[I’m working on a seasonal offering with my co-blogger. But, as you can perhaps imagine, complications abound in working on anything with a gargoyle. Communication problems, for one — we’re still getting used to each other’s language. And no computer “hard”ware known is meant for handling by someone with fingers of stone and eyes incapable of focusing on anything but the vague middle distance. So in the meantime, there will probably be a couple of brief posts here — like the one below — just to keep the site at a low simmer.]
Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.
(The popular saying “pushing the envelope” seems a little lame to describe South Park. The envelope in question isn’t just being “pushed” from inside; it’s actually bulging, rippling, threatening at every moment to tear itself from the addressee’s hands.)
The chief source of this tension, as in many works of, umm, art and literature, is the antagonist. The villain. The… resident evil.
Eric Theodore Cartman.
