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Fandom overview: South Park
INTRODUCTION TO SOUTH PARK
South Park debuted on Comedy Central on August 13, 1997 and quickly became a media phenomenon. It’s essentially a half-hour cartoon about four boys living in a magical-reality mountain town in Park Country, Colorado, about an hour outside of Denver. The premise is based on the experiences of creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who both grew up in the area. The show caught on mostly due to its juxtaposition of rough, primary-colored construction-paper stop-motion animation and adult humor. The four boys swear, love toilet humor, and are generally irreverent. The adults in their town are misguided at best, and the boys seem very well aware of it. This made the show initially shocking to some, and South Park has continued to generate controversy by becoming an equal-opportunity offender.
The show was based on two earlier efforts of Stone and Parker’s in the same style, a short class project from 1992 and a “video Christmas card” created for former MTV executive Brian Graden, who distributed the tape widely enough to bring Stone and Parker to Comedy Central, where the series is now in its 16th season. Currently, the show is contracted through its 20th season, in 2016.
Part of South Park’s longevity is owed to its topicality. The show’s production schedule is unusual in that each season is split into two runs of seven episodes, one in spring and one in fall. These seven episodes are scripted and produced all in the week before they debut, on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. EST. Often the episode is still in production up to a few hours before airing. This allows the staff to include allusions to current events before almost everyone else. Compared to the months-long production schedule of The Simpsons, this is fairly impressive. As a recent example, the Wednesday, September 26 episode of South Park was able to incorporate references to a Monday Night Football game that had happened fewer than two days previous. Stone and Parker maintain that they absolutely cannot plan an episode any sooner than six days before it airs, and this has in the past led to some insane contrivances that were absurdly funny, because the staff had no time to reconsider. Other times, episodes can feel rushed and thoughtless. The recent football episode seemed at times to be several things, including critiques of sarcasm’s overuse in discourse, the NFL referee lock out, assertions that football can lead to serious brain injuries, and parents’ lack of willingness to explain difficult topics to their children. It also repeatedly showed people drinking a 10-year-old’s nocturnal emissions. People seemed to find this funny, but you can’t argue that it was essential to the plot.
Whether all of this adds up to a show that is objectively good is anyone’s guess. South Park is widely judged on its ability to produce scathing critiques of hot topics, but lately it tends to skew toward parodies of reality TV shows. Some have criticized Stone and Parker’s positions as privileged, wealthy, white males. It’s also arguable that their extremely truncated episode production time doesn’t necessarily make for the best television.
What the show does have, however, is a strong emotional core. People will debate what South Park is about; I should say what it’s about is human absurdity, and our emotions play a big part in that. The characters, at least the four main boys, have always had relatively strong personalities that have developed acutely, if gradually, over the show’s run. People frequently express shock that South Park has a fandom. It has a well-established cast of characters, and it does have a kind of flexible continuity. Because it’s set in a version of the real world where supernatural and unordinary events sometimes happen, South Park offers writers a great deal to build on and work with.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SOUTH PARK SLASH FANDOM
A small but dedicated South Park slash fandom has been active for six or seven years now. The intellectual premise of the majority of slash is, “What would these kids be like when they grow up?” By far, the most popular age at which to represent the characters in is 17-18. This gives the SP fandom a lot of commonality with other fandoms that enjoy high school AUs — it's just that we're aging the characters up, not down. Stories about the characters in college are also popular, with a minority of writers dealing with them after college and older. Some authors do set their stories at the time of the show’s run, when the boys are 8 to 10 years old, but the vast majority of these stories are gen or deal with het elementary school relationships.
Despite its 1997 premier, there's little to no trace of a fandom on the internet before 2005-6. A few fan script sites online date to early in the show's run, but the fandom as we know it owes its existence to Eastern fandom, where fan art for SP became popular around this time. This art duly borrows heavily from anime style. The Eastern fandom remains very active today, primarily though Pixiv, where there is new art daily. From its origins, SP has always had an art-heavy fandom. To a certain extent, the staff of the show has been supportive of general SP fanart. Staffers have been known to create their own fan art and maintain DeviantArt accounts. In 2011, as part of the show's 15th anniversary, a Year of the Fan art contest was held, with many fandom artists placing. Additionally, South Park Studios assembled a physical gallery space featuring works based on the show and its characters. On the topic of fan fic, Stone once said that he didn’t read it because he was afraid it would be good. In a later interview, Parker and Stone’s Book of Mormon collaborator Robert Lopez called the actual Book of Mormon Bible fan ficition. Additionally, the entire series is available online for free in many countries, including the United States. All around, it seems that while the South Park powers that be don’t have the kind of direct relationship with the fan base that some fandoms have come to expect, there is generally an acknowledgement of and appreciation for fans.
It bears nothing that the general South Park fan base is very large and includes many disparate types of viewers. On fanfiction.net there is an entire subset of writers who created stories based around original characters attending South Park Elementary and becoming friends with the cast; there are others whose SP fandom is mediated entirely though South Park Studios message boards. The online slash fandom as we know it has little to do with these other fans, and they are not always aware of us or happy we exist. Repeatedly, people will stumble onto the #south park Tumblr tag, only to express dismay that “pedophiles” are slashing the characters. The fandom seems split on whether to argue with or ignore these people.
CHARACTERS
As with The Simpsons, or any long-running character-driven series, SP has spawned loads and loads of characters, many of whom come in and out of focus at different times. While the nucleus of the show has always been the group of Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Eric Cartman (or just “the boys,” per Matt and Trey, or [rarely] SKKE,), they often spend time with class loser Butters Stotch (SKKEB).
Arguably the most popular mainstream SP characters have been the adults. In the early years of the show’s run, the school chef, Chef, voiced by Isaac Hayes, was a central character; the kids would often turn to him for advice, which he’d dispense in the form of a sexy R&B tune. Likewise, their salty, screwed-up teacher, Mr. Garrison, has been the focus of multiple storylines, including his coming out and a reversed sex change. Finally, to some, the show has come to be dominated by Stan’s father, Randy Marsh, well-meaning perpetual dumbass. While on mainstream SP boards fans clamor for more Randy episodes, within the fandom he is usually reduced to a point of annoyance or angst for Stan, and within the slash community, fans groan when Randy episodes are announced, as we always hope to see the boys featured. For the purposes of this overview, I’ll focus primarily on the kids, as they are the main fascination of the fandom.
Initially billed as “the smart one,” Kyle Broflovski is best known for being Jewish. His family seems more culturally Jewish than strictly religious, though his parents clearly try to instill a strong sense of morals in Kyle. Underneath his green hunting cap is a comically large red jewfro, about which Kyle seems self-conscious. He is generally self-conscious as well, often feeling left out of fads and trying to overcompensate. He once fell into despair when the girls of fourth grade voted him near the bottom of a ranked list of boys in the class by cuteness, if not very last. Kyle is smart, or book smart at the very least, and he not only tries at school, he actually enjoys studying. He seems to be the geekiest, and is generally the first to make genre-savvy observations about situations. Though he means well and wants to do what is ostensibly the right thing, he’s not terribly tolerant and has little patience. Though he’s best friends with Stan Marsh, he and Stan find themselves at odds throughout the show’s run, though they usually make up. Recently, the fandom was distressed that Kyle refused to offer Stan real support when Stan was depressed during his parents’ separation.
The Broflovskis, though not exceedingly wealthy, seem well-to-do. Kyle’s father, Gerald, is a lawyer originally from South Park. His mother, Sheila, was a major antagonist early in the show’s run and in the 1999 film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. She was depicted as a moralizer who ignored the emotional needs of her children in order to make broader social changes. In response to her victory in forcing the school Christmas pageant to remove all references to Jesus, Santa, or anything vaguely Christian, Cartman’s response was to call her a “big fat bitch,” in song. He later reprised the number in BLU when she forced the US into war with Canada over the use of profanity in a film. Ironically, Kyle’s adopted younger brother, Ike, is originally Canadian. At the start of the show Kyle enjoys playing "kick the baby” with his brother, which is what it sounds like. Later Ike is revealed to be a genius, politically conservative, and ready to embark on a sexual relationship with his kindergarten teacher. For this, Ike is often written in fic as precocious, dispensing romantic wisdom to Kyle despite their six-year age difference. While Kyle’s father is rarely the subject of fandom scrutiny, his mother is often shown as an obstacle to Kyle’s happiness, either through her brassy deployment of Jewish mother’s guilt, or by actively disallowing Kyle to date Stan or be gay, or something.
In fandom, Kyle is the character most often and most thoroughly victimized, objectified, and feminized. There is of course major backlash to this treatment, from those who argue that he is too bossy and aggressive to be stereotypically gay or bottomy. They point to a season-eight episode in which Kyle resists following a metrosexual trend, declaring that he likes being a “dirty, filthy little boy.” Hse’s often shown to be capable of making Cartman burst into tears with one well-applied slap. Those who view him in the former light point out that while he is aggressive, his aggression is bitchy, not butch, and he tends to be passive, avoiding conflict and making few unnecessary overtures. Moreover, the show makes a point to victimize him. The first episode shows him scrambling to recover Ike from an alien abduction, while fretting that his father will blame him for the disappearance. By the first Christmas episode, he’s been committed for fantasizing about Mr. Hankey while feeling ostracized during the holiday. In season four he nearly died due to kidney failure; in season five due to a hemorrhoid; in season eight he had an abortion; recently he was the victim of the Human Centipede treatment. Which interpretation of Kyle’s character is more accurate is impossible to determine.
Kyle is rarely depicted with a girlfriend unless it's Bebe, his best friend’s girlfriend’s best friend, who expressed an interest in his ass once. He’s shipped with every male character, though mostly Stan, Cartman, and Kenny.
