South Park Takes Down The Great Mouse
The problem with the South Park: Joining the Panderverse episode is that it’s right on every level.
South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have infuriated Disney lovers again, and the world is all the better for it. Their latest episode criticizes Disney’s insufferable social justice warrior storytelling while blasting Kathleen Kennedy’s leadership of the once famed company. The entire show is hyper critical of Disney’s determination to repurpose beloved intellectual property with modern cultural social issues. Trading traditionally Caucasian characters with people of color while transforming male characters into female are analyzed against the backdrop of Joining the Panderverse episode; all while Randy and the rest of the white collar characters of South Park wage a war against college institutions for leaving them with expensive school loans and useless real-world skills.
Cartman rages like never before.
South Park has once again attacked the soft-white underbelly of Disney, exposing its shameless pandering to feminism and LGBTQ audiences alike. The result is an interpretation of modern Disney stories that pales in comparison to the way it was telling stories a century ago. When your hero is a hero simply because they are not a particular gender, you have successfully created a farcical Panderverse that no one wants to bear witness to, let alone venerate.
Stan and Kyle have been rebooted.
Step back and take a long, hard look at Bud Light and Dillon Mulvaney. Do not think for a second that Anheuser Busch gives a damn about LGBTQ rights. Contrary to what Mitt Romney thinks, corporations are not people; the only thing a corporation cherishes are profits. Anheuser Busch held their finger to the wind of social media, saw that LGBTQ rights are a hotbed of re-tweets, likes, and upvotes and decided to throw their hat in the ring. Not to uphold the values of equal rights and freedom, but to increase shareholder profit — nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
Disney has been pretending to care about LGBTQ issues for the same reasons; increase profits by pandering to a group they see as potential customers, not disenfranchised or underserved; but a market sector that could increase profitability. The problem with Disney is that their product is not a can of terrible tasting beer, but cinematic entertainment that fails by every metric they themselves established for over one hundred years. Disney forgot their bread and butter lies in fantastic storytelling and not pandering to hot-button cultural issues.
She-Hulk, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and Obi-Wan were hijacked by Disney’s pandering to female empowerment. The problem with how they did this lies in their storytelling. The women of these cinematic contrivances are never developed through story. They enter the screen in a plume of infallible light. They are perfect when compared to adversary and ally alike, and there is not one minute of dialogue or screen time that reflects this ascension. The problem is not the female heroine, it is Disney’s female heroine.
When your characters, male or female, are perfect from the start, there is no point in telling your story. You have ruined the hero’s journey by injecting characters that possess no room for change, and therefore, conflict. When your hero has no struggle within or without, the story you are telling is boring and not worth telling, and certainly not worth watching. There is a reason Batman Vs. Superman failed. How interesting is it to see a mortal fight against a veritable God? Superman cannot be harmed in any way, shape, or form. Batman can be killed, Superman cannot. The conflict is non-existent and so are the stakes. There is no conceivable way that Batman can do anything to really harm Superman. Before any action takes place, the viewer can imagine everything before even seeing the film. Either Superman wins, or it is a draw based on some sort of ambiguous moral dilemma that emerges in a trite and ham-handed segway…the end. Disney does not need to abandon female driven story narratives; they simply need to make them worth watching.
There is no shortage of misogynistic racists that have been crying foul towards Disney over the last decade. When these morons are not voting for Trump, they are busy clacking away behind screens, moaning about how their culture is being erased by x, y, and z. Sadly, these fools are heard over the cacophony of legitimate cinephile criticisms. Disney is failing most of its audience because it insists on telling stories that are about a hero whose defining characteristic is that they are not male. This is the worst way to develop any kind of character, let alone, a female one.
Imagine if Ripley from Alien was a know-it-all Mary Sue who constantly berated her male counterparts. Zero interest would grow inside the audience for her. In that “Panderverse” version of Alien, everyone would succumb to the errors of their own doing, and not the xenomorph. Dallas would simply slip and fall down a vent shaft, while Kane and Brett accidentally shoot themselves out an airlock. Your hero needs to have vulnerabilities and weaknesses to become an actual hero worth respecting. Princess Lea from Obi-Wan can rewire security gates and drones with zero training while Sabine from Ashoka can suddenly master the Force with enough skill to Force push a meandering minstrel into Thrawn’s departing ship. It took Luke a month training with a Jedi master to lift a rock while doing a handstand, but it takes Sabine a few minutes.
The problem is not that Sabine is using the Force so well, it’s that Feloni and Disney failed to include any worthwhile scenes that show Sabine training and failing to do so. There needs to be a struggle that audiences can sink their teeth into, that way when Sabine needs to use the Force, the audience is on the edge of their seat wondering if she will be able to at all. Instead, Disney makes their female hero’s incapable of failing in the face of any tangible stakes.
South Park has pointed this out for the masses to see, and that is why Disney sycophants are crying bloody murder in response; their delicate sensibilities have been torn asunder and laid bare. The emperor mouse has not been wearing clothes for a long time,and audiences are right to condemn their pandering of cultural issues as a panacea for abysmal storytelling and lackluster characters.
The “new” Cartman has arrived.
A hero’s gender never matters when their character is developed correctly. Disney has forgotten how great stories are told. When your hero is perfect from the start, the tale is over before it begins. South Park has hit the nail on the head with their latest episode. Disney and their mob of social justice warriors are reeling as a result…the truth hurts.