One handy trick among Twitter’s blue checkmark crowd (polishes apple, takes a large, crackling bite) is that, by changing your display name, bio, and image, you can much more realistically impersonate other famous people. The only thing giving you away is your actual handle, which most people don’t pay much attention to anyway. This is probably not kosher with Twitter’s terms of service, and will likely lead to some sort of crackdown in the near future, but in the meantime, why not pretend to be Rick And Morty creator Justin Roiland just to troll the show’s much-maligned fans and see what sort of response you can get?
That’s what Mashable writer Alex Arbuckle did a few days ago, and, while he pulled out of all of the stops to enrage that most enrage-able of modern fanbases, for the most part things went fine.
It started thusly:
This netted the expected response—threats of suicide, Rick GIFs, Kim Kardashian GIFs, incredibly sincere platitudes from earnest fans—although Arbuckle’s follow-up tweets tipped his hand a little. If anyone was buying shit like this, well, they deserve to be fooled.
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For the most part, the response was even-keeled, although it did net a few DMs from the show’s signature cringe-worthy fans:
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Arbuckle concludes a recap of his experiences on Mashable positively, saying, “The messages that flooded my inbox told stories of how the show had inspired fans, had helped them through difficult times in their lives, and had motivated them to better themselves.” Perhaps the endless, wonderful in-fighting in the Rick And Morty fandom is teaching some of its worst members to course-correct, or maybe their intellects are just high enough to detect Arbuckle’s parody. They are very, very intelligent fans, you may have heard.
