South Park

They threw as much hate against multiverse stuff as they did against pandering, if not more.

Finally someone gets it 👏

Totally agree, really good satire, and South Park is one of the best, makes everyone laugh

Stan and Kyle's speech was lame - it needed more gay chicks.

Black Cartman is the voice of reason. Ignore all the stuff going on and play Baldurs Gate 3.

Did you miss where Cartman and Kathleen agreed they were both wrong?

In typical South Park fashion they made fun of everyone here because everyone is acting ridiculous at the moment, then everyone looked at the special and only saw the jokes making fun of the other side and ran with that, people are idiots

You are 100% correct also, you missed the main point of this episode which is Baldurs gate 3 is awesome and it’s impossible to get a handyman to fix things around the house. My hot water heater is still broken and no one will show up. Lol.

South Park has always been about making fun of both left, and right. Including and not limited to every single other belief, joy, or topic lol.

Anything thinking that Matt/Trey or South Park leans towards supporting one side or another is usually in most instances wrong.

I haven’t even seen the special, but I knew immediately they wouldn’t just be making fun of race swapping, that’s too easy.

If I was to hate something about this, it would be the fact that people seem to think cartman is a real person

Same thing happened with the Barbie movie. The right wing ate it up as making fun of wokeness, yet they purposely refuse to ignore that woman's monologue at the end, which goes against everything they believe in lmao. But even that movie was making fun of pandering, just a little more subtle than SP.

Or take another example, gaming industry. Because of gamergate, there are now games that pander as well, but here's also the thing, those are all optional character creation choices that you don't have to do. Even the gay characters in Life is Strange are far better written than what Disney/Marvel puts out.

They just insert these token LGBT, feminist, multi-racial characters so they can meet a quota and pretend they actually give a fuck about these groups, but at the end of the day, they only just want their money. Nothing more, nothing less. And that is one reason why SP made this episode. If corpos really gave a shit, then said corpos would also change their flag to the rainbow one even in middle eastern countries!

Can anyone tell me how the right looked bad in this episode? Especially compared to the left? To be clear I think they all suck.

I don't even think it is truly about anything to do with right wing / left wing in the larger scheme of things. The bigger issue is and always had been that ANY complaint leveled against Disney for their poor performances lately had been labeled as extreme right bigoted hatred.

In other words what we're seeing is, even the general apathy portrayed by characters like Stan and Kyle (the common fan) being lumped in with the few extremists (cartman) in order to attempt to paint some type of picture of this massive gang coming after Disney unfairly.

When you read reviews by common movie goers, the negative reviews tend to mostly be about boring, badly written, redundant storytelling... And of course every so often you'll find some lunatic making off the wall comments. However, reading the media's response to these reviews, you'd get the impression that all of it is racist trolls. We've actually turned a corner recently where Disney has been doing so poorly that even the media isn't bothering to cover for them any longer.

The other side of the coin is that you'll get people on the most progressive side of the political spectrum that do nothing but boast the merits of Disney's diversity driven agenda all over social media. The mystery is why all this support isn't translating to success at the box office. The answer is either that all these people talk a big talk but don't actually support the product... Or their numbers are so few that they can't actually make a difference.

The people who you will see claiming this episode for their side are a drop in the bucket in the larger scale of things.

Ultimately the creators of Southpark have made their stance on what they think of Disney as a whole abudnatly clear regardless for years well before this episode even aired which some people seem to currently be totally oblivious to.

people have been stuck watching lazy and unoriginal movies and TV that they can’t interpret a pretty simple plot

Oh, great, another member of the patriarch coming to mansplain something to me while trying to control the narrative.

I think the most subtle part of the episode that flew over many people's heads is how Kyle and Stan openly rejected Panderverse Cartman at first ('That is not Eric Cartman!') but because Panderverse Cartman acted exactly the same Kyle quickly fell into his usual routine of arguing with Cartman like normal, with Stan literally proclaiming 'It really is Cartman' when his scheme to play Baldur's Gate III became clear.

The point being that even if a character's appearance is changed or updated, if they actually are written the same it doesn't change that much at all.

Don't send hate to Disney, just don't send them your $ and watch their woke garbage.

I’m not saying cartman is the voice of reason… but his catatonic state in the multiverse classroom, lying there, unable to move, communicating through moans, is super accurate to how it feels to watch those kinds of movies (“white heterosexual males think they welcome anywhere.” cartman: “aahhh. ahh.”)