You could debate whether Eric Theodore Cartman is SP’s hero, anti-hero, or villain for days. The truth is, he’s all of these throughout the series, often in the same episode. Arguably, he’s whichever is funniest at the time. The obese son of a single mother named Liane who earns her living as a crack whore, Cartman (almost never called “Eric,” except by Butters and adults) can be seen as a distillation of the human id. He’s delusional, self-centered, racist, insensitive, gluttonous, lazy, small-minded, greedy, and vindictive. He idolizes Hitler and, perhaps worse, Mel Gibson. In the earliest seasons he was often depicted as stupid, fat, and lazy without being overtly cruel. His biggest plotline was his search for his real father, a cliff hanger whose resolution was ignored for a fake-out episode set in the in-show cartoon Terrence and Phillip. To placate pissed-off fans, in the very next episode Cartman’s father was revealed to be his mother, who was a hermaphrodite. Cartman didn’t do much of note until a widely acknowledged turning point at the start of season five, when a ninth grader named Scott Tenorman sold Cartman a bag of his pubic hair for a middling sum. Learning that Scott’s pubes were worthless, Cartman demanded his money back. The situation escalated until Cartman engineered the murder of Scott’s parents and ground them into a bowl of chili Cartman tricked Scott into eating. Later, in season 14, it’s revealed that Scott’s father, a former Denver Bronco, was also Cartman’s father, and that the parentage had been covered up with that whole hermaphrodite hoax to protect the reputation of the team during their late 90s championship period.
Nobody on the show really likes Cartman, and the only character who shows him affection is his seemingly delusional mother — though she’s demonstrated growth since season 10, when she sought help from the Dog Whisperer to get Cartman under control. These efforts have basically failed, and Cartman remains manipulative and angry. Class loser Butters often expresses exasperation with or resentment for Cartman, though Cartman continues to treat Butters as a personal lackey while simultaneously despising him. Butters rarely resists. Often the entire class expresses hatred for Cartman, but he can be persuasive and charismatic when he wants. He has a particular predilection for hating and annoying Kyle, whose death he’s repeatedly wished for. This hate is mutual; though Kyle on occasion can summon the will power to ignore Cartman, Cartman sometimes comes across as hating Kyle to a point of obsession, climbing into his room at night to infect him with HIV, or trying to sell Kyle to a group of Germans by calling him a “beautiful soft Jew.”
The only person on SP who perhaps hates Cartman more than Kyle is Wendy Testaburger, with whom Cartman has often competed and mostly lost. He once harbored a crush on her, which she briefly returned; more recently, when he openly mocked her breast cancer awareness efforts, she beat the utter crap out of him, much to the delight of every other student. Cartman has expressed interest in numerous girls over the years, but also loves crossdressing and once unwillingly confessed that he “touched wieners” with his cousin. Some fans consider Cartman actually gay and expect there will shortly be a story to this effect on the show, despite the fact that sex seems very outside of 10-year-old Cartman’s periphery. On a trip to Hooters parody restaurant Raisins, he was more interested in the food than the waitresses.
Being many things at many times, Cartman is depicted varyingly by the fandom. Some find him difficult to write or his personality/fatness unappealing, and choose not to address him in fanworks. More frequently he will be depicted as a trim, handsome Draco in Leather Pants-type, with a token line thrown in as to how he grew out of his baby fat or joined a sports team. Then there are fans who glorify Cartman to excess, seeming to legitimately find him awesome. He’s most often shipped with Kyle and Wendy, in the hate-ship paradigm. Many argue that the Cartman-Kyle relationship on the show indicates an early crush and that they are already subliminally gay for each other. The Cartman-Wendy antagonism is often drawn as an example of a pairing that expresses its mutual affection through bantering, competition, and disgust, sort of like Ron and Hermione. Less often, Cartman is shipped with Butters. They have given each other oral sex in canon, and the recent football episode showed Cartman going to Butters for advice, and Butters directing Cartman to literally drink a bottle of Butters’ semen. Given these interactions in the source material they are shipped relatively infrequently.
Though Kyle is beloved by the fandom and Cartman and Kenny McCormick share the popular mainstream focus, Stanley Marsh is ostensibly the show’s protagonist. He’s a typical kid, smart about some things and stupid about others, with a “girlfriend” he barely acknowledges when not fixated on losing her, a pet dog, and a nuclear family of two parents and one sister. His interests are football, animals, and goofing around. This pretty much made him generally boring to the fandom until 2011, when a mid-season cliffhanger left him depressed and hopeless amid his parents’ (temporary) separation. Wild theories about his being written off the show grew during the off-season, as did the idea that this was the start of the end of South Park, despite Stone and Parker’s reassurances to the contrary. Stories and art about Stan’s departure, depression, and return years later began to manifest. When the show resumed Stan was shown to be briefly ostracized from his group of friends, though he got over it through drinking. There followed a long stretch of fanworks about Stan’s depression, isolation, and alcoholism. The show hasn’t returned to this well in the past year, and fans continue to wonder when this will be resolved or addressed. The biggest repercussion of Stan’s recent arc is his relationship with best friend Kyle, who refused to be nurturing or put up with Stan during his depression. Kyle told Stan that he was a drag to hang out with and that Kyle had to stay away or Stan would start to bring him down.
Stan has been dating Wendy since the first episode, and for much of the show his relationship with her has been a source of humor. She once dumped him, through they got back together; he only seems to remember she’s his girlfriend in offhand remarks or when she appears to be interested in another boy. When Stan was dumped that one time, Kyle became annoyed and sarcastically told Stan that if he refused to throw off his misery, he should go hang out with the goth kids. Stan then did just that, and though by the episode’s end he realized he wasn’t into goth culture and it was easier to resent Wendy and her new boyfriend than to feel sorry for himself, the fandom loves the “goth Stan” trope and has never given up on it. Even farther back, in the first season, Stan was depicted as the star quarterback of the school football team; he has since been cast in a jock role countless times. In the same episode, Stan gets a pet dog, Sparky, who turns out to be gay. The episode is more about Stan learning tolerance than it is about football, with Stan having to track Sparky down at a gay animal sanctuary. In later seasons Stan protested the consumption of veal and became an activist for whales and dolphins. His love of animals is often stressed.
Stan’s father, Randy, is an obnoxious, loud-mouthed asshole who works for the US Geological Survey. Nevertheless, he clearly loves Stan very much, though he’s warned Stan in the past that if Stan doesn’t stop hanging around with Kyle so much, people will think they’re “funny.” Stan’s mother Sharon is, in antithesis to Randy, sensible, pragmatic, and averse to bullshit. Stan has an older sister, Shelly, who’s not often made use of on the show or in fanfic. She is four years Stan’s senior and has headgear braces, which give her a lisp. She’s a fan of Friends, Britney Spears, Broadway musicals, and chatting with online boyfriends. She is aggressive toward Stan and in the first season was shown to beat him up, but she usually responds (grudgingly) to his pleas for protection or loyalty.
Many fics depict or mention Stan and Wendy’s relationship, though very few focus on it. More often, a story that will eventually become Stan/Kyle will begin with Stan dating Wendy, or having dated Wendy. Often his relationship with Wendy is a source of conflict, jealousy, or misunderstanding for Kyle. On the show, Stan’s nervousness around Wendy has manifested in his barfing on her. Some fics will invert this and have Stan barf on Kyle; others will subvert it by having Stan come to the realization that he was barfing on Wendy because he is gay and the thought of kissing her was nauseating. In many of these primarily high school S/K stories, Wendy and Stan’s football career are sources of angst for him and Kyle, with Stan maintaining that he cannot be gay because he likes football and Wendy, or that he can’t come out because it would jeopardize his football prospects and alienate Wendy. Sometimes Wendy will make comments to the effect of, “Even when we were dating I knew you were gay for Kyle.” These tropes are ubiquitous to the point of cliche.
Less often, Stan is shipped with Kenny or Craig Tucker. Around 2007-8 there were a few prominent fics that paired Stan with Bebe Stevens. In one episode he struck up an awkward, temporary friendship with a Mormon boy, Gary Harrison, and sometimes they’re depicted together. He will also be forever linked to the four goth kids, with whom he’s sometimes shipped.
Though Kenny McCormick is well known as the character who dies once an episode, he actually hasn’t died with regularity since he was killed “permanently” at the end of season five and resurrected at the end of season six. He is also, for all his media attention, a bit of a cipher. He wears a parka hood that muffles his speech, which allows him to say extremely vulgar lines, and he comes from a poor family where his parents are unemployed and his father an alcoholic deadbeat. He has a younger sister, Karen, and an older brother, Kevin. While he’s expressed much interest in sex, is interested in experimenting with drugs, and is willing to do anything for cash, his only real exposure lately is through his superhero identity, Mysterion, who fights crime and protects his loved ones. At the end of a trilogy of episodes dealing with his inability to remain dead, it’s revealed that he’s aware of this curse and that each of his deaths is traumatic, though none of his friends remember them. When Mysterion was first introduced, his identity was unknown, and there was much speculation over the revelation that came in fall 2010. Later he was shown, as Mysterion, to be especially devoted to his younger sister.
Fangirls see Kenny as obsessed with sex and drugs, and they often write him with unparalleled insight into matters of life, death, and romance, particularly Stan and Kyle’s romance. Because he never really speaks and isn’t given as much screen time as SKE, he’s notoriously difficult to write, though this rarely stops anyone. He’s most often depicted as bisexual or even polyamorous. Pairing him with Butters (see below) is hugely popular, and there is keen interest in shipping him with Craig. He is rarely shipped with Stan or Cartman, but Kenny/Kyle is a major pairing and takes much of its inspiration from the Japanese fandom, where this was the premier slash ship for years, producing some of the most iconic SP fan art.
