Fair warning that I’m typing this really quick so my thoughts may be scatted
I hate Family Guy because of its shitty, lazy writing with pointless RaNdOm cutaways and try-hard edgy jokes that don’t even have shock value because you expect it to be offensive. it’s lackluster characters with cliche boring overused tropes and almost no redeemable qualities (besides maybe in earlier seasons), and most of all for it’s lack of knowledge on topics it tries to cover, and the irresponsible way it covers real issues, because they don’t know how to cover the, so the writers bullshit everything on topics like abuse and rape. Not to mention they do ANYTHING for views. Like, anything. They would kill off a main character and force the audience to feel for them, only to bring them back a couple months later because The Statues Quo Is God (one of their favorite fuckin tropes). They would resort to doing “crazy and shocking” things like a dog getting a baby pregnant, but no one is shocked, because they aren’t above this. The shock value isn’t there when everyone watching expects this shit, and being crude and edgy just for the sake of being crude and edgy isn’t funny. You can be funny AND be crude, but being crude won’t make you funny. Family Guy fails at being funny, and just by watching the show you can TELL they’re trying so hard to stay shocking and edgy, you can tell they’re doing anything they can to get a shock-value laugh because that’s all they have going for them, and they’re failing. They can’t cover issues like sexual assault at work and domestic abuse correctly, not because of their crude humor, but because they don’t know HOW to. They like to play reverse the genders, but they never do it right, “what if X happened to a boy???” and they play it off the same way as it would happen to a girl. Not to mention, they give wrong messages. Messages like “You should stay in an abusive relationship to make your abuser happy” or “you should let someone rape you because they’re probably lonely” I know how stupid that sounds but these were not satire. These were REAL messages the show gave, that were supposed to be serious. The characters are also unlikable as all hell, for real, they only have one character trope now. In season 1 and two Stewie’s character was actually likable, he was well developed and had intersecting motives, but that all went to shit, and now his character is just “gay”. Chris is horny and fat that’s about it. Meg is the WORST character I have ever seen. She’s nothing but a punching bag, and it’s almost painful (dare i say cringe-worthy) to watch. Lois is a nagging wife and Peter is a dumb husband, as if we haven’t seen that a billion times, it’s getting old. This show, and it’s formula, are getting old, nothing about it is worth watching. It has almost no remediable qualities at all, besides maybe a few actually good jokes here and there (notice how it’s almost always the none-edgy ones too, weird huh?) it doesnt have much going for it. It uses satire and comedy as an excuse to say and do racist, homophobic, and sexist things, and try to justify it with a bullshit message at the end with a slow zoom.
South Park is everything Family Guy wants to be. South Park has genius satire, and amazing writing. It’s humor is crude, very very very crude, but it’s never used for shock value strictly, it’s satire, everything they do is satiric. It’s characters are actually well developed, and the shitty animation is something you get used to because it has a charm to it, it’s a trademark of the show. Look how many adult cartoons TRY to be South Park and fail. They think “South Park has crude humor and shitty animation so lets do that and instant money!!” but they lack the thing that actually makes south park good. Clever commentary, good writing, likable (yet very very flawed) characters, good messages and morals (despite the offensive material the show has) you can learn from it a lot, and most importantly, ITS SATIRE. South Park isn’t crude and edgy JUST to be crude and edgy (though I’m sure they enjoy it) South Park is crude because it’s satire, meaning, “
the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
“ It’s crude themes are exaggerations, they are ironic. If there’s an episode where everyone is racist to a huge extreme, does this mean it’s because the show is racist? FUCK NO, the exact opposite is being shown. They characterize the in-show racism as so exaggerated, that it shows how stupid these racist views are. South Park has characters with conflicting views, to show two sides of everything. Take Wendy Testaburger, the feminist of the town who no one listens to, even though she’s right 90% of the time (you can’t have a character that’s always right, that’s bad writing) VS Eric Cartman, a neo nazi asshole who only cares for himself. People see Eric and assume the show is like that, sense he’s a main character, but that’s wrong, Eric is almost always the bad guy, and he’s ussually the figure used to show how bad things like neo nazi views are. They use characters like Kenny McCormick, the poor kid, to cover topics like poverty, and in episodes like You’re Getting Old and Assburgers, Stan Marsh is used to cover the topic of depression, and i swear to you, i have NEVER NOT ONCE seen a better depiction of depression than in Stan on TV until that day, and they never even used the work “Depression”, hell, I cried. South Park does it’s research, it KNOWS how to do satire. It’s genius. Season 19 was so heavy handed in it’s satire that i would have to make a separate post to analyze it.
Bottom line is, Family Guy and South Park should fall under different categories. In fact, South Park did and episode on this, Cartoon Wars (Part one and two). I can’t tell you how many times people assume that liking South Park is the same as liking Family Guy. Specifically here on Tumblr (Outside the SP fandom), people assume liking South Park is a very un-PC thing, something that makes you the same as one of those Meninists (note: I’m actually a p big feminist) I think if people from here would stop looking at South Park in a more open-minded light, and peeled back the layers of irony in their satire, they’d see that South Park preaches a lot of the same messages that people here preach. And of course, you have the Bro-watchers of South Park, who are usually Anti-SJW’s, that fail to see that South Park is a very Social Justice show behind the crudeness. Family Guy doesn’t have that at all on the other hand, they try to. And even IF they did, their writing is still total shit, it’s lazy, they hop from plot to plot and do whatever they can to fit in cutaways that have nothing to do with anything, and that’s their “thing”.
pkjd