The Meaning of South Park
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Who loves ya, baby?
How did that manifest?
linebaugh
Well-known member
it was so popular its hard to pin any specific behavior to it. and it was already established and pacified for my age group, watched because everyone else was already watching it, not really indicative of a new milieu
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Perhaps we can consider both this and @boxedjoy's assertion to be correct. In this case, I'm using their words as a springboard to dive into what they could have been trying to say. So its gnosis, and not science.
Instead of considering postmodernism as a disappearance or withdrawal of sincerity, what if we consider it as a burying/cocoooning of sincerity within layers of sufficient skepticism, bureaucracy, distancing. Such that there is a wide sort of cortex surrounding the sincere core, and building of this cortex is a sort of alienation of the core from its cosmos.
In that way, perhaps South Park can be considered as a nugget of genuine and fundamental hope, dressed up in layers of skeptical defenses, facades. Perhaps even handled as an absurdism.
Analyzing the jump between the stage represented by South Park and the stage represented by Rick and Morty could be interesting as well. There was some theoretical stuff I was exposed to about Rick and Morty capturing some metamodern zeitgeist, and that would be part of the hypothesis here.
Corpsey
call me big papa
I feel like that guy on the train when he spotted craner on the train to Swansea reading "Salammbo".
IdleRich
IdleRich
For me, when South Park was coming out I read articles about it being about to appear on our tellies, I did watch a few and quite enjoyed it but then just kinda drifted away. Although I had friends who were into it and I heard jokes that presumably referred to it and kinda knew it was there in the background but never paid attention. Then for some reason me and my girlfriend were ill and had loads of spare time and we watched a couple of episodes as an experiment and they were good so we watched the whole fucking thing from start to finish. And all the new ones that came out since.
Of course it blows hot and cold, the moral positions they do hold slip and slide and every time they come out with something you agree with they blow it with a cheap gag the next week and some episodes are just shit, they pumped 'em out so fast that some of them they couldn't think of proper endings or whatever. But definitely there are moments of genius, brilliant characters and so on - even though the characters change their personalities hugely over time and become different people. I really think that Cartman, Butters, Randy... a few others are genuinely amazing creations.
Ultimately reviewing something by its fans can only take you so far.
Of course it blows hot and cold, the moral positions they do hold slip and slide and every time they come out with something you agree with they blow it with a cheap gag the next week and some episodes are just shit, they pumped 'em out so fast that some of them they couldn't think of proper endings or whatever. But definitely there are moments of genius, brilliant characters and so on - even though the characters change their personalities hugely over time and become different people. I really think that Cartman, Butters, Randy... a few others are genuinely amazing creations.
Ultimately reviewing something by its fans can only take you so far.