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Have you ever noticed that the pacing, tone, and story development of South Park changes after Stan jerks off his gay dog in the early episodes? How Stan and his world of anal probing aliens and Scuzzlebutt’s Patrick Duffy leg are relatively normal until after that red rocket incident? I have a theory.
Stan tied a condom to his wee wee so tight, trapping so much blood inside that he passed out and went into a coma. He was rushed to Hell’s Pass Hospital and treated with heavy medications. This is why he becomes a cynical douche. The medication took effect and stabilized his coma dreams so that, instead of being simple wacky hijinks involving Carman’s ass, the episodes become increasingly stupid for an Emmy Award winning show. That’s because the first thing he did in his schlong-induced coma was get high with Towelie, only they don’t show that part because mary-joo-wanna’s bad, m’kay. Much worse than saying shit on TV 162 times in one episode.
After the first five and a half seasons, the series is the result of Stan’s subconscious mind fulfilling his desires as well as attempting to escape reality. Should Stan realize he’s in a coma, he would wake up and suffer brain damage, so he must take down all of his mental barriers one by one.
If he can do that, he can come to grips with who he is and escape his coma. Further evidence comes from the realization that even though he’s the one boy with a steady girlfriend in South Park Elementary, he never carries a condom around in his pocket, due to having developed a phobia of them.
The coma and fantasy explains why he never changes much, physically. Almost twenty years have passed, but he’s only just turned ten in the show, whereas he was eight when he went into a coma way back in Season 5. Conventional wisdom suggests that he should be about twenty-nine years old now, which his unconscious vegetable body is, but his Swiss cheese mind only aged him to ten, just like Ash Ketchum, and Bart Simpson. Ten is a safe number, so ten is where he stays.
Judging by how miserable his family is, especially surging Red Sea of period blood that is his sister Shelly, he decided that growing up is gay, and therefore he would never do it. Despite that, he still caves deeply into his cynicism, though he had to force himself to see and hear more than just shit, because only seeing shit all the time and complaining about it sucks ass and nobody wants to hear it.
The shit he sees and hears are his family and friends who continue to visit his comatose body, hoping if they speak to him that he’ll come back to them. It’s a formality, though. They don’t really mean that. By now, Stan being a vegetable is what’s normal, and therefore him waking up will break the comfortable routine. That’s what he tells himself, because he doesn’t want to come back. Who wants to exist in a world with Pip and Barbara Streisand anyway? It’s bad enough that the government in his imaginary world is a stupid oligarchy, comprised only of douches, turds, and Mitch Connor. Imagine if he knew what it was like in the real world. Whatever's left of his idealism and innocence would be shattered completely.
His coma also explains how a child can go off on his own into a town full of dangerous and untamed animals, such as the majority of Catholic priests, and Jared, who lost all that weight because of sandwiches, AIDS, and jerking off to child porn.
In addition, it explains why people in every country in the world know how to speak English, and why every town in Colorado has snow. It only ever snows in South Park, so it stands to reason that it only ever snows everywhere else. Also, summer sucks, so summer doesn’t exist in Stan’s coma. Except in Afghanistan and Peru, but that’s different.
Anyway. Moving on to the characters closer to him… Stan’s Super Best Friends are aspects of himself that he can enjoy but cannot associate with himself.
Kyle represents Stan’s budding homosexual side, which he’ll never fully acknowledge. This is also why John Travolta and Tom Cruise will never come out of his closet. It’s a metaphor. Stan fell into the coma an unrealized homosexual dating a girl and, as such, needed a safe and familiar outlet for his growing homosexual tendencies, hence Kyle. This is why he doesn’t speak to Wendy for weeks at a time now. However, since he can never experience sex, Kyle must never fall in love with him. This is why Kyle and Cartman have grown closer over the years, where Stan and Kyle have grown farther apart. If Stan is going to be gay for Kyle, he must do so through Cartman.
Speaking of which, Cartman acts as his anchor, the ultimate familiar evil of South Park. The one thing that makes everything else kind of OK, kind of normal. It’s comforting to have at least one person around who is less functional than himself.
You may notice that Cartman’s past with Scott Tenorman is often brought up. It serves as a warning. Cartman is not an aspect of himself that he wants to fuck with. He must accept Cartman for what he is and just roll with it, or he risks being roused from his coma prematurely, spelling disaster and woe. This is why he always caves and allows Cartman to harass Kyle and Wendy however he pleases. In consciousness, Stan never learned what it meant to be a good Super Best Friend, or a good boyfriend, so he always stands back and watches as the people he loves most are repeatedly fucked by Eric Cartman.
