly, crowdsourcing is the source that never dries up.
And now you know the rest of the story.
CRAIG AND TWEEK R SO CUTE TOGETHER XDDDDDDDDD
Oh em gee Craig and Tweek together is so wonderful! My main ship in South Park yeess! XD Go Creek FTW! XD
Comments are closed.