Stephen and Linda Stotch (South Park)

Stephen and Linda Stotch are a Butters Stotch' parents and characters from South Park. They are notorious for grounding Butters for petty reasons.￼

Why They Suck

 * 1) For beginners, their main issue with them is their habit to grounding Butters for pettiest reasons. Notable ones are for making a silly face on school photo and for misplacing food in their cupboard.
 * 2) They are very bad at parenting and treat Butters like their punching bag and act like they want nothing to do with him.
 * 3) Linda literally wanted to kill Butters by drowning him in her car.
 * 4) They killed a social worker and wanted to feed Butters with her corpse because they thought he was a demon.
 * 5) They falsely thought that Butters had a multi-personality disorder, while Butters was just playing around.
 * 6) Cartman once managed to get them to beat up Butters thanks to him impersonating Butters.
 * 7) They sold Butters to Paris Hilton, showing that they care about money more than him. And when Stephen didn't got his money he grounded Butters for this, Great parenting!.
 * 8) When Butters' grandma bullied him, they didn't become suspicious about Butters' behavior.
 * 9) They often get away with how they treat Butters.
 * 10) Stephen is the worst out of the two. He sometimes acts like he cares for Butters, but he abuses and grounds him for no good reason.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Despite having doing nothing wrong, Stephen did get some karma in Grounded Vindaloop.
 * 2) Sometimes they care for Butters.
 * 3) Sometimes they have good reasons to ground Butters.
 * 4) Out of the two, Linda is a little more tolerable than her husband since she's shown to care for Butters at some points and even show some concern for him too.
 * 5) Passable character designs.
 * 6) They have a few funny moments here and there like spitting their coffee out in shock after Paris Hilton tells them that she'll give them $100, 000, 000 in exchange for Butters.

Reception
Despite receiving a mixed response from critics, Stephen and Linda Stotch received a LOT of heavy backlash from fans for grounding Butters for the littlest of reasons, blaming him for things he didn't do and for physically and emotionally abusing him (even people who aren't fans of the show hate them). However, the hatedom died down sometime after season 20 due to them not getting as much as screentime as they did before.