spjohnv-blog

[spjohnv-blog]

Good luck on your surgery, man

Thank you, that's very kind of you! I'm always a bit anxious beforehand but things went really well.

[spjohnv-blog]

I appreciate the insight on this a lot actually, thank you!

While we know from early on that Kyle's Dad is a lawyer, we only see his workplace a couple times in the early seasons of the show, during the second and third seasons. Broflovski and Jackson: Attorneys at Law is the name seen on the building, but we never meet Jackson. There seems to be a fairly large law library that Stan, Kyle, Kenny, Tweek, Craig, Francis and Pete Thelman use to research the flag debate. Customary antacid tablets are left out.

Gerald's law office is next seen over a decade later in season 15's "HUMANCENTiPAD" with a new design reflecting the show's far more advanced visual design. Gerald no longer sits in front of an open window, his desk is wooden and realistic instead of a bright red, the floors now have a detailed blue carpeting, and there's more bookshelves. He has a sweet mobile with photos of his family.

SPS labeled an image of Gerald's Office for 'Broflovski & Jackson' at their website at one point, but we only see an exterior for this building once, in season 22's "A Problem with a Poo", where the dark green exterior walls seem intended to represent an updated version of the previously seen exterior. Gerald also gets a newer computer.

In season 25's "Pajama Day", we briefly see Gerald head into work. We don't see an exterior, but the interior of the building has a sign labeled 'Broflovski and Stern'. He's either changed to a new firm or Jackson has departed he's found a new partner. The same geometric designs are also visible in the carpeting this time, although it looks like a different room, and we also see several co-workers now - maybe the guy in the Unicorn pajamas is Stern, or maybe it's the one in the pink pajamas. Who knows?

Just two seasons later in season 27's "Sermon on the Mount", we see Gerald's law office again. We look to be in a completely different building now - while the exterior has a similar shape to the original building but several changes suggestive of a major renovation, such as double doors in front, red brick instead of the dark green coloration, and two of the lower windows now resemble signage and billboards, and there's a handicapped accessible entrance. Glad Gerald is woke and progressive enough to work with disabled clients. It's now labeled though Taylor, Broflovski and Swift -- he's either joined a new firm or changed partners once again at the old renovated building. Also, lol, Taylor Swift, that is clever and subtle considering it's not in dialogue. Visual gags are fun.

We don't really see the partners, but there's now a sign behind his desk that looks to probably depict him with both of them. What's so funny about it though is besides this one prop, Gerald's office is entirely identical to the season 15 onward appearance, maybe shuffling a few of the same props around his desk. Did they renovate the building exterior but keep his office the same, or is it a new building but the animators reused the same office?

Obviously, "dude it's a cartoon it doesn't matter" but if we put on our silly thinking caps, there's a lot to mine here for being playful with headcanon. Does Gerald have a string of changing law partners? What happened to Jackson? Stern? Did Gerald murder them, using acid to dissolve their remains and then cut them up into garbage bags and dump it in the woods? Did Stern and him have some serious disagreements about his restaurant reviews? Is Gerald moving up in the legal world? Maybe changing specializations? Did he use money from an off-screen lawsuit to just update his building as his partners change?

Okay, switch from your Watsonian thinking cap to your Doylist thinking cap. Good reader. Did Matt and Trey change the name of the building or are the animators just having a little fun? Matt and Trey, of course, approve each of these designs, so they definitely know even if they don't know know. But what did they know and when did they know it?

Okay, I'm done. I actually was figuring a lot of this out for South Park Archives on Wiki.gg late Wednesday night and had a little fun again, so I queued up a silly post for Friday while I'm getting some minor surgery done. Hope some of you had fun with this silliness and let me know if I should do more posts like this. Or should I try video? Podcast?

[spjohnv-blog]

While we know from early on that Kyle's Dad is a lawyer, we only see his workplace a couple times in the early seasons of the show, during the second and third seasons. Broflovski and Jackson: Attorneys at Law is the name seen on the building, but we never meet Jackson. There seems to be a fairly large law library that Stan, Kyle, Kenny, Tweek, Craig, Francis and Pete Thelman use to research the flag debate. Customary antacid tablets are left out.

Gerald's law office is next seen over a decade later in season 15's "HUMANCENTiPAD" with a new design reflecting the show's far more advanced visual design. Gerald no longer sits in front of an open window, his desk is wooden and realistic instead of a bright red, the floors now have a detailed blue carpeting, and there's more bookshelves. He has a sweet mobile with photos of his family.

