Ten Lessons from South Park’s 20th Season (and some side notes)

Since this year will mark 10 years since the premiere of Season 20 from South Park, I decided to have an entry about lessons you can learn from watching the season. As an unpopular opinion, Season 20 was my favorite season of South Park. Aside to the serialization surrounding the entire season and the cute, but evil characters called the Memberberries, it made very good points about the US Presidential Election 10 years ago. Normally, people don’t start caring about the elections until much later in the year. But that wasn’t the case in 2016. In fact, the whole year was about the election. Due to the campaign of Donald Trump, the left-wing’s fear of social progresses getting reversed, the right-wing’s growing resentment towards social progresses, and the death of a conservative justice in the Supreme Court, everyone took the election too seriously. This is why we had an entire season of South Park dedicated to one election.

Some of the topics frequently discussed in the 20^th season are the election, trolling, Star Wars, nostalgia, privacy breach, and relationship conflicts. For half of these topics, there was a character specifically created for this. They were called the Memberberries, a superfruit that utter nostalgic phrases while also saying racist or homophobic things. They represent the far-right, and their prominence in the entire season imply two things. One of them is that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were not happy with Star Wars movie The Force Awakens and how it went. It was mentioned several times that it was just a remake of A New Hope, something even I saw on the first viewing. The other was that they do not like Donald Trump, and they implied that the reason why Mr. Garrison (the stand-in for Donald Trump at the time) was popular was because they kept eating Memberberries.

Ten years later, I have several connections to make between now and 2016. Here, I will present ten lessons coming from the show, what inspired these lessons, and some side notes related to the subject matter that Season 20 was about.

Ten Lessons from South Park’s 20^th Season:

Even though South Park is supposed to be a satire that makes fun of people and issues, there are ten lessons you can learn by watching each of the episodes.

• Lesson # 1:
  • Nostalgia isn’t all that great. It may be fun to remember the good old times, but you shouldn’t forget or disregard the harsh realities of the past, as well as the technological advancements that made life easier today.
• Lesson #2:
  • Anyone can be a troll. This includes well-mannered professionals who are nice and respectful to people offline. Also, a nice person on one website can be a troll on another.
• Lesson #3:
  • Cyberbullying can have serious consequences, especially if you do it in a way that strikes them in the heart.
• Lesson #4:
  • If you push someone or some group around for too long or in a very bad way, they will fight back. If this bothers you, you have no one to blame but yourself.
• Lesson #5:
  • Being rude or offensive can cost you a lot of respect from everyone, not just a few people. If you’re doing this to get out of winning, you’ll lose a lot more than what you could’ve won.
• Lesson #6:
  • Your past actions on the internet or in real life can come back to haunt you in the future. If you want to avoid this fate, don’t be rude or offensive.
• Lesson #7:
  • No matter how much effort you put into something, there are some things that you cannot change, whether you do good or bad to change something.
• Lesson #8:
  • If you let nostalgia consume you too much, then you will become ignorant and would then start embracing what was bad.
• Lesson #9:
  • Cyberbullying is bad, but it doesn’t make you any better to invade the privacy of cyberbullies. When you do the greater offense, you will come off as someone who is worse than the multi-offender.
• Lesson #10:
  • There will always be chaos, even if you eliminate or reset the source of it. You could start over the entire internet to clear up trolling, only for trolls to come back when it starts back up.

If you’re interested into a walkthrough of the lessons, you can click on the following details. You can click on the arrows to close the details of each lesson as shown in the South Park episodes.

Lesson #1 Details

We all have memories or moments of the past we really enjoyed. In the episode “Member Berries”, this was why people were indulging the Memberberries. But given their phrases like “’Member when marriage was just between a man and a woman?” and “’Member feeling safe?”, those were reminders that the past also had bad stuff. Take for instance, people who were born between the late 60s and early 80s would have nostalgic moments for the 1980s. They may had better food, better movies, and more freedom, but the 1980s also had its dark moments. It was an even worse time for LGBT people than the 2000s or even the 1950s. This is not to mention the higher crime rates, the AIDS scare, the Cold War, and problems in other countries (like the Apartheid in South Africa). Besides, even if you were to ignore that stuff, you can’t imagine the world without computers or the internet (which the 80s didn’t have). You like video games? All video games were 8-bit, which is nothing compared to the games I grew up with.

