South Park

[Peanutbutter]

They actually did manage to tie most of the plotlines together quite well in this last episode. I hope we get something with the member berries next season though. After largely ignoring them these past two episodes, they were at the end montage with Garrison.

Overall, a sloppy season with some enjoyable moments.

I'm glad they did what I hoped, bring a good end to Gerald and Cartman's stories. Despite the title of the episode, they left enough loose ends that I don't think they're dropping story arcs anytime soon.

[Daikun]

Welp, time for four more years of offensive Trump jokes.

Well... Never mind.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I know in their commentaries for season 19, they said they didn't want to do a Trump episode in the first place because of an oversaturation of Trump jokes (just like why Bush was portrayed in a neutral light for a handful of episodes and didn't appear at all in Team America, because they thought Bush jokes were stale and unfunny even by 2004), and just put Mr. Garrison in there because they thought he'd fit.

[Daikun]

Season 21 begins September 13.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I love this clip.

[Daxdiv]

That truly was the best part of the episodes.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I noticed that this week's episode took a jab at the "I used to love South Park, but now that I have grown up and learned empathy, I can see that they are offensive and nihilistic" crowd that have shown in the past few years. I've always rolled my eyes at those people because they always sound so smug and elitist about it, so it was a little satisfying to see them called out for once.

Consequentially, all the threads I've been reading have a dozen people expecting Kyle to die next episode. I have no idea why they think that'll happen.

[LumRanmaYasha]

So, how have people been enjoying the newest season so far?

I'm curious to see what they're building up to if anything. There seems to be an underlying theme of social violence becoming normalized under the pretense of protecting existing institutions and not offending people, with people repeatedly turning a blind eye and ignoring/shunning the problems in society without actually addressing them. Like when the town guilts Sharon into stop pestering them to do something about school shootings because she's making them feel sad, the Catholic Church trying to relocate Father Maxi and silence any witnesses and cover up any evidence of his wrongdoings, or the town banishing Mr. Hankey under the pretense that they're upset about his inappropriate tweets, but in actuality because they don't want to stand by him because he's a politically incorrect figure and they don't want to be associated with him for PR reasons.

Granted, the latter episode also makes it clear that Mr. Hankey is both literally and metaphorically a piece of shit, and he shat his own bed because of his lack of self-control and inability to take responsibility, own up to, and learn from his mistakes. But it really seems like this season of South Park's been commenting on how people make an uproar of being politically correct but when the onus falls on them to engage with those problems and put in effort the change the way things are, people generally opt for the easiest ways out, diverting responsibility from themselves onto others - keeping up appearances mattering more than actually affecting change.

While I felt the concept of the PC Babies and the line "sometimes PC babies don't know what they're crying about" was an immature and self-absorbed deflection of criticism on Matt and Trey's part about critical complaints of the show's content and its influence on popular culture and political discourse, I also there's some reality in the sentiment. Nowadays I notice a lot of people only look at the headlines of news articles that they might see on Twitter and base all their opinions on people and politics just on that or other people's second-hand opinions, without actually reading the piece, engaging with the issues, understanding the problems, and making an effort to do anything about it besides complaining. Like with what happened with James Gunn, and how people were manipulated to turn against him en masse on Twitter for tasteless but harmless joke tweets he made a decade ago, because vocalizing a performative abhorrence of anything that is not politically correct was easier and more important for most people than actually doing the research to check the legitimacy of the accusations against him, and Disney cared more about politically correct than defending their employment of him, despite having known about his background for years and having hired him in spite of that. So I think there's a lot of potential for South Park to explore this idea and how it applies to various sectors of and intersects with daily life, politics, and popular culture, and I'm hoping Trey and Matt don't drop the ball with it and end the season without paying off on a clearer thesis statement.

[Dr. Insomniac]

people generally opt for the easiest ways out, diverting responsibility from themselves onto others - keeping up appearances mattering more than actuality affecting change.

I always found that to be a recurring message in South Park. That when people want to change society, they often take the easy answer instead of the right one, rendering any real progress superficial. Like in that Underpants Gnomes episode where people immediate side with Tweek's dad over the Starbucks ersatz, even though Tweek's dad is an abusive parent who's even more corrupt than big corporation. Where people will often overlook the bigger issues just to fuss over smaller matters. And it's still evident within the citizens of South Park this season. Rather than addressing gun violence, they all assume Sharon has menopause. And even when schools are still facing shootings, the adults choose to treat Mr. Hankey as the villain. Whenever critics of the show say Trey and Matt are preaching political nihilism and that caring is bad, I have to believe they haven't watched many episodes of South Park to begin with. The season premiere in particular states out loud that the increasing tolerance and apathy toward school shootings is horrifying, and you'd have to be as idiotic as Randy to think it's no big deal.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Yeah, characters in South Park frequently distract themselves from bigger issues by getting worked up about frivolous trifles, and the show has always been critical of that. If anything, the message in South Park is that you should care - and that you NEED to care - about the things that matter and actually do something about them. South Park isn't apathetic, it's critical of people who focus on blaming and harassing people for supposedly causing problems rather than fixing the problems and helping people. So it's easy to tell whether someone critical of the show doesn't really understand its political perspective if their takeaway from an episode like "Douche and Turd" is something shallow and simplistic like "voting is stupid because both candidates always suck" and not "pressuring people to vote under the assumption that they'll vote the same way as you or bullying them to vote the way you want them too undermines the democratic principle of freedom of choice and what voting represents," which is what I feel like they were really trying to express with that episode. Not every episode of South Park is well thought-out, but Trey and Matt do care about issues and have opinions about the way they're talked about, and that's always been reflected in the show's messages and themes.

[Foggle]

I'm on and off with South Park's politics, as in I find myself agreeing with them about as often as I find myself disagreeing with them. While they don't always get their points across gracefully, Matt and Trey are clearly very opinionated people and I have no idea how this meme of the show's overall message being "not caring is cool" got started. I mean, the series does have its fair share of episodes where the moral is "sometimes the truth is in the middle" or whatever, but that's the exception rather than the rule. I think the only genuinely harmful episode (that I've seen) is Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina, which scarred me with its graphic images and led me to believe untrue things about transgender people at age 11.

[Dr. Insomniac]

To be generous to Trey and Matt, they did eventually learn more transgendered people and portrayed them in a more graceful way in Fractured But Whole.

[Foggle]

To be generous to Trey and Matt, they did eventually learn more transgendered people and portrayed them in a more graceful way in Fractured But Whole.

I'm not sure I can forgive that episode entirely, but it was 2005, and they've clearly evolved on the subject since then. For the most part, I think the show is really only likely to influence someone negatively if they're the kind of person who believes Cartman is a role model. It's not the creators' fault that (apparently) lots of people can't understand basic satire.

[LumRanmaYasha]

It's crazy to me that anyone can mistake Cartman, the show's most villainous character whom everyone in-universe hates, as someone you should emulate. I don't know how much more explicit the show can be to make someone who can't recognize that understand he's a shitty person and you're shitty if you act like him.

And yeah, I've always found Garrison to be a really messy character when they try to explore LGBT topics with him, and they've done much better since they stopped having him be the focus of those episodes. "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina" is easily one of the worst and most distasteful episodes they've done, and really, most of the episodes focusing on Garrison as a trans-woman were pretty bad outside of "Follow That Egg" and "Go God Go."

[Dr. Insomniac]

Garrison was pretty much the proto-Randy. The character Trey and Matt used to explore topics that even the boys were too young to touch.