Why does everyone hate fans of the sci-fi cartoon Rick & Morty? It’s a question that spawned two massive threads on the Rick & Morty fansite known as Reddit. A Twitter search for “Rick & Morty fans” shows that yeah, a lot of people do hate them, calling them obnoxious and elitist.
https://twitter.com/ahleeyou/status/913120514239074304
There are two answers:
- Some Rick & Morty fans are annoying.
- Some Rick & Morty fans are abusive.
Neither of these problems is unique to Rick & Morty. And it’s possible, even easy, not to be either type of fan. Here’s what to avoid.
Don’t be annoying
Image via /r/cringepics
To some extent, any fan of anything popular will be a little annoying to a non-fan. If you don’t watch Game of Thrones or Arrested Development, or listen to One Direction or Beyoncé, or read David Foster Wallace or Harry Potter, you get this. But in all these cases, it’s the extreme fans who really ruin things for the rest of us.
https://twitter.com/JumpinJackFlask/status/911383074126090240
If you’re a good fan, you want everyone to enjoy what you enjoy. (If you don’t, well, more on you below.) So here are some tips for behaving in public so you don’t drive everyone else away.
- Don’t act like the object of your fandom is better than Shakespeare. Hell, maybe it is! A Midsummer Night’s Dream is overrated. But you’re setting up an impossible bar for this thing to reach, and when someone finally tries it out, they will be disappointed. That’s why they’re reluctant to hear you out — they know you’re setting this thing up too high, so you’ve destroyed your credibility.
- Don’t wrap your entire life around one piece of culture, until your identity is indistinguishable from it. Think twice before making the characters your avatar and screenname, or comparing absolutely everything to this one piece of culture. Love it, recommend it, point out all the ways it’s excellent, but don’t let it take you over. Because what’s left of you when this thing goes away? What kind of life is one defined by consumption? If you’ve invested too much in your fave, you’ll value it more than other human beings, and you’ll start doing the abusive things in the second half of this post.
- Think critically about which character you compare yourself to. Do other characters view this character as an arsehole? Do you try to emulate even their flaws? Do you think you “love” this character more than its creator? These are all red flags!
- Catchphrases are a sometimes food. You don’t need to scream “Pickle Riiiick!” into the YouTube comments like a football chant; you don’t need to wedge it into every remotely related conversation. It’s like playing your favourite song as your morning alarm; it ruins the magic. Cf. “The cake is a lie,” “I took an arrow to the knee,” and finishing sentences with “…bitch!”
- Don’t yell at people for not liking what you like. Don’t tell them they’re too dumb to like it. That’s the fandom equivalent of “You’re just jealous!”
Don’t be abusive
Image via /r/CringeAnarchy
Much worse than the annoying fans, while often opposed to them, are the elitist fans. They also love their fave too much, but instead of spamming this love out to as many people as possible, they try to hoard it for themselves, insisting that other people, including the people who make it, don’t deserve to join the fandom.
While the conversation above was probably made up (to impress who exactly?), it’s common for fans to “test” other fans, and it’s overwhelmingly a male-on-female attack. Baseball fan Megan Brown once famously told off some dick from a dating app who decided to test whether a woman could really be a fan of a sport OMG.
it’s so insulting when dudes try to quiz me about sports soooo i had a little pun fun ⚾️❤️ pic.twitter.com/s1X0qJagrp
— megan BRAUNY FOREVER brown (@thatgirlondeck) March 29, 2016
It’s no coincidence that this behaviour is largely committed by men, against women. Why would you possibly single out women to “test,” unless you believe that women are inherently less capable of enjoying things? And why would you believe that, unless you believe women are less human?
https://twitter.com/HickeyWriter/status/913414474433998851
Most despicably, in behaviour that recalls the sexist and dumb-as-rocks abuse of Breaking Bad actress Anna Gunn, some Rick & Morty fans have harassed the show’s women writers, threatening them personally, blaming them for “ruining” the show. It got so bad that a Reddit moderator who worked on the show publicly called it out at length.