SPS labeled an image of Gerald's Office for 'Broflovski & Jackson' at their website at one point, but we only see an exterior for this building once, in season 22's "A Problem with a Poo", where the dark green exterior walls seem intended to represent an updated version of the previously seen exterior. Gerald also gets a newer computer.

In season 25's "Pajama Day", we briefly see Gerald head into work. We don't see an exterior, but the interior of the building has a sign labeled 'Broflovski and Stern'. He's either changed to a new firm or Jackson has departed he's found a new partner. The same geometric designs are also visible in the carpeting this time, although it looks like a different room, and we also see several co-workers now - maybe the guy in the Unicorn pajamas is Stern, or maybe it's the one in the pink pajamas. Who knows?

Just two seasons later in season 27's "Sermon on the Mount", we see Gerald's law office again. We look to be in a completely different building now - while the exterior has a similar shape to the original building but several changes suggestive of a major renovation, such as double doors in front, red brick instead of the dark green coloration, and two of the lower windows now resemble signage and billboards, and there's a handicapped accessible entrance. Glad Gerald is woke and progressive enough to work with disabled clients. It's now labeled though Taylor, Broflovski and Swift -- he's either joined a new firm or changed partners once again at the old renovated building. Also, lol, Taylor Swift, that is clever and subtle considering it's not in dialogue. Visual gags are fun.

We don't really see the partners, but there's now a sign behind his desk that looks to probably depict him with both of them. What's so funny about it though is besides this one prop, Gerald's office is entirely identical to the season 15 onward appearance, maybe shuffling a few of the same props around his desk. Did they renovate the building exterior but keep his office the same, or is it a new building but the animators reused the same office?

Obviously, "dude it's a cartoon it doesn't matter" but if we put on our silly thinking caps, there's a lot to mine here for being playful with headcanon. Does Gerald have a string of changing law partners? What happened to Jackson? Stern? Did Gerald murder them, using acid to dissolve their remains and then cut them up into garbage bags and dump it in the woods? Did Stern and him have some serious disagreements about his restaurant reviews? Is Gerald moving up in the legal world? Maybe changing specializations? Did he use money from an off-screen lawsuit to just update his building as his partners change?

Okay, switch from your Watsonian thinking cap to your Doylist thinking cap. Good reader. Did Matt and Trey change the name of the building or are the animators just having a little fun? Matt and Trey, of course, approve each of these designs, so they definitely know even if they don't know know. But what did they know and when did they know it?

Okay, I'm done. I actually was figuring a lot of this out for South Park Archives on Wiki.gg late Wednesday night and had a little fun again, so I queued up a silly post for Friday while I'm getting some minor surgery done. Hope some of you had fun with this silliness and let me know if I should do more posts like this. Or should I try video? Podcast?

[spjohnv-blog]

I've been quiet because a lot of shit happened in September 2023 that for a while just completely turned me off the show, and I'm still a little fractured on my feelings (as many of you have seen if you know me on Discord) but I'm really hopeful that the new season will help me be whole again and then I can help and be weird like you're all used to.

[spjohnv-blog]

A Tale of Two Wikis

Which of the above wikis would you trust to be comprehensive?

I posted previously about the South Park Archives being put into an uncomfortable position by FANDOM's Offensive Terms policy. There's no getting around how awkward it is try to maintain an encyclopedia for something like South Park while trying to make it look family-friendly, especially when the literal episode titles are often satirically offensive. You can see a good example of this above.

In October 2024, the staff and community of the South Park Archives made the decision to "fork" their wiki to maintain their independence and be censorship-free, leaving FANDOM behind and instead being hosted at Wiki.GG, a wiki farm which had mostly up to then hosted video game wikis. The content between the new South Park Archives and their former home on FANDOM, now called the South Park Public Library, is mirrored up until the date of the "fork", and since then the staff at SPA have been tinkering and making improvements to the new version of the site, while the old one is mostly, um...

The clean-up crew is still working, I guess.

During my time editing at the South Park Archives, one of the admins' most sincere wishes was to receive an official partnership with South Park Studios. I'm a little unsure how far along this was but I know it was a frequent topic of discussion for several years, definitely before the pandemic. There was discussion of comparing transcripts with official scripts from the show, being able to request specific character assets for the wiki (as I used to do when I helped the Official Wiki out) and cross-promotion. Wiki partnerships can be very simple (shiny badge! updated main page!) or complex, and it looked to me like the Archives had a lot of really cool ideas they wanted to try that would help the community. I'm sure lots of us would love to see more art assets out there, for example, or storyboards.

