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Notes -
Anyone following the new South park season? You can get a sneak peak here.
https://youtube.com/@southpark/videos
Unsurprisingly they are going after Trump's administration and hard. So far the first episode was offensive incoherent mess, the second is offensive coherent mess. I hope the rise in quality will improve. They are obviously trying to bite Trump administration into retaliating and seems to be succeeding - seem to have the uncanny ability to find the snowflakes - starting with the snowflake in chief. Vance is playing it cool, so I suppose his mocking will diminish.
I am confused what is better for USA now - Trump to die now and Vance to take reigns now and only have 2 mandates or to die after the midterms and have two and 1/2.
I laughed at both episodes quite a bit, even as a twice-voter for Trump. This guy summed up a lot of my internal thoughts though. For a show that famously "goes after everybody", they were suspiciously hands off the low-hanging fruit that was the Biden administration.
I really hope they don't make the entire season about Trump. It's already way overdone and feels beneath them.
I've never understood Parker and Stone when it comes to their politics, or at least not over the last 13 years since they moved on from their early episode libertarian leanings. Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness (note: I haven't consistently watched the last few seasons of South Park, so I may be wrong about recent years. But I remember them soft balling progressives from 2013 through 2017ish), and repeatedly claim that Trump is the worst person ever, then turn around and awkwardly claim they're Republicans. And most of the episodes I've seen of South Park over the last 5 years just seem so random and incoherent. I almost feel like they don't really have any convictions, don't really understand the current issues, and are just randomly throwing whatever elements they feel like together in episodes, while trying to pass it off as relevant political commentary.
Well, I mean to say they don't really understand the current issues that they try to tackle on their show. They always seem to misunderstand the core issues. I remember when they had an episode about safe spaces where they were fighting a complete straw man. Their main argument seemed to revolve around people using safe spaces to avoid having to think about starving 3rd world countries. That's just so off the mark.
In that episode, they were specifically showing everyone who wanted safe spaces being guys who don't want to feel bad about living in the first world, and don't want to be asked to donate to charity at the supermarket. And "Reality's" argument against it was you should feel bad about living in the first world sometimes. It seemed way off the mark to me, just like they're missing anyone and everyone's points on the issue.
That is just an attempt at absurd humor, intentionally juxtapositing things that are usually thought unrelated (concept of safe space with , first world citizen Randy wants safe space against charity shaming which feels bad). South Park does it often, sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn't
The scriptwriters clearly attempted to interrogate wider concept of safe space. Episode starts with Cartman disliking comments about his weight, eventually Butters has to censor all the social media to make it safe from criticism. In the end, Reality almost gets the point, and the adults proceed to comically misunderstand (something that South Park also does often).
Sure, I just feel like I haven't seen it land pretty much anytime since about 2013, such that it ultimately made me question whether they actually understand anything they juxtapose.
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