The “gayfish” episode of South Park, in which a disillusioned Kanye West can’t wrap his head around a simple joke about fish sticks, has become a classic since its initial airing in 2009. A few years later, Kanye returned to the show and realized that Kim Kardashian is probably a hobbit. Now, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have added another chapter to their relationship with Kanye, and while their previous jabs were mostly in good fun, this latest one doesn’t leave them looking so great.
In a new trailer for the upcoming game South Park: The Fractured But Whole, we catch up with Kanye, who is now a fish living in the sea. He teams up with Seaman in an effort to get his mother, the late Donda West, into heaven. This transitions into a parody of his 2015 video game Only One, where the goal is to do just that.
Where things get messy is when we actually see Donda, riding a unicorn and depicted as a black fish with big red lips, gold earrings, and voluminous eyelashes. Although there was hopefully no racist intent behind the game’s depiction of Kanye’s mother, it’s tough to ignore the similarities between the character’s exaggerated features and the Al Jolson-style blackface minstrel acts of the early 1900s.
Neither Parker nor Stone have addressed the character yet, but as Polygon notes, they previously mocked the Only One game at an Ubisoft press briefing, and Parker told The Hollywood Reporter in 2011 that while his brand of comedy thrives on controversy, the goal is never to offend anybody, saying, “When someone goes, ‘Oh, this group is really pissed off at what you said,’ there’s not a piece of my body that goes, ‘Sweet!’ That means I did it wrong. I’m just trying to make people laugh.”
South Park: Fractured But Whole comes out on October 17th for Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Watch the trailer above.