What did really surprise me though, is that I was alerted recently that the South Park Public Library might be getting a partnership instead????

I don't know the details much, I actually thought this was probably some kind of joke when I saw it, but it looks completely real, and they are just openly discussing the possible partnership on an admin's message wall.

This is confusing, and a little bit alarming.

I've watched the South Park Archives staff over many years put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into trying to create a connection with the studio including after moving to a completely new platform. A partnership with the studio has always been a central goal, and the staff often expressed a feeling they weren't being supported in this respect, and it really sucks to see their work to create a comprehensive and uncensored resource might be totally sidestepped here in favor of the wiki they left behind, now run by a single active administrator, and now subject to such heavy censorship that episode titles, images from the show, have had to be censored and deleted. As I said in the last post, if this were a wiki for something aimed at children or families, I would completely understand censorship, but not for South Park, which has made opposing censorship a central part of its ethos.

I would guess this is a Paramount decision, as I would be very surprised if South Park Studios would be choosing to work with a wiki that can't actually display the proper titles of episodes, much less images and quotes, especially when their own wiki was completely uncensored when I helped out there, as was the now defunct forum where the show's content was concerned.

I don't know what happens next, it might be a done deal and if so we'll see what it entails, but I mean, does this look weird to you guys? Everyone I'm hearing from says it looks very, very weird.

[spjohnv-blog]

The only purpose of "fan theories" and "headcanon" in 2025 is to create content for 'normie' fans to laugh at and put in their cringe compilations. why would you even try to be creative in that kind of environment? are you crazy?

[spjohnv-blog]

South Park Studios Live-Tweet Archive

From 2013 to 2018, South Park Studios did "live-tweets" on Twitter during broadcasts of episodes. These often contained pre-production art, script images, miscellaneous facts, and sometimes a little insight from Matt and Trey. For the ongoing seasons, these were usually done the following week before the brand new episode aired, with a couple odd exceptions, but select "classic" episodes were also done, usually during the first and the dark weeks in a new season.

Willie "Big Will" Westwood archived these at the Scriptorium during its final years, and I've found the archive links for most of them. Seasons 20-21 are incomplete here, and Season 22 is not archived; the #SocialCommentary features on the Blu-Ray releases are also based on these. "The Hobbit" was skipped because there was no accompanying new episode and "Naughty Ninjas" was cancelled because of a police shooting, but otherwise I believe one was done for every seasons 17-22 episode.

Whoever was in charge of the Twitter at the time did a strong job on these and definitely had access to the studio. Some of the Matt and Trey comments are familiar but some are not included anywhere else, on some occasions a piece of pre-production art would be shared earlier in the day or week as a tease for the live-tweets (I don't think these pre-tweets are included below) and on one occasion they actually hyped up a scene in an upcoming episode hours before broadcast. (For "Freemium isn't Free", they teased the return of a character who hadn't been seen in years; this was in reference to Satan)

I hope one day to ask Willie for the un-archived ones and maybe getting these backed up somewhere, possibly the uncensored South Park Archives on Wiki.gg

Season 5

"Scott Tenorman Must Die"

"Towelie"

Season 6

"The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers"

Season 8

"Awesom-o" (live-tweeted twice!)

Season 10

"Tsst"

"Make Love, Not Warcraft"

Season 12

"The Ungroundable"

Season 13

"Fishsticks"

"Butters Bottom Bitch"

Season 14

"Medicinal Fried Chicken"

Season 15

"Broadway Bro Down"

Season 16

"Raising the Bar"

"A Nightmare on Face Time"

Season 17

"Let Go, Let Gov"

"Informative Murder Porn"

"World War Zimmerman"

"Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers"

"Taming Strange"

"Ginger Cow"

"Black Friday"

"Titties and Dragons"

"A Song of Ass and Fire"

"The Hobbit" (blank page, possibly a placeholder; I don't recall this one actually receiving a live-tweet)

Season 18

"Go Fund Yourself"

"Gluten Free Ebola"

"The Cissy"

"Handicar"

"The Magic Bush"

"Freemium isn't Free"

"Grounded Vindaloop"

"Cock Magic"

"#REHASH"

"#HappyHolograms"

Season 19

"Stunning and Brave"

"Where My Country Gone?"

