Rick and Morty: Can You Love a Show That Hates You?
By Jakob Johns | Misfit Media Columnist
Watching the back-and-forth between Rick and Morty and its fanbase over the past few years has been a depressing experience. It happens with lots of communities, mind you: watching the Cyberpunk fiasco occur was a nice little nugget of misery, and the slow descent into necrophilia of Team Fortress 2 fans has been a mix between harrowing and inspiring. We’ll get an update one day fellas, one day…
But Rick and Morty is an odd case to me, because sometimes it feels like nobody else notices it. In reality, it’s just that most people who notice don’t care enough to keep paying attention. Why am I paying attention then? Probably masochism.
Speaking of self-hatred, it’s important that you’re aware of the show’s creator Dan Harmon. His other biggest televised achievement is the show Community, which has had a little surge of popularity recently thanks to Netflix. In that show, Harmon has a bit of a meta self-insert in the form of Abed Nadir – an (implied) autistic film student that seems oddly aware that he is a character in a show. He’s a quirky addition to the show that lets Community poke fun at itself, introduce fantastic elements, and allows the other characters (many of whom are morally questionable) to stay afloat.
Harmon’s self-insert for Rick and Morty, on the other hand, is Rick himself. Now, the protagonist of Community, Jeff, is a similar sort of character – a disillusioned genius who spends a lot of time on the fence morally, but thanks to the good influence of characters like Abed, he generally ends up falling on the right side. Rick, on the other hand, is a combination of Jeff and Abed. He’s aware that he’s in a show, and fucking hates it.
The reason this is important to note is because these protagonists end up reflecting the status’ of the shows themselves, and when you look at the greater contexts of these shows and their creator, you begin to understand the bigger picture. Community struggled to survive during its run but stayed afloat thanks to the positive influence of its small but passionate community. Rick and Morty, on the other hand, is trying to exist in a world of hungry fans that demand more and more and more with every season. It has nothing to keep it straight. Nothing to keep its passion alight.
Listen to Harmontown, Dan Harmon’s old podcast, and bathe in the (st)utter self-loathing of Rick and Morty’s creator. He’s a clever writer, but as more people have come to expect the world of him, he has only become more bitter and self-aware. As a result, his show has come to despise you for wanting more of any given thing, and every single episode will take the chance to take a jab now. How dare you want serialisation. How dare you want a consistent villain. How dare you want better-paced development. How dare you want to learn more about these characters.
Dan Harmon doesn’t read this – I don’t think anyone does though, to be fair. But if he did, I would give one piece of advice, which also applies to Harley Quinn: forget about them. The fans, that is. They would never have become fans if they didn’t like what you started doing, so forget ‘em and just get back to doing what you do best. Learn to love your show - and love the people that want it to be better.