Often SKKE hangs out with Leopold “Butters” Stotch, a “melvin” whose authoritarian parents are prone to grounding him for incidentals beyond his control. He’s based on the personality of South Park animation director Eric Stough, whose nickname is actually Butters. Butters is one of Matt and Trey’s favorite characters, and he’s incredibly divisive. His nature is genuinely sweet, patient, and loving, though he’s prone to intolerant or frustrated outbursts. This side of his personality manifests itself as Professor Chaos, his ineffectual arch-villain alter ego. He was also once forced by his male classmates to attend a fourth grade girl's slumber party in drag as "Marjorine." Marjorine was no more popular with the girls than Butters is with the boys, though both Marjorine and Professor Chaos are very popular with the fandom, and there is much investigation of the many facets of Butters' identity. The show itself came back to pick up this thread in an episode where Butters is erroneously diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
Some fans see Butters as hilarious while others are annoyed with his overexposure; some fangirls consider him a beacon of sweetness and light, while others deride him for being dopey. In fandom, Butters is almost always portrayed as gay and a bottom, usually paired with Kenny or, less frequently, Cartman. When he is written as straight it is often for comic value, and other characters in the fic lampshade how they all thought he was gay. This is something that his parents have done in canon, when he falls in love with a girl who works at Raisins. Likewise, when he is written as gay, characters make comments as to how they always knew he was gay. In a season 11 episode where Butters is caught unwittingly fellating Cartman, he’s sent to a pray-the-gay-away camp where he meets a young boy named Bradley. Though little is established about Bradley and he’s never seen again, Butters’ heartwarming speech for Bradley’s benefit about how Butters doesn’t mind being "a little bi-curious" fuels a rare ship.
Other boys in the class include:
Craig Tucker was brought to prominence in a third-season episode in which he was characterized as the class “bad kid” who’s always flipping people off. Since then, he’s consistently come off as an asshole. In his most triumphant moment, he created a closed-circuit school TV show, “Animals Close Up-With A Wide Angle Lens” and, later, “Animals Close-Up With A Wide Angle Lens Wearing Hats.” The shows were hugely popular until it was discovered that the school population only enjoyed Craig’s work while high on cough syrup. The focus was again on Craig in a season 12 arc, “Pandemic,” where’s he’s roped into forming a Peruvian pan-flute band with SKKE, only to end up deported to Peru, where he learns he has mystical powers. When SKKE bitch about the other kids in the class, they sometimes refer to “Craig and those guys,” indicating that Craig is something of a de facto leader. Entire subsets of the fandom only care about CATG. Craig’s father, Thomas, and unnamed mother and sister are rarely depicted on the show, though some fans ship Craig’s sister with Ike Broflovski and call her “Ruby.”
Due to his having to fight Tweek Tweak in his first big appearance, Craig is most often shipped with Tweek. After Stan/Kyle this is usually considered the most popular pair in the fandom. Despite that, Craig spends little time with Tweek, and more time with Token Black and Clyde Donovan. For a while it was felt that Craig was never happy, due in part to his nasal monotone, but recently he’s been depicted smiling a lot, once when stealing a girl’s Easter basket. His status as an asshole who enjoys pissing off others remains intact. Kenny is often seen as a good match for Craig, as they’re both a bit bad-ass. Alternatively, he’s shipped with Clyde, his complete opposite. After an episode showed Craig telling Thomas, a boy with Tourette’s, that Craig wanted to do Thomas’ laundry, that pairing had a year of vogue. Less frequently, Craig’s shipped with Stan (because they’re somewhat analogous), Kyle (because they’re both well-liked), or a girl named Red (who knows).
Token Black is, per his name, the only black kid in class. He’s also the town’s token rich kid, living in a mansion with his well-educated, successful parents. Token is soft-voiced and underused on the show, though when he is, he comes off as mature and calm. Token is insecure about his family’s wealth, and at one time engineered a campaign to entice other wealthy families to South Park, bringing an onslaught of black celebrities to town. Finding these rich kids insufferable, Token went to go live with the lions, only to feel like an outcast there, too. Ultimately, the fourth-grade boys told him to lighten up, which he seemed to take in stride. He’s sensitive about his race, too; after Stan’s father said something stupidly racist on national TV, Token tried to tell Stan that Stan would never understand what the big deal was. While typically soft-spoken and eloquent, Token has had his humiliating moments; he finds Tyler Perry absurdly hilarious and recently tricked Kyle into filming a reality show about Cartman’s obesity in order to profit.
Earlier in season 16, the fourth grade class got a new student, a girl named Nichole. Token and Nichole struggled with their mutual attraction, since they’d been the subject of manipulation by Cartman, who believed that as the class’ only two black students, they should be an item. Token resisted this assertion but truly liked Nichole for who she was. Despite this, there hasn’t been much shipping. Token dated Wendy, only briefly, but they tend to get paired in fics where Stan isn’t interested in Wendy romantically, though Token/Wendy is never a main pairing. More often Token is paired with Clyde Donovan. Similar to his underuse on the show, Token needs more attention from the fandom. He’s mostly seen as a hot, kind, rich guy, but his lack of distinctive definition makes him difficult to use.
Clyde Donovan is a member of Craig's gang. On the show, he's bumbling and not altogether very bright — but while he shares Butters' good nature, he is highly insecure and self-aware. Mousy-haired, nasal, and quiet, Clyde was paid almost no attention on the show or in the fandom for most of his existence — but in recent seasons he's risen in prominence. In most fan art, you'll see him in a red letterman jacket with a “C” on it, which he first wore in season 11’s “The List.” It has become associated with him ever since, as have tacos, which Butters once told Stan Clyde enjoyed, back in season four. This has since become some big fandom joke, with Clyde’s character often reduced to that of a glutton who only eats or is unhealthily obsessed with tacos. In response, some fans of Clyde have complained that the tacos have obscured his hidden depth and reduced him to a stupid joke.
In fanfic, older Clyde gets written as either a shallow football jock or an emotionally awkward loser — or both. He's popularly shipped with Token (particularly in Craig/Tweek fics), Craig (in a “best bros” sort of way), Kevin Stoley (a crackship), and Bebe, whom he's dated twice over the course of the show — though her interest in him is largely exploitative (Clyde's dad owns the local shoe store). Clyde is rarely paired with any of the main 5 kids, although some (rare) fics pair him with Kenny or Butters in a very cutesy fashion. On the show, Clyde is one of Eric Cartman's favorite chew toys and/or lackeys, but the fandom doesn't expand on this very often.
Tweek Tweak was introduced as the son of the local coffee shop owner. Perpetually jacked on caffeine, Tweek was jumpy and prone to paranoia. He claimed that “underpants gnomes” came in the night to steal his underwear. When SKKE spend the night at the Tweaks’, they find that not only are the underpants gnomes real, they have a massive underground capitalist society in which underpants are the sole commodity. The “Step One: [something], Step Two: ???, Step Three: Profit!” meme was generated by South Park, and for the underpants gnomes, Step One was, well, underpants.
In season six, when Kenny has died and SKE have grown tired of hanging out with Butters, they hold open auditions for a fourth friend. Tweek was the unlikely winner. Since Kenny’s permanent return in season seven, Tweek hasn’t been frequently featured, or even had very much dialogue.
Despite this, he remains one of the most popular characters in the fandom, particularly when paired with Craig. He’s seen as damaged and Craig is often cast as his caretaker, especially when they’re slashed. Tweek is rarely paired with anyone else, and Craig/Tweek remains insanely popular.
Additionally, there are girls in the class who receive screen time on the show and in fandom:
Bebe Stevens is smart, self-aware, and fairly secure, though she can be shallow. She’s been known to date or demonstrate interest in boys; she found Kyle to have a nice ass in an early episode, though in “The List” she not only dated Clyde for free shoes, but perpetuated a massive cover-up to ensure that all girls were able to date him in order to procure shoes. On the show and in fandom she is depicted as Wendy’s best friend, and is the second most utilized girl character after Wendy. In fandom she’s seen as sexually liberated, and sometimes she’s paired with Kenny for this reason, though they’ve never had a genuine interaction. She’s sometimes shown to be dating Kyle (often when Stan is dating Wendy) or Clyde, although some fan fictions pair her with Stan. She is sometimes paired with Wendy, and this is the show’s only real F/F ship.
Wendy Testaburger is Stan’s girlfriend, insofar as such a thing is possible, since Stan becomes so nervous around her that he vomits. She broke up with him to date Token at one point, though they later reunited, and she briefly crushed on Eric Cartman (to her own dismay). She’s an adept and dedicated student who makes genuine commitments to social causes, and she’s intelligent and well-spoken. She’s also able to physically beat Cartman up. She is sometimes jealous of other women who spend time with Stan, and uneasy with the shallow/competitive aspects of girl culture. She is a good example of a textured female character and has grown over the course of the show into a mature, sympathetic girl. Her character is divisive, though, as some shippers see her as an obstacle to pairing Stan with others. Often her relationship with Stan is the source of conflict in Stan/Kyle fics. She’s shipped at times with Kenny, Bebe, and Kyle, though her interactions with Kenny are negligible and Kyle demonstrates no real interest in her, romantic or otherwise. She is perhaps most often paired with Cartman, and this is fueled by their public kiss and, later, ongoing animosity and competition. She’s sometimes also paired with Token.
Red is a girl with red hair who’s been called Rebecca on the show at various times, though characters have also called her “Red,” as does the SPS website. She seems to hang out with Bebe and Wendy, and little is known about her. She receives a disproportionate amount of attention in fandom, considering her minimal role on the show. She is sometimes shown to be dating Kyle.
And there are even more characters!
Jimmy Volmer is a “handicapable” boy who uses crutches and speaks with a stutter. He fancies himself a stand-up comedian. He is most often seen hanging out with SKKE or with Timmy, the wheelchair-bound kid who can only say two phrases, “living and lie” and “Timmy.” For whatever reason, Jimmy is not often featured in fan fictions, though he is one of the more prominent beta characters on the actual show.
