I've been a fan of South Park since 2008. The first episode I remember watching was Tonsil Trouble, though I don't know exactly when I watched it. But the episode that really changed my brain chemistry was Guitar Queer-O.

I grew up in a complicated household and a complicated relationship with my parents. By this point, I had been volunteering at my church three times a week and during the weekends for a few years now. At the same time, during the school year prior, I had grown close to a friend who introduced a lot of edgier media into my tastes. He showed me Drawn Together and Family Guy; we watched The Superhero Movie and You Don't Mess with the Zohan on their theatrical release dates. At this point in my life, I was very religious and rebellious, within a censored and heavily monitored life structure. I was also a teenager, about to start high school.

I'd already heard of South Park at this point. Who hadn't? In the spring I had a hyperfixation on Guitar Hero, playing nearly every day after school on my family's Wii. During the summer, when I wasn't in China, like all the years before, my sibling and I marathoned episodes of Boy Meets World and Futurama on cable.

And just like that, everything fell into place. As I watched Futurama on Comedy Central, South Park episodes followed and I had no reason to change the channel. I watched "Tonsil Trouble." I watched "Guitar Queer-O." Something happened inside of me. My prior views on homosexuality aligned more with my dedication to church, belief systems I had heard before. It took a twenty-minute episode based on a game I was obsessed with, overdramatizing the relationship between two boys, to change that.

I don't remember the precise order of events, but I do remember how I started obsessively looking up "Stan x Kyle" (and all other possible iterations) on deviantART, whether it was at school or after church. I remember reading as much Style as I could on Fanfiction.net and drawing a lot of fanart. I remember telling my girl friends how brainrotted I was, and how weirded out they were by my sudden obsession with yaoi. I remember researching homosexuality and Christianity apologetics, determined to find an argument to champion gay rights within my religious belief system. I remember how delighted I was every time I watched an episode that made fun of something I knew, made fun of me.

In August 2008, I changed completely. Thanks to this stupid and frequently offensive adult cartoon, my life hasn't been the same since.

Now

I stopped keeping up with the show during season 18 in 2014 for a variety of reasons, not all of which are necessarily owed to the show. But because this was my first ever slash fandom - not to mention the first fandom I binge-read fic about relationships between canon characters to the degree that I did - South Park eventually started to feel like a juvenile interest to me, something I had outgrown.

Seventeen years later, in August 2025, this interest rekindled over a weekend. Well, to be more precise, my interest rekindled after an inexplicable hyperfixation on keeping up with American political news, as well as soon after befriending a fan in a different fandom who said that South Park remains to be one of their favorite TV shows. When the first episode of season 27 premiered, I had no qualms watching the show again. And after being an avid reaction watcher for a couple of years now, in the following week I watched dozens of reactions to the episode, to see if people had the same reaction to it as I did.

If I really let myself think about it, I knew it was all just an excuse for me to watch the episode over and over again.

South Park is as stupid and smart as I remember. It's an exaggeration of reality - an exaggeration of middle America, which, though not where I grew up, is pretty culturally close. It's changed a lot over the years, but to me, the important parts have stayed the same. It's a TV show, not a politician; it's a comedy, not just fiction. It made me see the world differently through my favorite coping mechanisms - humor and storytelling - and turned me from a brainwashed and narrow-minded neo-centrist into a socialist lesbian fujoshi.

I was hooked on South Park years ago as a shitty edgy teen for the satire and yaoi. I still am, though a lot about my worldview and analytical skills have changed, and I've shaken off most of the Protestant remnants from my belief system. In fact, I think I like the show even more now because I understand how much I value my freedom, intellectual curiosity, and sense of humor. In the same way that South Park exists regardless of anyone's sensibilities, so does my unapologetic love for it.

South Park has its own genre of episodes, ranging from social satire to character shenanigans. The one thing each episode has in common is that they manage to be simultaneously smart and stupid in an absurdist way that can only be translated through animation, and sometimes music.

As a big fan of all of these genres - satire, comedy, absurdity, music, and animation - not to mention my own fondness for being stupid and smart at the same time, a lot of episodes are fun for me to watch in different ways.

On this page, I've organized episodes not by genre, but by the main character(s), ships, and themes as well. And my yaoi ships, because that's the main reason I started watching the show in the first place.

