I never really tolerated this take on the show. And how many often accused Matt and Trey of being libertarians or even downright bigots even though they’re trying to make a socialist statement on civilisation or the topic of the week like gay marriage and treatment of disability in media and how people could potentially be faking it for exploitation both of which were actually very well done and progressive especially the tourettes example.
Also they’ve ruthless mocked Trump in a story arc not only once but twice. And their latest season is so aggressively ruthless and savage, It feels like they’re doing more for the liberal No Kings uprising than The current democratic party leaders who are all talk and no substance.
I’m not saying I don’t fully disagree with people’s disdain for the show (primarily the trans community. I can see why they hate South Park’s guts) but to consider it a permanent stain on basic human decency and a horrid influence for milennials is honestly pretty hair splitting if you’d ask me.
Am I missing something here within these folks? is punching sideways/mocking everyone equally really any worst than complete douchebags straight up punching down for the sake of pissing off the unfortunate because they find it hilarious (Looking at you Tony Hinchcliffe, and Babylon Bee)? Are the South Park guys really to blame for shaping an entire demographic into not caring about any Global Disputes with Current Affairs? Or did the boundaries pushing and subtle satire simply got lost in people who either grewed up into the very thing they were mocking or viewed it as a cesspool of nihlist Slop?
They leaned into anti-woke stuff pretty hard, right as it was being used to radicalize men. I agree that some of the criticism from the left misses some of the nuance in some of the plots (eg, PC principal often being the voice of reason), but some of it is valid IMO. At best they were out of touch in a pretty harmful way. It’s good that they seem to be making an effort to repent with the recent seasons, but they definitely weren’t helping the situation for a solid decade before that.
Miss me with that modern satanic panic bullshit lmfao
hit me with that satanic picnic
Beelzebub needs neither grill nor sticks to put the hot dogs on, just put the 'dogs on his horns.
One one hand, South Park has expertly satirized current events for its entire existence, and the writing is genius.
On the other hand, it pretty much gave all the worst school children in the 2000’s permission the scream “fag” and “jew” all the time because they didn’t understand that Cartman isn’t supposed to be a role model.
The Colbert Effect
Punching everyone equally gives the appearance that everyone deserves to be punched. Just another form of “both sides” bullshit.
Folks are rightfully calling out the anti trans stuff and anti gay stuff, and the climate change stuff. But one that really sticks with me the most is when they punched down on alcoholics.
Basically they implied alcoholics should be able to enjoy a tiny bit of alcohol here or there, and called out alcoholics who completely abstain as being undiciplined losers.
As someone with outrageous amounts of alcoholism on both sides of my family, it doesn’t sit well with me at all.
Plus, Matt and Trey are Republicans, so fuck them.
The scene in which Randy gets arrested for drunk driving is based on a near identical experience that Parker had with his father when he was nine years-old.
From Wikipedia, so it seems like he’s had some personal experience as well.
Also I don’t think they are republican or democrat
Also I don’t think they are republican or democrat
they are Republican.
Pretty sure if it was the opposite, and they declared themselves liberals to a room full of uncomfortable right wing elites, we wouldn’t be ignoring their history or rejecting that label.
Im an Xer and love the show. Its both high brow and extremely low brow and they rip everything and everyone including themselves.
As a fellow generation member who recalls downloading the original short over FTP - the idea that a TV show can ruin a generation is as laughable as the Satanic Panic.
Hope you’re hanging in there, it’s tough for us Xers.
So are you saying fox news has had no measurable effect on people?
That’s a network, right? A gigantic, concerted effort to propagandize, not one show. And I didn’t comment at all about networks or concerted efforts to propagandize.
🤷♂️
Are you making shit up whole cloth?
come september unemployed for two years. happy closing in on retirement. Wait. thats not real either.
Software?
As a fellow generation member who recalls downloading the original short over FTP - the idea that a TV show can ruin a generation is as laughable as the Satanic Panic.
I don’t think it’s impossible. Think about a TV show run by the tate brothers or something like that.
South Park has had some really good moments. The last season was especially fantastic.
But South Park has also had many equally terrible moments. They’ve been pretty awful on trans issues. The whole PC Principal arc really said a lot about who Matt and Trey are as people. And even if they eventually walked it back, the fact that they tried to deny climate change has to be brought up in conversations like this.
For the most part, I’d say the show has been at its best when it’s kids getting into hijinks and at its worst when Matt and Trey use the show as their mouthpiece.
People are bad at media literacy?
A tale as old as time.