When Stan was depressed and Kyle told him to go hang out with the Goth Kids, they were probably a one-off joke. Years later, they’ve been repeatedly featured on the show and are a subject of enduring fascination in fandom. There are four goth kids, only one of whom has a canon name: Henrietta Biggle, an overweight girl who maintains that her family doesn’t care about her, even when her mother vivaciously remarks, “You are so creative!” Her younger brother, Bradley Biggle, plays super heroes with the other boys; his persona is MintBerry Crunch. As the end of the season 14 Mysterion trilogy, it was revealed that Bradley was actually an alien with real powers. He was last seen calling his sister a fat bitch.
The remaining three goth kids have no canonical names. The tall one is called Tall Goth or Ethan; the one with spiked hair and purple shoes who constantly flips his long bangs out of his face is Red Goth (for the streak of red dye in his hair) or Dylan. The smallest goth kid is called Kindergoth at times, due to being sized proportionate to other kindergarten characters on the show, in Ike Broflovski’s class; he’s often called Georgie, and some writers have decided Georgie is female.
Writers sometimes frame entire stories around the inner workings of the goth kids’ circle. They hate the poser vampire kids who shop at Hot Topic and read Twilight, resent being called “emos,” and worship Cthulhu. It’s been revealed that they are “goth” due to insecurity about their physical appearances, and they spend most of their time drinking coffee and writing macabre poetry. They claim to be nonconformists and hate all the “Nazi conformist cheerleaders” at school. Due to Stan’s brief brush with the goth kids, he’s sometimes shipped with one of them, or all of them, but Henrietta in particular. Due to the relative lack of kindergarten-aged characters on the show, Kindergoth is sometimes shipped with Ike.
Christophe and Gregory are two melodramatic foreign kids who filled out archetypes in the South Park movie and were never seen again. This hasn't diminished their popularity in the fandom, however. Christophe is a chain-smoking Frenchman whose code name is “the Mole” — or “ze Mole,” in his ridiculous accent. Gregory is a blond British gentleman who showed up to sweep Wendy off her feet and threaten Stan's role as leader, temporarily. Although Chris and Greg never interacted, their fleeting and enchanting presence in the movie has made them a popular couple, and they are rarely paired with anyone but each other. On occasion, Christophe is paired with Kyle, who made the mistake of singing to Chris as he died in his arms, ensuring that Chris would be banging him in fanfic til kingdom come. But as a pair, Chris and Greg take on an exciting and adventurous life in fanfic and fanart — full of espionage, assassination, governmental overthrow, and anal sex.
Pip Pirrup was the prototype for Butters, in the early years of the show. An obnoxiously cheerful Dickensian Brit, Pip was hated by all, and was canonically killed off in episode 201. But he lives on, in the fandom's heart, to be shipped with Damien Thorne, the son of Satan. Featured in one early episode, Damien was squeaky-voiced and socially inept, and Pip attempted to take him under his wing, out of empathy. This didn't work out too well for Pip — Damien is all too happy to use his satanic powers on anyone who gets in his way. But, like Christophe/Gregory and Craig/Tweek, their one-off character combination prompted an avalanche of shipping. In fic, Damien is an angry denizen of Hell who aspires to his father's throne, and is sometimes portrayed as an effete and lovable bark-and-no-bite kind of guy. His magical powers are used as a deus ex machina in some fics.
Kevin Stoley is a background character with very few speaking roles, though his rare appearances have sparked a wave of fandom speculation and embellishment. An early episode describes Kevin as Chinese, and a running joke is that he is obsessed with Star Wars, and inevitably ruins the kids' attempts to roleplay LOTR characters or pirates. Kevin has some background interactions with Red, but the most popular Kevin-based ship is Stolovan, which pairs him with Clyde Donovan.
When Gary Harrison was the new kid at school, the fourth-grade boys sent Stan to kick his ass. Ineffectual at ass-kicking, Stan befriended Gary, until Stan learned all about Gary’s Mormon faith. Finding it completely insane, Stan insulted Gary, to which Gary basically told Stan he was immature and to fuck off. Gary hasn’t returned to the show since, though he’s shipped with Stan from time to time.
Though the kids are the primary focus of shipping activity in the fandom, a small but dedicated contingent creates fanworks centering on the adults. These are the kids’ parents, the rabble-rousers who get the town into trouble. These characters’ relationships have been the subject of multiple episodes. Gerald and Sheila Broflovski have a curious sex life and possibly an open marriage; Butters’ father looks for anonymous gay sex; Randy and Sharon Marsh have had numerous marital difficulties, but always reconcile. Liane Cartman, of course, is a prostitute. So it should some as little shock that there is shipping of the parents. Some authors focus solely on these relationships in the context of the kids and their issues. In one season three episode, for example, Kyle’s and Stan’s fathers jerked off together in a hot tub, which sets up scenarios in which Kyle and Stan’s relationship is affected by this information. In other stories, it’s theorized that there is myriad wife-swapping, or so many cross-relationships that it’s possible some of the kids are actually siblings.
Before Cartman’s mother’s hermaphroditism was revealed (or retconned) to be a misdirection, there was a somewhat popular fan theory that Cartman and Kyle were brothers. In an early episode, Liane and Sheila are shown to have hooked up, fueling the idea that since Cartman’s mother was his father, perhaps Kyle’s mother was also Cartman’s mother. Sheila Broflovski is depicted as relatively fat, and Cartman’s anti-Semitism would be weirdly ironic if this were the case. It seems unlikely, though, that with Kyle’s birthday on May 26, he and Cartman would be in the same year in school even if there were substantive evidence for a longer affair between Liane and Sheila. More often, canonical tension between Gerald and Kenny’s father Stuart is spun into a past relationship. It’s frequently implied in fics that Stan’s uncle Jimbo Kern and his war buddy, Ned Gerblansky, are lovers, but this has never been the subject of much independent interest. A few fan fictions are framed as far-reaching multi-generational epics. But generally, the fandom focus remains on the kids, with SKKE playing a central role.
FANDOM RESOURCES
The SP fandom has never been centralized. Until late 2011 the fandom was primarily located on DeviantArt and FanFiction.net. Many fans have kept a LiveJournal and there has always been a SP presence on LJ, but it’s never been predominantly popular. Now things have largely migrated to Tumblr, where individual fans reblog GIFs and fan art, argue, and perpetuate all the same Tumblr stuff you know and love.
If you want to know more about the SP fandom, here are some places to check out:
South Park Studios site — the show’s official site, where you can watch every episode for free, with the exception of certain recent installments, which are available for one week after airing, then taken down for one month due to contractual obligations. The site also features downloadable media, information about characters, an FAQ, a character-maker, and any ongoing official projects of Stone and Parker’s.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
slashpark — the main LJ community for SP slash, with episode discussion threads, occasional contests, crossposts of links to fic and art, and the occasional meta chat. Has been active in the past; with the move to Tumblr, much less so. Has a good tag system, though, so remains an excellent archive
stanxkyle — more or less the above, with a focus on Stan and Kyle.
spbigbang — the home on LJ for the first South Park big bang. SPBB 2012 produced over a million new words of fic in stories of 20,000 words or greater; each story had two assigned artists and received at least two illustrations. Sign-ups and announcements are maintained through LJ. There is also a chat community, spbigbangtalk, which participants have used sporadically. SPBB is currently running a mini reverse bang, where artists submitted illustrations for which authors are now composing short stories. [Disclaimer: I am a coordinator for this event.]
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
southparkkink — active SP kink meme. Showcases some great work, not all of which is porn. Many heartfelt, well-written fills; some extremely weird prompts.
spkinktracking — inactive as of Jan. 2012, but useful as index of all SP kink memes to that date. (There have been three total.)
Active current SP kink meme tracking blog
SP fic tag at Fanfiction.net — though, yes, the vast majority of work on this site is garbage, for quite some time it has been the principle archive for SP fic. It can be difficult to find the quality stories without outside help; regardless, most quality authors in the fandom have posted there, sometimes (though not always) exclusively.
SP fic tag at AO3 — there fewer than 300 SP stories on AO3, the vast majority of them cross-posts of work available on FF.net or LJ. Still, as with AO3 in general, the quality is mostly higher, though as more authors get invites this appears to be on the wane. The fandom is not particularly active there.
South Park Big Bang site — archive of stories and art from SPBB events. Includes participant directories, including links to work on other sites.
SP tag on Tumblr — typical mixed bag of stuff, but because there’s no centralized community blogging on Tumblr it’s the closest you can get. And it doesn’t get very close.
Outdated ship manifesto for Stan and Kyle
Reviews of SP episodes on the Onion’s AV Club media coverage site, classic and current — nothing to do with shipping, but fun nevertheless, if you’re looking for a subjective opinion on the critical reception of South Park as an actual TV show.
AFTERWORD
The South Park slash fandom, particularly on Tumblr, had a wide-ranging response to this overview. Some fans have critiqued it as focusing too much on Stan/Kyle or casting Wendy and Stan's canon relationship in a dismissive light. Others have argued that Cartman/Kyle is in fact the second most popular pairing and as such should have received more attention. It was never my intention to purport to represent all viewpoints of the SP fandom; as a participant and a shipper I am inherently biased, though I have tried to compose an entertaining and informative overview. I maintain that this overview is an accurate impression of the fandom as I have experienced it for five years, nothing more or less.
Thanks to Nhaingen for her generous feedback and contributions to this overview.
