This year's South Park content has come to an end (after what sometimes felt like an eternity). Time to look back at the good, the mid, and the ugly.
🥇 1. "Sermon on the 'Mount" (S27, E1)
No, this is no chronological order, but yes, the very first episode is sitting at a number one for me. Not because it was the return from a very long hiatus, but simply because it was one of the episodes that felt South Park-ish and did not have all the overarching plot involved yet. Not to mention the "Pro-Trump PSA" at the end of the episode. Glad they posted the behind-the-scenes for that (four days of arguments about showing a finger posing as another body part ...).
🥈 2. "Turkey Trot" (S28, E4)
Again, this episode had that more classic South Park feeling to it, and it probably is one of the few episodes that I can rewatch without the rest. Loved the Danger Zone cover with "Pete Hegseth is a Fucking Douche" (of course I made the wiki article for it), and Tolkien's face at the end just kills me. Besides, Hegseth at least was a politician I've heard about before. Most other times the season's ripping on American figures did not hit the mark because you simply don't hear that much about them in German media.
🥉 3. "Sora Not Sorry" (S28, E3)
That the show would rip on the generative AI model Sora was kind of to be expected, with all those AI-generated clips mimicking the show that were floating around. They pulled it off well, and the kids being more in the spotlight was refreshing, but the ending of the episode kind of felt like they lost their thread or lacked enough time to have a proper ending for it. Meanwhile I'm still asking myself what kind of weird obsessions Thiel has, since he had all those recordings of a certain act on his hard drive ...
4. "The Crap Out" (S28, E5)
I was pretty pessimistic about yesterday's episode, but I was pleasantly surprised. They finally gave Jesus the opportunity to be badass again, and the Woodland Critters actually returned, as @jamezvader predicted on the SPA Discord.
Satan finally leaving the White House and Stan moving back into his old home concluded the season well enough for me, giving me hope that next season will be less serialized and less political once again.
5. "Got A Nut" (S27, E2)
ICE raiding Heaven and Kristi Noem shooting Krypto the Superdog from the sky definitely wasn't on my bingo card for this year. This was also the episode to introduce Vance as Trump's tiny sidekick with the baby face, and gave one of the most memorable phrases from the two seasons:
Would you like me to apply the baby oil to Satan's asshole, boss?
It was still good, but for me personally it slightly suffered from my lack of knowledge about Kristi Noem. I of course read up after the episode and my reaction was not pleased. The episode however will probably be mostly remembered for parodying Charlie Kirk, whose death unleashed pure toxicity from both sides on the socials, including the official Discord.
6. "Wok is Dead" (S27, E4)
There must be some sort of curse on this show. Back when Not Suitable For Children released, I had never heard or read anything about the energy drink Prime that was spoofed in the special. Just a week later, Aldi started promoting it to oblivion in their newest advertisements and every supermarket suddenly had the drink in stock.
Similar things went down with this episode: After it had released, those Labubus began popping up in stores and even on festivals everywhere. Ironically enough, merchants in Rome now offer them to people who are waiting to be let in for the audience with the Pope at the Vatican. Meanwhile the Labubus are accused of being satanic. Think of this as you want ...
About the episode itself: It was okay, the revelation of Satan's pregnancy at the end came out of nowhere and took me aback at first. Same with the girls' satanic ritual summoning Trump first out of all people. It had its moments, but looking back at it it wasn't really that special.
7. "Conflict of Interest" (S28, E2)
The main reason I consider this episode to be okay are the Looney Tunes-like sequences of Trump's attempts to get rid of his baby (and Brendan Carr conveniently always ending up suffering the consequences), as well as Cartman's (and many others') scheme of trying to make profit with an offensive bet on Kyle's mom. The parts with D. Trump Jr. weren't really funny to me.
8. "Sickofancy" (S27, E3)
"Auf Nimmerwiedersehen", Tegridy! That, Randy's dependence on ChatGPT and the Star Wars reference with Trump as Jabba the Hutt were the good parts of the episode. However, the Ketamine part did not quite work out in my eyes, and the Trump stuff started to get stale with this episode (apart from the aforementioned Star Wars reference).
