Suck it, Rick and Morty fans

>eruditorumpress.com/blog/pop-between-realities-home-in-time-for-tea-rick-and-morty/
Suck it, Rick and Morty fans.

Attached: rickandmorty.jpg (1145x644, 68K)

Attached: nigga.jpg (550x301, 53K)

>skim article
>blah blah white men blah blah blah
dropped

Being obnoxious about an article won't get people to read said article.

Attached: 1553826857423.png (934x720, 372K)

>You can't condemn something and also mine it for comedy.
The great dictator would like a word.

at least put a snippet of the article in the OP you absolute cock

>On October 7th, 2017, just over two months after The Doctor Falls, police were called to several McDonald’s locations following a disastrous promotion in which the fast food restaurant brought back an obscure McNuggets dipping sauce, “Szechuan sauce,” that had briefly been released nearly twenty years earlier to tie-in with the release of Disney’s Mulan. The limited amount of sauce released to select McDonald’s was wildly insufficient for the crowds that arrived, which consisted of hundreds of people lining up for hours only to discover that restaurants had as few as twenty sauce packets. The result was bedlam—young men (the crowds were almost exclusively male) hurling obscenities and venting their frustration on minimum wage workers. On Twitter, people seriously suggested class action lawsuits and claimed that any workers who had a bad day deserved it because of the company’s bad actions.

The key bit of context needed to understand this madness is why McDonald’s was bringing back an ancient dipping sauce that Eater described as having “the color and consistency of strawberry jelly” and tasting “mainly like corn syrup with maybe a tiny bit of Worcestershire thrown in.” The answer is that several months earlier, when the third season premiere of Rick and Morty dropped unannounced on April 1st (so two weeks before The Pilot), the episode had culminated in a monologue in which Rick Sanchez, one of the two title characters, declares that his only real motivation in life is to eat that sauce again

>Well. Sort of. The more accurate description of what happens is that Rick stands above his grandson (Morty, the other eponymous character) as he cowers, whimpers, and sobs, angrily telling him that he deliberately broke up his parents’ marriage out of spite and to become “the de facto patriarch of your family and your universe” before threatening him if he ever tells anyone about this conversation and revealing his end goal of Szechuan sauce. It’s a genuinely distressing scene, in ways that are difficult to quite get a handle on. The distress is clearly intentional—the scene makes an active point of focusing on Morty’s fear and anguish, and on making the horror of what Rick is saying clear. But it’s also clear that the scene is meant to be funny, complete with Rick making a fourth-wall breaking claim that he’ll get the sauce “if it takes nine seasons.”

>This tension is not so much common for the show as the nominal point. If you assert that Rick and Morty is a bad television show on Twitter, you will quickly be assured by somebody that the show is in fact a critique of Rick’s nihilism. This is an interesting claim. Certainly the claim that Rick and Morty is a highly intelligent show that is routinely misunderstood is common enough that a chunk of copypasta beginning “to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty” became a meme. And as the Szechuan sauce scene demonstrates, the show is open about the fact that Rick is a terrible person. That’s established in the first episode’s cold open, in which he drunkenly drags Morty out of his bed and begins to ramble incoherently about his plan to destroy all life on earth for him.

But before we go much further, it’s probably worth actually relating this to the topic of the blog. The reason that this show—which I should stress is the single least pleasant thing I have ever watched for this blog, and I include Heil Honey I’m Home! in that assessment—is of interest is that it is, among other things, a parody of Doctor Who. Rick’s character design is a riff on Doc Brown in Back to the Future, but the result clearly evokes Peter Capaldi’s Doctor as well. And the basic concept—that Rick has invented a portal gun that allows him to travel between dimensions and drags Morty along on adventures to them—is clearly a variation on the familiar Doctor Who infinitude of possible stories. (And, of course, series co-creator Dan Harmon has form on this point, having previously included a more direct Doctor Who parody in Community in the form of Inspector Spacetime.)

>So what we have is a show that is openly serving as a dark and corrupted parody of Doctor Who in which the Doctor figure is subjected to at least some sort of sustained critique. So it’s worth looking at the substance of that critique. As noted, the usual phrasing is that Rick and Morty is a critique of Rick’s nihilism. But nihilism is a curiously specific charge, and not one that really applies to Doctor Who, where the main character, whatever he might be, is clearly not a nihilist. But frankly, it’s a weird critique for Rick and Morty too. Certainly Rick expresses a routinely bleak and cynical worldview that frequently features things like rejecting love as “a bunch of chemicals” (now that’s a familiar line…) but to suggest that the prevailing problem with Rick is that he’s cynical or a nihilist is strange. The problem is that he’s horrifyingly abusive. Episode after episode entails him being a callous, violent abuser to Morty and, indeed, to the rest of his family. This isn’t a show about the corrosive effects of nihilism—it’s a show about wanton cruelty.