Lesson #2 Details

This lesson is the whole point of Season 20. The episode “Member Berries” ended with the plot twist that skankhunt42 was Gerald Broflovski, and the episode “Skank Hunt” was about this wrath. The thing here is that of the four main fathers, Gerald is the sanest one, given how insane Randy Marsh has become, how drunk and abusive Stuart McCormick is, and how abusive and clueless Stephen Stotch is. You would expect that someone like Cartman would be the troll since it was mostly on the South Park Elementary school boards. Instead, it was Gerald. And he didn’t just target the girls that go to the school. He targeted every female on the internet.

Lesson #3 Details

The suicide of the Danish gold medalist and breast cancer survivor in “The Damned” was the turning point of Season 20. But why did she commit suicide? It’s because Gerald Broflovski trolled her hard, which shows what kind of damage trolling can do in real life. And the way he did it was really bad. Any method of trolling that would strike the victim in the heart, such as mocking on a deceased person in front of their family member(s) or mocking on someone’s disability or sexual orientation while making fun of their name or interests, is very offensive, and that could lead to the victim committing suicide or retaliating through extreme means. Gerald’s mockery of her breast cancer through fake doctor names is a perfect example of what would strike victims in the heart.

Lesson #4 Details

While this lesson doesn’t justify sexual harassment like what the boys did in “Wieners Out”, this is an important lesson to consider, especially since it was one of the reasons why Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election (which Season 20 was about). The girls had the right to break up with the boys, but some of the stuff they did (like breaking up through organized conspiracy, assuming that all boys are like skankhunt42, and not giving the boys any chances) pushed the boys too far. In other words, it was the girls who started the gender war, not the boys. They pushed them around, so they’re paying the price.

Lesson #5 Details

Mr. Garrison did take advantage of this in “Douche and a Danish” by making sexual remarks towards women. He did cause his rating to plummet, but it also costed him a lot of respect from his party. The result, they chased him like a mob. Granted, the Republican Party were being jerks, and the only reason why they cared about the offensive comments is because that would make them lose. But if you did stuff like making racist or homophobic comments to attack one specific person rather than a whole group, you would not only hurt that one person, but also the entire group. And you’ll lose respect from not just that group, but also people who supported the group.

Lesson #6 Details

The sixth lesson is best explained by the dialogue between Kyle and Cartman about Trolltrace in the episode “Fort Collins”. They can leak anyone’s entire internet history, not just skankhunt42’s, and Kyle is very likely to print out Cartman’s history to show Heidi the misogynistic comments he made before he started a relationship with her. Cartman (as well as other characters) had the right to be worried. Because if Heidi found out what he said, she would eventually break up with Cartman. And some people are more sensitive than others. Right around that time the episode premiered, peoples’ pasts have been brought up to damage the reputations of people, such as Paula Deen, Roy Moore, and Brett Kavanaugh. On one hand, the past is in the past, so bringing it up in the future would re-open an old wound. On the other hand, the fact they even did these things at all is what’s going to hurt them.

Lesson #7 Details

This lesson was highlighted by some of Mr. Garrison’s actions in most of Season 20 and in the episode “Oh Jeez!”. Throughout the season, he tried convincing everyone to not vote for him. He even said to vote based on their Star Wars preferences. But it didn’t work, because the Memberberries had power over others. It sucks to say, but some events in real life are inevitable, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

Lesson #8 Details

This lesson is similar to the first lesson, but as highlighted in “Members Only”, some of the quotes are “’Member the Cold War?” and “’Member the Stormtroopers?” (referring to the German Stormtroopers during World War I). This shows how absorbed and extreme they have in ‘membering. As a representation of the right-wing, this is how extreme they have gotten since 2020. On the pop culture side of this, every decade had their share of good and bad films, shows, songs, and in some cases, video games. I have fallen in this trap for SpongeBob already, but if you fall in this trap for all media, you would have no appreciation of today’s media.

Lesson #9 Details

This is basically the villainy of Lennart Bedrager and TrollTrace. Yes, Gerald Broflovski was pretty extreme for a troll, but Lennart Bedrager wanted to invade his privacy. Not just his privacy, but everyone’s privacy. World War III intentions aside, this is a more serious offense than what the trolls have been doing. It can also be seen as an infringement upon others’ rights. This lesson doesn’t just apply to trolling. It’s not even limited to the internet. If you do a crime with a heavier weight than the acts done by the people you’re targeting, even if the target is at a lower level of morality, you have shown to others that you’re the bigger villain.

Lesson #10 Details

Not much can be said about the last lesson since that was more applicable to the ending of the episode, but if you hear that the first e-mail after the internet apocalypse was inappropriate, this shows that trolling like what Season 20 was all about is going to happen anyways. Heck, a much earlier South Park episode (Go God Go XII) explains this lesson too. In that episode, a world without religion was still at war, and even after Cartman accidentally resolved the religious disputes, they still had other wars going on. There will be chaos until the world ends.

