Does Butters Have the Highest Kill Count of Any ‘South Park’ Character?

For all of Mr. and Mrs. Stotch's shortcomings as parents, maybe they were onto something with their disciplinary measures toward their son — how many thousands of innocent people would still be alive if Butters was grounded on their last day?

Over the past 26 seasons and scores of specials, South Park has seen a startling number of on-screen fatalities. Starting with Kenny McCormick’s first (and certainly not final) death in the debut episode “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone have shown a stunning propensity toward graphic death that only continues to grow. Any given South Park episode is likely to feature at least a small handful of casualties up to and including mass murder, which is usually more unpunished than it is unexpected. For such a small, secluded town, South Park, Colorado is somehow the on-screen murder capital of the world judging by its hilariously long list of featured deaths.

On South Park, any character, no matter how naive, sensitive and innocent they may be, is more than capable of taking many, many lives, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, the deadliest killer in South Park may not be the murderous ManBearPig or the generally genocidal Eric Cartman — no, according to many fans in the South Park subreddit, the most lethal member of the show’s cast might be the kid who racks up a double-digit corpse count just by tap dancing.

It’s hard to quantify culpability for deaths due to the actions of each South Park character, as many Redditors pointed out. For instance, Stan’s “gay little song” about buying Priuses in “Smug Alert!” indirectly caused the destruction of San Francisco by smug storm, presumably leading to the deaths of its roughly 800,000 residents. Similarly, Cartman’s steering of Cthulhu in his Coon storyline ended untold number of hippie lives as he racked up his own formidable fatality counter — assuming hippies count as people.

As for Butters’ case for most accomplished killer in South Park, his slaughter began with his emergence as a tap-dancing prodigy in “You Got F’ed in the A,” when his loose shoes create chain reactions that claims the lives of 16 people, including a pregnant woman and two suicide victims who couldn’t live with the memory of Butters’ coincidental carnage.

But Butters’ biggest act of accidental butchery comes in the Season Sixteen episode “Going Native,” wherein he hits the captain of a cruise ship in the eye with a golf ball, causing the gigantic vessel to crack in half and sink into the sea off the coast of Hawaii with no survivors. Considering cruise ships can hold up to 3,000 or more guests at a time, this single act may have propelled Butters into first place on the rampage rankings. Stupid Ben Affleck!

Then again, that placement only holds up when we’re exclusively counting the deaths we see. When accounting for off-screen fatalities, the kill count record is in the millions — Randy and Mickey Mouse are neck-and-neck at the top of the list for that time they started COVID by fucking that pangolin.