Original air date: 9/21/2016
After skankhunt42's trolling forces Heidi Turner to quit Twitter, the girls plot revenge on the boys while the boys embark on a mission to find and expose him. Meanwhile, Gerald decides to start trolling all over the world.
Skank Hunt includes examples of:
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Cartman breaks down crying for the guys not to destroy his electronics, but to no avail.
- All for Nothing: The boys shattering Cartman's electronics was all in vain since he was Good All Along.
- Asshole Victim: Certain that Cartman is skankunt42 and playing up his pro-women stance in order to divert suspicion, the other boys lure him to a cabin to destroy all his electronics as punishment and to cut him off from going online. They discover when they get home that skankhunt42 was active the entire time they were off the grid, and Cartman was being entirely genuine. It was easy to come to that assumption given how much of an asshole he is (it doesn't quite fit his typical MO since he is not that devious and usually has a clear goal in mind), but they do feel sorry for what they did to him.
- Attention Whore: Scott Malkinson. Mr. Mackey is sympathetic when Scott tells him he's thinking about quitting Twitter at first, but then Scott keeps badgering him, making it clear he just wants attention.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- The boys talk as if they're gonna murder Cartman in the woods. When in actuality, they were just going to destroy his electronics and cut him off from the internet, believing he was skankhunt42 due to his past history of misogyny, racism, homophobia, love of upsetting people, and other general unpleasantness.
- At first it looks like the girls are going to get revenge on the boys violently, but then they just pass Dear John notes to their boyfriends.
- Bait-and-Switch Suicide: After Heidi Turner gets trolled she walks to a bridge, types something on her phone, and the camera pans up as we hear a splash, implying she committed suicide. Turns out, she actually just quit Twitter and threw her phone in the river.
- Before the episode aired, many fans believed that Heidi actually was going to commit suicide, to show the effects of trolling.
- Being Good Sucks: Mr. Mackey starts to grow sick of helping Scott Malkinson.
- Big Bad: skankhunt42 has officially cemented himself as this since he now plans to troll the world.
- Big "NO!": Several by the end of the episode when the girls break up with all of their boyfriends.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: skankhunt42 is pretending to be a kind, affable person by day, but is secretly a cyberbully by night.
- The Cake Is a Lie: The boys lure Cartman to a remote cabin with the promise of Counter-Strike and junk food.
- Crack Pairing: Kevin and Red is confirmed...and destroyed.
- Cyberbullying: Gerald's online persona SkankHunt42 is primarily a troll who harasses random groups of people for fun, but he dedicates extra time to Freja Ollegard, a Danish Olympic medalist and breast cancer survivor who takes down her website and personally denounces the trolling. After giving this statement, the trolls target Freja by sending questions to her on a talk show mocking her breast cancer. This eventually drives Freja to kill herself and kickstarts Denmark's national contempt for trolling.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The girls collectively punish every boy in school for the action of a single Troll, who, unbeknownst to anyone, isn't even a student. Lampshaded by Butters, who notes that nowadays, everyone in a group is considered responsible for one member's behavior.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?:
- Quitting Twitter is treated like committing suicide by everyone.
- Destroying someone's electronic devices is treated like murder.
- Skankhunt's trolling scene is capped with an explosion, followed by him looking satisfied and yawning.
- The girls dumping their boyfriends may be a sex strike
analogy - the visuals of it are also reminiscent of a war zone.
- Downer Ending: Cartman has all of his internet devices destroyed for no reason, Kyle and the others feel guilty about it, and all of the girls in the school who have boyfriends (including a reluctant Wendy) dump them in retaliation for skankhunt42's trolling, believing his opinions are reflected by all boys at school.
- Driven to Suicide: Parodied and Subverted with Heidi; a scene is set up as if she jumps off a bridge, only to reveal that she threw her phone into the water after quitting Twitter. Nevertheless, people react as if this were the same thing.
- Scott Malkinson repeatedly threatens to do it too, with Mr. Mackey trying to talk him down.
- Evil Feels Good: skankhunt42 is having the time of his life offending people and getting away with it.