Art credits:
Kyle, Cartman, Stan, Kenny, Butters, Craig, Token, Clyde, Tweek, Bebe, and Wendy created for this overview by Nhaingen
Red and Kevin by RMR
The goth kids, Christophe, Gregory, Pip, and Damien by Preoprix
South Park debuted on Comedy Central on August 13, 1997 and quickly became a media phenomenon. It’s essentially a half-hour cartoon about four boys living in a magical-reality mountain town in Park Country, Colorado, about an hour outside of Denver. The premise is based on the experiences of creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who both grew up in the area. The show caught on mostly due to its juxtaposition of rough, primary-colored construction-paper stop-motion animation and adult humor. The four boys swear, love toilet humor, and are generally irreverent. The adults in their town are misguided at best, and the boys seem very well aware of it. This made the show initially shocking to some, and South Park has continued to generate controversy by becoming an equal-opportunity offender.
The show was based on two earlier efforts of Stone and Parker’s in the same style, a short class project from 1992 and a “video Christmas card” created for former MTV executive Brian Graden, who distributed the tape widely enough to bring Stone and Parker to Comedy Central, where the series is now in its 16th season. Currently, the show is contracted through its 20th season, in 2016.
Part of South Park’s longevity is owed to its topicality. The show’s production schedule is unusual in that each season is split into two runs of seven episodes, one in spring and one in fall. These seven episodes are scripted and produced all in the week before they debut, on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. EST. Often the episode is still in production up to a few hours before airing. This allows the staff to include allusions to current events before almost everyone else. Compared to the months-long production schedule of The Simpsons, this is fairly impressive. As a recent example, the Wednesday, September 26 episode of South Park was able to incorporate references to a Monday Night Football game that had happened fewer than two days previous. Stone and Parker maintain that they absolutely cannot plan an episode any sooner than six days before it airs, and this has in the past led to some insane contrivances that were absurdly funny, because the staff had no time to reconsider. Other times, episodes can feel rushed and thoughtless. The recent football episode seemed at times to be several things, including critiques of sarcasm’s overuse in discourse, the NFL referee lock out, assertions that football can lead to serious brain injuries, and parents’ lack of willingness to explain difficult topics to their children. It also repeatedly showed people drinking a 10-year-old’s nocturnal emissions. People seemed to find this funny, but you can’t argue that it was essential to the plot.
Whether all of this adds up to a show that is objectively good is anyone’s guess. South Park is widely judged on its ability to produce scathing critiques of hot topics, but lately it tends to skew toward parodies of reality TV shows. Some have criticized Stone and Parker’s positions as privileged, wealthy, white males. It’s also arguable that their extremely truncated episode production time doesn’t necessarily make for the best television.
What the show does have, however, is a strong emotional core. People will debate what South Park is about; I should say what it’s about is human absurdity, and our emotions play a big part in that. The characters, at least the four main boys, have always had relatively strong personalities that have developed acutely, if gradually, over the show’s run. People frequently express shock that South Park has a fandom. It has a well-established cast of characters, and it does have a kind of flexible continuity. Because it’s set in a version of the real world where supernatural and unordinary events sometimes happen, South Park offers writers a great deal to build on and work with.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SOUTH PARK SLASH FANDOM
A small but dedicated South Park slash fandom has been active for six or seven years now. The intellectual premise of the majority of slash is, “What would these kids be like when they grow up?” By far, the most popular age at which to represent the characters in is 17-18. This gives the SP fandom a lot of commonality with other fandoms that enjoy high school AUs — it's just that we're aging the characters up, not down. Stories about the characters in college are also popular, with a minority of writers dealing with them after college and older. Some authors do set their stories at the time of the show’s run, when the boys are 8 to 10 years old, but the vast majority of these stories are gen or deal with het elementary school relationships.
Despite its 1997 premier, there's little to no trace of a fandom on the internet before 2005-6. A few fan script sites online date to early in the show's run, but the fandom as we know it owes its existence to Eastern fandom, where fan art for SP became popular around this time. This art duly borrows heavily from anime style. The Eastern fandom remains very active today, primarily though Pixiv, where there is new art daily. From its origins, SP has always had an art-heavy fandom. To a certain extent, the staff of the show has been supportive of general SP fanart. Staffers have been known to create their own fan art and maintain DeviantArt accounts. In 2011, as part of the show's 15th anniversary, a Year of the Fan art contest was held, with many fandom artists placing. Additionally, South Park Studios assembled a physical gallery space featuring works based on the show and its characters. On the topic of fan fic, Stone once said that he didn’t read it because he was afraid it would be good. In a later interview, Parker and Stone’s Book of Mormon collaborator Robert Lopez called the actual Book of Mormon Bible fan ficition. Additionally, the entire series is available online for free in many countries, including the United States. All around, it seems that while the South Park powers that be don’t have the kind of direct relationship with the fan base that some fandoms have come to expect, there is generally an acknowledgement of and appreciation for fans.
It bears nothing that the general South Park fan base is very large and includes many disparate types of viewers. On fanfiction.net there is an entire subset of writers who created stories based around original characters attending South Park Elementary and becoming friends with the cast; there are others whose SP fandom is mediated entirely though South Park Studios message boards. The online slash fandom as we know it has little to do with these other fans, and they are not always aware of us or happy we exist. Repeatedly, people will stumble onto the #south park Tumblr tag, only to express dismay that “pedophiles” are slashing the characters. The fandom seems split on whether to argue with or ignore these people.
CHARACTERS
As with The Simpsons, or any long-running character-driven series, SP has spawned loads and loads of characters, many of whom come in and out of focus at different times. While the nucleus of the show has always been the group of Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Eric Cartman (or just “the boys,” per Matt and Trey, or [rarely] SKKE,), they often spend time with class loser Butters Stotch (SKKEB).
Arguably the most popular mainstream SP characters have been the adults. In the early years of the show’s run, the school chef, Chef, voiced by Isaac Hayes, was a central character; the kids would often turn to him for advice, which he’d dispense in the form of a sexy R&B tune. Likewise, their salty, screwed-up teacher, Mr. Garrison, has been the focus of multiple storylines, including his coming out and a reversed sex change. Finally, to some, the show has come to be dominated by Stan’s father, Randy Marsh, well-meaning perpetual dumbass. While on mainstream SP boards fans clamor for more Randy episodes, within the fandom he is usually reduced to a point of annoyance or angst for Stan, and within the slash community, fans groan when Randy episodes are announced, as we always hope to see the boys featured. For the purposes of this overview, I’ll focus primarily on the kids, as they are the main fascination of the fandom.
Initially billed as “the smart one,” Kyle Broflovski is best known for being Jewish. His family seems more culturally Jewish than strictly religious, though his parents clearly try to instill a strong sense of morals in Kyle. Underneath his green hunting cap is a comically large red jewfro, about which Kyle seems self-conscious. He is generally self-conscious as well, often feeling left out of fads and trying to overcompensate. He once fell into despair when the girls of fourth grade voted him near the bottom of a ranked list of boys in the class by cuteness, if not very last. Kyle is smart, or book smart at the very least, and he not only tries at school, he actually enjoys studying. He seems to be the geekiest, and is generally the first to make genre-savvy observations about situations. Though he means well and wants to do what is ostensibly the right thing, he’s not terribly tolerant and has little patience. Though he’s best friends with Stan Marsh, he and Stan find themselves at odds throughout the show’s run, though they usually make up. Recently, the fandom was distressed that Kyle refused to offer Stan real support when Stan was depressed during his parents’ separation.
The Broflovskis, though not exceedingly wealthy, seem well-to-do. Kyle’s father, Gerald, is a lawyer originally from South Park. His mother, Sheila, was a major antagonist early in the show’s run and in the 1999 film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. She was depicted as a moralizer who ignored the emotional needs of her children in order to make broader social changes. In response to her victory in forcing the school Christmas pageant to remove all references to Jesus, Santa, or anything vaguely Christian, Cartman’s response was to call her a “big fat bitch,” in song. He later reprised the number in BLU when she forced the US into war with Canada over the use of profanity in a film. Ironically, Kyle’s adopted younger brother, Ike, is originally Canadian. At the start of the show Kyle enjoys playing "kick the baby” with his brother, which is what it sounds like. Later Ike is revealed to be a genius, politically conservative, and ready to embark on a sexual relationship with his kindergarten teacher. For this, Ike is often written in fic as precocious, dispensing romantic wisdom to Kyle despite their six-year age difference. While Kyle’s father is rarely the subject of fandom scrutiny, his mother is often shown as an obstacle to Kyle’s happiness, either through her brassy deployment of Jewish mother’s guilt, or by actively disallowing Kyle to date Stan or be gay, or something.
In fandom, Kyle is the character most often and most thoroughly victimized, objectified, and feminized. There is of course major backlash to this treatment, from those who argue that he is too bossy and aggressive to be stereotypically gay or bottomy. They point to a season-eight episode in which Kyle resists following a metrosexual trend, declaring that he likes being a “dirty, filthy little boy.” Hse’s often shown to be capable of making Cartman burst into tears with one well-applied slap. Those who view him in the former light point out that while he is aggressive, his aggression is bitchy, not butch, and he tends to be passive, avoiding conflict and making few unnecessary overtures. Moreover, the show makes a point to victimize him. The first episode shows him scrambling to recover Ike from an alien abduction, while fretting that his father will blame him for the disappearance. By the first Christmas episode, he’s been committed for fantasizing about Mr. Hankey while feeling ostracized during the holiday. In season four he nearly died due to kidney failure; in season five due to a hemorrhoid; in season eight he had an abortion; recently he was the victim of the Human Centipede treatment. Which interpretation of Kyle’s character is more accurate is impossible to determine.
Kyle is rarely depicted with a girlfriend unless it's Bebe, his best friend’s girlfriend’s best friend, who expressed an interest in his ass once. He’s shipped with every male character, though mostly Stan, Cartman, and Kenny.
