Negs sent me a pic of the pic they drew me for vday that got lost in the mail, which commemorates how we have finished ds9 and are watching snoo and snoo is inferior and Stan and Kyle are horny, if you haven't seen snoo fyi this is accurate
he also believes half the kids in school are jerking off to pike while they cry into their paella
Negs sent me a pic of the pic they drew me for vday that got lost in the mail, which commemorates how we have finished ds9 and are watching snoo and snoo is inferior and Stan and Kyle are horny, if you haven't seen snoo fyi this is accurate
SEKRIT FINALLY WROTE SOME I DREAM OF KENNY FIC OMGOMGOMG
in honor of larry hagman of course r.i.p.
click through for stan being a sexually frustrated astronaut and kyle eating like a million cheeseburgers off screen probably
~
Stan paced back and forth in front of the sliding doors to his patio. Everything in his neat Florida bachelor pad was in its place; the coffee table was spread with delightful appetizers; the bar was stocked, rows of highballs waiting to be filled with mint, rum, and lime. Sighing, Stan picked up the lamp, unbottling it. “Well,” he sighed, as orange smoke began to belch from its opening, “here goes nothing.”
I forgot I did this, and it was funny, so I’m reblogging it, three years later.
Great news, Negs found this so I can finally rehome it on my blog forever
they did some art for it but I just spent an hour looking for it only to find out that it was part of a larger sheet of sketches, rest assured Kenny was hot like this
rip Larry, still thinking about you
Facets of growing up in Park County ca. 2010: thrifting 1980s prom dresses for your graduation party, nobody's heard of puberty blockers, and straight guys crash the board game club. Family beach trip non-optional. Stan/Kyle, PG-13 to NC-17
A decade ago I wrote a series of three fics about trans Kyle drama, and I've left them off of my AO3 and mostly just sent the buried LiveJournal links to people if they were interested.
I'm in the middle of trying to archive all (or at least the bulk) of my SP fanfic on AO3, so, what the hell, here is a series I'm calling 3/4 Full that collects the three fics.
It's Stan/Kyle, it's set over about five years, and I could write 3,000 words about what I was trying to do with these fics:
How do you even post fic anymore, let alone very old fic? I guess like this.
Anyway, I'll be back on Halloween (!!) to post the last chapter of RIAT, if anyone's still waiting for that. At least it's actual new content.
This is maybe one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. Like I really can’t imagine anything breaking me so thoroughly and entirely as spending my entire day writing an impassioned 3,000-word essay and losing it after I posted it because Tumblr is fucking broken after I already noted this week that Tumblr was fucking up in this way. Like genuinely I’m fucking losing it, I quit Tumblr, I’m never posting here again, email me if you fucking want me, feel free to follow my AO3, I’m gone forever, good fucking bye, this website sucks and you all need to get off of it.
I spent hours and hours today, like 10 hours, writing a really fucking good meta post that meant a lot to me, and I somehow managed to accidentally reblog it from myself twice, so I went to delete it, and then apparently somehow deleted the original post, and although I spent all day meticulously saving the draft, and also had copied and pasted the post into a Word doc to proofread it, I closed and didn’t save the Word doc I was proofreading, and obviously I posted my draft so it’s not in there anymore, I feel like complete shit, I cannot believe this happened, virtually everything in my life is doing so badly right now I truly cannot imagine I fucked this up because Tumblr is -- as I have been saying for 13 years -- a truly fucking horrible piece of shit website none of us should be using for fandom.
I have been in this fandom since 2007 and conversations about Kyle vis-a-vis both sexuality/gender expression and antisemitism have been happening, I shit you not, since before that time. “This” is something that has been not just going on, but ongoing.
Previously in my career as the single best person in this fandom (2007-present) I said things like, you know, we’ve already had this Kyle conversation, do we really need to have it again? Didn’t we settle it in the like Seaouryou era, or the Foodstamp era, or the Holly era, or the post-2015 whatever happened next era?
Being an adult man of some experience I am going to deliver some intellectual honesty and confess that I was wrong to think these conversations were, or should have been, concluded. We should keep having them. They are important to have. Does this mean some people haven’t historically said some real dumb things? I mean, yeah, sure, DM me. Is this about how much and what specifications a grown-up speculation of a 9-year-old cartoon boy prefers in anal sex? Yes, often. Doesn’t that sound wild? Yeah, also sure, especially to people who don’t get SP fandom, as if there is anything to get.
