Rick & Morty Fanbase

[bandicoot]

I've never seen the show, but after this thread I'm not sure if I want to watch it.

It has it's moments, but it's a little busy for me at times.

 

[method115]

I just started watching it and it's pretty good stuff. I normally don't watch a lot of cartoons (wife does) but this one is pure gold imo....

Yea I just finished it about two months ago after a coworker showed me a clip of the blue helper guys. I laughed my ass off and asked him what show it was and started streaming it on Hulu. Still need to watch the last season, Hulu doesn't have it.

 

[Madmick]

What the hell do journalists have against the Rick and Morty fanbase? They won't let this go. From the high-brow Atlantic Monthly:
The Cartoon That Captures the Damaged American Male
Rick and Morty is a dialectic of masculinity unmoored.

f the universe is indeed run—as users of cutting-edge psychedelic drugs will occasionally suggest—by nine-foot-tall interdimensional locusts with lawn-mower voices and glittering, loveless minds, who program our life patterns on cold locust computers and grind their forelegs appreciatively over our sweatier delusions and sentimentalities; and if (as I personally suspect) these giant locusts from time to time hack our entertainment systems in order to disseminate their confusing and inhuman values, like the Russians did with Facebook, then I know what they’re up to right now. Our insect overlords are busy writing the fourth season of Rick and Morty.

The animated sci-fi sitcom created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, which ran for three seasons on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim nighttime programming block, is officially on hiatus. But in the spring came the news—the daunting, locust-delighting news—that Adult Swim had commissioned an additional 70 episodes of the show. At the previous pace of 10 or so episodes a season, that’s seven more seasons. Seven more seasons of Rick and Morty? Jesus Christ. This show is already a kind of pop-cultural omega point, a metaphysical ultimatum, a slurping spoof spiral, an uncorked algorithm of chaos that produces chaos-ripples in the actual, non-TV world. If you know any 18-to-34-year-olds, they likely enjoy, or perhaps fearfully consume, Rick and Morty: It was the No. 1 comedy in America for that age bracket last year. Its fan base is fetishistic and wildly entitled. Last year, after a Rick and Morty episode referenced a certain long-discontinued Chicken McNuggets dipping sauce (Szechuan, not seen since it was a product tie-in with the Disney movie Mulan in 1998), McDonald’s tried to make friends with the fans by reissuing the sauce for a limited time. But—such foolishness!—it didn’t produce enough. The fans freaked out, roaring for their sauce packets and frightening McDonald’s workers. Pure, dizzying, late-capitalist entropy. Ice-creaks of astral mirth from the locusts.

What’s the show about? Well … somewhere in a dreaming suburban slab of Simpsons-esque tract housing lives the Smith family. Jerry is the hapless and bad-joke-making husband; Beth is his pissed-off veterinarian wife, thwarted by marriage, motherhood, the whole thing; Summer is their teenage-daughterish teenage daughter; and little 14-year-old Morty, quaking and pubescing and desiring and saying “Aw jeez,” is their son. And then there’s Rick—Rick Sanchez, Beth’s formerly estranged alcoholic father, now back in the nest. Rick is an old-school mad scientist: lab coat, pipe-cleaner legs, blue-gray corona of boffin hair. Out in the garage, he delivers lectures and harangues sideways while squinting into the circuitry of a time machine or unscrewing a ray gun. “The universe is basically an animal that grazes on the ordinary,” he explains. “It creates infinite idiots just to eat them.”

Rick started life, deep in the germinal phases of Rick and Morty, as a scabrous parody of “Doc” Brown from Back to the Future. But he’s evolved into something much stranger: Doctor Who crossed with Doctor Faustus crossed with Larry David crossed with William Burroughs crossed with my therapist. His view of existence—of which he has seen a supernatural amount, having traversed many universes—is desolate and bracing. He builds himself a tiny robot whose sole purpose is to stand on the kitchen table and pass him the butter. “What is my purpose?” asks the robot. “You pass butter,” says Rick. A pause. “Oh my God,” says the robot, head dropped, tiny tin hands hanging. “Yeah,” says Rick in his rancid, sardonic way. “Welcome to the club, pal.” His grandson, Morty, meanwhile, is constantly, stammeringly overwhelmed: “What the hell, Rick? What the hell?!”

