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This account is back on ice until further notice. Look forward to coming back when I'm comfortable again.
I just want to reiterate I absolutely would have South Park fanon wiki removed from the internet in an instant if it was possible. in fact, it would [already] be long gone. - the founder of south park fanon wiki
piggybacking off this a little and thinking on why i love BLU so much.. it really is so funny to preach about "the innocence! the innocence!" since the whole movie is so intrinsically tied to shock value and crassness... the word fuck is said over 300 times, and that's somehow one of the tamest aspects of the film. but i love that the inflated budget for the music score or directorial choices really lend itself to embrace more innocent flourishes and remind us that these are silly little kids
i could, have, and will again rant and rave about Marc Shaiman's music score until i am dead in the ground. but there are so many bits of the score that just feel so endearingly naive and gentle and quaint, which is in contrast to the show's music score (at least at the time) and the characters. had Cartman ever been associated with music as innocent before this? 0:39 if the timestamp doesn't embed
the gentle flutes and strings and chimes as he's getting tucked into bed at night... of course this comes in contrast to the joke immediately after, where he asks Liane about the scheiße video, but there's still a very poignant sort of feeling to how "small" he is in this scene. he's not cutting up a kid's parents into chili or doing whatever it is he's doing now. he's in bed with his snacky smores pajamas with his mommy comforting him
same principle with this score. it's likewise a segue/accompaniment to the shock value of the Anne Frank parallel with Ike in the attic, and the topper gag of him playing the harmonica like a jailed prisoner.. but you have Kyle patting Ike on the head and his really cute and stilted reasoning for hiding Ike in the attic. it's not a big, verbose speech with Kyle being a Kyle-shaped filter for Matt Stone. it's a little kid giving his wishful thinking through very childlike optimism and reasoning ("don't worry, Ike--we're gonna put an end to this! and then they'll make mom come home, and we'll all be a family again!"). no verbosity and not even an "i learned something today". just a kid following kid reasoning, and the music mirrors this endearing nativite really well
and yet again i find myself talking about Christophe.. but his introduction really embodies this too. which, again, you'd think is antithetical considering how "adult" his character appears on the inside--but the whole joke and reveal of his character is that he isn't one. his mom calls for him, and she exits the frame. we hold on this empty, exposed door...
...until the camera pans down to meet Christophe's height (which is an oxymoronic statement. he has no height. that's the joke.) the camera has to pan down to meet at his level. we find out he's a kid, but the camera still lingers on the empty doorway for a moment, as if to fake us out into believing that he's at LEAST one of the taller 5th or 6th graders... but no dice.
and the music and sound design picks up on this too. you can hear little jangling sounds before you see him (😭😭😭) because of his silly equipment. the music, before its beautifully ironic melodrama, is very inquisitive and lithe and peppy--that little flute glissando that connotes a curious innocence. likewise with how Christophe says nothing, he just dutifully comes when called and stares with blank curiosity at the boys--Stan's the one who has to initiate the conversation (in his own endearningly stilted kid-speak).
and you have shots like this that deliberately make the kids feel physically and emotionally small. Sheila towers over Kyle literally and with her authority
and i just love it i LOVE IT! this isn't to say that the show nowadays maybe doesn't do the same, the staging and music certainly have gotten much more advanced and mature, as we all know. but i think that's why i'm so fond of it here, when it's still paired with that comparative immaturity--in characters, in jokes, but art direction too, as i discussed here. it feels like the perfect storm and perfect balance. the more vague art direction doesn't negate the emotionality or sincerity of the moments, nor do the emotional/sincere/"innocent" moments negate the effectively crass jokes. there may be less on the surface compared to now, but it all feels very harmonious
South Park ask/do meme
These are weird, fun and tricky questions (for me at least)
1. Do you hate eric cartman?
2. Who is the (overall) smartest in stan’s group?
3. If any of the kids should be immortal and die all the time alongside kenny, who should it be? (who deserves it or who could support kenny, the choice is yours)
4. Is kyle a hypocrite?
5. Who overreactes the most?
6. Is creek really that great?
7. Do you have any sympathy for cartman?
8. Should Randy just die?
9. Who has the worst familly life out of all the main 4?
10. if you had to match each kid in craig’s gang with the kid that was the most like them in stan’s gang, who would be the most like who?