But things that are happening in fandoms and fanworks are expressions of people who reside in society in the real world, and so “lol chill bitch it’s south park” is never really an adequate take. What we say and do about and to fictional characters in fandom is not neutral. It’s important to discuss it because it’s not neutral. It’s really easy to tell ourselves that the real world where things matter is distinct from fandom, which is an unrelated thing we do for fun, but that’s not really true. We’re the same people all the time, and the things we do and see in fandom inform how we go through the rest of our lives, and vice versa.
could you PLEASE explain the context of that john elway blog???? Its a stan blog right????? It has to be, oh my god im losing my fucking mind its so good
yes!!! it’s a stan roleplay blog
yes but the real test is, who can find the companion Kyle blog
Okay listen I'm 100 percent certain I reblogged this by mistake? I mean like I went to look at my Tumblr and then this was somehow suddenly on it?? anyway um, good art, love this art, first time for everything I guess
“hey um, kyle, it’s stan, i think i might’ve like. left my flash drive in your computer? call me back if you get —”
“hey stan”
“oh hey kyle. what’s up”
“not much. yes i have your flash drive.”
“oh, cool! cool. great. um. did you see —”
“i saw the self insert john elway fic where you both turn into werewolves yes”
This was good, I’ll reblog it. Do people just getting into this fandom understand John Elway? Anyway, whatever.
Picard should have ended with William Shatner walking in to interrupt the game, “what did I miss?,” smash cut to credits
okay, new meme time, give me basically any topic and I will just write pure SP dialogue for it, I’m ready, let’s go
Seventy years later I am back to say, the level of writing AI can produce is like, believably what you’d consider a great job for a fourth grader. If the characters were any other age group this plot would be impossible, making it a really smart fit for this show. Actual AI writing is not that smart, not that novel, and not that deep, since it can’t make new points and is solely drawing on things that already exist. It’s also usually like typically syntactically and grammatically correct, but stilted and underdeveloped. Altogether it’s plausible that someone who’s asleep at the wheel like Garrison would accept it as not only legit, but impressive, for grade school.
Meanwhile, this mirrors what happens with the text messages: what we see on screen is generic and treacly and frustratingly unspecific; if someone I cared about told me something as limp and empty as the sentiments Bebe and Wendy are touched by, I’d be ambivalent at best, and probably quite catty about it. But these are children, for one thing, so their range of human experience, let alone vocabulary, is not that wide. Also, they have presumably (Wendy for sure, and Bebe we are meant to think) been getting very little in the way of investment from their boyfriends. (A concept that’s in itself a joke on this show, since a romance between two 9-year-olds is what it is.) So whatever they’re getting here is reassuring and meaningful to them not because what they’re getting is meaningful, but because even the rote impersonal sentiments they’re getting via AI are better than literally nothing -- even if the text are, frankly, conceptually nothing.
“Conceptually nothing” is the right way to think of what AI can do for writing -- at this point, anyway.
After my trip to LA I told Nhaingen about the trolley at the Grove and
for reasons I was admiringly surveying my blog and I like this so I’m reblogging it
I have seen some posts that are DISAPPOINTED about the moral or ethical implications of that episode, and all I have to say is that the ending was Trey Parker writing a prompt to a chatbot and getting an ending that offered a simulacrum of South Park that got eerily close but also wasn’t exactly it, and actual South Park animated it to show how it was very close but not exactly right, which itself reveals the kind of shittiness of AI technology, and also how ingrained the patterns of South Park are, there was no greater takeaway, that rules.
im intrigued anyway! what’s your soundtrack for RIAT? or for stan/kyle in general lol
Okay, well, to prevent everyone from despairing at a long-ass self-involved tract on my anti-social fic, I'll start with Stan/Kyle in general. I imagine I've talked about this somehow over the last 80 years in this fandom? So, sorry to old people, this might be boring to you.
There is a 90s song by a band called the Refreshments called "Banditos." It is about a heist. This is no band I'd ever heard of and and no song I'd ever listened to until a guy made me a mix with this song on it in college. This was around the time I was getting into S/K and I think the lyrics are very Stan/Kyle, broadly construed: "you can look deep into my eyes like I was a supermodel," it goes. "Well, it's you and me, baby, no one else we can trust," on a crime spree that I guess involves using a fake ID bearing the name "Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the United Federation of Planets." Yes, Stan and Kyle would. But then I think the main selling point is:
Everybody knows that the world is full of stupid people
And I think, well, isn't that just the thesis of South Park? Justified or not. Stan and Kyle learn the world is full of stupid people, over and over again, starting with their parents and all the authority figures around them. You have to figure this would expand pretty rapidly to "everyone" once they were old enough to get out of the house. It's also the show's curdled ethos.
