‘South Park’ Goes Full 'Law & Order: SVU' With Deepfake Revenge Plot

This week at South Park Elementary, the students become embroiled in a vicious revenge porn scheme. A spurned Butters started the heinous trend because he felt used by Red after he bought her a Labubu. To get back at her, he made an AI generated video showing Santa Claus peeing on her. 

To get back at Butters, Red then made an AI video showing Butters having sex with the Studio Ghibli character Totoro. Immediately, the South Park Police Department got involved, abandoning Cartman’s mom, Liane, in her quest to bring her missing son home. Instead, SPPD does a full Law & Order: SVU-style pivot to focus on the videos circulating of the South Park students having intimate relations with popular animated characters. 

When told that a young boy (that’d be Butters) was “molested by Totoro,” Detective Harris jumped into action. “Holy Shit!” Detective Harris declared, before making his apologies to Mrs. Cartman and dashing off to the elementary school. 

The teaser of Season 28’s third episode was already making fans mad before it aired, with some people going so far as to block fictional Trey Parker accounts on X to express their rage that Butters’ character is taking an incel character arc. 

It’s probably less of a comfort, then, that Episode 3 follows an eerily similar plot line to Law and Order SVU’s Season 27 Episode 4, titled “Clickbait.” In that episode, Olivia Benson and the gang are tasked with a very similar chore as the South Park Police Department: deepfake revenge porn is circulating at a local high school, and the cops have to go through a dizzying investigation in order to figure out who the culprit is. 

The SPPD is a little slower on the solve—Detective Harris was convinced the deepfakes were real, and he sat Butters down to demand a description of Totoro’s penis. Then, when he found out there’s another video, this time showing a student getting raped by Popeye, Harris jumped to a bold conclusion. “This all has to be connected,” Harris deduced. “A string of rapes, the missing Cartman boy, South Park is going to shit.” That last part seems like a pretty direct dig at critics of these new South Park episodes. 

Eventually, after a few wrongful arrests of Studio Ghibli’s leadership and a truly upsetting undercover operation where South Park PD goes under cover as animated characters in the hopes of solving the child attacks, the detectives uncovered the truth. Butters, along with Kyle and Kenny, end up going on trial for spreading AI generated revenge porn of Bluey. Bluey, the titular character in the hit animated Australian kids program Bluey, testified against the trio. “They made me do things I would normally never do,” the blue dog testifies. 

The investigation and the trial—and even the political subplot—mirrored the NBC crime drama so tightly, it was shocking the show didn’t end with the signature Dick Wolf dun dun.