You could debate whether Eric Theodore Cartman is SP’s hero, anti-hero, or villain for days. The truth is, he’s all of these throughout the series, often in the same episode. Arguably, he’s whichever is funniest at the time. The obese son of a single mother named Liane who earns her living as a crack whore, Cartman (almost never called “Eric,” except by Butters and adults) can be seen as a distillation of the human id. He’s delusional, self-centered, racist, insensitive, gluttonous, lazy, small-minded, greedy, and vindictive. He idolizes Hitler and, perhaps worse, Mel Gibson. In the earliest seasons he was often depicted as stupid, fat, and lazy without being overtly cruel. His biggest plotline was his search for his real father, a cliff hanger whose resolution was ignored for a fake-out episode set in the in-show cartoon Terrence and Phillip. To placate pissed-off fans, in the very next episode Cartman’s father was revealed to be his mother, who was a hermaphrodite. Cartman didn’t do much of note until a widely acknowledged turning point at the start of season five, when a ninth grader named Scott Tenorman sold Cartman a bag of his pubic hair for a middling sum. Learning that Scott’s pubes were worthless, Cartman demanded his money back. The situation escalated until Cartman engineered the murder of Scott’s parents and ground them into a bowl of chili Cartman tricked Scott into eating. Later, in season 14, it’s revealed that Scott’s father, a former Denver Bronco, was also Cartman’s father, and that the parentage had been covered up with that whole hermaphrodite hoax to protect the reputation of the team during their late 90s championship period.
Nobody on the show really likes Cartman, and the only character who shows him affection is his seemingly delusional mother — though she’s demonstrated growth since season 10, when she sought help from the Dog Whisperer to get Cartman under control. These efforts have basically failed, and Cartman remains manipulative and angry. Class loser Butters often expresses exasperation with or resentment for Cartman, though Cartman continues to treat Butters as a personal lackey while simultaneously despising him. Butters rarely resists. Often the entire class expresses hatred for Cartman, but he can be persuasive and charismatic when he wants. He has a particular predilection for hating and annoying Kyle, whose death he’s repeatedly wished for. This hate is mutual; though Kyle on occasion can summon the will power to ignore Cartman, Cartman sometimes comes across as hating Kyle to a point of obsession, climbing into his room at night to infect him with HIV, or trying to sell Kyle to a group of Germans by calling him a “beautiful soft Jew.”
The only person on SP who perhaps hates Cartman more than Kyle is Wendy Testaburger, with whom Cartman has often competed and mostly lost. He once harbored a crush on her, which she briefly returned; more recently, when he openly mocked her breast cancer awareness efforts, she beat the utter crap out of him, much to the delight of every other student. Cartman has expressed interest in numerous girls over the years, but also loves crossdressing and once unwillingly confessed that he “touched wieners” with his cousin. Some fans consider Cartman actually gay and expect there will shortly be a story to this effect on the show, despite the fact that sex seems very outside of 10-year-old Cartman’s periphery. On a trip to Hooters parody restaurant Raisins, he was more interested in the food than the waitresses.
Being many things at many times, Cartman is depicted varyingly by the fandom. Some find him difficult to write or his personality/fatness unappealing, and choose not to address him in fanworks. More frequently he will be depicted as a trim, handsome Draco in Leather Pants-type, with a token line thrown in as to how he grew out of his baby fat or joined a sports team. Then there are fans who glorify Cartman to excess, seeming to legitimately find him awesome. He’s most often shipped with Kyle and Wendy, in the hate-ship paradigm. Many argue that the Cartman-Kyle relationship on the show indicates an early crush and that they are already subliminally gay for each other. The Cartman-Wendy antagonism is often drawn as an example of a pairing that expresses its mutual affection through bantering, competition, and disgust, sort of like Ron and Hermione. Less often, Cartman is shipped with Butters. They have given each other oral sex in canon, and the recent football episode showed Cartman going to Butters for advice, and Butters directing Cartman to literally drink a bottle of Butters’ semen. Given these interactions in the source material they are shipped relatively infrequently.
Though Kyle is beloved by the fandom and Cartman and Kenny McCormick share the popular mainstream focus, Stanley Marsh is ostensibly the show’s protagonist. He’s a typical kid, smart about some things and stupid about others, with a “girlfriend” he barely acknowledges when not fixated on losing her, a pet dog, and a nuclear family of two parents and one sister. His interests are football, animals, and goofing around. This pretty much made him generally boring to the fandom until 2011, when a mid-season cliffhanger left him depressed and hopeless amid his parents’ (temporary) separation. Wild theories about his being written off the show grew during the off-season, as did the idea that this was the start of the end of South Park, despite Stone and Parker’s reassurances to the contrary. Stories and art about Stan’s departure, depression, and return years later began to manifest. When the show resumed Stan was shown to be briefly ostracized from his group of friends, though he got over it through drinking. There followed a long stretch of fanworks about Stan’s depression, isolation, and alcoholism. The show hasn’t returned to this well in the past year, and fans continue to wonder when this will be resolved or addressed. The biggest repercussion of Stan’s recent arc is his relationship with best friend Kyle, who refused to be nurturing or put up with Stan during his depression. Kyle told Stan that he was a drag to hang out with and that Kyle had to stay away or Stan would start to bring him down.
Stan has been dating Wendy since the first episode, and for much of the show his relationship with her has been a source of humor. She once dumped him, through they got back together; he only seems to remember she’s his girlfriend in offhand remarks or when she appears to be interested in another boy. When Stan was dumped that one time, Kyle became annoyed and sarcastically told Stan that if he refused to throw off his misery, he should go hang out with the goth kids. Stan then did just that, and though by the episode’s end he realized he wasn’t into goth culture and it was easier to resent Wendy and her new boyfriend than to feel sorry for himself, the fandom loves the “goth Stan” trope and has never given up on it. Even farther back, in the first season, Stan was depicted as the star quarterback of the school football team; he has since been cast in a jock role countless times. In the same episode, Stan gets a pet dog, Sparky, who turns out to be gay. The episode is more about Stan learning tolerance than it is about football, with Stan having to track Sparky down at a gay animal sanctuary. In later seasons Stan protested the consumption of veal and became an activist for whales and dolphins. His love of animals is often stressed.
Stan’s father, Randy, is an obnoxious, loud-mouthed asshole who works for the US Geological Survey. Nevertheless, he clearly loves Stan very much, though he’s warned Stan in the past that if Stan doesn’t stop hanging around with Kyle so much, people will think they’re “funny.” Stan’s mother Sharon is, in antithesis to Randy, sensible, pragmatic, and averse to bullshit. Stan has an older sister, Shelly, who’s not often made use of on the show or in fanfic. She is four years Stan’s senior and has headgear braces, which give her a lisp. She’s a fan of Friends, Britney Spears, Broadway musicals, and chatting with online boyfriends. She is aggressive toward Stan and in the first season was shown to beat him up, but she usually responds (grudgingly) to his pleas for protection or loyalty.
Many fics depict or mention Stan and Wendy’s relationship, though very few focus on it. More often, a story that will eventually become Stan/Kyle will begin with Stan dating Wendy, or having dated Wendy. Often his relationship with Wendy is a source of conflict, jealousy, or misunderstanding for Kyle. On the show, Stan’s nervousness around Wendy has manifested in his barfing on her. Some fics will invert this and have Stan barf on Kyle; others will subvert it by having Stan come to the realization that he was barfing on Wendy because he is gay and the thought of kissing her was nauseating. In many of these primarily high school S/K stories, Wendy and Stan’s football career are sources of angst for him and Kyle, with Stan maintaining that he cannot be gay because he likes football and Wendy, or that he can’t come out because it would jeopardize his football prospects and alienate Wendy. Sometimes Wendy will make comments to the effect of, “Even when we were dating I knew you were gay for Kyle.” These tropes are ubiquitous to the point of cliche.
Less often, Stan is shipped with Kenny or Craig Tucker. Around 2007-8 there were a few prominent fics that paired Stan with Bebe Stevens. In one episode he struck up an awkward, temporary friendship with a Mormon boy, Gary Harrison, and sometimes they’re depicted together. He will also be forever linked to the four goth kids, with whom he’s sometimes shipped.
Though Kenny McCormick is well known as the character who dies once an episode, he actually hasn’t died with regularity since he was killed “permanently” at the end of season five and resurrected at the end of season six. He is also, for all his media attention, a bit of a cipher. He wears a parka hood that muffles his speech, which allows him to say extremely vulgar lines, and he comes from a poor family where his parents are unemployed and his father an alcoholic deadbeat. He has a younger sister, Karen, and an older brother, Kevin. While he’s expressed much interest in sex, is interested in experimenting with drugs, and is willing to do anything for cash, his only real exposure lately is through his superhero identity, Mysterion, who fights crime and protects his loved ones. At the end of a trilogy of episodes dealing with his inability to remain dead, it’s revealed that he’s aware of this curse and that each of his deaths is traumatic, though none of his friends remember them. When Mysterion was first introduced, his identity was unknown, and there was much speculation over the revelation that came in fall 2010. Later he was shown, as Mysterion, to be especially devoted to his younger sister.
Fangirls see Kenny as obsessed with sex and drugs, and they often write him with unparalleled insight into matters of life, death, and romance, particularly Stan and Kyle’s romance. Because he never really speaks and isn’t given as much screen time as SKE, he’s notoriously difficult to write, though this rarely stops anyone. He’s most often depicted as bisexual or even polyamorous. Pairing him with Butters (see below) is hugely popular, and there is keen interest in shipping him with Craig. He is rarely shipped with Stan or Cartman, but Kenny/Kyle is a major pairing and takes much of its inspiration from the Japanese fandom, where this was the premier slash ship for years, producing some of the most iconic SP fan art.