Remember when fundamentalists viewed Pokemon as a satanic threat?
Because South Park put a mirror to their own bullshit. And they are those that say that about South Park.
I just don’t like South Park. There are couple good episodes - but to me most of it is slop for the masses.
Very little actual value over shock factor and being vulgar for vulgarity sake.
Tho it is my personal preference - if you enjoy it go ahead and have fun! Life is just too short and messed up.Same. Watched it as a teen and grew out of it.
It’s clearly not to blame for anyone’s troubles, though. It’s just social commentary in the form of a juvenile cartoon.
It’s just social commentary in the form of a juvenile cartoon.
From someone who really enjoys the show, this is extremely accurate.
South Park has always been viewed this way. As awful terrible and ‘ruining the children’.
It’s always seen this way by ignorant people who never watch the show. It’s still one of the most relevant and accurate satire comedies going on.
And it really makes folks uncomfortable, hence why they want to put it down.
I’d say they are a mixed bag with how they handle handle things. Obviously they are a very mixed bag on LGBT+, They have little bits of support here and there, and huge mockery and issues at other points. Climate change and environmental issues, they fell straight into the liberterian hole of “it’s all a hoax”. With every character who believed it being a complete idiot or a manipulative monster. Though I do have to give them props for eventually realizing their mistakes and making newer episodes basically mocking their former view. I have far more support for a group that can realize their own mistakes and take the time to communicate a correction in their format.
Explanation for those who don’t watch south park. One of the most famous ones is Manbearpig. Basically in the episode Al Gore was constantly leading the kids into danger and causing destruction trying to protect everyone from a monster he called manbearpig. Which is basically implied in the episode that it’s all in al gore’s head.
Several years later they did a different episode in which, manbearpig actually appears and starts wrecking the city, and everyone stands around either saying that they don’t believe manbearpig is real (right in front of wakes of destruction and death), to immidiately saying “oh no manbearpig is real, but it’s too late to do anything so we just have to watch him destroy everything”
Al Gore was insufferable and did more damage to climate change awareness than he did good. His movie was massively overblown and inflated and paranoid. He was a coward who gave up the election in Florida and then went full bore into this issue, while he himself was massive hypocritical in his own life, having a massive carbon footprint while telling the rest of us to stop driving our cars.
They were targeting Gore more than Climate change.
I’ve never denied climate change but even when Inconvenient Truth came out and I watched it, I was like ‘this is some over the top bullshit.’ Michael Moore had the same problem, massively over dramatizing shit and shooting himself in the food in many of his documentaries.
Liberals and leftists fuck up all the time when it comes to an accurate portrayal of events, dangers, and reality. And yeah South Park goes after them for that, as they should.
What almost nobody gets is that South park isn’t targeting issues, it’s targeting the inflated egos of those involved in the issues. When you use a social issue to feel socially superior to other people, you’re a pathetic dickhead and you need to be taken down a notch. That is what South park does. Your notion of ‘justice’ or ‘truth’ doesn’t excuse you from being a miserable abusive cunt to other people around you, or the violence you think is justified in the name of your ‘freedom’.
I can agree with the concept that yes making fun of the people is a different matter than the issue. but to be fair their metaphors on all climate change and environment issues in the early seasons, were almost always universally put with something that flat out doesn’t exist. Hence why their semi-correction episode that came out years later, specifically involved admitting it did. IE the message from that episode wasn’t “Al gore is going about this in the wrong way”. it was “there is no right way because he’s chasing nothing”. Seconds in a different episode where the kids destroyed a dam, blamed it on global warming, and all the scientifically minded characters blindly listened.
IE you can compare that to say how Sally Struthers was treated in the “Starvin Marvin” plot, or the anti-bully organizations etc… where they didn’t pretend that the activists were hallucinating/fabricating the problem… but did attack the hell out of them for the directions of their solutions.
They have very different ways they handle “bad solutions to real problems”, and “the problem isn’t even real”.
You mean: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, comics, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, anime, South Park, etc.?
Because people have been stupid for a million years.
We’ve got quotes of Socrates bitching about the youth…
Yeah, but he also complained about writing which is very funny as we only know that he existed because other people wrote about him.
I like South Park mostly, but the way they have handled LGBTQ+ stuff often wildly misses the mark.
I haven’t seen any SouthPark in a decade, but I only remember Big Gay Al and Mr Garrison. I always thought those were so obviously wrong that it woul be hard to take offense at them. But I’m not the one to judge that
They have had multiple episodes on trans people that have basically insinuated that they are not meant to be treated seriously.
