South Park Cleanup

The intention is that Jimmy is confusing the term "cripple" with the name "Crips". I don't think there was any deeper meaning to it than the superficial similarity of the words.

Wikipedia has the following on the Crips:

The etymology doesn't seem very clear. It seems not even the actual gang can agree on what it means.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 26th 2021 at 7:49:15 PM

Yeah, it's a pun more than a reflection of reality.

Edit: I'm gonna do a subpage review tonight, probs Broken Base, but I'm open to a different page if others suggest it.

Edited by LargoQuagmire on Apr 26th 2021 at 12:13:28 PM

I think I brought it up before in the Broken Base cleanup but it didn't get much feedback. It does seem to have issues with one-sided entries and non-issues.

It also has serious Episodic Troping problems. It would be a good one to get out of the way.

After a delay, South Park. My opinion is in bold red after every entry. This is my first attempt at something this comprehensive so please feel free to take me to task if this is off-base.

As a reminder, the four parameters for a Broken Base entry to count:

• Sustained Conflict
• Vicious Conflict
• At Least Two Large Factions
• Divisive Conflict (hardly any neutral parties)

Let's get this started!

• There are two main views on the show as a whole: either it really hit its stride when it moved from a show composed solely of crude, shock-value humor to one focused just as much on social/political satire/commentary, or it completely went to hell by turning into an Author Tract. I've always struggled with this criticism because they've been political from the start - Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride is episode FIVE. However, I know this has been an argument within the show's fanbase for ages, one that the show even brings up ("at least Family Guy doesn't get all preachy and up its own ass with messages"). Recommendation: probably keep.
  • The fandom became even more fractured as later seasons began incorporating season-long story arcs. The thing with South Park is, though, that it can sometimes be as polarizing to its fanbase as it is to people in general. Combine that with a town full of people and the tendency for things to stay relatively the same despite earth-shattering events, and you end up with a show that can have half its fanbase loving how it's using a character/joke/plot/etc., and the other half hating it, meaning the whole thing is constantly a Broken Base, over any number of issues from any given episode. I think the first sentence is valid; the split between people who love serialization and people who hate it is STARK. The rest of the entry is really messy and argues everything in the show is a base breaker, which is... not possible with the trope guidelines. Recommendation: cut everything from "The thing with..." and expand to make this not a ZCE.
• "You're Getting Old" and "Ass Burgers". Many fans weren't happy with these episodes for being overly dramatic, derailing the characters (especially Stan), and ultimately led to absolutely nothing but more of the same, while bashing both Stan and the audience at the same time. Oh yeah, this was a nightmare of a series of episodes to live through. The example as written doesn't quite outline the sides, though - 'You're Getting Old's' ending split people between those who were eager for a change in the status quo, those who were horrified at the idea and wanted Status Quo to Stay the Same, and a large panicky faction that thought the show was ending because of the episode's content. 'Ass Burgers' managed to piss off the first faction afterwards by hitting the Reset Button HARD. Recommendation: keep, rewrite.
  • "Ass Burgers" also got some flak for saying that Asperger's doesn't actually exist, with people being split on whether the characters saying it (namely, a bunch of people using Asperger's as an excuse to be assholes) were supposed to be right or not. The Season 22 episode "Buddha Box" came under some similar criticism for its handling of anxiety disorders. I think everything about You're Getting Old/Ass Burgers potentially ending the show waaaaay overshadowed this. Additionally, I love media criticism, but pointing out observable flaws in a show isn't really Broken Base material. Recommendation: cut.
• The show's increasing reliance on topical episodes. Some fans embrace this, while others miss the episodes that consisted of original plotlines that weren't Ripped from the Headlines. This is the same as the first entry rewritten. Recommendation: cut.
• In general, fans argue whether South Park was better as a lighthearted, yet vulgar Monty Python-esque sitcom, or the darker political satire of later episodes. Oh my god how many times can we say the same thing. Recommendation: cut.
• Season 17 has also caused this. Apart from the widely-loved Black Friday trilogy, some have pegged it as one of the worst seasons due to its shorter length and overly topical nature, while others cite it as an improvement over the last few seasons. Episodic troping. Looking at the episodes in S17, there aren't any that were huge base breakers from what I recall. Recommendation: cut.
• Season 18 in general can also be considered this with a few episode exceptions some fans finding it more topical and less funny than season 17 and having a continuing story while others think the continuing story and more topical nature improved it. I think this is episodic troping, too. It is the real start of South Park getting serialized elements, but most of them were well-received iirc (the Lorde arc was incredibly popular). Recommendation: cut.
• Season 19 continues the previous season's more topical approach to comedy and fans are still divided as to whether or not it made the season smart and more focused or just draining. In particular the season's focus on "PC Culture" and modern social justice moments, proved to be a big divider. For some the season tackled the hypocritical and self-serving attitudes of modern progressivism (and neoliberalism) in a smart way that few other shows were able to. Others feel that it was a very arduous and Anvilicious diatribe against the people trying to fix the social inequalities inherent in America while overusing Strawman Political caricatures. This season is where the wheels started to come off on the serialization split, which I'd say is the bigger base breaker. I'm not gonna say this commentary isn't valid, but people disagreeing on whether Parker and Stone handled an issue well on the show has been a staple of the show since 1997. Recommendation: cut.