"The City Part of Town"

"You're Not Yelping"

"Safe Space"

"Tweek x Craig"

"Naughty Ninjas" (was cancelled)

"Sponsored Content"

"Truth and Advertising"

"PC Principal Final Justice"

Season 20

"Member Berries"

"The Damned"

Season 21

"Hummels & Heroin"

[spjohnv-blog]

I sometimes love the implied subtext you're referring to here - and indeed, I liked to think at the time Annie's little "Girls in South Park won't be ignored anymore" speech was given to her for being the girl who has been there since the Pilot and still ignored up to then, in the same vein as having Dogpoo deliver a speech about the boys - or maybe Daniel or Nate or Louis or someone since Dogpoo's kind of a character already.

Of course, since Butters kind of jumps around, Annie probably does too.

send me questions?

I don't know how many of my followers are even active these days - shout-out if you are - but please feel free to put a character, a ship, or an episode in my inbox, and I'll do... something. I don't know. I used to do headcanons and what I would change about episodes. If you remember any of my fanfics, name one and I'll do a memory from it?

You've noticed a lot of this blog lately is me being introspective and my mental health is, ah, well anyway, but I'd like to bring this blog a little back to being, hopefully, interesting, and maybe moving past fandom traumas I should be over two years ago.

[spjohnv-blog]

I try not to wade in on controversial topics because I'm basically fandom dead anyway but I've had this feeling for a while and I feel like almost like a liar for not saying it. I strongly disagree with the "Kyle only does moral things to look better than Cartman" premise and I almost can't understand anyone who says it. I don't think this is an opinion, it sounds to me like an attempt at a factual statement, and it simply isn't true. Kyle has tried to do moral things without Cartman present in several episodes. I may list them later. I think it'd be valid to say he isn't as moral as he claims to be, or that he can be a hypocrite, etc. but acting like it's all connected to Cartman feels like a misreading of his entire character and role in the show.

[spjohnv-blog]

don't know if this counts as a "hot take" but I find it equally valid to write Butters as genuinely innocent and kind-hearted or as chaotic and bitter after internalizing the abuse around him. I find both of these pretty valid for both third/fourth grade Butters or an older, aged up Butters.

I feel pretty strongly that the show is not really consistent on his character between these extremes and swings based on the needs of an individual episode. He can be pretty misogynistic and violent in some episodes but there are still other recent episodes written that seem to rely on an untainted innocence. maybe I'll essay about this later.

but I do feel pretty strongly part of why Trey and Matt love the character is his flexibility and elasticity. You can do a lot of jokes between Butters genuinely viewing Cartman as a selfless friend one week and next week acknowledging he's a horrible person he resents.

[spjohnv-blog]

Happy to answer!

Red McArthur

I usually tried to balance Red by having her be a tomboy at heart who wants to be one of the girly girls, and is a little insecure about it. She can be mouthy, likes to kick ass and picks strong characters in games, but she doesn't want to be seen as a tomboy and is a little tryhard with stereotypical female interests to offset it. Haha, yeah, I love boys and perfume, fellow girls, don't you? This isn't to say there isn't some truth to these things, but that she is maybe more vocal about it than her masculine interests, which she is more lowkey with. She'll be like 'yeah, I like that movie' about an action movie but spend more time actually talking about a girly movie. But she likes both. She also gets quiet when her insecurity is too much to deal with, which is why she isn't as talkative as Wendy and Bebe, etc.

It's worth mentioning that I wrote the majority of my works back when Skeeter being Red's father was acceptable - even when I had doubts about this as long-term canon, it was a fun dynamic to write in fanfic, and really fun to play with. I liked to give her a hint of redneck from that and it played into her sometimes being confrontational. Assuming the generic adults in "The Pandemic Special" stick as her parents, her dad is on the City Council. The common thread for both things is I like to think of as someone who has a lot of responsibility at home and is sometimes involved with her dad's work, and so she mostly shows her girly side around the other girls, not as much with her family at home.

I had her and Kevin as childhood friends, going back way before school, and she puts some distance between them as they get older because he's a nerd and she wants to be popular, but he is also accepting of her as she is in a way other people are not and that draws them back together. Annie is her best female friend because they are both so insecure and can bond over that. These were virtually permanent headcanon for me, and even if Red/Kevin didn't happen, I had them as friends.

