South Park is a blight on humanity.
It establishes dozens of harmful tropes, and the redeeming arc is shoved in there mostly an afterthought to distract critics.
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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I disagree. From the article:
"The irony is that the character Timmy is presented with warmth in South Park and given character depth by co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker."
It's really dark humor, but it's thoughtful and empathetic. The problem is when viewers don't understand those nuances.
The entire show, as written, Is a two step backward three step forwards kind of thing. Which would be sort of fine if it didn’t attract the kind of viewers that never make it to the three steps forwards.
So all your left with is people shouting TIMMAH and MANBEARPIG.
Timmy isn't at all comparable to Manbearpig. Manbearpig was Matt and Trey being smarmy dipshits who didn't understand or try to understand climate science and wanted to make fun of people who were warning about it; they even ate crow much later in the show by having Manbearpig turn out to be an actually real creature. I'm sure any climate scientist would tell you that Manbearpig was a setback for the public perception of climate change.
Timmy was Matt and Trey delicately creating a character who at face value seems like a joke but who actually represents a sincere, thought-out, and respectful portrayal of disability and is often cited as meaningful representation by those with similar disabilities.
The smarmy dipshit stuff is what attracts the dipshit viewers.
It’s all connected. It’s unredeemable as a whole.
Would you say the dark knight is irredeemable as a movie because of what it did to incels trying to be joker?
Haven’t seen it. But in general, I don’t think as a creator you can ethically dismiss the social impact of your work. Especially if you could have foreseen it or have kept doing it for a long time after the impact had started to manifest.
And South Park is definitely in the latter category.
So any medium that portrays something controversial shouldn't, because media illiterate idiots will take it at face value. Gotcha.
That’s not what I wrote. Like, not even a bit.
Oh my God the media illiteracy is coming from inside the thread.
Just because people don't understand the nuance doesn't mean people aren't bullied as a result of the show.
And yet you'll find, per the excerpt of the article I presented in my comment, that actual people with actual, similar disabilities (including this bullied author) cite Timmy as an example of meaningful representation. That doesn't mean that he's somehow objectively good or causes no harm, but it does suggest that vzq's comment comes from a place of well-meaning ignorance and doesn't comport with what the people actually affected by Timmy's portrayal think.
Huh? I know you can disagree with the article, but this author who's been bullied literally writes:
The irony is that the character Timmy is presented with warmth in South Park and given character depth by co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
An equal in the show’s unflinching satire, his disability isn’t necessarily the brunt of the joke.
Timmy is an accepted member of the class: he fails to complete homework, faces adversity and causes trouble with his disabled best friend Jimmy. His personality is conveyed through the different intonations in which he delivers his name.
One episode, Timmy 2000, sees him win a battle of the bands as frontman for a metal group. The adult characters are shown to respond in an over-protective and condescending way - a striking criticism of the way society often treats disabled people.
Nearly 20 years ago, a poll by Ouch! - the former name of the BBC’s disability section - crowned Timmy as the most popular disabled TV character.
Seattle Times’ late disabled critic Jeff Shannon described Timmy as the most “progressive, provocative and socially relevant disability humour ever presented on American television”.
“Without telling viewers what to think, South Park challenges [the audience’s] own fears and foibles regarding disability, and Timmy emerges triumphant,” he wrote in 2005.
In interviews Stone and Parker have spoken of how carefully and purposefully they integrated him into the show.
But two decades later, the fact remains that on meeting Timmy, certainly at first glance, many find him outrageously offensive.
You really don't have any idea what you're talking about on this one.
I addressed this in my comment didn’t I?
I explicitly addressed this in my comment because I knew people were going to post this because it’s in the article.
So I addressed it in the comment.
You know just saying "I addressed this in my comment" three times in a row doesn't magically make that reality? And you know people here aren't actually stupid enough not to go back to your comment and verify that it does not, in fact, address it?
Yeah, agreed. I enjoy the show but I'd never let it spill into bullying others. Gingers probably have been harmed the most. It just spills out as humor received as cruelty.