Although Stan and Kyle are the voice of reason I definitely don't agree that the multiverse as a story concept is inherently bad

The thing is that Cartman is largely just a strawman but yeah sure whatever. The people that are critical of Disney aren't "right wingers" they are legitimate fans that are told "we don't want your patronage anymore, kindly fuck off" and so they did. And now look at Disney.

The true message of Joining the Panderverse is: Fuck Kyle!

I agree with most of what youve said. What I really like about this special is that there is finally some mainstream recognition for all the woke shit being inserted into modern media. So far its been mostly "anti-woke" commentators on youtube talking about it and a lot of them are kinda cringe as well. We need more Kyles in this world for this to get fixed.

The point of the episode was Matt and Trey asking Kathleen Kennedy to stop fighting racism through corporate media propaganda…

That’s all it was and it was filled with a b subplot covering Bernie bros, a.i. and the billiionare feuds.

The liberals and left wing progressives going in circles in this sub trying to figure how they can spin this… your tears are bliss…

In short, you can’t please all of them, criticisms will be there, if you’re an artist, you need to be open and reflect on the problems in your work, if you’re a critic critiquing someone’s work, don’t be overly critical or hateful in your critiques, it’s all about being open-minded and understanding

If people saw Star Wars (the series that arguably kicked off the hate mail) and just said CALMLY, "Idk, didn't feel the same. I didn't care for it."

This probably would have blown over. But the demonizing from one side lead to the other side doubling down

Both sides are stupid but to a certain degree there have to be people who complain about this stuff or else they will keep pandering.

True message, movies suck right now

I feel like a lot of people are straw manning the shit out of this episode

I see MUCH more people complaining about how nobody understood it than actual people misunderstanding it

It seems like there’s a very firm consensus that the episode attacked both sides and appealed to the common sense answer to the ‘culture war’: instead of pandering to the cultural zeitgeist in order to achieve a bare minimum, shallow, surface level of diversity, focus on telling good stories and the socially progressive cultural zeitgeist will take care of diversity for you.

The whole point bc many of you all are thinking way too deep or trying to disect the episode too much is that disney sucks and has been with movies, peoples are too attached to the phones where they cant do a damn thing, and that southpark will continue to make fun of the woke as long as people keep it alive and ruining things lol

Also they showed that they can make content that panders to both sides to gain viewership and discourse online. Maybe SouthPark has been pandering to the widest audience possible this whole time

What I find amusing is that culture warriors on both sides of the political divide seem to think that Matt & Trey are taking THEIR side. I don’t see it that way. To my mind Panderverse is a polemic against The Culture Wars themselves. Matt & Trey clearly don’t have a lot of love for smug leftists & Disney’s faux corporate progressivism. That said, alt-right “classical liberal” types who rejoice in lib pwning don’t come out of this looking so brilliant either. Kathleen Kennedy IS pretty awful, but so are the idjits who can’t fall asleep at night until they’ve checked under their beds to make sure there aren’t any rogue Disney execs lurking beneath, coiled like a viper.

You people are ducking weird. It was certainly primarily making fun of obvious diversity pandering.

It panders to both sides which is funny.

I haven't watched the special but I wanted to say something about the Miles Morales-example: Pandering and race swapping are real things but it's important to get the definitions straight. Miles Morales has always been a canon black character in the marvel comics. Therefore, this is not "race swapping". He's literally a different version of spiderman (hence why his name isn't Peter Parker). Something these Movie Giants like Marvel, Disney etc. are doing is indeed pandering, but in this case it's more in the sense that they are trying to get brownie-points for solely having a canon black lead in a movie without truthfully engaging with their blackness and it means for the narrative. Which is lazy writing as best and a disgustingly bad cash grab at worst.

Sometimes, people hear what they want to hear.

Threads like this remind me that arguing with anyone on the internet regarding politics is a fool's errand and a complete waste of time. Everyone has their own backwards and easily disprovable interpretation and opinion over what is right or wrong or whatever, and with some of the absolutely cringe-inducing, ice-cold takes I've seen here I can't imagine that the world will ever get any better as long as ignorance reigns.

I think the episode goes out of its way to forgive bad decicion making by a mega corporation. It could have easily been tilted towards cartmans perspective and been right. What south park did by displaying two sides was mercy. It wasn't indicative of who is most at fault. Which is the huge mega Corp with near limitless resources and talent to pull from.

The problem is diversity and inclusion sells fine in enough other instances where the art isn't dictated by a committee.

It isnt people like cartman who made Disney's decicions for them. You can't both sides a situation where one side has every opportunity to just make better business decicions not clouded by ego and a sense of self righteousness. Especially when you have every reason not to fail.