• Characters - The central focus of the A-plot of each episode among the five main boys, and/or B-plot if it's significant enough. This also includes the relationships between the boys, even if mostly platonic; as in, all Butters & Cartman episodes will also be under "Butters" and "Cartman" individually.
• Kid Shenanigans - Aside from the yaoi, I love the episodes that focus on the kids being kids, despite any politics or absurdity. Truthfully, I don't care about the adults' antics even half as much.
• Style (Stan/Kyle) - My OTP ever, and the best friends of the show. They're based on the creators, Matt & Trey, because RPF can never escape from me. Their dynamic is echoed in a lot of my other ships across fandoms: guy bffs who are two sides of the same coin and devoted to each other but argue frequently. I love every single episode that focuses, highlights, or uses their relationship as a plot device. This is also why Guitar Queer-o will always be my favorite episode.
• Creek (Craig/Tweek) - I didn't care about them back in the day, though they were always a background ship that I understood and didn't mind. But the yaoi episode is cute, and the way their relationship has developed so far has been really cute. I'm incredibly amused that they went from making them a ship as a joke to really fleshing out their relationship, but I'm so here for it.
• Yaoi - All episodes under Style and Creek, plus a few others that are gay-coded in my opinion, but not one of these relationships. So far they include Butters/Kenny (my #2 OTP), Kyle/Cartman, Butters/Cartman, Kenny/Cartman, Stan/Kenny, Stan/Butters, and Randy/Gerald (Stan/Kyle's dads). If you watch an episode and are like "where's the yaoi?", listen - it's about the fujoshi crumbs.
• Satire/Commentary - Evidently made with some sort of political or social commentary.
• Censorship - Heavily themed around censorship and creative freedom. This is clearly the issue that Trey and Matt care about the most, and it shows, because episodes about the topic are almost always bulletproof episodes.
• Favorites - My favorites, for whatever reason. Usually a combination of yaoi, shenanigans, writing, and my agreement with the messaging. But I really emphasize the writing tbh

Other things I like:

• Anything making fun of me, my identities, or anything I know and love
• Plot continuity, lore, and long-lasting worldbuilding
• In-your-face political commentary about something I agree with, even if I never thought about it before

Essentially: personal freedom; social empathy; anti-corporate and abuse of power; anti-colonialism/imperialism; valuing children as human beings; nuance in everything.

• Metatextual humor
• Cartman getting comeuppance

See Etc. for episodes I consider good satire with valuable messaging, but don't necessarily feel like they belong on my personally curated list.

If you've stumbled across this and are thinking "Why do you need to warn about that?" don't worry about it.

Like anything, there are certainly elements of South Park that I don't like. But there's a lot I do, and hundreds of episodes, despite Matt and Trey's best efforts to get it canceled.

In the episodes listed on this page, you can expect:

• Casual use of the f-slur and r-slur (until season 20, when they become far less frequent)
• Cartman being immaturely and exaggeratedly anti-Semitic, misogynistic, racist and anti-black, classist, ableist, categorically abusive a la DARVO, among other things. Characters are often fatphobic to him in return.
• Comically flawed parents, including: Randy Marsh (narcissistic parent), Stephen and Linda Stotch (abusive; the worst in my opinion), Liane Cartman (pushover parent, though she gets better circa season 18), Sheila Broflovski (overbearing, but only at her peak in the movie), Stuart and Carol McCormick (neglectful alcoholics)
• Unflattering depictions of nearly every referenced celebrity/public figure.
• Disabled or explicitly described "ugly" characters are drawn in ways that one may find offensive, though they tend to be characterized like all of the other characters rather than as caricatures of their physical appearance.
• Tuong Lu Kim, the most featured "Chinese" character, is depicted in an exaggeratedly racist way. He is canonically white. I think he's hilarious.

Some questionable worldbuilding choices are referenced (and usually fixed) in later seasons.

Things I don't like

These will be sparse in the listed episodes. See episodes for specific and additional warnings.

I will always warn for these.

• Excessive poop and fart jokes

  South Park categorically has these in abundance, within the show's reality that 9-year old boys find them funny, regardless of the show's target audience. I'm always willing to tolerate them, but I have a threshold to where I feel more squeamish than unamused.

• Graphic sexual assault
• Excessive and graphic bodily fluids or genitalia
• Gore will always be warned for (but I don't mind it that much in this show)

Here's clip of a deleted scene of Stan and Kyle fist fighting their classmates together ♥

My favorite song from the entire franchise is What Would Brian Boitano Do? from the movie, followed closely by Put It Down from the eponymous episode. I also love La Resistance, Mountain Town, Wendy's Audition Song, The Dreidel Song, Do What You Wanna Do, Stop Bullying, and Cartman's covers of O Holy Night and Poker Face. I like Shelly's cover of I Saw Three Ships, but more for the clip than for the music. Sorry Shelly.

Despite how much I've written on this page, I don't take South Park that seriously. I like thinking, but I love laughing.