My South Park Midlife Crisis
((Note: This post was published on September 15th, before season 24 premiered)).
I’ve avoided watching South Park for my entire life. I’m not a fan of scatological humour and I’m really not a fan of offensive jokes that target minorities or exist for the sake of shock humour.
However, due to the fact that the world is ending and I’m going through a difficult transition in my career, I’ve completely lost my fucking mind and ended up spending so much time on Pinterest that I fell down a South Park fan art hole without even realizing what was happening. Next thing I know, my YouTube recommendations are nothing but South Park vids; top tens, clips, analysis videos, Vine compilations, etc. And I watched them. Yikes.
The slippery slope escalated to the point where I’ve now seen many, many episodes of the show. Not in any particular order, but scattered throughout all of the seasons.
And hoooooo boy do I have some thoughts.
My initial impressions of the show were not wrong; there’s a lot about it that I really can’t stand and overall I think the bad outweighs the good in terms of its cultural impact.
However, I would be lying if I said their weren’t aspects of South Park that I really enjoyed, and some of those positive aspects are things I want to see more of in other media.
The fact that I have such conflicted feelings about this show is giving me the worst case of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever experienced, so I’ve decided the only possible way to deal with it is to make a long ass post with the intention of spreading positivity. I want to examine this show and talk about how it succeeds in its comedy and storytelling, but I also want to encourage people to think critically about the media they consume and how said media might affect people in negative ways.
Basically, I’m trying to make this educational.
Also, just a disclaimer: This post won’t be discussing every South Park controversy. A post like that would be 100,000 words long, and I’m by no means an expert, so the scope of this post is limited to broad topics based on what I’ve seen and researched.
I also want to say that these are just my opinions. It’s totally cool if people disagree with me or want to add their own comments.