Then there’s the obscure Kenny, who’s more a friend to Kyle and Cartman than he is to Stan in his abandoned non-comatose world. Stan cried real tears when he thought holistic medicine was going to kill his Kyle, whereas when Kenny got crushed by a piano, he gave not one shit about it. “Oh my god, he... oh whatever.” Something like that. It’s worth noting that the coma also explains the deus ex machina surrounding the mysterious and convenient disappearance of Kyle’s diabetes, which later manifests itself in a made up boy named Scott Malkinson. Stan is still traumatized by the fact that Kyle’s autoimmune disease almost killed him, and therefore Stan’s coma made the whole thing go away. For Kyle. His Kyle. Who he’s gay for, but also totally not gay for.
Anyway. Back to Kenny. It’s not that Kenny is actually obscure. Kenny is Stan’s f-f-friend after all. But Kenny also represents Stan’s hedonistic tendencies, which are dangerous to him as he comes from a long line of alcoholics and raging rednecks. In a panic, his mind makes Kenny terminally ill and kills him off in his coma permanently, trying to cut that part of his mind out entirely, until Stan stops caring and Kenny returns unnoticed. Stan feels intense guilt over this. It felt sort of like breaking up, so while Kenny was away he had to fill the hole somehow.
So he tried with Butters. Butters, being bi-curious or whatever, likes boys, so Stan’s closet homosexual tendencies are automatically drawn to him, even if he is a total Melvin. All of his adventures with Butters are exceedingly lame, though. Aspen especially is permanently ruined for him. His name isn’t Darsh, damn it! And he still doesn’t know his pizza from his french fry, so he’s gonna have a bad time, and he decided that was Butters' fault. This is why Butters was fired and wears a lot of gay tin foil now.
He then tried to fill the void with Tweek, another boy who likes boys, but that was lame, too. So Stan’s mind shoved Tweek away in the mental box titled “Craig and his Douche Friends” and that was that.
Later on, like fifteen or something years later in real time, Stan crawls so deep into the closet that he can see Narnia. At one point his repressed homosexual side has increased in intensity exponentially, which is normal for some gay and bisexual men. It was so strong, in fact, that it had to manifest itself in more ways than through Kyle and Cartman’s stupid antics, or he risked blowing a blood vessel in his brain.
At first his mind took a very safe route, providing a husband for his good friend, Big Gay Al. Mr. Slave might have been a whore, but that didn’t make him a bad person, so Mr. Slave got to be that husband. Only Mr. Garrison was a bad person, and that’s why he’s orange and forever alone now. But anyway, Stan found he didn’t really connect with that, despite it being a nice thing to do. He had to turn to his peers. Thus, to save himself from certain death, Tweek and Craig, decidedly the two gayest boys in class who weren’t total Melvins, became boyfriends, and Wendy became a transgender boy. Well, genderfluid, but Stan never learned what genderfluid was because he went into a coma long before that term hit any Internet space he was familiar with.
Anyway. Wendy being genderfluid may represent bisexuality in Stan, but according to Toolshed’s character sheet he still clings to the “Cisgender Heterosexual” label, hence why he’s in Narnia. To be far, back when he wasn’t in a coma, Cisgender Heterosexual was the default state of all men in his his mountainous little redneck Colorado town, so he assumed that’s what he was. He had no reason to believe otherwise. In subconsciousness, he is gay or bisexual, confused about his gender, and feels guilty about being a Cissy, but he’ll work through it, because everyone else has to at some point in their lives. He wants to talk to Chef about it, because Chef is the only adult he trusts; however, because of his shame, his mind twists and warps Chef beyond his reach to the point where Chef winds up getting killed off because of some fruity little club. Therefore, Stan has no one to talk to, and he uses that as an excuse to stay in his coma, too.
Moving on. Randy Marsh is what Stan wants to be, at first. He is wish fulfillment. He was a successful geologist, husband, and dad, living a normal life. Stan venerated his father, as most young boys do. Randy’s example was something Stan could strive for in his relationship with Wendy, or Wendyl, as it were. Randy being Lorde, thus genderfluid, is where Stan has no hang ups with Wendy’s occasional male identity, while also being in the closet about it. Stan needs someone to make sense in his mixed up world or he won’t be able to validate it and will start questioning why he is where he is. It’s a subconscious trap to keep him from becoming too aware of his coma; however, Stan knows his dad is unstable. He’s seen evidence of this outside of his conscious world, thus Randy’s slew of midlife crises escalate more quickly later on in the series.
Stan’s mind must have figured out that awareness of the coma would snap him out of it, so it took something the boy already loved, his dad, and built a way out for him with it; however, Stan is too complacent to make a final stand and fight his way out of it, so he doesn't.
Thus South Park lives on, a glimpse into the fractured butthole mind that is Stan Marsh the Darsh. Because whatever. You’ll watch it. Fuck you! Only on HBC.