The moderator was cheered by many decent fans. As with most fandoms, the vast majority of Rick & Morty viewers are decent people, pissed off that some jerkwad is giving them all a bad name.
Dan Harmon, co-creator of the show, lit into the abusive fans too:
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. It f — ing sucks.
He pointed out that not only is this “disgusting,” it’s also stupid: The fans thought that if a woman writer was credited with writing an episode, that somehow she was the only one who worked on it. But, Harmon says, “I want to scream at my computer: ‘You idiots, we all write the show together!’”
Don’t be that guy. Don’t get so full of yourself for liking something that you think you own it. You don’t; the person who made it owns it, and when they see you trying to hoard the enjoyment that is theirs to freely give, they will strike you down with furious vengeance. They will point at you in front of everyone and show how little you actually know the thing you “defended.”
When you cringe at the annoying type of fan, don’t abuse them. Quietly ignore them, or guide them toward the light. Work from an assumption that they truly enjoy the show and simply didn’t realise the depth of conversation they can have. Treat them as your ally. But remember that they probably don’t want to be “educated.” After all, if any of the above describes you, you really hated this little lecture, didn’t you?
Comments
4 responses to “Horrible Rick & Morty Fans Demonstrate How Not To Be A Fan”
I just started watching the show on Netflix a few weeks ago. Quite like it. No one else I know watches it. It’s pretty nice just enjoying it myself in a vacuum for what it is.
Clearly Nick is just too dumb to get Rick & Morty… You dumbass Nick.
I’ve been watching it from the start and I never knew this was an issue, then again I don’t have any social accounts either. Having said that, R&M is friggin brilliant, you just never know what’s gonna happen from one moment to the next. All you haters can go F… well, you know 🙂
Wasn’t the entire blow up over appointing writers to ensure gender balance?
A politically correct decision that no one believed was necessary.
Maybe it was necessary. Maybe they realized the show had evolved beyond just “Rick and Morty” going on random adventures to include the entire Smith family, 2/5 of which are female, and decided that they wanted to write the best tv they could so they hired women to give the female character’s authentic writing.
Let the show do what they want
A politically correct decision that no one believed was necessary.
Except Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland:
Harmon: It was great. It all went really well. We had a gender-balanced writer’s room for Season 3. I’ve always thought with writers’ rooms, the hat trick is not oh, getting women into the writers’ room, it’s having it be gender-balanced. That way, nobody represents any gender because if nobody outnumbers anybody else, then nobody’s an ambassador to anything. If I’m one of three men in a room full of six writers and three of them are women, that means I can pitch stories about, uh, tampons without understanding them and the three women don’t have the job of explaining tampons to me. They can just be like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but…”
We had that for this season and I thought the results were really good because it meant that both the men and the women could increase their attention on Beth and Summer. Previous to that, as quote-unquote decent gentlemen in an all-male writer’s room, if we talked about Summer, we were kind of like… [stutters]. Propriety and craftsmanship made us second-guess ourselves whenever we’d say, “Uh, I don’t know, is that how teenage girls work?” When you have a mixed room, it’s not about the women going, “Here’s a bunch of secrets about women.” It’s more about everyone being freer to just pitch randomness. So the result is you see cool stuff happen with Beth and Summer this season.
src: http://www.thedailybeast.com/rick-and-morty-creators-how-hiring-female-writers-made-season-3-the-best-yet
This decision wasn’t handed down by some Department of Political Correctness on pain of death. It was a creative decision by the creators that they believe makes their show better.
The misconception that this is just some stunt to head of complaints is one of the things Harmon is so pissed off about.
The fact it’s been their best season, pretty much reaffirms they made the right call.
This is all news to me. I just watch Rick & Morty and share it with friends, any faux-socializing that occurs around a TV show seems a little off.
People are accusing others of being elitist because they are watching a cartoon? I know there’s a lot of meaty stuff in R&M, but to be honest, I really only explore that on the second or third viewing, if at all. Can’t we just be grateful that the show exists and the producers and broadcasters have been generous with it?