It’s Been 10 Years Since the Last Goth Kids Episode of ‘South Park’

Halloween season is almost upon us. The leaves will soon start to turn color, a chill will fill the air, and as we await the spookiest weeks of the year, South Park fans will wonder, “Where are the goths?”

Henrietta, Michael, Pete and Firkle are South Park Elementary’s most disaffected, depressed and darkly dressed students. The four are almost always seen huddled together, usually holding coffees and cigarettes as they sit around bemoaning the state of the school’s “conformist” culture and trashing whatever pop star was coolest to hate that season. They are not the same as those Twilight vampire twats that popped up around Season 12, they thumb their noses at the emos, but they were cool with the Cthulhu cult — before that got boring too.

As the stand-ins for the millennial generation’s infatuation with everything dark and dreary, the Goth Kids had a good run of episodes centered around their antics in the late 2000s to early 2010s, coming to a conclusion with the Season 17 episode “Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers,” which premiered on October 23, 2013. Since then, the frightful four have been relegated to background duties with lines few and far between and new plotlines nonexistent — except in the video games, which, in terms of mainstream conformity, is a fate worse than undeath for a true goth.

Since the peak of the goth kids, South Park seasons have shrunk significantly to their current length, a paltry six episodes in the most recent Season 26. As a result, the South Park world itself has shrunk, and beloved side characters have been all but abandoned as Trey Parker and Matt Stone focus their efforts on the core four kids (plus their extravagant Casa Bonita renovations, of course). Sadly, the Goth Kids are just four of many abandoned plotlines that may never see the light of day again — though they like it better in the dark, anyways.