I think I realized how much these cartoons sucked when they left my life and absolutely nothing got worse, and I didn't feel as though I was diminished for their absence.

My partner really doesn't like most pop culture, and especially early in our relationship, we were sharing spaces intended for a single person - single rooms in an apartment and stuff - so we had to agree on a lot of what we consumed - it meant my "adult" cartoons and shit fell to the wayside. South Park, American Dad, that kind of pablum.

Once we got enough space back that i found myself able to more comfortably revisit this stuff, it never really landed again. It felt irrelevant. It felt shitty. It felt, at times unkind, but really mostly just irrelevant. Most of them have the voice of the older men who make them - a viewpoint I no longer share nor aspire to - and It's just like... each episode is 20 minutes of my life I could have spent reading, or doing literally anything more interesting.

The X shit is gonna be one, maybe two seasons of garbage nobody asked for - just another sign of the rising irrelevance of gen x probably.

For me, I was watching this shit out of some kind of inertia - it was how I had always filled my time, from the earliest days when sneaking south park was a subversive act against my parents - till those early days realizing my partner's happiness was more important to me than continuing to watch them - I bet anyone still attached to these garbage shows would have a similar experience if they had a similar extended break. It's just so non-essential.