I'm goin' down to South Park Archives, gonna have myself a time. Faceless avatars everywhere, interesting folks with some temptation. Goin' down to South Park Archives, gonna leave my woes behind. Ample edits day or night, people spouting that Craig's their favorite character. Goin' down to South Park Archives, gonna see if I can't unwind. I think Bebe would be hot if she were real and in her 20s. So come on down to South Park Archives and see if I can make some friends. OK, theme song parody over. While I have always been interested in South Park, I didn't become a real fan until age sixteen. My mom wasn't quite ready for me to be a fan, which is understandable because most moms wouldn't want their kids constantly thinking about Mr. Slave, and was horrified that I intended on taking the plot of the episode "It's Christmas In Canada," remove all South Park elements, and put it on as a miniature play at a theraputic boarding school I went to in grades nine and ten. It was the kind of school that practically punished you for thinking about, not just talking about, profanity, sex, violence, drugs, and anything else teenage boys think about. And this is in their adolescence, when your brain won't let you think of anything else. Because denying puberty is "theraputic," apparently. Obviously, even making the episode G-rated is not enough to protect students from the evil that is South Park. Of course, I "transitioned" from the Little Keswick School back to a public high school, and somehow, I, a skinny and pale white kid diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (real Asperger's Syndrome, not hyper-cynicism as seen in "You're Getting Old" and "Ass Burgers," though I do think Asperger's can make people more cynical in some ways, yet not total cynics) fit in more with a school full of predominantely-white-yet-still-somehow-multicultural preps getting by on science and athletic scholarships I could never achieve than a small, all-boys school with "different" people like me. As someone with Asperger's, I realized that I don't like many other people with Asperger's. "Normal" people have been better company for me throughout my life, and most of those friends didn't care about my social awkwardness. They usually liked it. But anyway, back to my connection to South Park. My mom eventually accepted that aspect of my character and slowly began to support it. Like most things I like, I researched everything I could about it, tried to watch every episode at least once, and managed to be the most knowledgable person in town when it came to South Park. I like South Park because of how it can be animated within a week, it has a fair mixture of black comedy and genuine wit, it presents smart ideas to the world that (at least in the mid-2000s) presented a center-right libertarian counterbalance to Comedy Central's own Jon Stewart's liberal "progressivism," and its characters are surprisingly relatable (I find Butters to be almost exactly like myself at that age). In layman's terms, it's funny. While I do think that Trey and Matt have somewhat gone the way of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as they feared, with most of Seasons 16-18 being not really funny (the episodes World War Zimmerman, Go Fund Yourself, #REHASH, and #HappyHolograms especially don't even feel like Trey and Matt made them) and poor business decisions like the Hulu exclusivity deal, I think they have enough self-awareness to not go all the way down that road. The lapses in story quality in Seasons 16-18 may be because they've spent all their time writing the video games The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole. If writing video games has become more comfortable than writing television, films, and plays, that's fine, but you could at least tell us honestly and openly rather than having your name on episodes you didn't even make. Trey and Matt don't even have their own personal Twitter accounts, rather having the show have its own Twitter account that they don't even run. A strong relationship between fan and creator is a valuable thing, as long as both do not expect an unrealistic amount out of the other and act like one owes the other anything. I was so bothered by the four episodes I mentioned earlier and by certain things Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert said near the end of their times on their respective shows that I couldn't agree with said in a way that showed that their "comedy" does have an agenda, not merely a point of view, along with the faux-progressive ideology forced into nearly every show on Comedy Central nowadays that I have told others that if South Park presents a message I can't support in Season 19 in a similar fashion to World War Zimmerman, Go Fund Yourself, #REHASH, and #HappyHolograms, I would swear off not only South Park, but Comedy Central, Viacom, and HBO, due to Comedy Central's presence over there with Bill Maher and John Oliver. Of course, I doubt they'd go that far, and I think that they'd always find a way to keep reeling me back in. While I don't agree with every decision made by South Park Studios, I still think that the show will go down in history as one of the greatest animated programs ever made- as long as they keep the show about five foul-mouthed elementary schoolers and their parents and using their perspective to allow us to laugh at the absurdities in society in general rather than turning Cartman into a caricature of the right-wing villain involved in every current event within the past three months of the episode's airing. Screw you guys, I'm getting off.
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