11. if you had to kill of 3 of any of the main (minimum importance level is Kevin Stoley or Red) kids, who would you murder?
12. Who deserves more love?
13. What are the 3 worst seasons of south park?
14. What are the 3 best seasons?
15. Name 6 ships that dont already exist (and should stay that way)
16. Match 5 characters with an animal
17. Match 5 characters with a type of drink
18. Has Mr. Garrison improved over the years?
19. What is your darkest south park related secret?
20. Name what jobs the main 4 will have when they grow up
21. On a scale of 1-100, how gay is south park?
22. Who is the cutest kid in south park?
23. Name your NOTP(s)
24. Is butters gay?
25. Write a headcanon for one of the girls
26. Who is the nicest in stan’s group?
27. What is the worst SP fan drawing/fic you have ever seen?
28. is the south park fandom expired?
29. should the south park fandom just end?
30. What do you hate more, this fandom or yourself?
31. Were the last three questions valid or stupid?
32. What SP character are you most like?
33. Which SP character would be your SBF?
34. Which SP character do you have a crush on?
35. Write a shitty poem about your favourite characer
sp tumblr is basically just 8 freaks dragging around corpses
I dont want to say “liminal” bc thats been thrown around a lot but the scenery of old south park is soooo good.
theres something about the scrappier look of it all that makes it feel like a dream where you’re juuuuust on the cusp of waking up & you can only make out objects on a very basic level, no details or anything
IT'S SOOOO GOOD I KNOWWWW!!! YES! i absolutely get what you're saying!! there's such an innocence to it too, the lack of definition and details... the boys feel more "innocent" back then and it feels like their world does too, and as they've matured, so have the backgrounds/again world. blabbing about old episode to non-parkateer friends and we've maybe said the phrase "i mess when the show looked like shit" dozens of times LOL.
this is tangential and not necessarily what you're hitting on, but it's been on my mind and this ask is a good place to talk about it. this same phenomenon applies even to things like color choices too! in the BLU commentary Matt and Trey bust Eric Stough's balls over the background colors bleeding into/overlapping with the characters--like the hospital walls are the same exact teal as the doctor's uniform, Cartman's hat being the same color of the wall, Gregory's hair the same color as the chair, Wendy's jacket the same color of the carpet...
the actual movie looks fine and this isn't a detriment at all, but typically you doooo avoid these things in animation, particularly with color designers. and it's just so NICE to see these ""flaws"" though, to see them getting away with stuff they never would now. for the show and watch experience it's really charming and lends itself to that innocence through simplicity... and on a more selfish level as someone who works in animation i'm always like "DANG i wish we could get away with doing stuff like that" HAHA. weirdly these errors and "cheats" and "flaws" come with a certain envy of freedom. you want your show to look good, but sometimes you also just wanna go "well they took [x] shortcut [x] years ago, why can't we do that now!". and i just admire the simplicity of the art direction soooo so so much, it's really liberating and i cling to the simplicity sooo hard
a selfish and very irrational part of me wishes the entire show remained in true stop motion.. that would be INSANE and idek how they'd do it. but omfgggg i love how Anal Probe looks so much. the pinholes poked in black paper with the backlighting to create the illusion of stars..
the simplicity and cheats taken due to the (...self imposed, you could be super detailed with paper cut out animation if you wanted to, but SP isn't that show--or it wasn't, at least) limitations of the art form. it's so inspiring!!
