Rick And Morty’s worst fans don’t deserve Rick And Morty
Rick And Morty may just be the perfect sci-fi show. It is certainly, with apologies to Westworld, currently TV’s most ambitious, taking a handful of long-running conceits (the infinite-universe theory) and extrapolating a set of narrative forces from them (the Citadel Of Ricks, the Galactic Federation). It occasionally delights in unveiling the power structures of its multiverse, but it also tends, much more, to explore the randomness that such vast scope facilitates. In so doing, it combines the fantastical, parable-filled episodic adventures of the first two Star Trek series, while also indulging the longer arcs of Ronald D. Moore’s Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica. These varying threads haven’t been woven so elegantly since, say, The Prisoner, but showrunners Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland have updated their concerns to encompass not just the structure of reality but also the structure of their argument about reality. We are never not aware, in Rick And Morty, that we are watching a sci-fi television show, and that it has been lovingly constructed by sci-fi nerds, with references to Sandman and Dragon Ball Z and Zardoz and Paul Verhoeven flicks packed into every episode. These references do more than buttress the show’s cred—they build its entire cosmology, its intensely self-aware universe of sex-bots, species collectors, purges, and interdimensional reality TV.
If you are among the show’s adoring fans, in other words, congratulations: You are correct. But you probably didn’t need me to tell you that, right? Rick And Morty fans have slowly gained a reputation as some of the worst people on the internet, self-congratulating, smug, and, worst of all, mobilized. This trend culminated, recently, in a sustained campaign of harassment against the show’s writing staff, which in its latest season has come to include more female writers. Dan Harmon spoke at length recently about this, saying, among other things:
These knobs, that want to protect the content they think they own—and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender. It’s offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by “protecting” my work. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people.