South Park and Childhood

I rewatched all of South Park and replayed The Stick of Truth and The Fractured But Whole. I don’t really know why other than morbid curiosity and a vague notion that I was going to make some sort of content out of it. (Life tip: You can justify a lot of questionable media consumption decisions by simply saying to yourself, “I don’t know, maybe a blog post later!”) 

South Park is an important show for me, and a very precarious one. On one hand, you don’t need me to tell you the aspects of the show that don’t hold up. Many of the show’s more conservative stances come from a place of extreme intellectual dishonesty or outright disinformation (shout out to Manbearpig), it frequently falls into the seemingly endless Gen X transphobia hole, it comes from an era of television where certain slurs were more casually thrown around, and blah blah you know the rest.

On the other hand, I still find vast swaths of it funny, and on a personal level, the DVD commentaries were my first exposure to the concept of storytelling structure. Specifically, the one on the Cartmanland episode where they discuss going from having an A story and B story to just having everything revolve around the one A story and what it takes from a storytelling standpoint to pull that off. I wouldn’t be interested in screenwriting and narrative were it not for this show.

Moreover, rewatching the whole show and replaying the games strongly reinforced something I already suspected but didn’t fully appreciate: South Park is one of my favorite depictions of childhood ever.

It’s a topic we’ve covered before, and it’s one that I still find myself coming back to thanks in large part to Perfect Tides and Turning Red and 2022’s flood of incredible coming-of-age media. How does South Park contrast with that stuff? True, South Park is a product of the ‘90s and mostly about boys. But I think the differences run a little deeper than that.

Precocious Indie Kids

I think another source of my hyper awareness of the depiction of childhood comes from the fact that I came of movie analyzation age during the rise of a certain wave of indie films.

I was a teen when Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, and other “quirky” indie movies reached a level of popularity that films like that had rarely hit before. I never really loved any of them. (Some I’d rewatch later and discovered that I outright loathed.) Sometimes it was just your typical clash of sensibility and tonality and sometimes I had more tangible reasons. It’s not that these movies didn’t reflect my childhood. It’s that they seemed like they weren’t a reflection of anyone’s childhood or childhood in general. (I’m aware, for the record, that all these examples are movies about high school and not the 4th graders of South Park, but the same general principle applies.)

Maybe all these indie directors really did grow up these super precocious hyper literate New York Lonely Boys. Maybe they were all Charlie Bartlett or the kids from Moonrise Kingdom or whatever other frequently four eyed monsters from the Salinger lagoon. These vessels for unrealistic and, arguably, unhealthy levels of innocence and purity. But somehow I doubt it.

Again, the issue is not one of relatability. It’s that these kids don’t register as kids so much as an adult’s fantasy of idealized adolescence. It’s a very narrow and overly romanticized depiction of childhood that lives in a fantasy where the outside world has no impact of their identity and they aren’t capable of cruelty or any kind of duality. To be fair, not all kids in media have to be the same. Sometimes being at a bit of an arm’s length with reality is genuinely affective and even what’s called for in terms of selling a story. However, on some level, I was keenly aware that none of the kids in Wes Anderson’s movies had to experience being pulled out of class on 9/11 or seeing the world fall apart on the news and feel absolutely hopeless. 

And really, why would they? A lot of the filmmakers behind those films didn’t have an experience like that in their childhood. But many after a certain chronological line in the sand did. Some may find escapism in this kind of portrayal, and honestly, more power to them. But for me, on an emotional level, these indie kids are completely intangible. 

Just so it doesn’t seem like I’m beating up on a certain generation of indie kids too much, this is far from the only wave of fictional narrative that’s guilty of this problem. A lot of these movies are the children of Harold and Maude and fiction and, on a macro level, this idea that children are these repositories of a pure vision of the world. Maybe you see the world that way. Personally, I think that’s a burden that kids shouldn’t have to bare. Also, (and I couldn’t think of a way to phrase this without sounding like a monster but here we go) I think it’s giving them too much credit.

The Kids on South Park

The kids in South Park are little assholes. Or to be more accurate, their default isn’t precocious angel.

They frequently tear each other to shreds for petty reasons and go for the jugular each and every time. They’re frequently crude because they think it’s funny. (To be fair, it was funny when my friends and I were like that then, and we’re still like that now and it’s still very funny.) They jump on trends without a moment’s thought, they’re inconsiderate, and as I said, they’re little assholes.

They are, in short, kids. And because kids are never as simple as we like to think, they have much more going on underneath the surface.

All of the kids on South Park, save for Cartman, are capable of sweetness and innocence. (And even then, Cartman has his moments in the early days of the show, albeit usually in some twisted form. See: Cartman putting the entirety of Disney World up his ass in the episode “Cartman’s Silly Hate Crime 2000.”) The Kenny/Mysterion episodes about his protecting his little sister are some of the most touching moments on the show, as well as Kyle looking after Ike. Jimmy and Timmy are both frequently the butt of the joke (and the depiction of the disabled is far from perfect in general), but both are treated like normal kids and they both have more autonomy than the vast majority of TV shows that portray the handicapped.

One of my favorite aspects of the show is despite the fact that all the kids swear and say horrible stuff (which, again, I’m still guilty of on a daily basis), they still retain a certain degree of innocence. “Proper Condom Use” is an episode based on the fact that none of the kids actually know what sex is, and because their sex ed curriculum was designed to emphasize the scarier consequences, it drives them to fear and terror. The parents think all the kids have seen the porno they accidentally gave them in "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers,” when really, they’re just playing Lord of the Rings and they’re agape when their parents explain every graphic act in said porno.

(And while we’re here, all the fantasy and superhero themed kid recreations in the videogames, in which everything from weapons to costumes are made from household supplies and spare clothes and so on, are undeniably charming.)

They’re also frequently motivated by righteous causes. “Fun with Veal” is an episode about the kids trying to save baby cows from slaughter. (The episode still works despite the “break out in vaginas” thing.) “The Biggest Douche in the Universe” sees Stan trying to rescue Kyle from the clutches of John Edward, a one-time popular TV “psychic,” and the episode is really a means to dunk on scammers who prey on the bereaved and the emotionally desperate. In fact, the need to look out for one another is one of the biggest motivators for stories, and even if they’re doing something they shouldn’t, there’s still a sense of camaraderie and compassion for one another that feels real. 

All of the kids have a level of nuance that many depictions of children in media don’t have. Sweet kids like Butters (my favorite character on the show), does more than his fair share to uphold the toxic rites of boys that he himself is frequently the victim of. Cartman is obviously a sociopath and he’s so over-the-top that you can’t and shouldn’t take him seriously, but there were definitely kids in my classes growing up who had an underdeveloped sense of right and wrong. Hell, I was that kid frequently. The kids do wrong from the right reasons and vice versa.

To be fair, if the kids I was complaining about in the last section are just vessels for a certain kind of fantasy, it can be argueed that the kids in South Park are just as guilty. The difference being that the twee kids are from the fantasy and the South Park kids are vessels for satire and whatever ill-defined libertarian bullshit the creators want to spew that week. However, even in those circumstances, the South Park kids are given much more of an opportunity to simply be kids. Their existence is sometimes burdened by an adult’s need to represent whatever it is their creators want them to represent that week. But they also frequently just get to be carefree children. 

In the end, that’s what we really miss about childhood. Not having to worry about anything. And that’s if we were lucky.

In South Park, it’s acknowledged that kids are simply that. Sometimes, it means they’re innocent. Sometimes, it means that they’re gremlins. Both of these things can be true at once.