Rick and Morty go on adventures, a boy and his grandfather, leaping through a sputum-green portal and riding the wicked rainbows of the multiverse. Little Morty quivers and repines, making fear-noises and doubt-noises like Shaggy in Scooby-Doo. Rick, anesthetizing himself against his own omnipotence, glugs on a hip flask and burps a lot. Booze-spittle decorates his chin. Rarely is he conspicuously or flat-out wasted, but always is he unfiltered, crabby, pestilential. The story lines, relentlessly time-twiddled and dimensionally proliferating, are of stroke-inducing complexity: In one episode, the screen splits into 64 pieces, like a hellish Hollywood Squares. Sometimes Summer goes with Rick; sometimes Beth; sometimes even Jerry. But they always return to the household, to the family. It’s the show’s bitter master gag: Here they go, traipsing through infinite realities; and there they are, back again, condemned to one another’s company by the iron laws of sitcom. No exit.

I was about to write, critical tweezers clicking, that Rick and Morty is “not without insight.” But why be coy? It’s stuffed with insight, gel-injected with insight. In one episode, or in one strand of one episode, Rick books Beth and Jerry for a “two-day intensive” at Nuptia 4, an extraterrestrial couples-counseling institute. “They can save the marriage of a dog and a bar of dark chocolate,” rants Rick. “They can save the marriage of a porn star and a porn star!” At Nuptia 4, technicians are able to “isolate the parts of the subject’s brain containing all perceptions of its romantic partner” and then materialize those perceptions in the form of a “mythologue”—a biological representation of how each partner sees the other. A lever is thrown, an electro-whoosh is heard. Behold! Jerry’s mythologue of Beth, his wife-imago: a towering, punitive Giger-esque horror-mantis with homicidal talons. More whooshing. Beth’s mythologue of Jerry: a shuffling, perspiring worm-blob; when threatened, it tearfully presents its rear.

I have wept with laughter at Rick and Morty; I have flinched in repulsion. The humor oscillates between an ingrown bro-ness, a cackling in the man cave, and something so emancipated and post-everything that it is nearly transcendent. Nearly, but not. “Nobody exists on purpose,” says Morty to his sister. “Nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.” Rick, burping warlock of the spaceways, puts it differently: “When you know nothing matters, the universe is yours.”

If you’ve been wondering why Jordan B. Peterson, the Canadian professor, guru of modern masculinity, and author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, has been selling so many books and filling so many theaters, this is why. Rick and Morty is why. It’s no surprise, really, that a small and well-documented subset of the Rick and Morty fan base exhibits terrible, snickering, alienated-white-male troll behavior. The female writers who were hired for the show’s third season were infamously harassed and abused by this mob. “I loathe these people,” co-creator Harmon commented at the time. “It fucking sucks.” But it makes sense: Rick Sanchez himself is a time-troll, a transgressive brain, an avatar of barbed aloneness and free-floating male scorn.

Everywhere he goes, on every plane and platform, Rick leaves comments. On the planet Gazorpazorp, where women rule and men are enslaved, he lets rip a rending, endless, wholly chauvinistic fart. Dragged cursing to family therapy in the Emmy-nominated episode “Pickle Rick,” he is asked by the therapist why he doesn’t want to be there. “Because I don’t respect therapy!” he says. “Because I’m a scientist. Because I invent, transform, create, and destroy for a living. And when I don’t like something about the world, I change it.” (“All things that move between the quiet poles,” declares Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, “shall be at my command.”) Quavering, dithering Morty, with his vestigial concern for other beings and his pangs of this and that, is Rick’s split-off other half. A dialectic of damaged maleness, you might call the pair. Together they form one futuristically fucked-up man. (Both characters, incidentally, are voiced by the same person: Roiland, the show’s other co-creator.)