Often SKKE hangs out with Leopold “Butters” Stotch, a “melvin” whose authoritarian parents are prone to grounding him for incidentals beyond his control. He’s based on the personality of South Park animation director Eric Stough, whose nickname is actually Butters. Butters is one of Matt and Trey’s favorite characters, and he’s incredibly divisive. His nature is genuinely sweet, patient, and loving, though he’s prone to intolerant or frustrated outbursts. This side of his personality manifests itself as Professor Chaos, his ineffectual arch-villain alter ego. He was also once forced by his male classmates to attend a fourth grade girl's slumber party in drag as "Marjorine." Marjorine was no more popular with the girls than Butters is with the boys, though both Marjorine and Professor Chaos are very popular with the fandom, and there is much investigation of the many facets of Butters' identity. The show itself came back to pick up this thread in an episode where Butters is erroneously diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
Some fans see Butters as hilarious while others are annoyed with his overexposure; some fangirls consider him a beacon of sweetness and light, while others deride him for being dopey. In fandom, Butters is almost always portrayed as gay and a bottom, usually paired with Kenny or, less frequently, Cartman. When he is written as straight it is often for comic value, and other characters in the fic lampshade how they all thought he was gay. This is something that his parents have done in canon, when he falls in love with a girl who works at Raisins. Likewise, when he is written as gay, characters make comments as to how they always knew he was gay. In a season 11 episode where Butters is caught unwittingly fellating Cartman, he’s sent to a pray-the-gay-away camp where he meets a young boy named Bradley. Though little is established about Bradley and he’s never seen again, Butters’ heartwarming speech for Bradley’s benefit about how Butters doesn’t mind being "a little bi-curious" fuels a rare ship.
Other boys in the class include:
Craig Tucker was brought to prominence in a third-season episode in which he was characterized as the class “bad kid” who’s always flipping people off. Since then, he’s consistently come off as an asshole. In his most triumphant moment, he created a closed-circuit school TV show, “Animals Close Up-With A Wide Angle Lens” and, later, “Animals Close-Up With A Wide Angle Lens Wearing Hats.” The shows were hugely popular until it was discovered that the school population only enjoyed Craig’s work while high on cough syrup. The focus was again on Craig in a season 12 arc, “Pandemic,” where’s he’s roped into forming a Peruvian pan-flute band with SKKE, only to end up deported to Peru, where he learns he has mystical powers. When SKKE bitch about the other kids in the class, they sometimes refer to “Craig and those guys,” indicating that Craig is something of a de facto leader. Entire subsets of the fandom only care about CATG. Craig’s father, Thomas, and unnamed mother and sister are rarely depicted on the show, though some fans ship Craig’s sister with Ike Broflovski and call her “Ruby.”
Due to his having to fight Tweek Tweak in his first big appearance, Craig is most often shipped with Tweek. After Stan/Kyle this is usually considered the most popular pair in the fandom. Despite that, Craig spends little time with Tweek, and more time with Token Black and Clyde Donovan. For a while it was felt that Craig was never happy, due in part to his nasal monotone, but recently he’s been depicted smiling a lot, once when stealing a girl’s Easter basket. His status as an asshole who enjoys pissing off others remains intact. Kenny is often seen as a good match for Craig, as they’re both a bit bad-ass. Alternatively, he’s shipped with Clyde, his complete opposite. After an episode showed Craig telling Thomas, a boy with Tourette’s, that Craig wanted to do Thomas’ laundry, that pairing had a year of vogue. Less frequently, Craig’s shipped with Stan (because they’re somewhat analogous), Kyle (because they’re both well-liked), or a girl named Red (who knows).
Token Black is, per his name, the only black kid in class. He’s also the town’s token rich kid, living in a mansion with his well-educated, successful parents. Token is soft-voiced and underused on the show, though when he is, he comes off as mature and calm. Token is insecure about his family’s wealth, and at one time engineered a campaign to entice other wealthy families to South Park, bringing an onslaught of black celebrities to town. Finding these rich kids insufferable, Token went to go live with the lions, only to feel like an outcast there, too. Ultimately, the fourth-grade boys told him to lighten up, which he seemed to take in stride. He’s sensitive about his race, too; after Stan’s father said something stupidly racist on national TV, Token tried to tell Stan that Stan would never understand what the big deal was. While typically soft-spoken and eloquent, Token has had his humiliating moments; he finds Tyler Perry absurdly hilarious and recently tricked Kyle into filming a reality show about Cartman’s obesity in order to profit.
Earlier in season 16, the fourth grade class got a new student, a girl named Nichole. Token and Nichole struggled with their mutual attraction, since they’d been the subject of manipulation by Cartman, who believed that as the class’ only two black students, they should be an item. Token resisted this assertion but truly liked Nichole for who she was. Despite this, there hasn’t been much shipping. Token dated Wendy, only briefly, but they tend to get paired in fics where Stan isn’t interested in Wendy romantically, though Token/Wendy is never a main pairing. More often Token is paired with Clyde Donovan. Similar to his underuse on the show, Token needs more attention from the fandom. He’s mostly seen as a hot, kind, rich guy, but his lack of distinctive definition makes him difficult to use.
Clyde Donovan is a member of Craig's gang. On the show, he's bumbling and not altogether very bright — but while he shares Butters' good nature, he is highly insecure and self-aware. Mousy-haired, nasal, and quiet, Clyde was paid almost no attention on the show or in the fandom for most of his existence — but in recent seasons he's risen in prominence. In most fan art, you'll see him in a red letterman jacket with a “C” on it, which he first wore in season 11’s “The List.” It has become associated with him ever since, as have tacos, which Butters once told Stan Clyde enjoyed, back in season four. This has since become some big fandom joke, with Clyde’s character often reduced to that of a glutton who only eats or is unhealthily obsessed with tacos. In response, some fans of Clyde have complained that the tacos have obscured his hidden depth and reduced him to a stupid joke.
In fanfic, older Clyde gets written as either a shallow football jock or an emotionally awkward loser — or both. He's popularly shipped with Token (particularly in Craig/Tweek fics), Craig (in a “best bros” sort of way), Kevin Stoley (a crackship), and Bebe, whom he's dated twice over the course of the show — though her interest in him is largely exploitative (Clyde's dad owns the local shoe store). Clyde is rarely paired with any of the main 5 kids, although some (rare) fics pair him with Kenny or Butters in a very cutesy fashion. On the show, Clyde is one of Eric Cartman's favorite chew toys and/or lackeys, but the fandom doesn't expand on this very often.
Tweek Tweak was introduced as the son of the local coffee shop owner. Perpetually jacked on caffeine, Tweek was jumpy and prone to paranoia. He claimed that “underpants gnomes” came in the night to steal his underwear. When SKKE spend the night at the Tweaks’, they find that not only are the underpants gnomes real, they have a massive underground capitalist society in which underpants are the sole commodity. The “Step One: [something], Step Two: ???, Step Three: Profit!” meme was generated by South Park, and for the underpants gnomes, Step One was, well, underpants.
In season six, when Kenny has died and SKE have grown tired of hanging out with Butters, they hold open auditions for a fourth friend. Tweek was the unlikely winner. Since Kenny’s permanent return in season seven, Tweek hasn’t been frequently featured, or even had very much dialogue.
Despite this, he remains one of the most popular characters in the fandom, particularly when paired with Craig. He’s seen as damaged and Craig is often cast as his caretaker, especially when they’re slashed. Tweek is rarely paired with anyone else, and Craig/Tweek remains insanely popular.
Additionally, there are girls in the class who receive screen time on the show and in fandom:
Bebe Stevens is smart, self-aware, and fairly secure, though she can be shallow. She’s been known to date or demonstrate interest in boys; she found Kyle to have a nice ass in an early episode, though in “The List” she not only dated Clyde for free shoes, but perpetuated a massive cover-up to ensure that all girls were able to date him in order to procure shoes. On the show and in fandom she is depicted as Wendy’s best friend, and is the second most utilized girl character after Wendy. In fandom she’s seen as sexually liberated, and sometimes she’s paired with Kenny for this reason, though they’ve never had a genuine interaction. She’s sometimes shown to be dating Kyle (often when Stan is dating Wendy) or Clyde, although some fan fictions pair her with Stan. She is sometimes paired with Wendy, and this is the show’s only real F/F ship.
Wendy Testaburger is Stan’s girlfriend, insofar as such a thing is possible, since Stan becomes so nervous around her that he vomits. She broke up with him to date Token at one point, though they later reunited, and she briefly crushed on Eric Cartman (to her own dismay). She’s an adept and dedicated student who makes genuine commitments to social causes, and she’s intelligent and well-spoken. She’s also able to physically beat Cartman up. She is sometimes jealous of other women who spend time with Stan, and uneasy with the shallow/competitive aspects of girl culture. She is a good example of a textured female character and has grown over the course of the show into a mature, sympathetic girl. Her character is divisive, though, as some shippers see her as an obstacle to pairing Stan with others. Often her relationship with Stan is the source of conflict in Stan/Kyle fics. She’s shipped at times with Kenny, Bebe, and Kyle, though her interactions with Kenny are negligible and Kyle demonstrates no real interest in her, romantic or otherwise. She is perhaps most often paired with Cartman, and this is fueled by their public kiss and, later, ongoing animosity and competition. She’s sometimes also paired with Token.
Red is a girl with red hair who’s been called Rebecca on the show at various times, though characters have also called her “Red,” as does the SPS website. She seems to hang out with Bebe and Wendy, and little is known about her. She receives a disproportionate amount of attention in fandom, considering her minimal role on the show. She is sometimes shown to be dating Kyle.
And there are even more characters!
Jimmy Volmer is a “handicapable” boy who uses crutches and speaks with a stutter. He fancies himself a stand-up comedian. He is most often seen hanging out with SKKE or with Timmy, the wheelchair-bound kid who can only say two phrases, “living and lie” and “Timmy.” For whatever reason, Jimmy is not often featured in fan fictions, though he is one of the more prominent beta characters on the actual show.
