For me it’s Dragon Ball Z, that was a pretty fucked up show tbh.
Like holy shit, all the characters are terrible people except maybe Gohan and Trunks.
For me it’s Dragon Ball Z, that was a pretty fucked up show tbh.
Like holy shit, all the characters are terrible people except maybe Gohan and Trunks.
This is a weird one but the nihilism of Robot Chicken used to really get to me. Just vignettes of characters dying horrible ironic deaths. Its funny I guess in a group setting but alone and stoned in my room, not so much. I think the elephant in the room is South Park. Especially around 2013/14 when they helped bring the term “PC” back into the political zeitgeist, which was the buzz word the right loved before “woke”.
Everyone realized South Park’s messaging was horrible even back then, but ”that’s the joke bro, they’re being misanthropic edgelords for the lulz!”, which in itself led to some even worse stuff from South Park poisoned people.
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The Harley f-slur episode did it for me. A couple years prior, my closest friends all got together and agreed to stop using the f-slur. We had no out queer friends (god it took me so long to admit dicks are good actually), and we were just “this is dumb to just use constantly”. The word was so ingrained in our lexicon and a bunch of idiot 13 year olds decide amongst themselves that enough was enough. Then like 2 years later that episode came out. Was a quick “well this is dog shit” realization.
They embrace it. There was an ep where Stan starts drinking to accept things. It’s literally “caring will make you unfunny, lonely, and lame”.
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Or that time they popularized redhead hate in the US
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the season in either 2016 or 2017 I remember a lot of people, including leftists, were trying to tell me was super progressive and a biting critique of society. It’s the only season of South Park I ever watched, because my roommate at the time wanted to (who of course loved it since he later evolved into a right-wing shithead) and yeah, there was like one pretty good story line about gentrification, there rest was just shitty South Park shenanigans
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Watching this is definitely not one of my proudest life phases. I remember it really got to me with neurodivergence and how they chose to depict that. Also it’s incredibly violent to fat people, the way Cartman gets portayed and what the supposed reasons are for his behaviour.
Someone posted a Red Sails article here yesterday that goes over the way entertainment conditions us to the status quo. I think South Park is a perfect example of that, in making horrible be supposedly mainstream.
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Here you go: https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
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Robot Chicken is literally just a “kill Barney” joke stretched out to 15 minutes and told by adults instead of obnoxious kindergartners. Never liked that show. Happy Tree Friends-tier humor, just absolute bottom of the barrel.
I have real and visceral anger towards South Park and also Family Guy and Call of Duty, which was the unholy trinity of what middle school boys were into when I was in middle school. There’s a lot I fault my mom for in my upbringing, but one thing I am very glad she did in hindsight was not allow me to watch those shows, cause lord knows I wanted to. Those shows were so ubiquitous in those years though that I can’t help but feel I picked up some bad messaging from them just through osmosis because most of my friends were into them. The first I ever learned of climate change was through my friends telling me it wasn’t real because that’s what they heard on South Park and then showing me the Al Gore manbearpig clip. I don’t think society has yet had a reckoning with how damaging those shows were.
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You how people talk about Rick and Morty? South Park is actually the show they say R&M is. They don’t actually have a problem with edgy nihilism.
my mother will not stop loving south park
This and Celebrity Deathmatch were absolutely unwatchable to me. Same with Sons of Butcher. Just poisoned apathy.
I was enthralled with celeb deathmatch and clayfighter
Claymation is just cool, so that’s fine
South Park for me has a handful of 10/10 eps and then a septic tank of increasingly frequent steamers. the first 3 or so seasons were funny, but they increasingly felt they needed to Say Something while also running out of having anything to say. the “everyone who cares about this is stupid” default was arrived at because they got through all the things they actually care about.
okay actually i’m gonna check wikipedia to make sure the first 3 were actually funny and i’m not just having a reaction to enjoying like 2 episodes ever bolstered by my memories of being a teenager
No, there are definitely quite good episodes. The beginning, when they were leaning into immaturity and absurdism was definitely when it was the best. Plus, even in later seasons, there are some episodes like that, more about how ridiculous kids can be, which people remember more, like the superhero one, or the Lord of the Rings one, or the one where they get shurikans and bladed weapons.