My Side Notes to Season 20:

Regarding the issues mentioned in the entire season, I have some side notes to share about each. They can be subjective.

• I’m going to be honest. While I believe those who voted Trump in 2024 were being stupid, the ones who voted for him in 2016 were at least thinking straight. While he’s not the person they should have in office, some of the issues at the time, like political correctness, Supreme Court vacancies, and Obamacare, they were reasonable concerns for the right wing. It’s also worth mentioning that during Obama’s presidency, America has gotten much more radically progressive (not as bad as it was in in the early 2020s, but still pretty extreme). Most of those who voted for him were either fed up with Obama’s radical social progresses, tired of being smeared as racists, didn’t want Hillary as president, or wanted to slam the brakes on political correctness, or even reverse it.
• The whole season warned against nostalgia. The irony here is that (in addition to liking the Memberberries as one of my favorite characters) watching this season made me even more nostalgic towards the past. As someone who already liked older media more at the time of the season’s airing, I ended up embracing it rather than going against it. And now, I’m feeling nostalgia towards this entire season (as well as 2016 as a whole).
• The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy actually shaped up to be worse than the Prequel Trilogy, at least in my opinion. In fact, without even mentioning diversity, I can name 10 or 20 things that were wrong with the Star Wars sequels, with the biggest one being that Disney defied the whole point of Star Wars. It was supposed to be about the tragedy of Darth Vader, not a cash cow franchise. I can’t even take the Original Trilogy seriously anymore because of how bad the sequels were.
• Cyberbullying has always been, and will always be, a serious issue. I can bring up a lot of horror stories on my experiences on other sites and Discord servers (not just when I got picked on, but also what I witnessed of what others did to others). Ask me about the Bell Tree Forums, there’s a lot worth mentioning, but I’m only going to share a few examples. For instance, there was a time this one troll bullied everyone on the first What’s Bothering You thread, causing the thread to explode into a war, resulting in several bans and the thread being locked. There was also a time when the Unpopular Opinions Thread broke out into a forum war because of people posting hate speech and arguing instead of members reporting it, which resulted in the moderators spending hours to clean up the thread. The worst member the forum ever had was a transphobic member who frequently mocked pronouns and trans issues while also pushing her transphobic rhetoric on the site, as well as her Twitter and Substack. Her behavior got a few members leaving and a few threads locked. Her ban from the forum made her even worse. Once she got permanently banned, she not only became more transphobic, but also sought revenge against the forum.
• Regarding one of my lessons that reflected how the gender war started, I have to say that we had something similar in the coming years. For a long time, men have been sexually harassing women. The result was that women began to speak up against it, costing many careers. At the same time, when they gotten extreme about it, they eventually faced a backlash for their activism.

The one thing that ruined Season 20 for many, including Trey and Matt, is that they set up the plot to have Hillary Clinton win. But since Donald Trump won, they had to rewrite the plot and rush it through. Before I wrap this up, there are a few other things I would like to point out:

• Cartman feared that Heidi will break up with him if she ever found out what he said about the Ghostbusters reboot. But to be truthful, as the rest of Season 20 and most of Season 21 shows, Cartman was a bad boyfriend to Heidi. He would’ve lost her anyway due to being a toxic influence on her, not for that one comment.
• Since the season ended, the Memberberries have not shown up except for once. They’re not even being seen in the Vaccination Special, or the Season 25 episode “Back to the Cold War”, or the latest two seasons. I would like to see them come back in the future, as well as the Jewbots from the Season 13 episode “Fishsticks”.
• Season 20 had many ironies. The biggest jerk of South Park Elementary became a nice guy, a nice guy that everyone bullied became the biggest jerk that led everyone, a lesser-known background character was one of the most prominent characters, Stan and Kenny were essentially background characters, and one of the most sane adults was the most insane one. I would also like to give a kudos to Randy Marsh for being one of the sanest men for about half the season, and Stephen Stotch for being more reasonable in grounding Butters this time. But fans didn’t really like the characters being out of character, including the show being serialized.
• I wish there was a YouTube video that had the full instrumental song “Hail to the Chiefs” in the form of Imperial March (which South Park used in the episode “Members Only”), but this time, no dialogue.
• Judging by how this season was written, I would have to agree that Pokémon GO, one of the hottest topics in 2016, didn’t really need a plot point or even a mention. But we did get some nod to the shooting of Harambe and its memes (in form of an episode title), the Brexit vote, and the release of Pokémon Sun/Moon.