Life is pain. Life is only pain. We're all taught to believe in happy fairy tale endings, but there is only blackness...dark, depressing loneliness that eats at your soul.
---Goth Kid from South Park's Raisins Episode
I think that my favorite characters in the long-running satirical cartoon South Park series have to be the Goth Kids...although I wonder whether their depiction accurately reflects Goth culture on school campuses (and presumably beyond). They're shown to be utterly cynical about life and society specifically...I can totally get that outlook at times. They also repeatedly point out how nonconformist they are...but as the series' main character Stan quickly finds out on that episode, you have to wear the same clothes and listen to the same music if you want to join the "nonconformists". As for their ostentatious expression of style, to me it doesn't ring well with their philosophy. I think I would have made a great Goth kid in school because back then I embraced many of their attitudes, but had such a group existed in the 1970's, they would have no doubt rejected me just for my nonconformity. Yet in spite of that apparent hypocrisy about them brought out on South Park, there are times in my life when their cynical, highly critical opinions on the world and humanity scream loudly with truth. The ultimate irony of this is that with Christianity, humanity is also essentially depicted as fallen, with only undeserved divine intervention providing rescue and solace. You'd think that there might be a kind of distant alliance between the Goths and Christians, but sadly my impression over the years is that too many of the latter are prisoners of their own self-imposed pride, materialism, selectively convenient legalism and idolatry worship of secular political figures while casting a critical eye at anyone different from themselves, the exact opposite of the noble creed to which they claim to adhere...
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