Annie Knitts

Like a lot of fans, I started when most of what we had to work with was "I don't even know what a queef is", so there's a starting point of making her kind of soft and shy and a little innocent. TSOT supports this interpretation to a partial degree but it does feel like S20 broke from it a little. I had her close with Red, who was her best friend in the group, often following her lead, and having a natural girly streak but often being mistaken for a boy, due to how in older storyboards she was sometimes used as a male background character.

A major moment for me was deciding to make Annie's mom the sort of... embarrassing mom who thinks she's still cool. This started as a way to add some texture and humor to a scene at Annie's House (that was about other female characters plot-wise) and it stuck a bit as a headcanon afterward. I built up some parallels to her mom being a little like early Randy, with Annie, like Stan, being someone who wants to be normal but feels surrounded by extraordinary people.

I sometimes leaned towards making her a bit "boring" (as in, intentionally and in-story boring) or a bit of a cloudcuckoolander, but none of that stuck well. She was someone I always hoped to explore a little more.

send me questions?

I don't know how many of my followers are even active these days - shout-out if you are - but please feel free to put a character, a ship, or an episode in my inbox, and I'll do... something. I don't know. I used to do headcanons and what I would change about episodes. If you remember any of my fanfics, name one and I'll do a memory from it?

You've noticed a lot of this blog lately is me being introspective and my mental health is, ah, well anyway, but I'd like to bring this blog a little back to being, hopefully, interesting, and maybe moving past fandom traumas I should be over two years ago.

[spjohnv-blog]

So does the inbox work now?

Wow, okay, this is the first functional ask I've gotten in years, so it looks like it??

It still says "39 unread messages" next to this blog though, and only two others show, so that's still 36 missing. The question is whether they are there, but unable to be seen, or were destroyed somehow.

[spjohnv-blog]

Update: I have reason to believe my inbox isn't working!! Which explains why I haven't heard from any of you in like, actual years. I alerted Tumblr to this error in January and once a couple years back and thought it was fixed.

send me questions?

I don't know how many of my followers are even active these days - shout-out if you are - but please feel free to put a character, a ship, or an episode in my inbox, and I'll do... something. I don't know. I used to do headcanons and what I would change about episodes. If you remember any of my fanfics, name one and I'll do a memory from it?

You've noticed a lot of this blog lately is me being introspective and my mental health is, ah, well anyway, but I'd like to bring this blog a little back to being, hopefully, interesting, and maybe moving past fandom traumas I should be over two years ago.

[spjohnv-blog]

headcanon

back when I was new to fandom, when you had a "headcanon" it meant that when you wrote different fanfiction, you had certain ideas you reused that were not based in the show. Okay, maybe in one fic Stan is dating Wendy and in another she's with someone else, but in both fics I'm writing, Stan's paternal grandparents are deceased but were somewhat wealthy. That was what a "headcanon" was back then. You didn't need to change these sorts of things between different fic and even if you did once in a while, it was your default setting. Sometimes writers borrowed from each other because not all of us had our own ideas for first and last names for characters not fully named in the show (ie Mr. Mackey's first name, Gregory's surname, etc.) or occupations for characters or eye colors (ie Kyle's infamous green eyes) and some of this was to fill in blanks that are old news to young fans now, but not all of us were willing to hold up a fic or art piece for six years to find out what Timmy's last name would turn out to be on a growth chart. This was very much a fanfiction author and fan artist thing and that was pretty much it. There was no "discourse" because you'd only find them in the art itself. Someone might ask "why do people write this" out of genuine curiosity, and usually there was some nugget of reason.

Somewhere along the way, the concept of a "headcanon" changed, and I'm not sure why. I think some of this has to do with 'headcanon blogs' that just post people's ideas with shitty graphics, and just social media in general, but "headcanon" started to include all sorts of story concepts that probably wouldn't be reused in different art, actual canonical concepts re-framed as creative fan theories, and a lot of diversity that has been politicized in the real world, and in some bigger fandoms it's just a catch-all for "I don't follow the official lore that means headcanon". I don't know what happened, but now it feels like every other person in fandom has to express a contempt and hatred for "headcanons" and the example usually is a TikTok with pronouns or something (the more famous examples of which are clearly jokes) and it all carries this underlying suspicion that having any headcanon is to spit in the face of canon directly and disrespect Matt and Trey's carefully-constructed world-building and to insert unnecessary outside real world politics into a show that regularly tackles real world politics.