- Faux Affably Evil: Gerald aka skankhunt42, is seen parading throughout town acting like a Wide-Eyed Idealist while secretly ruining people's lives by trolling. If he's not faking, it's just plain Affably Evil.
- Felony Misdemeanor: Skankhunt's trolling tactics are fairly basic and immature, but the entire premise of the season thus far is treating him like a dangerous cyber-terrorist on the verge of causing an international crisis.
- The mass dumping at the end of the episode is likewise treated with all the seriousness of mass murder.
- The First Cut Is the Deepest: The first stage of the girls' plan to combat skankhunt42's sexism is to break up with all their boyfriends in order to make their first devastating blow to the boys.
- Gilligan Cut: A woman claims that all trolls are just sad lonely losers who have nothing better to do and should just be left to wallow in their own misery, cut to Gerald being the happiest man in South Park.
- Hate Sink: Skankhunt is cementing himself as one.
- It Amused Me: The reason skankhunt42 is trolling everybody is this combined with Evil Feels Good - it's just a fun hobby to him.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The girls mentions a few time how for too long people have been ignoring them and toss them in the background. It fits with the theme but also how until now they were mostly a background of Flat Character (especially when most of those complaints come from Annie Knitts, a Living Prop.)
- Lysistrata Gambit: The ending is basically a G-rated example.
- Memetic Troll: It's actually skankhunt42's whole In-Universe goal to become the world's most infamous internet troll through his offensive comments.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The other boys' reaction when they discover Cartman really wasn't skankhunt42 after they destroyed his devices.
- Oh, Crap!: Cartman when he realises there's no wi-fi in the cabin and the other boys really brought him there to break his devices.
- Only Sane Man: The one character who tells a victim of Skankhunt's trolling to just ignore it - also played as a gender-based Double Standard, as the victim in question is male, while the victimization of females by Skankhunt is treated as deathly serious.
- Rule of Symbolism: When skankhunt42 types away at his computer, we're treated to a shadow of him on the wall in the shape of a Humanoid Abomination - also played for laughs in the same scene when his trolling is compared to buildings exploding.
- Running Gag: Scott Malkinson constantly telling Mr. Mackey he's going to quit Twitter, but doesn't go through with it. He even calls Mackey in the dead of night about it.
- Sadist: A more Denser and Wackier example. skankhunt42 is taking sick amusement in causing controversy on the internet that also lead up to real problems later.
- Series Continuity Error: The Danish Olympian looks nothing like the Danish did in Canada on Strike
- Whole Foods makes an appearance to spite how it flew away at the end of "PC Principal: Final Justice".
- Serious Business: Quitting social media is treated the way that suicide would be treated in the real world, and destroying one's electronics is treated like murder.
- Skankhunt42's pranks are pretty childish and predictable, even by Troll standards: mostly they come down to crudely Photoshopping penises into women's mouths. Nevertheless they're deemed newsworthy and are on the verge of creating an international incident.
- Ship Sinking: Stan/Wendy for the third time. Though it's very obvious Wendy is reluctant to do so, and only did it due to peer pressure - though her note is much more personal than the other ones we see, hinting that there is some degree of sincerity to it (in the storyboard, Wendy looked straight-up angry, while she looked a bit apprehensive in the actual episode).
- To Token and Nichole as well.
- Red and Kevin Stoley.
- Shoot the Dog: The boys breaking Cartman's electronics is treated like bringing a dog in the woods to put him down. While Cartman is an established asshole, in this episode he was just some kid who thought his friends invited him to a slumber party only for them to destroy all of his devices.
- Shout-Out: Gerald's office features a globe with a hidden bar compartment.
- The girls have a "Twerpz" poster, an obvious parody of the "Bratz".
- Smug Snake: skankhunt42 is proud of the attention he gets as the world overreacts to him.
- Take That!:
- Cartman's idea of what all female comedians' jokes are about is basically Amy Schumer's whole schtick, a comic the creators have admitted to hating.
- Women who love to blame men for everything wrong with their lives because of a few bad apples, as Butters points out.
- Tragic Mistake: The boys destroying all of Cartman's electronics then realizing he wasn't skankhunt42.
- Visual Pun: Gerald types on his computer keyboard in time with the organ solo on his Boston record. He's "playing the keyboards."