Ms. Garrison being treated as disgusting not for their horrible attitude, but for their transitioning, attempting to bodyhorror with the dolphin transitioning of Kyle’s father, and, just, the entire trans athlete episode. Also, Cartman’s mom could fall into this category if you don’t treat that as more of a one-off joke.
Essentially, they do occasionally do a lot of research on certain select topics like Tourette’s, but then they pull this shit out and you basically can see they unapologetically do not care.
Basically, they, at best, do not give a shit about trans people, and at worst, actively hate them. The trans athlete episode is, to me, especially egregious because you could ACTUALLY DO a trans athlete episode real fucking easily that gets the basic facts right and still even put their normal libertarian spin on it, and it would have been enjoyable to everyone without implying that trans people are faking it to win sports (and exclusively women’s sports at that, a thing they have previously implied in prior episodes no one gives a shit about anyway.)
There has yet to be a single group that has not been lampooned by SP. You take umbrage with it because it’s finally targeted a group you care about.
Hell, you can be trans in the South Park game and the entire community rallies around to support you.
Just because you are not rah-rah-rah cheered 24/7 by literally everyone and everything does not mean something is transphobic. It’s was just your turn on the mocking wheel, which is good, it means you’re being treated just like everyone else. Which is the entire fucking point, that you’re no different from any other human.
You are just fucking wrong. You can make a South Park trans episode where you make fun of trans people without disparaging the fact they are the gender they identify as. These episodes do not promote a “both sides” approach to transness. They state, fairly unequivocally, that trans people do not exist. There is no other side to that narrative. The trans dolphin episode (and several Ms. Garrison episodes) makes it pretty clear they think that surgical reassignment is grotesque. The trans athlete episode is wrong on multiple different levels.
The trans athlete episode could even fucking exist with that same plotline if they showed that that rhetoric was harmful to both women and trans people and, you know, not a real thing that has ever happened. They could even try to play up that they’re trying to be too inclusive or some shit. But because they do not show a real trans athlete in that episode, there is no other side. It is purely a dunk on transwomen in women’s sports which is transphobic.
Again, there are episodes where they do their research. But most of the time, they don’t, including this. This just happens to be a topic I fully fucking understand.
Like, holy shit, this is easy shit to make fun of. Trans people are so easy to throw jokes at that don’t question their gender identity. Fucking just talk to a trans person. You can do the same level of jokes aimed at black people that they do to Token! They are racist jokes, but they don’t treat Token like black people are disgusting or awful or other disparaging stereotypes, even if he does fall into several stereotypes.
I viewed the ‘Strong Woman Competition’ episode as lambasting the idea that a man could just one day start identifying as female and suddenly sweep all of the athletic competitions. Like “look at this ridiculous scenario that could only ever happen in an upside-down universe like South Park”. I took it as being a tear-down of the conservative panic over trans athletes. Maybe that’s just me, though.
The treatment of Garrison and Caitlyn Jenner is pretty bluntly transphobic though. There’s no commentary nor subversion of concept there; it’s just mean spirited hating. They’ve never really atoned for that.
People who think South Park ruined anything or that the creators are politically shitty do not get it and probably haven’t watched much of it. Imo to think they are politically shitty, it takes being a purity tester type who is looking for secret evil everywhere. The type who is not satisfied with the evil people being honest about their beliefs, they know the truth: most people who claim to have leftist views are actually secretly evil conservatives. This is a type of person I will never get along with.
Like how they demonized climate change for nearly a decade. I got it crustal clear during the al gore episodes
What the fuck are you talking about? Easy block of a purity testing twat who doesn’t understand comedy or satire.
He’s talking about the fact that for over a decade south Park played a significant part in fueling climate change skepticism with Al Gore screaming “manbearpig guys I’m super cereal” only for the creators to later admit that yeah they were actually super wrong about climate change and it is a serious issue. That’s why they made manbearpig real and had it start killing people, but that doesn’t erase the influence that they’ve already had on people. It’d be like if they had a TV show calling aids fake and gay for the first few years of the aids crisis and then only changed their tune once it started affecting people they know.
Claiming that anyone who rightfully criticizes their handling of climate change as being a purity testing twat with no understanding of comedy or satire is disingenuous and makes it obvious that you don’t actually understand what you’re talking about
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Who defended Trump? The OP?
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I’m quite confident that your interpretation of the post is incorrect. OP is using South Park’s criticism of Trump in defense of the show.