• Season 20's jabs at the Alt-Right. Some feel they're a perfect counterpoint to Season 19's satire by hitting the flip side of the coin and tackling modern bigotry in a way that's seldom handled as well in other shows. Others feel that putting the objects of ridicule from Seasons 19 and 20 on equal ground is a Golden Mean Fallacy, with people on either side decrying their portrayal as inaccurate. Much like Season 19, Season 20's deliberate parallels to the extremely hot button issues surrounding their release is liable to set off quite a few arguments. Also not helping Season 20's point is the fact that the girls are blaming someone who hasn't done anything to them. I think there's something here about the Golden Mean Fallacy and the show in general. That's a criticism I've increasingly seen online and one that does not tend to have a middle ground - Parker and Stone either used their show as a mouthpiece for some truly misguided comparisons between unequivocal issues, or you're reading too much into this show and they couldn't have predicted how dire US politics would turn out/how bad their comparisons would look in hindsight. Recommendation: rewrite to make more about that split, with some evidence from more than one season.
  • Then there's the way Season 20 was handled in general. Some people feel that dropping the episodic nature of the show in favor a serialized approach that focuses on a few set topics (i.e. the Alt-Right movement, the 2016 election, Internet trolling) is Trey and Matt continuing their evolution in terms of storytelling that started back in Season 18. Meanwhile, others felt that this approach results in a major lack in humor when compared to earlier years. Still, others feel that Season 20 started out strong, but that its dependence on the outcome of the 2016 election made the last few episodes horribly backfire. I know a LOT of people who dropped South Park after the Trump election, because of how badly they wrote themselves into a corner on that, but that doesn't seem like a Broken Base in of itself. You can't say a side is vicious if they just wash their hands of the show entirely. Recommendation: maybe cull this to shore up an example on the serialization debate?
• On who is really the fourth member of Team Craig: Tweek or Jimmy? The South Park wiki states they are both members in some capacity and most fans just expand the group to five and include both characters. Still doesn't stop some fans from continuing the war, though. Jimmy would be the most logical choice as his presence was much more well known. However, following Season 19 with the Creek uprising, Fans and fanartists have been drawing Tweek as the fourth member while making Jimmy what Butters (a fifth member). My Main Four-focused ass doesn't know anything about what the Craig side of fandom is doing, lol. Recommendation: ???
• "Timmy 2000"'s Take That! towards Phil Collins. While making fun of celebrities is par for the course for this show, and Collins is a rather divisive figure in music, many felt their reason for targeting Phil Collins was far more petty than others, which was the fact that "You'll Be In My Heart" beat "Blame Canada" for best original song at the Oscars. Some pointed out if they really wanted somebody to blame for being snubbed, it should have been the Academy. Not helping matters is that they have another Take That! towards Collins in South Park: The Stick of Truth, meaning that they're still bitter about it 14 years later. Some were okay with it, but others were accusing Trey and Matt of being sore losers. I have literally never heard this ever in my 15+ years in this fandom. Additionally, in film criticism/awards prediction circles, Tarzan is STILL seen as at MOST a weak win in the category (1999 was one of the most stacked years in Best Original Song), and "Parker and Stone were sore losers" isn't a narrative I've seen there, either. If someone is complaining about this, it's a definite minority. Recommendation: cut.
• Their critique on Donald Trump has been this. Some fans don't mind either because they seem him as an Acceptable Target or because they attack everyone. Another group of fans think the jokes have gotten old and feel the show is beating a dead horse with the heavy use of plots or subplots focused on critiquing him and wish they would just move on to something new. In addition to the notes above about S20, this seems really close to ROCEJ. Also this is funny to see right above an entry on Randy, a character whose every move is dissected much more than Garrison's ever were. Recommendation: cut.
• Season 23 has been generally received fairly well, but there are some elements that make it divisive. On one hand some are annoyed by the over-reliance on Randy and the Tegridy Farms story arc wearing out its welcome, after Trey & Matt stated they would not do serialized storylines anymore; on the other, relying on minor characters in the second half alienated other viewers. Other topics of contention are an underwhelming and forgettable 300th episode (after the epic two-parter and Continuity Cavalcade that were "200" and "201"), overuse of meta-textual humor (with Randy representing the show's creators and their decisions), the controversy on the topic of transgender athletes that several reviewers felt was handled poorly, and some episodes like the one with Butters and the Mummy, perceived as weird for the sake of it (reviewers reading it as a Take That! to Trey Parker's then-recent divorce doesn't help), with nothing particularly insightful or amusing about them. Well this entry is all over the place, isn't it? I think the BEST shot this has at being a valid entry is by incorporating the Tegridy Farms complaints into a Base-Breaking Character entry for Randy and jettisoning the rest. The rest of this is a List of Transgressions that is part media crit (the trans athletes episode, which got an noticeable amount of bad press but falls into the same Asperger's/anxiety box as an above entry), part continued irritation with serialization, all complaining. Recommendation: scrap for parts.