I feel like we often give season 20 a lot of shit, and having not really watched it since it premiered because it fell apart in flames I really agreed with the sentiment. But since I've been doing some rewatching of "modern" sp seasons (18-25, currently, working through it) I can say with confidence that nothing will beat the awfulness of season 23. S20 suffered by circumstance, but up until the election episode everything actually was building really nicely and was some of their better serialization work. And even with the crash and burn of the plot not knowing where it was going anymore, it still wasn't as bad as it felt in the moment when it first aired.
Season 23 however is just as fucking bad as I remembered it being. What a way for things to go out if the pandemic really had killed this show
This is where I've always landed on S20 and it's validating to see someone else say it, much less Chey. There's some really careful plotting in the first couple of episodes, a clear sense of escalation and setting balls up for later, there's definite story flaws and a bit in the middle where it's trying to create a sense of progress that isn't quite working, and it's clear so much of the crash and burn has to do with adapting to real world events changing. It's hard to do a theme about nostalgia being bad when a certain nostalgia kind of wins for Garrison, or about consequences when consequences don't happen for Garrison. etc.
Seasons 21, 23, and 27-28 revisit this theme in a vague sense, where there's this exploration of the possibility of characters becoming terrible people and potentially suffering consequences for their actions, but ultimately those consequences are avoided by Garrison, Randy, the President, and other antagonists, and it's part of why I think all of these storylines end up feeling so unsatisfying, because ultimately one of the primary functions of storytelling as we process it is to watch characters' actions and the consequences of those actions and see how they change. (ie Hero's Journey, Dan Harmon's Story Circles) All of the seasons tie to the same real world elements that defy this.
Season 23 has the least excuse as it is least tied to the real world. "Mexican Joker", "Season Finale" and later "Christmas Snow" there is this vague arc of Randy becoming a complete monster in pursuit of money including committing murder, and needing to suffer consequences, which is linked to Garrison in-story with real world parallels over the middle episode, but he... doesn't suffer consequences and gets away with it all again, and a few episodes later the whole town needs his help. and we lose a funny-looking background character over this, too, so SOMEONE suffers consequences but not one of the antagonists. but there's really no reason to deny Randy growth, no lesson?
You go back to Season 19, which was fairly acclaimed, and you realize one thing it does is... the season's antagonist is killed off pretty clearly, and there is a sense characters are suffering meaningful consequences for things they've done, which contrasts with everything that's happened since.
I wanted to share this upcoming South Park fan animated series I'm making, which has Kenny/Mysterion as the main character as well as exploring a bunch of the other kids as well, I'm currently in the process of making Episode 1 but here's some glimpses also there's more info on my blog including the link to the tiny teaser I posted on my YouTube channel (a proper trailer will come later)
i'll try to post the link under this sentence but i'm not sure if it'll work ^^;
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fc5796yBWY4
very fun! good luck!!!
This looks so cool!
What should my blog be at this point?
The actual blogging and personal stories about fandom are fun
Post headcanons again!!
Review/comment on episodes of the show
Writing snippets
Try making art again, if you can?
I prefer when post gossip and talk shit tbh
go back to being the revin guy
fandom history nerd stuff
I do not promise to stick to the results of this poll but I definitely promise to take the results into account
it's our ficciversary?
I usually celebrate April 8 as the anniversary of when I started writing South Park fanfiction. My actual first fic was a year and a half earlier, but that was the day I committed. That first fic was in November 2006. I also started editing wikis around that time.
So, we've kind of informally reached the fact I've been doing this for twenty years, which is... um, insane. There's what, two or three people in the fandom who can claim to have done this kind of stuff over that long? I'm not sure either of the other two would want to be called on for it.
It's been a weird journey. I've not really written for SP in close to a decade now. I think I've one fic in that period. A part of me really wants to be proud of this -- it's a weird business card to pretend you have, it makes me less "weird" and "cringe" about liking the show, a lot of my older works even in very young adulthood still read like they were written by a teenage boy, I'm less "attached" to the fandom or "problematic" content, etc.