9. "The Woman In The Hat" (S28, E2)
Some may have enjoyed this episode more than me, but many others and I simply were unable to. Not only did the previous episode (the lowest ranked here) still have lingering effects, but also many other ongoing behind-the-scenes issues made us interpret the episode in ways that were definitely not intended by Parker and Stone.
The only notable part about the episode is the return of Kyle's cousin Kyle as a crypto scammer (I think enough will also have gotten the more subtly implied joke in that), but for a Halloween special it overall was really weak. Them moving the premiere date to 31st October only frustrated everyone; that episode was actually the only one I did not watch the premiere of.
10. "Twisted Christian" (S28, E1)
Probably the only time where I actively regretted getting up at 4am in the morning to watch the premiere. The teaser already was a huge red flag for me, and the episode itself delivered on that red flag. The constant repetition of the number meme wasn't getting funny with its repetition, I much rather cringed at every further instance. Considering it's South Park, they might have actually managed to make it work, but they really ended up disappointing with this one.
Jesus transforming his entire personality in what was maybe five seconds also felt very off, additionally those parts also felt pretty stale. In my opinion, they executed the idea behind it far better in the season finale "The Crap Out", which I ranked much higher previously in this blog.
Concluding
Seasons 27 and 28 were quite the mixed bag. Some episodes were bangers and are actually rewatchable despite the omni-present politics, others on the other hand were approaching "Pip" levels of "bad" and will be forever banished into the shadow realms of my head.
In one thing Parker and Stone definitely exceeded all expectations this year however: Controversy. Sometimes intentional, other times by coincidence. Subtracting the first two episodes of the 28th season, I can say that this year, despite the serialization, was pretty solid.
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WATCH OUT! False information originating from the unofficial(!) South Park "Wiki" hosted on the official website is spreading, even onto trusted sources such as Wikipedia (revision link).
Said misinformation has been up on that wiki for days (link, archive link):
The only information that is legit as of now stems from TV guides, which label the new episode as "The Woman In The Hat", with the synopsis:
The White House deals with a disruptive spirit from the east wing; Stan worries that South Park has become too political.
If that changes, we'll of course update the South Park Archives accordingly, where we have created pages for the upcoming episode already based on the aforementioned TV guide information.
tl;dr: Be very careful with what sources you trust on information about upcoming episodes. This is sadly NOT the first time where other wikis have spread misinformation about upcoming episodes, and it hurts to see how people keep falling for it.
Fandom today announced that they aim to AI-translate wikis into foreign languages, beginning with German.
As someone who has put countless hours into expanding the German South Park Wiki by doing own research and using the dubs as main source, I simply find this DISGUSTING and VERY FUCKING SOULLESS.
Quote from the blog post:
Ultimately, we want to improve the accessibility of wikis for international users—creators and fans alike!
To start, we are helping communities translate their wikis to German.
This is done with AI-assisted translation [...]
No matter how big of a thing that would turn out to be, I feel highly disrespected. First they shut down all international support, and now they pretend to care by slamming AI into our faces???
People don't want AI, how often do people have to remind companies of that? But I am honestly not this surprised, considering Fandom's enshittification and how they treat their communities. Seriously, fick dich Fandom.
Ironically enough, their platform refused to publish my original comment due to "profanity", so here it is:
I have spent so much time on bringing wiki pages to German myself by doing very own research and evaluation, and now you basically tell me and many others in the international wiki community to fuck off? Because you think AI can do it better?
Your "AI" isn't even capable of properly detecting vandalism - hell no, it even randomly reverts back to edits that were solely made to spread hate and toxicity.
You really should not wonder why more and more wiki communities across Fandom decide to leave, and with this you will definitely lose even more. People don't want AI-generated slop, they want human-written texts if they visit a goddamn wiki.
What's up next, Fandoom? Whole AI-generated pages or even entire wikis???
This is a scrapped "Level Up" animation seen in a beta build of South Park: The Stick of Truth, which used a different insult for each rank reached. The style of the animation references the episode "Guitar Queer-O".
