Cartoon Theories

Hey Arnold!

I rarely ever update, but it's about time I started back up and tHANKS FOR THE 100 votes and 2.72k views!!

Hey Arnold! follows Arnold, a fourth grader who lives with his grandparents, and the trials and experiences he has with his friends in a large city. If you've ever turned on Nickelodeon for more than five seconds, you've seen this shit.

The Theory:

Except that the real protagonist is the antagonist, Helga G. Pataki, a unibrowed bully who constantly makes fun of Arnold's hideous deformity by calling him "football head." So says Redditor iSmokeTheXS, who has apparently never noticed the name of the goddamn show.

Why It's Not That Crazy:

But, wait a minute -- who shouts "Hey Arnold!" (repeatedly) during the show's intro? Helga. And who is the only character who gets to have a monologue (about how much she secretly loves Arnold) in every episode? Helga. Everything that unfolds then is recounted to the viewer, by her, in her opinion.

This makes sense, because Helga's life is a lot more dramatically interesting than Arnold's -- she's a bully, yes, but this is caused by a neglectful father and a mother who desperately needs to visit an AA meeting. Her older sister, Olga, is adored, while Helga is scorned, neglected, and treated as if she was the black sheep in the family -- her father simply refers to her as "the girl" in several episodes. And to top it all off, she has feelings for a boy but doesn't know how to express it, so she's mean to him.

And that's what the show is about, ultimately: Helga's obsession with a strange-headed boy, and how she finds meaning in her otherwise bleak life through him. Hence the title, and the disproportionate amount of screen time for Arnold, a secondary character. It's no wonder that the creators wanted to make a spinoff that was openly about Helga, but it was shot down for being too depressing.

-via By: Matthew Moffitt | March 20, 2014 on cracked.com