If Helga was a guy and Arnold was a girl...

If Helga was a guy and Arnold was a girl, Helga would be considered abusive and the relationship would be one giant red flag city. It would be a sin to ship it or see it as cute and harmless in any way.

It's sad that Craig Bartlett has such a hard-on for the two of them ending up together, because I'm pretty convinced that Arnold is just going to end up a battered husband, especially due to his compassionate and forgiving nature. He'll always get upset with Helga but then think of her dysfunctional family and low self esteem and feel the need to soothe her after. The highs of forgiving her and reconciling will make up for the lows of her beating the shit out of him, making him feel ugly and deformed for his football head, and letting him do all the child-rearing. Those highs start to become what Arnold looks forward to most.

In his nightmare world of their marriage she was a sadistic asshole to him. In her dream scenario married to him Arnold was nothing but her prize, her prop, and completely submissive to her as she had an exciting life outside of him.

Don't act surprised when you see him at the reunion glancing overly nervously at his wife as he explains to you that his bruises are from playing recreational baseball with other neighborhood Dads.

double standards man. they're everywhere.

Doubt it.

This is fiction so everything will work out. Helga's damaged enough to be sympathetic but it conveniently won't be enough to fuck her up for life and instead she will make a wonderful, respectful, kind and functional partner in life.

Yep.
Unless all that she did to him was just tension and being unable to talk about her feelings to any reasonable degree.
In wich case Arnold wouldn't have to worry because by the time the relationship progressed that far he'd be able to defuse Helga's more aggressive tendancies.

Otherwise

Wasn't there supposed to be a spin-off with Helga where it turned out their relationship didn't work out?

Just because someone is sympathetic, wouldn't mean that they wouldn't be abusive or awful. Considering how it is with her family, it's not exactly a longshot.

i mean yeah helga>arnold would be seen as normalizing the fucked up misogynist playground rules of boys hurting girls because they like them which in turn would lead into apologism for rape culture and abuse and all of that, it would definitely be a hated pairing and helga would lose a lot of sympathy. i think she'd still be a loved character as a boy and a victim of bob's toxic masculinity or whatever they'd frame it as but her crush on arnold would definitely be demonized and seen as a threat.

Yeah. Helga doesn't need to be an irredeemable monster to believably suck as a girlfriend or not be able to handle fights or feelings in a remotely sensitive way at all. She blows up, she gets defensive, and she has a temper and a tendency to belittle others when they are emotional, despite her own habits of becoming hysterical. She's basically a lot like her Father.

It was supposed to be an on-off relationship because Craig said they would fight a lot.

This would be more believable if she wasn't awful to other kids in general and if it was only targeted at him. She has a lot of redeeming qualities of course and is an interesting character but she is not exactly gathering the tools to become a sensitive or communicative person and that's not just from having a repressed crush. The repressed nature of the crush is the result of the poor traits and coping habits she already has from her upbringing, but it is not the cause of those aggressive and bullying and insensitive traits.

She could just be shy and completely freeze up or bottle up when it came to confessing but otherwise be a nice person or at least avoid him.

Sometimes a passive/submissive person ends up attracting a hyper aggressive person regardless of gender. It happens. I think a boy Helga being secretly obsessed and possessive over a girl Arnold would still be cute but that's just me.

The shrine thing would be seen as slightly creepy but still pretty funny. Anybody whose fucked in the head enough to collect used gum of their crush is automatically funny. It's not like it's used underwear or anything sexual, they're like nine years old ffs.

You raise a good argument user.

>playground rules of boys hurting girls because they like them

But...boys AND girls do that shit to each other, people honestly see it as a sexism issue?

this is, of course, assuming that they have exactly the same personalities as adults that they had when they were 10 years old

Yes, people are fucking retarded. Especially feminists. They will pretend that anything bad that people do is a gendered issue that only affects women.

I'm not contesting that a boy Helga's crush shouldn't be seen as cute, I'm saying that it wouldn't be from a good majority of the fans who made up Helga's fanbase as girls.

Yes. There is a lot of discourse about how this behavior dismissing "boys will be boys" and telling girls that they are being picked on or bullied because the boy likes them is enabling abuse, toxic masculinity, and encouraging a lack of accountability in behavior. It also conditions young girls to accept negative attention as love and to look into abusive behaviors as acts of repressed affection.

>Yes. There is a lot of discourse about how this behavior dismissing "boys will be boys" and telling girls that they are being picked on or bullied because the boy likes them is enabling abuse, toxic masculinity, and encouraging a lack of accountability in behavior. It also conditions young girls to accept negative attention as love and to look into abusive behaviors as acts of repressed affection.

I think you missed the point.