A lot more content was cut before the final release, if you are interested, check out the (WIP) article on the South Park Archives about it:
This page is for all missions, objects, and characters at which some point was originally planned to be in South Park: The Stick of Tru
A small reminder that the South Park Archives wiki has moved to wiki.gg, please help us by spreading the word on all social media platforms, through word of mouth and of course by linking to our new wiki 🙂
South Park Archives is a community-driven database for the Comedy Central series by Matt Stone & Trey Parker, starring Cartman, Kyle, Stan,
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If you're familiar with the South Park Archives, pretty much the only SP fansite still online - there's over eighteen years of history there, pages and renders for tons of characters and locations, thousands of screenshots, a pretty dedicated staff, transcripts of every episode, and so much more. When I made my start writing shitty fanfics, it was a super useful resource, and that was a small chunk of what it is today.
FANDOM has today unveiled a new Offensive Terms Policy which continues a trend in the last few years been suggested in events like Community Connect, where it has previously been suggested wikis avoid references to canonical sex. The avoidance of slurs is something I would be super supportive of generally -- we don't need to see that kind of stuff on Wookiepedia or like, a wiki for Bluey. It'll keep people from vandalizing children's wikis with adult content for kicks. I am generally in favor of content filtering, especially for family-friendly-oriented content.
...but, this is going to cause a lot of problems for the South Park Archives, a show with a major character who frequently uses slurs and is firmly anti-censorship. You don't need to be an editor to think about that. If you're a fan, you know what kind of show we're talking about.
This is a show with episodes called "The Biggest Douche in the Universe", "Major Boobage", "Reverse Cowgirl" and "Titties and Dragons". There are songs like "Fuck the Police" and "Jacking it in San Diego". There is a character called 'Retarded Fish'. The names of these songs and episodes, bear in mind, are legally registered copyrights, not our choices -- how do you change that? Move an article to Episode 1601? What about "Fuck the Police", which isn't even a South Park original song?
You can clean up a synopsis, and formalize language on a character page, I've done both of those things when I was an editor, but you can't undo all of this. How do you?
That's not even getting into the transcripts pages, which are intended to be 100% accurate to the actual dialogue, continuing the tradition from the good ol' South Park Scriptorium...
Within the day of the policy change, FANDOM has already started to make changes to remove slurs from the transcript pages that are unable to be modified as it is directly related to global policy. I don't know that the staff were communicated with about this personally either, but I'm not in the know like I used to be.
No doubt some of this move is prompted by advertisers - FANDOM previously cited advertiser feedback as a motivation for inserting all sorts of videos on top of wiki pages (similar to their later push to include AI-generated content) and understandably many advertisers may not want their brand name mere inches from a discussion of cartoon eight-year-olds using slurs. I mean, shoot, I wouldn't if I were in charge of a major company, and I get someone needs to keep the lights on, but...
I don't know man, it's a shitty position to be in. It's a well-intended policy that I'd support in almost any other context but literally this narrow exception, and I definitely hate the thought of looking like I'd be defending use of offensive terms, but like, how do you cover "everything" about South Park, an explicitly adult show that is so firmly anti-censorship, that builds entire episodes around these kinds of jokes, or even analyze it from a critical perspective, in such a family-friendly, sanitized way, without betraying its spirit and creative intent?
You can imagine how many staff members there are probably scratching their heads or bashing them into lamp posts, trying to figure out what to do or how to move forward after this. They could apply for an exception, but would it even be granted? What would the alternative be? Are restrictions like this worth it or do they render the whole thing moot? How much responsibility lies with FANDOM? Are advertisers forcing the whole internet down this road? There are so many questions in the air on this. I certainly don't have answers.
While my internet was out on Wednesday, South Park Archives publicly announced a decision to fork from FANDOM, citing the 'Offensive Terms Policy' as a core reason, along with some other longstanding issues. I definitely recommend taking a look at the letter that was posted. The wiki's fork is available here and looks pretty good, honestly -- better than I'd have anticipated, and thankfully, editing looks to use the same kind of wiki markup, ie '''Stan Marsh''' is the son of [[Randy Marsh]] and lives at [[Tegridy Farms (Location)|Tegridy Farms]].
I'm not as in touch with the wiki side of things as I once was but definitely curious to see how things develop on this.
Feedback for the fork so far is overwhelmingly positive - no matter what FANDOM staff may claim.
The move definitely caused some uproar in the bubble named "Fandom Stars" though - from shock over some approval to pure bashing of admins, calling one even "racist", instead of properly self-reflecting why we forked (Surprise: One of the main reasons was Fandom's actions).
