If you are interested in part of the background of my "Viva El Barto" collab (still ongoing, but it will surely die at some point, lol)

[MH//ANTIPODE]

Once, The Simpsons stood as a peculiar kind of oracle, a yellow-tinted mirror reflecting the absurdity of late 20th century existence with sharper clarity than any solemn critique. Beneath the slapstick, beneath the bright palette, there was an uncanny precision. The show knew that the structures of family, work, politics, and culture were already hollowing out, and it dared to laugh at the collapse while it was unfolding.

Yet oracles do not remain ageless. What began as satire hardened into repetition. Characters that once revealed paradoxes of American life became simplified caricatures, echoes of echoes, hollow shells of their former selves. The radical act of self-awareness that made the series electric solidified into a formula, as if the mirror had been turned upon itself, endlessly replaying its past glories until only parody without tension was left.

To observe this decline is to watch how culture consumes its own creations. The Simpsons dismantled the conventions of the sitcom, but was found useless trapped within them. Embalmed yet animated, a strange zombie of television. Episodes continue not because they are needed but because the machinery of entertainment resists cessation. The series itself becomes allegory, a loop of production that testifies to the exhaustion of the very system it once mocked.

The tragedy is not simply that the show became bad, for decline is always possible, but that it became unnecessary. Its voice, once disruptive, has been drowned out by the noise of the media landscape it helped to build. It no longer reflects society, it reflects only inertia, a cultural fossil that insists on remaining alive.

So The Simpsons persists, not as art, not even as parody, but as symptom. Proof that in a culture afraid of endings nothing is permitted to die, not even the works that once laughed at death itself.