So, in this massively popular cartoon show, along with all the snorts we have howling despair, a kind of sorcerous materialism, and the American-male psyche cracked right down the middle. Harmon, Roiland, and their team are very good writers, and with very good writers many things are possible. Perhaps the next 70 episodes of Rick and Morty will be soaring works of the spirit, enlarged by compassion or conversion. For now, though, here’s the health warning: Watch your intake, young person, of this hilarious toxicity. Be not the sport of psychedelic locusts.

BTW, not that I see his relevance, but Peterson is specifically known as a public thinker who disdains vehicles of nihilism (if we are to accept that is the "cultural omega point" that Rick and Morty represents):


Why do 21st century journalists hate men so goddamn much? What a bunch of fucking losers.

 

[Clear Winner]

I'm a Rick and Morty fan, but some of the fans are complete wankers. The football team I support also has its fair share of idiot fans too though.

Some of the R&M fans supposedly doxing and sending death threats to the female writers was a step too far.

 

[Madmick]

I'm a Rick and Morty fan, but some of the fans are complete wankers. The football team I support also has its fair share of idiot fans too though.

Some of the R&M fans supposedly doxing and sending death threats to the female writers was a step too far.

Why aren't MCU fans judged by its worst element? Or any other fanbase for that matter?

 

[Clear Winner]

Why aren't MCU fans judged by its worst element? Or any other fanbase for that matter?

I suppose it's that the turd MCU fans aren't as vocal or as visual as hordes of R&M fans turning up at McD's and causing scenes. Also, what are the worst MCU fans guilty of other than moaning about a few support characters races being changed? Genuine question, as there might be something I'm unaware of. DC fans seem the more annoying because they claim some sort of conspiracy against their shite movies.

Loads of other fans are judged by their worst element too. Football/Soccer and hooligans, politics and the far right/far left idiots, it just depends on how visible to the masses they are. I don't think there was much of a spotlight on the R&M fans until the McD's incidents. That really brought it to the masses. Before that, I recall a few "oh, their fans just think they're so smart" comments.

 

[Stranger Come Knocking]

The funny thing about these types of fans is that Rick would hate them

 

[Madmick]

I suppose it's that the turd MCU fans aren't as vocal or as visual as hordes of R&M fans turning up at McD's and causing scenes. Also, what are the worst MCU fans guilty of other than moaning about a few support characters races being changed? Genuine question, as there might be something I'm unaware of. DC fans seem the more annoying because they claim some sort of conspiracy against their shite movies.

Loads of other fans are judged by their worst element too. Football/Soccer and hooligans, politics and the far right/far left idiots, it just depends on how visible to the masses they are. I don't think there was much of a spotlight on the R&M fans until the McD's incidents. That really brought it to the masses. Before that, I recall a few "oh, their fans just think they're so smart" comments.

Does this make all comic fans "incels" deserving of derision?
https://www.themarysue.com/comic-book-online-harassment/

 

[Clear Winner]

Does this make all comic fans "incels" deserving of derision?
https://www.themarysue.com/comic-book-online-harassment/

The short answer is no, but nobody's claiming it is. Not here at least.

This is one case from 2016 that nobody other than feminists and hardcore comic book fans would have heard about. As I said the McDonald's case garnered enough attention across America to be on the local (maybe even national?) news. People were queuing up overnight and police were called to several different McD's, so it makes for a better story.

If the multiple stories of comic fans pestering women got more attention and made the local news, I'm sure there would be similar generalisations about them.

When it comes down to it.... Who cares? There are far worse generalisations and stereotypes levelled at people and groups that can actually affect their real lives.

 

[Jack Reacheround]

Wow, I couldn't have possibly asked for better timing to illustrate my point. Watch the 45 second video to the end. I found a YouTube vid of it below:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/11/politics/sarah-sanders-trump-taxes/index.html

What in the fuck is even going on in here?

 

[Madmick]

What in the fuck is even going on in here?