The song rampages along in a spirit of camaraderie, unclear what the relationship is between the singer and the person being sung to. There's just a lot of just "you," classic "this could be gay" territory, but then there's the "look deep into my eyes like I was a supermodel" -- also gay? Why would you look deeply into a supermodel's eyes? These two people are close, though. This whole song is about mutual trust. It also paints a picture of fleeing from a small town ("slash the deputy's tires") and invokes the West ("Banditos," "I'll keep the pesos"), which captures the expansive, rural mood I get from both Stan/Kyle and the show's earlier seasons.
Uhhhh what else about Stanky generally? We all love Sufjan’s “Predatory Wasp of the Palisades,” like I guess this is a fandom playlist standard, but it’s easy to liken this to S/K: stuff about brothers, stuff about hats, stuff about being cold in bed (as you would be in the mountains) and swimming (as you would in Stark’s Pond) and loving your best friend, all very small-town middle-American childhood-adjacent. Kissing? Breakups? Can’t be. Of course, as the King of Illinois, I am the only person who is allowed to claim this album at all, so, I’m right. I-L-L-I-N-O-I-S, ring the bell and call or write us! O, great river, green with envy! O, Jane Addams, spirit send thee!
There’s Grouplove’s “Tongue Tied,” which is about just kinda like, bumming around the suburbs, “take me to your best friend’s house, I loved you then, I love you now” which I don’t think is implying it’s the best friend the singer is in love with, but IDK, at the time this felt very S/K fic-core, just kind of rolling around the void in a small little town with your buddy, maybe touching his dick experimentally, growing up and loving someone, that kinda thing. Everyone always partying in SP fic, some kissing amidst. I’ve written my share.
Two references from this hunk of a fic draft I posted ten years ago:
The Thermals, “St. Rosa and the Swallows.” Very much about being united against a hostile world, maybe existential threats, possibly in a post-apocalyptic situation, or maybe just, again, in noplaceness (”the flat days and the static nights”). Could be rural Colorado (”the cold days and the frozen nights”). Some stuff about depression ("all the days I switched to auto mode, days for which I have nothing to show”). Mirrors the plot of the fic (such as it is, being unfinished) in that Stan and Kyle are just trying to get by and out together, but they find themselves tripped up by their surrounds and, ultimately in this fic, Cartman (”passing our enemies, passing our friends, passing the means we used to tell the difference between -- it’s subtle”). I think this song is supposed to be about religion, as is a lot of this album (The Body, The Blood, The Machine -- “Here’s Your Future” on this album not S/K but also great), but there’s very much a cooperative “hold you tight” teamwork vibe here, which is my go-to for them, I think.
MGMT, “Time to Pretend.” About growing up, which is the Stan/Kyle aesthetic at its core. Being creatively successful, I guess, not that I think Stan and Kyle will get wives and move to Paris and do heroin. But this is very potent for the pairing for me:
“I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms. I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world. I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog, and my home. I’ll miss the boredom, and the freedom, and time spent alone. But there is really nothing, nothing we can do -- love must be forgotten, life can always start up new.”
I mean, if there is a more “Stan Marsh grows up” sentiment, I’d like to hear it.
Similar affect to many of these, by the way, in Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” although I believe Arcade Fire is (or should be? hard to say) off the table now, ya know, out of favor. But I mention because, if you care to listen or just remember, it’s not even particularly a love song; it uses first person plural and second person singular (“grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving”) to evoke a big empty rural (or ... suburban) void where a kind of aimless coming-of-age detachment is rebounded in the humanity of personal attachment to one unnamed person the song is kind of being sung at. Also apocalyptic or eschatological edges, calamity haunting the song’s periphery.
Well, that’s always happening to Stan and Kyle on South Park! “In my dreams we’re still screaming” -- I know I write a lot of fic that is about 47-year-old Stan and Kyle politely being asked by the manager of a gay bar to leave the drag show because Kyle got into a fight with the waiter over only tipping 17 percent because an errant piece of ice fell in his basket of wings and kind of melted in there and got sauce everywhere, but, when I think about general Stan and Kyle feelings, I still kind of picture them rooted in the messed-up climate of the show as I imagine them growing up in that grody little town hating everything, including themselves, except each other. And I think these songs mostly speak to that.
Anyway I’ll reblog this later with some RIAT songz for whoever wants em.