Edited by LargoQuagmire on Apr 27th 2021 at 6:08:39 AM

There's a Team Craig? No idea what that's about. Seems to be a fandom thing more than anything else.

The Phil Collins thing was definitely petty, regardless of what you think of Tarzan. It's not the first time South Park has turned rather petty, either: Barbra Streissand has been an early target for no particular reason. South Park often picks on deserving targets, but sometimes it just picks on whomever they feel like.

The division on Trump criticism is certainly real, but that clearly has more to do with real life politics than the actual show. In other words, people are not divided on it because of the show, but because of their actual political affiliation. If you're pro-Trump, you are naturally going to dislike the show for criticising Trump, and vice versa.

Randy is certainly base breaking, the rest of that entry, not so much I think.

Yeah, it's for sure petty, but I've never seen people actually, seriously divided over their treatment of Phil Collins... Or anything remotely resembling that argument.

The rest, I think we're on the same page. Does anyone know anything about Team Craig dynamics, lol?

I think you may be right, it doesn't rise to the level of a sustained or vicious conflict.

I can weigh in on the Team Craig thing. So basically, Team Craig is either Craig/Token/Clyde/Tweek or Craig/Token/Clyde/Jmmy (Jason's in a few episodes but nobody really cares about him). I don't know if it's a big fandom argument though, cuz I don't care that much about "Craig and those guys" fans, but I know some fans of them so I can ask my Discord server or something. Everybody puts Craig and Tweek together no matter what cuz it's the One True Pairing, but I don't see much vitriol for Jimmy either, so IDK if it's a heated argument. Might've been in the past though.

FWIW, I think "Board Girls" might count as a standalone Broken Base entry, if only because a lot of arguing happened on Tumblr about whether the episode was truly transphobic or not, but I'm not sure if I'm biased because I was part of that argument (I'm on the side that hates it, FTR).

Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 28th 2021 at 1:01:24 PM

I don't think the Team Craig thing is widespread enough that there are hardly any neutral parties.

Yeah based on that I assume the Craig thing is cut. I've seen more intense discussion on Cartman's eye color. (What even is this fandom.)

I know Board Girls was pretty explosive and did waffle on suggesting it as a standalone before leaning no. It hurt me deeply as a trans person who felt heard by this show after The Cissy, and it got a level of angry, critical commentary pretty unusual for the show in its later years. I ended up leaning no more because, with how South Park is, debates on their appropriateness about X subject happen with almost every episode and I don't know if this particular episode created a rift bigger than any previous instances of that. (I hate being impersonal about this and fuck that episode but I'm aware we're in a minority in general and don't have many allies but ugh I hate impersonally debating hateful messages about my own life)

Yeah, sounds about right. I think it was slightly more intense than other episodes but it might not be a majority, and I might've been biased since I knew a lot of LGBT fans so it resonated more there? Honestly I'd be nervous to even try a writeup even if it did count, lest people want to debate the issue itself and violate ROCEJ, and I would personally feel very weird adding the defense side, so maybe it's better not to add it for now.

Is there a broader BB entry in there for people who criticize the show's "offensive" material vs those who think it's all okay cuz it offends everything, or is that covered by other entries and the revamped Season 20 idea you mentioned? Cuz those are separate factions for sure.

(Also I deeply appreciate having people in the fandom for years here cuz I've only been watching the show for a few years haha)

I was debating that too - I was wondering if something like that would count, since the side who finds the show offensive is usually specific groups offended by specific episodes (i.e., trans people and allies by Board Girls/Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina; Scientologists and Trapped in the Closet; Japanese people and Chinpokomon; Karens and Season One toilet humour), and these groups rarely form one coherent block. Their opposition is always the same, though, so there might be something there.

(I feel so old in this fandom sometimes, lol. My first episode was Woodland Christmas Critters. Shit almost destroyed my brain.)