But y'know, I was proud and happy doing it as a teenager, and I think sometimes my lessened enthusiasm for the show has been linked not only to the shift in the program itself but also in me viewing it less as a creative space and more as someone else's playground. The "cringe" version of me was a worse person but undoubtedly productive. I'm glad some of the dumb teenager jokes aren't on my head anymore, but sometimes I wonder if I didn't take my stuff offline for so long if I'd have a renewed audience or attention by now?
Maybe one day I'll edit the old stuff and put it on AO3 as a historical artifact. It might be a fun project. Maybe.
I still have ideas sometimes, but I'm a perfectionist now and it kills that. Knowing what will look "cringe" kind of ruins the impulse to let the story ride. It's harder to write Cartman saying something when you can already imagine the essays about what it 'means'. It was a little more fun when it felt like Kenny is just saying shit and I'm writing it down. But that is also why it was easier to be self-indulgent because there was less self-awareness. Writing is a funny hobby. But maybe I'll write something sometime again and it'll be less serious. And maybe that'll get me back productive on the wiki.
Or maybe adulthood kicked my ass and I'm being nostalgic for what it was like to write as a child.
Here's to twenty years.
damn fandom I miss you guys rn
I was going to put an elaborate April Fools joke here but didn't make it online that day until after midnight. (Again.)
Was chatting with some guys from the wiki and there was some talk about how we could maybe use a new South Park discussion server on discord, something a bit more oriented towards 'serious' and mostly older fans to discuss theories, ideas, analysis -- with both creative and more canon-oriented spaces, the latter which could maybe work alongside the wiki. I know some others I've spoken with around here have been warm to the idea of a new discussion server. Is this something people would be interested in?
Kidrobot should do a Craig and Those Guys box set
We don't have Clyde at all and Tolkien is VERY hard to acquire.
Craig, Tweek and Jimmy run the risk of being 'boring' reissues, but give Jimmy his smile and Tweek a neutral expression and boom, you have variation from the blind boxes. Tolkien is a little harder but a variant expression can help keep the value of the existing version.
That leaves Craig.
You know what I'm thinking?
Middle finger, baby.
Jason's only with the group once but you could throw him in just to add a little 'new'-ness to it versus 4 reissues and Clyde.
A good friend of mine got doxxed three years ago and even though it wasn't really about me, the prospect of being a possible target absolutely scared the daylights out of me and as dumb as it sounds I think slightly traumatized me. There was overlapping drama involving a couple acquaintances I was working with on a fandom project at the time and naively treated as friends who both turned out to be awful. Since the doxxing, I've been uncomfortable in fandom spaces, even a lot of familiar and safe ones, including posting here, even though this corner has been nothing but good to me for most of the ... actual decade, fuck.
My reaction is that I intentionally put up walls to my own access to fandom spaces, even messaging functions. I used to have so many friends in this fandom I put an effort to keep in contact with, birthdays over several years, 'hey your favorite character was in the new episode', people from here and from wikis and from roleplays and my fanfiction days, so many good people in this fandom I am just absolutely dropping the fucking ball on staying in basic contact with, let alone being supportive or a good friend. the thing is I do really, really enjoy these conversations when they happen!!! but my real life has gotten busier, I am not a teenage shut-in anymore, and I am a paranoid old fuck now.
I feel like I still have a good project left in these old bones but who even knows anymore?
in hindsight I keep finding it funnier and weirder that the Christmas Critters, characters best known for violent ritual sacrifice and a blood orgy, show up and basically do nothing except offer Satan, who has almost always been an insanely nice guy, and to a lesser extent Stan some fairly solid emotional support, and then say "my work here is done" off-screen and disappear quietly.
anyway I am now headcanoning they follow Damien around and piss him off and warn him about Peter Thiel.
what if I were to offer open requests for holiday drabbles again. what if.