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“We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount -- a Skydance Capitulation.” (née 'Corporation')
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Skydance
Sick burn.
When names collide everything start to lose meaning.
As much as I find satire amusing, a lot of it does not do what people think it does as effectively in this context.
Sacha baron cohen, sining throw the jews down the well had a bunch of racists singing it with zero care what it's satiring. Dave chapelle did similar to black culture. South park gets pretty close to the same.
theres a bit overeliance on satirization. Paul ryan wasn't satirically listening to "Rage against the machine"; he was actively trying to redefine it for his own delusion.
I worked with people who totally missed the sarcasm and satire in Parker & Stone's Team America World Police and legit thought it was just a cool action movie about America kicking the world's ass. I had to double check before it dawned on me that they were serious.
You will never be able to stop the simple minded racist with your educational movie. He only consumes media that appeals to him. "Go woke go broke!" as they say. If you want to get through to him you need to appeal to his smarter friends and family. You can bring them together with sarcasm more than any other tool, because two people of opposing views can relate to the same media.
What I mean is, SP is one of most prominent cultural examples of " both sides are equally bad, everyone and everything sucks", they've had great success with this schtick, ManBearPig, Turd Sandwich, etc. They did a lot of prep work for the current regime, after all, once you but into their mindset, MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.
There are still a variety of subjects where I’m sure people on the other side of the aisle would take objection (i think of the ultra PC “pc principal” who demands that everyone honor everyone’s pronouns at the threat of violence). Last couple of years though, the tone has shifted, for example the depiction of trump as the literal duplicate of saddam Hussein and satans new boyfriend, who literally impregnates satan with the Antichrist, and then spends the season trying to abort it.
The whole premise of the new season is telling. It's not about the suffering people have gone through due to wars (trade or military) or the food situation (the diarrhea parasite / cancer beef ep writes itself). Nope, it's about how the silly goose in office is renaming stuff.
It's possible to be serious and funny, but the new stuff I've seen has been unserious and unfunny.
How is that not changing?
They didn't go after Gore because he was wrong. They went after him because he committed the cardinal sin of really, earnestly taking a stand on a big issue. That is NEVER okay in South Park. There is never a correct side. Both sides must always be bad, on every issue. The "correct" view in South Park is always to not really take a stance on anything, and any character who is strongly on one side or the other on any issue will always be portrayed as wrong to do so.
That's not to say that South Park doesn't have some great episodes poking fun at some very deserving targets. They absolutely do. Some real gems in recent seasons.
“Trump has renamed Lake Ontario to the Lake of America. Of course, the left knows you can’t just rename things for political gain, just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
There are much better examples where the 2 parties are frustratingly aligned to a large extent. For example, datacenters, ICE, and foreign policy. You can find a good number of democrats who are mad about Iran not because it's a dumb war, but because it wasn't done correctly by going through congress.
Both sides are aligned pretty closely in making their donors happy above their voters. That keeps democrats from regulating like they should and it keeps republicans focused on "the enemies within".
Latinx is attempting to provide an umbrella term for latino and latina, it's not renaming one of the two.
"Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female. (You can express your own feelings about the reality that this exists, but it does exist regardless of how you feel about it).
On the other hand Lake Ontario is a real lake that already had a name and now someone is trying to give it a new one.
Maybe I just live in a red area, but I see a lot of people judge liberals based on wild Twitter takes and random think pieces — which aren't actually policies/rule of law.
If Joe Biden signed an EO denouncing the use of the phrase "pregnant woman" in government documents as a queerphobic slur or mandating Gov employees add their pronouns to their email signatures, I'd find this take more compelling.
But he didn't.
just because the recent right/republicans were able to more effectively lean into the meme-heavy southpark-type (crude, male-targeted) humor as marketing doesn't really track with your last assertion (for me)
The last season made fun of ICE, Peter Thiel, Trump-gift-based-economy, shitcoins and so on (Labubus, 67, ...)
They also poked fun at themselves that South Park sucks now as it's all about politics, which I don't think they ever really wanted
I'm a big fan though
For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...
Get real.
I don't think South Park ever implied both parties are equally bad. Just that they are both bad. And I don't think irreverent satire is prep work or psy-op propaganda for an authoritarian government. If anything, it's the inoculation.
It's quite clear that you haven't watched the series in the past decade. I'm sure you wouldn't be crowing the same tune if you'd watched the Mr. Garrison storyline.
What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from?
Why is it insufficient to (assuming the poster isn't lying to us) watch SP for 20 years before drawing a conclusion about it and the creators? They owned up to not having watched recently before asking about whether things have changed. I don't understand the weird hostility in your post when they owned up to the limitations of their PoV.
It started about 10 years ago, when the person apparently stopped watching it, during the 2016 presidential campaign.