Been a while, not reading through that again, but IIRC, kid forwarded the claim that Rick and Morty isn't profound or groundbreaking, as if it had objective worth, then tried to run to the classic subjective "my opinion" refuge when he was called on it. It's a post demonstrating the anti-postmodernist opinion, which isn't hip, that you can make objective claims about art, but you can't expect these to be accepted as the dominant argument if you cannot defend your argument. Sanders tried to hide behind the hip "agree to disagree" bullshit to justify an outright, objective lie.

It's fashionable. It will erode and be forgotten.

 

[Jack Reacheround]

Been a while, not reading through that again, but IIRC, kid forwarded the claim that Rick and Morty isn't profound or groundbreaking, as if it had objective worth, then tried to run to the classic subjective "my opinion" refuge when he was called on it. It's a post demonstrating the anti-postmodernist opinion, which isn't hip, that you can make objective claims about art, but you can't expect these to be accepted as the dominant argument if you cannot defend your argument. Sanders tried to hide behind the hip "agree to disagree" bullshit to justify an outright, objective lie.

It's fashionable. It will erode and be forgotten.

But can there be an objective truth when discussing the value of a show, painting, music, or art? I’m not saying I disagree. I know that there are some truths in this arena that are just undeniable, for instance that Thomas Kincaid is a piece of shit painter. But even then, it’s still an opinion. Sanders is lying about something that can be proven.

 

[Frank23]

The #FakeNews media strikes again.

 

[Madmick]

But can there be an objective truth when discussing the value of a show, painting, music, or art? I’m not saying I disagree. I know that there are some truths in this arena that are just undeniable, for instance that Thomas Kincaid is a piece of shit painter. But even then, it’s still an opinion. Sanders is lying about something that can be proven.

Absolutely. Nevertheless, it's more complicated than inert, objective truths. This is why we tend to aggregate subjective opinions, which can themselves be measures objectively (ex. IMDb), and the strongest arguments that prevail over time in favor of one work over another. Time is the greatest tutor for discerning those works which have really tapped into the undercurrents of the universe and human nature/experience.

This is how the canon is born.

 

[Jack Reacheround]

Absolutely. Nevertheless, it's more complicated than inert, objective truths. This is why we tend to aggregate subjective opinions, which can themselves be measures objectively (ex. IMDb), and the strongest arguments that prevail over time in favor of one work over another. Time is the greatest tutor for discerning those works which have really tapped into the undercurrents of the universe and human nature/experience.

This is how the canon is born.

I agree and disagree at the same time. While aggregating the opinion of the masses is an effective way to measure the opinion of the masses, they are simply not always right. But since nobody really can be right when talking about the value of a piece of art, it is as close as anyone can get.

But Rick & Morty is awesome.

 

[Diogenes of Sinope]

why are people getting into a philosophical debate about the moral responsibility of rick and morty ITT.

its not that deep lol

 

[The_Renaissance]

Gimps. Same annoying traits as South Park fanatics - sitting in public, social areas where they might have the chance of picking up a girl but ruining it by doing childish impressions of characters voices from the fucking show they're obsessed with. Good work, boys. Back to your bedroom to snack and watch adult cartoons, after that small bottle of beer.....

R&M was alright, what I saw of it. But I dont worship adult cartoons so I'm obviously not the target market. Hated South Park with a vengeance though - I appreciate the effort that goes into it and the current affairs/social commentary shit, but the voices make it impossible for me to sit hrough 30mins.

 

[is normal]

Doc and Marty is great

 

[method115]

I honestly think that it is popular to a large degree because viewers can give themselves a pat on the back because liking it makes them smart.

I watch the show but I don't think that the show is as smart as the writers like to think it is.

Take a really smart movie like Primer or a T.V. show like Bo Jack Horseman and compare it to the writing in Rick and Morty or

lol who thinks that show is smart? I don't see anything smart about it. I love the show but the last thing on my mind is that I'm smarter or that watching this makes me smart.