I'm not trying to gatekeep "headcanon" here, which I know it sounds like, but I also feel like the concept has evolved so far in the social media age that I really genuinely feel like a lot of people don't even understand the context in which it originated and evolved anymore because they're too busy associating it with cringe.

[spjohnv-blog]

cool project coming soon??

[spjohnv-blog]

I think this encapsulates the issue with Kyle's reception pretty perfectly, and matches my experiences in the fandom well.

I think though, it's somewhat clear Kyle is intended to be a sympathetic character. He's based on Matt Stone and this is pretty openly referenced, while Cartman is the "garbage in everyone's souls". The "I learned something today" speeches are assigned to him - he delivers the intended message when there's one to be expressed. This writing structure leans on him as a voice of the creators, though of course it is sometimes used by other characters.

None of this is to say he can't be self-righteous, but I also don't imagine any of this would really 'fit' if that was intended to be core to his character that he was a self-righteous hypocrite who only says things for other people.

"i guess because the show does not spend a lot of time focusing on kyle’s internal struggles or anything"

I think this is really key. When Matt and Trey seem interested in doing a story with an introspective character, they usually use Stan, who has always been more one to look for advice and console in others, but Kyle often seems chosen when he is meant to be unmovable, only changing at the end of a story. The result is though, Kyle seems to lack introspection. I think you sort of see some comparison with Matt here, who tends to be the more outward one compared to Trey, the one willing to handle business and interviews.

There is one moment though, I tend to think about a lot for Kyle's inner life.

"Do you?! Do you, Stan?! Because all my life I was raised to believe in Jehovah! To believe that we should all behave a certain way and good things will come to us. I make mistakes, but every week I try to better myself. I'm always saying, "You know, I learned something today..." and what does this so-called God give me in return? A hemorrhoid. He doesn't make sense! What is your logic?!"

This is from "Cartmanland", which also kind of encapsulates Kyle's development over the early seasons and transformation into Cartman's contrast/rival, but I think it says a lot about who Kyle is as a person. He's trying to be a better person every day, and I think in some ways that reads to me that he does have some insecurity and does wrestle with past decisions. We don't see this much but I think his overreactions when he is being framed as wrong also point towards some insecurity. But that's between Kyle and Kyle, not projecting for others, I would say, so I don't know where the idea he is insincere really comes in, although I've seen it.

But back to the question, the other issue I think is Kyle is a very reactive character. His motivations are often about protecting Ike or disagreeing with Cartman, doing something because of what someone else is doing. We don't really know his individual hobbies and interests without one of the other kids around. We've picked up some stuff about Stan - he loves animals, Butters says he likes LEGOs, he mentions Star Trek a lot in old episodes, but Kyle's implied interests all seem more subtextual. He has a mystery book on his desk and an MC Dreidel poster, those might mean something.

I think though, we've seen he's often depicted advocating for the responsible choice, even without Cartman around, such as his concern for Ike in multiple episodes or looking after Blanket in "The Jeffersons", showing him as a responsible in contrast to Blanket's father, and there's no indication he's looking for credit or outside feedback for any of that. He also chooses not to expose that he wasn't last on the Girls' list, which someone image conscious would do.

So, for lack of an idea of Kyle having some hobby in his free time, I think it's easier for people to jump to conclusions. It's common for people to claim Kyle is "obsessed" with Cartman on some equal level, or that he is at fault because he chooses to respond to Cartman's attacks, or suggesting they both harass each other equally. The thing is though, I don't think there's too many episodes where Cartman goes out of his way to target Cartman without Cartman instigating first, and the main examples on my mind where Kyle makes fun of Cartman for being "fat" - this seems to be normalized, from season one to present, across all of their classmates, unlike Cartman going after Kyle's religion, which is unique and personal.

I mean, Cartman even acknowledges targeting Kyle in his own home ("I've broken into Kyle's house lots of times") which in the real world is considered a pretty high level of harassment, even if you know someone, while Kyle hasn't really done this to Cartman outside of an episode where Cartman specifically broke into his house first. But maybe I'm getting old and rusty. Moreover though, while we often see Cartman express unfound fears about Kyle from a distance, I can't think of many time Kyle was really obsessing over Cartman from afar besides "Cartmanland". The idea he's guilty for acknowledging Cartman just weirds me out, honestly.