When Stan was depressed and Kyle told him to go hang out with the Goth Kids, they were probably a one-off joke. Years later, they’ve been repeatedly featured on the show and are a subject of enduring fascination in fandom. There are four goth kids, only one of whom has a canon name: Henrietta Biggle, an overweight girl who maintains that her family doesn’t care about her, even when her mother vivaciously remarks, “You are so creative!” Her younger brother, Bradley Biggle, plays super heroes with the other boys; his persona is MintBerry Crunch. As the end of the season 14 Mysterion trilogy, it was revealed that Bradley was actually an alien with real powers. He was last seen calling his sister a fat bitch.
The remaining three goth kids have no canonical names. The tall one is called Tall Goth or Ethan; the one with spiked hair and purple shoes who constantly flips his long bangs out of his face is Red Goth (for the streak of red dye in his hair) or Dylan. The smallest goth kid is called Kindergoth at times, due to being sized proportionate to other kindergarten characters on the show, in Ike Broflovski’s class; he’s often called Georgie, and some writers have decided Georgie is female.
Writers sometimes frame entire stories around the inner workings of the goth kids’ circle. They hate the poser vampire kids who shop at Hot Topic and read Twilight, resent being called “emos,” and worship Cthulhu. It’s been revealed that they are “goth” due to insecurity about their physical appearances, and they spend most of their time drinking coffee and writing macabre poetry. They claim to be nonconformists and hate all the “Nazi conformist cheerleaders” at school. Due to Stan’s brief brush with the goth kids, he’s sometimes shipped with one of them, or all of them, but Henrietta in particular. Due to the relative lack of kindergarten-aged characters on the show, Kindergoth is sometimes shipped with Ike.
Christophe and Gregory are two melodramatic foreign kids who filled out archetypes in the South Park movie and were never seen again. This hasn't diminished their popularity in the fandom, however. Christophe is a chain-smoking Frenchman whose code name is “the Mole” — or “ze Mole,” in his ridiculous accent. Gregory is a blond British gentleman who showed up to sweep Wendy off her feet and threaten Stan's role as leader, temporarily. Although Chris and Greg never interacted, their fleeting and enchanting presence in the movie has made them a popular couple, and they are rarely paired with anyone but each other. On occasion, Christophe is paired with Kyle, who made the mistake of singing to Chris as he died in his arms, ensuring that Chris would be banging him in fanfic til kingdom come. But as a pair, Chris and Greg take on an exciting and adventurous life in fanfic and fanart — full of espionage, assassination, governmental overthrow, and anal sex.
Pip Pirrup was the prototype for Butters, in the early years of the show. An obnoxiously cheerful Dickensian Brit, Pip was hated by all, and was canonically killed off in episode 201. But he lives on, in the fandom's heart, to be shipped with Damien Thorne, the son of Satan. Featured in one early episode, Damien was squeaky-voiced and socially inept, and Pip attempted to take him under his wing, out of empathy. This didn't work out too well for Pip — Damien is all too happy to use his satanic powers on anyone who gets in his way. But, like Christophe/Gregory and Craig/Tweek, their one-off character combination prompted an avalanche of shipping. In fic, Damien is an angry denizen of Hell who aspires to his father's throne, and is sometimes portrayed as an effete and lovable bark-and-no-bite kind of guy. His magical powers are used as a deus ex machina in some fics.
Kevin Stoley is a background character with very few speaking roles, though his rare appearances have sparked a wave of fandom speculation and embellishment. An early episode describes Kevin as Chinese, and a running joke is that he is obsessed with Star Wars, and inevitably ruins the kids' attempts to roleplay LOTR characters or pirates. Kevin has some background interactions with Red, but the most popular Kevin-based ship is Stolovan, which pairs him with Clyde Donovan.
When Gary Harrison was the new kid at school, the fourth-grade boys sent Stan to kick his ass. Ineffectual at ass-kicking, Stan befriended Gary, until Stan learned all about Gary’s Mormon faith. Finding it completely insane, Stan insulted Gary, to which Gary basically told Stan he was immature and to fuck off. Gary hasn’t returned to the show since, though he’s shipped with Stan from time to time.
Though the kids are the primary focus of shipping activity in the fandom, a small but dedicated contingent creates fanworks centering on the adults. These are the kids’ parents, the rabble-rousers who get the town into trouble. These characters’ relationships have been the subject of multiple episodes. Gerald and Sheila Broflovski have a curious sex life and possibly an open marriage; Butters’ father looks for anonymous gay sex; Randy and Sharon Marsh have had numerous marital difficulties, but always reconcile. Liane Cartman, of course, is a prostitute. So it should some as little shock that there is shipping of the parents. Some authors focus solely on these relationships in the context of the kids and their issues. In one season three episode, for example, Kyle’s and Stan’s fathers jerked off together in a hot tub, which sets up scenarios in which Kyle and Stan’s relationship is affected by this information. In other stories, it’s theorized that there is myriad wife-swapping, or so many cross-relationships that it’s possible some of the kids are actually siblings.
Before Cartman’s mother’s hermaphroditism was revealed (or retconned) to be a misdirection, there was a somewhat popular fan theory that Cartman and Kyle were brothers. In an early episode, Liane and Sheila are shown to have hooked up, fueling the idea that since Cartman’s mother was his father, perhaps Kyle’s mother was also Cartman’s mother. Sheila Broflovski is depicted as relatively fat, and Cartman’s anti-Semitism would be weirdly ironic if this were the case. It seems unlikely, though, that with Kyle’s birthday on May 26, he and Cartman would be in the same year in school even if there were substantive evidence for a longer affair between Liane and Sheila. More often, canonical tension between Gerald and Kenny’s father Stuart is spun into a past relationship. It’s frequently implied in fics that Stan’s uncle Jimbo Kern and his war buddy, Ned Gerblansky, are lovers, but this has never been the subject of much independent interest. A few fan fictions are framed as far-reaching multi-generational epics. But generally, the fandom focus remains on the kids, with SKKE playing a central role.
FANDOM RESOURCES
The SP fandom has never been centralized. Until late 2011 the fandom was primarily located on DeviantArt and FanFiction.net. Many fans have kept a LiveJournal and there has always been a SP presence on LJ, but it’s never been predominantly popular. Now things have largely migrated to Tumblr, where individual fans reblog GIFs and fan art, argue, and perpetuate all the same Tumblr stuff you know and love.
If you want to know more about the SP fandom, here are some places to check out:
South Park Studios site — the show’s official site, where you can watch every episode for free, with the exception of certain recent installments, which are available for one week after airing, then taken down for one month due to contractual obligations. The site also features downloadable media, information about characters, an FAQ, a character-maker, and any ongoing official projects of Stone and Parker’s.
slashpark — the main LJ community for SP slash, with episode discussion threads, occasional contests, crossposts of links to fic and art, and the occasional meta chat. Has been active in the past; with the move to Tumblr, much less so. Has a good tag system, though, so remains an excellent archivestanxkyle — more or less the above, with a focus on Stan and Kyle.spbigbang — the home on LJ for the first South Park big bang. SPBB 2012 produced over a million new words of fic in stories of 20,000 words or greater; each story had two assigned artists and received at least two illustrations. Sign-ups and announcements are maintained through LJ. There is also a chat community, spbigbangtalk, which participants have used sporadically. SPBB is currently running a mini reverse bang, where artists submitted illustrations for which authors are now composing short stories. [Disclaimer: I am a coordinator for this event.]southparkkink — active SP kink meme. Showcases some great work, not all of which is porn. Many heartfelt, well-written fills; some extremely weird prompts.spkinktracking — inactive as of Jan. 2012, but useful as index of all SP kink memes to that date. (There have been three total.)Active current SP kink meme tracking blog
SP fic tag at Fanfiction.net — though, yes, the vast majority of work on this site is garbage, for quite some time it has been the principle archive for SP fic. It can be difficult to find the quality stories without outside help; regardless, most quality authors in the fandom have posted there, sometimes (though not always) exclusively.
SP fic tag at AO3 — there fewer than 300 SP stories on AO3, the vast majority of them cross-posts of work available on FF.net or LJ. Still, as with AO3 in general, the quality is mostly higher, though as more authors get invites this appears to be on the wane. The fandom is not particularly active there.
South Park Big Bang site — archive of stories and art from SPBB events. Includes participant directories, including links to work on other sites.
SP tag on Tumblr — typical mixed bag of stuff, but because there’s no centralized community blogging on Tumblr it’s the closest you can get. And it doesn’t get very close.
Outdated ship manifesto for Stan and Kyle
Reviews of SP episodes on the Onion’s AV Club media coverage site, classic and current — nothing to do with shipping, but fun nevertheless, if you’re looking for a subjective opinion on the critical reception of South Park as an actual TV show.
AFTERWORD
The South Park slash fandom, particularly on Tumblr, had a wide-ranging response to this overview. Some fans have critiqued it as focusing too much on Stan/Kyle or casting Wendy and Stan's canon relationship in a dismissive light. Others have argued that Cartman/Kyle is in fact the second most popular pairing and as such should have received more attention. It was never my intention to purport to represent all viewpoints of the SP fandom; as a participant and a shipper I am inherently biased, though I have tried to compose an entertaining and informative overview. I maintain that this overview is an accurate impression of the fandom as I have experienced it for five years, nothing more or less.
Thanks to Nhaingen for her generous feedback and contributions to this overview.
Art credits:
Kyle, Cartman, Stan, Kenny, Butters, Craig, Token, Clyde, Tweek, Bebe, and Wendy created for this overview by Nhaingen
Red and Kevin by RMR
The goth kids, Christophe, Gregory, Pip, and Damien by Preoprix
no subject
Laughed super hard at this line: "On occasion, Christophe is paired with Kyle, who made the mistake of singing to Chris as he died in his arms, ensuring that Chris would be banging him in fanfic til kingdom come." haha, of course.