Honestly how do you think the trajectory of their personalities will go, especially Helga's, without any useful intervention? She was still going to be similar as a teenager in the Patakis and apparently her and Arnold would have been an on again/off again relationship due to quarreling and a lot of fighting and "driving each other crazy" so it's not like she's chilled out. Arnold I can at least see naturally getting a backbone, seeing as he's shown it plenty of times in the series and had less patience for Helga's behavior by the end. But Helga would need to shape up and change, not just for Arnold, but for relationships around her in general. Phoebe is kind of treated like shit by her usually and that's someone she obviously cares for.

you're thinking of The Pataki's which would basically start with Helga and Arnold breaking up and Arnold leaving town.

Helga then actually has to figure out how to be a good person.

How? They were voicing incredulity about the way schoolyard teasing is seen in a gendered way and that's basically the gist of it.

Well, yeah, realistically Helga would grow up pretty fucked up with the signs we've seen her show at only 10. And all three members of her family have not escaped the dysfunctional dynamic unscathed, even Olga is an unstable and dysfunctional wreck deep down.

But this is fiction and fiction allows you to end up with your first crush rather than move on and find new loves in adulthood and also allows love to shine through and win and that's ok.

Helga is a Tsundere 9 year old. Don't assign adult emotions and liabilities to 9 year olds.
If Helga was a boy, he'd essentially be a little douchebag that pulls Arnolda's pig tails to get her attention.

But hey do the same shit for little girls. They dismiss it because it's stupid little kids.

Speak for yourself- I loved Helga cause she was extremely flawed and passionate, not because she was a girl too. If you take her gender and flip it the character still has a fucked up family life and intimacy issues but has small breakthrough moments where they get humbled.

Helga's just a good character in general.

No, I'm talking about the discourse of how these behaviors are engendered is profiled in certain discussions. This is pretty big in a lot of feminist discussions especially in tracing back normalizing of abuse/rape culture. Girls picking on boys is not seen as rampant or as normalized or as leading to boys apologizing for abusive behavior in girls or growing up thinking that a girl targeting them cruelly means the girl just needs to be changed with love. Though little kids do the same thing it is not seen as the same or interpreted as the same by society or in different schools of thought and ideologies.

She has some pretty complex love assigned to her for being 9 that everyone seems to take incredibly seriously, including the show as it is seen as who she will marry.

"Tsundere" boys would just be seen as abusive, sorry. A boy making fun of a girl's looks and publicly mocking her often and targeting would be tolerated way less. On Cred Forums I'm sure it would be fine, but not in a lot of other places.

I get that nobody wants to be abused or see their kids abused, but turning it into a gender issue is fucked up because it happens to both sides.

But then again, the entire social justice movement boils down to "closed mouths don't get fed." Boys don't talk about getting pushed around by girls unless they become stand up comedians and people can laugh with them about it

the op is trying to talk about how most feminists and pop-media analysis would see the relationship, not how you individually would still like it. with that being said they are 10 years old so i don't take any of it seriously or consider it damaging to arnold. he seems to find helga annoying at worst.

>No, I'm talking about the discourse of how these behaviors are engendered is profiled in certain discussions. This is pretty big in a lot of feminist discussions especially in tracing back normalizing of abuse/rape culture. Girls picking on boys is not seen as rampant or as normalized or as leading to boys apologizing for abusive behavior in girls or growing up thinking that a girl targeting them cruelly means the girl just needs to be changed with love. Though little kids do the same thing it is not seen as the same or interpreted as the same by society or in different schools of thought and ideologies.

This is because feminists are degenerate retards. It in no way reflects reality.

Well, I mean, a lot of Hey Arnold is fucked up in retrospect. Im pretty sure Bartlett intended that. One of Arnold's caretakers is so senile that she sees people who aren't there, but he and Phil trust her with complex tasks anyway

so you're telling us that you're triggered?

Aren't they like, 9? Who fucking cares.
Even if they did get together when they're older but are on/off, you don't know what they'd be fighting about. Couples fight, couples break up, plenty are on/off. Seems realistic to me, and since that'd be years later you don't know if it's just Helga causing it either(though i'd imagine its mostly her).

People like Helga because of her shit. If they didn't portray her in any sort of sympathetic light and having relatable family troubles then no one would like her. A lot of the 'bad' characters had their moments and ones like Sid, Stinky, Harold, Ronda, Curly, etc all were pieces of shit in plenty of episodes.

son, don't pull the thread on this one. we WANT women to get more aggressive in hitting on us. Because then we won't have to hit on them. We hate doing it, they hate it being done to them, we get in trouble, then everyone just keeps to themselves out of fear. fuck that. we need more helgas in the world.