>article starts with
>BUT THE FANDOM
and that's how i know it's not even worth reading, when it sounds like the whining of a bitchy little keyboard warrior pointing fingers and screaming, this you!

>This is not a small distinction. Nihilism is a philosophical position whose consequences can be traced out. There are critiques to be made of it, but there are also cases to be made in its favor. Brilliant nihilist art exists. Nihilism has been taken seriously and incorporated into interesting and insightful works. Maybe, when everything is taken into account, nihilism is still worth condemning, but there’s a discussion to be had on the matter.

>Abuse is not like that. Abuse is simply a ragged, scarring wrongness. I mean, sure, there are people who actually and in all seriousness defend corporal punishment or make arguments that children can consent to sex, but these viewpoints are widely recognized as monstrous, and anyway only amount to trying to redefine the boundaries of abuse. More to the point, Rick and Morty makes no real effort to suggest that Rick is not an abusive monster to Morty and the rest of his family. This isn’t subtext. The show very much cares that we look at the abuse being perpetrated and recognize it as such. This is not hard. When I say that this si the worst thing I have ever watched for the blog, I mean that it is viscerally upsetting. There are multiple, prolonged scenes of child abuse. The dynamic in which Rick furiously berates a Morty while he cowers and stammers feeble, useless protests is utterly commonplace. And that’s on top of things like the frequency with which, for instance, adult sexualization of minors is casually dropped in—the first two episodes I watched (the pilot and “Rick Potion #9”) both had jokes about school officials being sexually attracted to Morty.
.

>All of this rather undermines any claim that Rick and Morty is engaged in critique. Abuse isn’t really something you can critique in the first place. You can show the political and social systems that help perpetuate it, you can demonstrate the psychology of it, and you can document the trauma and anguish that it leaves in its wake, but there’s not really anything to critique about furiously berating a crying child about how you broke up his parents’ marriage to gain power over him. It’s kinda like locking children in concentration camps that way. And when you couple the abuse with laugh lines about quixotic obsessions with late 90s McDonald’s promotions, frankly, you’re falling so profoundly far below the minimum standards of basic human decency that you should probably just stop talking, preferably forever.

>No, Rick and Morty isnt a critique of nihilism or anything else. It’s a sniggering bit of juvenile edgelording. And the fact that it’s so convinced that it’s doing something substantive like critiquing Rick when it blatantly thinks its drunken abuser of a main character is fucking hilarious is a damning indictment of the pathetic pretensions that surround the setup. Which, let’s be perfectly honest, basically amounts to the pathetic pretensions that animate the basic idea that troubled white men who lash out are actually an interesting subject. (There is some debate to be had over whether Rick is intended to be white, but given that Justin Roiland, when asked about this on a panel, actively declined to confirm it, saying that he doesn't see race and doesn't care about Rick's heritage, leading Dan Harmon to crack "way to see race, bigot" at the person who asked the question, well, fuck them both.)

In 2017, as Brexit careens onwards to its inevitable conclusion of calamitous farce, as Trump marches the United States towards the single stupidest fascism in history, and as rampant and unchecked capitalism pushes the planet ever further along the line to a mass extinction that may well take us out with it, with all of this, whoever else might be involved, fundamentally the antics of white men with delusions of grandeur and importance. All of this would be true regardless of a shitty cartoon whose fans abuse minimum wage workers when they can’t have their Szechuan sauce, and all of it would make the idea that we need stories about something—anything—else.

But Rick and Morty is a demonstration of how the anxieties and turmoils of white men aren’t merely creatively overrepresented, but something whose centering threatens to become deeply and inherently toxic. My point in saying this is maniestly not that there is nothing interesting about tortured white men; the Capaldi era alone shows how that’s simply not true. But Rick and Morty shows that in 2017, it was at last clearly played out. Moffat was as good a last creatie hurrah as white dudes could possibly have wished for, clever and full of ways for white heterosexual masculinity to do better. But the claim that we need diverse stories is not merely an observation that the diversity of real world audiences demands a diversity of content, nor is it simply a description of the ways in which diversity in both creative teams and content can invigorat tired genres. It is a brutally accurate response to the fact that egotistical white men who think their angst is deep, left unchecked, turn out things like Rick and Morty.