I think we'd see some of this differently if the show returned to having short scenes of Stan and Kyle hanging out, or did more episodes of the boys as a unified group, and it'd be easier to say that's the status quo and the fights are just part of the episodes, rather than something that is a constant.

Again though, there's the structure of the show. The first season really has Wendy and Cartman as sort of playing the role of rivals, but the show rebuilt itself in seasons 4-6 around Kyle and Cartman being two contrasting characters, a bit of "Stan and Kyle vs. Cartman" giving way to more of the latter two. Kyle, who had initially been more hot-headed, was becoming more and more the smart, responsible and philosophical one, with some implied character development to this angle, while Cartman became less and less of a spoiled stupid kid and more and more devious and intentionally awful. The structure of a first act becomes a lot of 'Cartman has a dumb idea, Kyle tells him it's dumb, Cartman does it anyway with Butters and that's where the real plot and the jokes start'.

Star Trek is a big influence on Matt and Trey, and you can sort of see hints of the structure here. Kirk confronts a problem, and initially goes to Bones and Spock for their opinions, they contrast one another and make some barbs at each other, but at the end of the day everyone is friends and we solve the problem. In early episodes, Stan often went to other people for help with his problems, with others offering solutions. Stan has stepped back from this, and other characters are largely outside the morality play, but we still get Cartman and Kyle contrasting ideas about the problem of the week.

We also know, just practically speaking, Matt and Trey prefer to have their characters talking to each other, and that's why Cartman often interacts with Kyle and Butters, who are both Matt, or even Craig or Scott Malkinson, and not as much with Stan, who is Trey, so to some degree the Kyle-Cartman rivalry is also important to have Matt and Trey doing their thing together in a completely literal sense.

It's a common comedy writing trope to sort of take your big joke character and place them alongside a voice of reason and it's unfortunately very often the voice of reason character gradually becomes 'boring' and implications of hypocrisy or a dark side emerge as a way to make them interesting or funnier -- but in almost every case I've seen this applied, it undermines any moral authority the character otherwise holds. I think Kyle was a victim of this process, especially from season 17's "Ginger Cow" on, which is probably the high point of 'self-righteous' Kyle within canon. I've also seen it with Stan, with "A Scause for Applause" seeming to feed negative sentiment about his motivations in other episodes, too. Both of these involve episodic circumstances, I think. It's kind of difficult because these flaws undermine Stan and Kyle, but making them flawless wouldn't be funny.

I go into all of this structure nonsense because at this point the show's structure needs the Cartman-Kyle rivalry to work, and so you're going to do things to keep that going. Cartman losing weight, getting disciplined, and unlearning racism ends the show, and fighting with Kyle is kind of part of that. So you need both of them to do their thing and both are therefore pretty valuable from a structure standpoint. It's common for this to be invoked in Cartman's defense, that he's a necessary component because he's the 'funny' one, but not as much with Kyle, who is needed. His pushing back provides tension for the viewer and motivation for Cartman. He wouldn't even be as interesting a character if everyone just quietly agreed with him.

Look back to "Smug Alert!", where we see that Cartman needs that pushback sometimes and almost craves it. I think this is the root of their dysfunctional relationship really, more than anything Kyle does, Cartman enjoys pissing him off. If Kyle wants pancakes, Cartman will want waffles, and that's our episode, and that's how their rivalry for all it's faults acts as the center of the show.

the fandom can be pretty torn on kyle as a character and i’ve come to realize it’s because some people see him as someone who genuinely has passion for the causes he gets behind and wants to do good things for people, and others think he’s insincere and solely wants to make himself seem like a good person or win fights with cartman. i’m the former, but honestly, as i’ve thought about it more i can sort of understand why some people think the latter too? i have arguments about why i think what i do but it’s one of those things i don’t think you can definitively prove either way you know

[spjohnv-blog]

send me questions?

I don't know how many of my followers are even active these days - shout-out if you are - but please feel free to put a character, a ship, or an episode in my inbox, and I'll do... something. I don't know. I used to do headcanons and what I would change about episodes. If you remember any of my fanfics, name one and I'll do a memory from it?

You've noticed a lot of this blog lately is me being introspective and my mental health is, ah, well anyway, but I'd like to bring this blog a little back to being, hopefully, interesting, and maybe moving past fandom traumas I should be over two years ago.