YMMV / South Park S 1 E 5 An Elephant Makes Love To A Pig

• Aluminum Christmas Trees : While not precisely a hybrid of the two animals—more like a taxonomic third or fourth cousin of the elephant and rhinocerous—a creature that looks like a small piglike pachyderm does exist: behold, the tapir.
• Base-Breaking Character: Shelley, Stan's Big Sister Bully. While she's intended to be hated, fans are split on whether her abuse of Stan is too extreme to be funny or if it's brutality makes the subversion of the Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male trope all the more effective. Her exaggerated lisp and the fact that she's a Karma Houdini doesn't make her any more likeable, but then again that was the intention.
• Broken Base: The Deleted Scene of Shelley setting Stan on fire and dousing him with a bucket of water three times. It's either too brutal for its own good (regardless of the Executive Meddling) and the episode is better off without it, or does it's removal make the second beating look tame in comparison to the first one, with Shelley only throwing Stan unto the ground. The fact that a puddle of water appears out of nowhere in the revised scene doesn't help, even if it was edited out in the remaster.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Shelley beating Stan and giving him a black eye isn't funny. Her dropping a TV on him, throwing him out a window and down a flight of stairs, and running him over with a lawnmower can be. The boys' reaction to him being thrown out of the window being "ready to go, Stan?" with him snapping back in an instant and joining them? Hilarious.
• Cry for the Devil: Stan's clone getting his brains blown off by Mephesto, especially since he was the most sympathetic antagonist of the episode. It doesn't help that the more detestable Shelley and Terrance Mephesto are all Karma Houdinis
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Despite only having a speaking role in this episode, Terrence Mephesto is arguably more popular than his father, due to his haughty and over-the-top demeanor serving as a foil to the boys' more crude and immature attitude. Fans weren't pleased when South Park: The Fractured but Whole showed that he got Killed Offscreen by Mecha-Streisand during the events of Mecha-Streisand.
  • Fluffy is also very popular, and appears in a lot more fanart than Kyle's elephant.
• Fridge Brilliance: Cartman's Stay in the Kitchen remarks in regards to Shelley makes sense when you remember the effect his teacher Mr. Garrison had on Stan the previous episode. The Movie will show that Garrison himself is a Straw Misogynist, and several episodes show the two of them having bizarrely similar mindsets on some topics, such as dolphins living in igloos and Scuzzlebutt being real.
• Fridge Horror: Is Stan's Troubling Unchildlike Behavior and Lack of Empathy in the early episodes a product of his abuse at the hands of Shelley, or is it the origin of it? Is it a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Future episodes will show Shelley having a bigger reaction to death than Stan himself, and Shelley seems to get especially angry when Stan acts nice (like when he says he loves her or thanks her for sticking up to him), implying she may view him as a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, which is ironically how he sees her.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When prompted by Garrison, Stan maintains that neither his father or his mother abuses him, as it's her sister Shelley who beats him. As the show went on, Randy became a massive Abusive Dad of the verbal sort, eventually having a bigger impact on his psyche than Shelley ever had.
  • Stan here tries to get his unstable clone to beat up Shelley as revenge for all the torture she puts him through, but fails since she beats him instead. The movie South Park: Post Covid will finally see Stan exact his revenge on Shelley, in the form of accidentally burning her alive while she was locked inside the Tegridy Farms barn, which will leave him completely wracked with guilt.
  • Cartman caring about Fluffy and treating her well in this episode becomes this in Cherokee Hair Tampons where he hits her after she wakes him at night. What makes it worse is that she never makes an appearance again after season 5, whereupon Cartman crosses the Moral Event Horizon. So much for his Morality Pet.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Shelley shrugging off Stan's attempt to appeal to their brotherly bond and beating him up again becomes this after they reach their 40s in the revised future in South Park: Post Covid: The Return of Covid, when she will finally mature into a better person and a better sister to him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In this episode, Cartman repeatedly says that he wouldn’t let a girl kick his ass. Come Breast Cancer Show Ever, Cartman gets his ass beaten by Wendy.
  • During a discussion, Cartman tells Kyle to "go back to San Francisco with all the Jews", and Kyle angrily replies that there are no Jews in San Francisco. In Smug Alert, Kyle would actually move to San Francisco against his will, and it will be Cartman who gets him out and back into South Park. It could count as Heartwarming in Hindsight if it weren't for the fact that Cartman did it only because he gets off on fighting with Kyle.
• Jerkass Woobie: Clone Stan, who is disowned by his creator the moment he's born and then unleashed upon a town he doesn't know anything about, only to get shot in the head by his creator as he was starting to show some humanity. The fact that he shares memories with Stan doesn't help.
• Values Resonance: When this episode aired in 1997, society discouraged male victims of Double Standard abuse from females from speaking out. In the decades that followed, Stan's experiences became relevant as people became more sympathetic to male abuse victims.
• The Woobie: Stan. He's beaten senseless by his sister, and unlike Ike, doesn't have the privilege to be Made of Iron, leaving him with injuries that he later tries to hide from his friends out of shame. As if that wasn't enough, his friends and even his teacher either laugh or dismiss him for being beaten by a girl. As if that wasn't enough, he's also blamed for the destruction his clone caused, with the entire town wanting him killed, which finally drives him to tears. The scene when he tries to save his face from being beaten into a pulp by telling Shelley that he loves her, only for her to torture him anyway (and in such a horrific fashion that it had to be cut from the final version) solidifies him as this instead of the usual Jerkass Woobie.

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