You are such a dickwad
A sumary you dumb fuck

>A sumary you dumb fuck
real morph hours

I've always seen Rick and Morty as the ultimate example of a text where the show that the creators think they're making is completely different to the show that the audience thinks they're watching. In interviews, the creatives all seem to think that Morty is the main character of the show. The entire programme exists in an inherently cruel universe and Rick is presented largely as an extension of it - as someone who's been torn down by the universe around him and allowed himself to become just as bad as it is. As such, according to the show's makers, Rick and Morty is primarily about how Morty and his family try to survive living in a hellscape world that seems to be actively sadistic towards them (something which I think has a lot of applicability to the modern sadistic hellscape that has become 21st Century Western Society) and thus is largely sympathetic towards them.

A large section of the audience seems to have watched the show and decided that Rick's the main character though, taking the fact that Rick's succumbed to the world around him to mean that he's now the smartest person in the world and the only person who knows how the world around him really works, relating to him like on these grounds. In these regards, he's basically our generation's Alf Garnett: a character created as a broad parody of a certain archetype who the creatives then went to town with under the assumption that no-one would ever actually agree with him.

And that, for all I love Peter Capaldis acting and many of the stories he had as the doctor, is why I can't really get behind the Capaldi era.
The whole narrative arc seems to be a grumpy white man learning to become less grumpy, and that supposed to make for dramatic angsty television.
Am I a good man, asks the doctor, well know when you randomly berate a PE teacher, act in a condescending way towards people who have just lost loved ones and Mock young people because of their relative inexperience even though they've accomplished a great deal, you're not a good man you're just a grumpy old git and the world and I dare say the universe, has plenty of those already.

>hat animate the basic idea that troubled white men who lash out are actually an interesting subject
And here is the actual crux of why they are writing this: the character is bad not because he's an asshole, but because he's a white asshole.

The Szechuan sauce thing is striking in that R&M's creators 1. apparently didn't contact McDonald's before the episode aired and 2. presumably anticipated that it would cause chaos, including irate fanboys yelling at minimum wage workers and so on. That was, one gathers, part of the joke, which is typical of R&M's humour.

If anything, you could level the charge of nihilism at R&M itself, but that would be too kind - the show revels in subjecting its characters to trauma and misery, it's not simply apathetic to this, it's part of a concerted project to make the show aggressively unpleasant viewing. It's a 'joke', in the same way that the use of racist stereotyping in Family Guy is a 'joke' (no coincidence, the shows are part of the same overall trend in American cartoons in this respect, see also South Park).

>Moffat was as good a last creatie hurrah as white dudes could possibly have wished for, clever and full of ways for white heterosexual masculinity to do better
Do better at what?

...seriously?

oh its a comin

Attached: 04c26e703d05f68f3276b5684addf93b3b4da30760e9159132de5641fb0935c6.jpg (800x1289, 498K)

So you're admitting it's just toothless shaming.

I wouldn't actually hold up that essay as a presentable critique of the show to people who defend it, at the end of the day its premise is "WTF these scenes of Rick berating Morty aren't funny because they're abusive" and nobody who actually laughs at such material will find that comprehensible.

At the end the critique is "white men can't have negative traits or have any spotlight in media."

huh?

Might wanna get your reading comprehension checked you little incel freak.

Do you have a different interpretation of this line?
>It is a brutally accurate response to the fact that egotistical white men who think their angst is deep, left unchecked, turn out things like Rick and Morty.
Every argument they make falls back on the race of the characters and the writers.
Also
>accusing someone of being an incel
>while actively posting on /co

It's sort of the general premise all satire operates under.

oh no no no, the sheer cope of it all!

To be fair, Rick and Morty really isn't satire, it's pastiche done cynically. The premises aren't themselves engaged in or mocked, they're just used mean-spiritedly.

>this is what women think argument is in 2019

PICKLE MORPHERS IN THE HOUSE!

Attached: pickle morph.png (581x569, 427K)

The article is lefty moralfaggotry. Questioning everything is a good thing, exploring ideas also, which the show does. People subverting and destroying the western world and more precisely everything which is good for white men, don't get to complain when their own ideology or values are challenged. Well they are free to do so, but it makes me enjoying it even more.

Attached: city-of-venus-dead-city-04.jpg (695x433, 111K)

>I can't handle edgy humor and I've had enough of white male stories
that's the whole article, so why is it 2000 words?

I plead guilty.I mean the show is called RICK and Morty,not Morty and Rick