Edited by LargoQuagmire on Apr 28th 2021 at 11:03:32 AM

I think there is somewhat of a broken base over whether this show should be more about the comedy or the political commentary.

Yeah, I agree. The first bullet point on the Broken Base page covers that and is probably one of the few examples we can leave in with minor tweaking.

(Edit: the current page is such a mess that I'm debating doing a first pass to cut out the obvious bad entries/start crafting some functional ones for serialization, Golden Mean Fallacy, etc. It'll make it easier for us to pick apart what's present and what isn't.)

Edited by LargoQuagmire on Apr 28th 2021 at 11:11:10 AM

Off-page entry, but I found this under Angst? What Angst?:

• Butters has an especially bad childhood. He's essentially the in-series Butt-Monkey and The Scrappy and his parents are abusive however he stays an oblivious idealistic kid. He probably counts more as a Stepford Smiler, since he's clearly terrified of his parents half the time and comes off as very neurotic.

I don't think this fits the trope. Butters has a lot of implications of being traumatized (examples: the gag in "Super Best Friends" where he falls asleep and wakes up to the sound of screaming, the way he imagines his father in "Imaginationland"), and the entry even admits he's just a Stepford Smiler. Hell, Butters is one of the few characters who actually does seem to react to the traumatic shit he goes through.

Edited by mightymewtron on May 4th 2021 at 9:36:52 AM

I'd agree with that.

(I know it's taking me forever to clean Broken Base, I'm sorry. Work sucks.)

We should look over South ParQ Vaccination Special sometime soon. I'm concerned it may be bloated with shoehorning and speculation.

We need to look at the Base-Breaking Character entries on YMMV.South Park at some point. The only ones that I think should stay are Cartman, Randy, Mr. Garrison, and PC Principal; everything else is questionable.

Wendy is definitely a base breaking character in my opinion. People either love her for being the main Strong Female Character or hate her for being a know-it-all. Her relationship with Stan also affects the perception of her character way more than it does Stan's, so people either love or hate her based on how they feel about Stendy. For a small sample of the fandom debates surrounding her, see this confession blog. I sense a lot of intense arguments here.

I think Kyle could qualify as base-breaking but not for the reason the entry claims he and Stan are base-breaking. It's more because people fight over whether he's really a good person. Stan isn't really that controversial at all.

Also I personally see more people enjoy Mr. Garrison for his Crosses the Line Twice nature than dislike him for it. Don't know if he's base-breaking, at least not on the level of, like, Randy.

Edited by mightymewtron on May 8th 2021 at 2:57:16 PM

I forgot that "strong female characters" are Base Breaking Characters almost by default these days, but let's not get into that topic. You've convinced me that Wendy can stay. Stan definitely doesn't count and should be cut. Kyle probably counts, but the entry needs to be rewritten. There are two things that need to be taken into account for Mr. Garrison: he was temporarily transgender, and he was a Donald Trump stand-in. Those things are going to make anyone a controversial character, but if we want to, we could use Rule of Cautious Editing Judgment to cut him anyway.

I suppose Garrison can count. I was thinking more about how even people who dislike those arcs don't always hate Garrison as a character, but he does provide some of the more controversial moments. The entry could be rewritten to be less biased against him though.

I rewrote Kyle and Garrison's entries. How do they look? I also cut the PC babies entry since I added that earlier than I should have and, to be honest, I was kind of using it as an excuse to complain. In hindsight, the PC babies aren't talked about too much at all.

Edited by mightymewtron on May 9th 2021 at 3:15:03 PM

Both of them look good to me. Also, do the Goth Kids count? One of the requirements for BBC is inspiring a vicious conflict, and the way the entry is written makes it sound like the conflict isn't vicious at all.

I'd agree with Cartman, Wendy (maybe her launching Ellen into the sun should be mentioned in her write up, because people are STILL up in arms over that after 25 years), Kyle (rewrite is good), Randy, and Garrison. Cartman needs a serious sub-bullet clean.

I don't think the others on the page are nearly the level of base-breaking as those five.

Edit for ninja post: I don't think the Goth Kids count. They're super popular in fandom and I think the only controversies that arise around them are when they headline their own episode (of the "why do they have their own episode?" variety).

Edited by LargoQuagmire on May 9th 2021 at 12:54:19 PM

Yeah, you either fucking adore the Goths or are indifferent to them.

I think the other two subbullets for Cartman can be nuked and maybe summarized in one or two sentences. While his season 20 characterization seems to have been contentious at the time, most people I know agree that Cartman worked as a Hate Sink in the season 21 Heidi plot. As for Heidi herself, most people seem to like her or be indifferent.