Look, we’ve tried really hard to take the side of the show here. Taken on its own, Rick And Morty is about as well-written as any comedy or sci-fi show on TV, absolutely deserving its status as the top-rated comedy on the air. But of course, we cannot view it in a vacuum. We have to view it alongside Rick And Morty fans, who are getting really fucking hard to deal with.
We reported over the weekend about the light-hearted McDonald’s Szechuan sauce promotion, which had become a meme and rallying point within the community over this season, and how it went totally batshit as limited supplies led to really long lines of angry, terrible fans. Many of those fans are looking in the mirror today and realizing that they are the monsters of the internet, with the above video currently being passed around on r/RickAndMorty as exhibit A. You will not believe this, but the “Pickle Rick” screaming Szechuan fan in it is actually a YouTube personality, who, in the comments below the video, implores viewers to “please subscribe for more cancerous content,” adding, “Also do you guys really think this is legit? Just enjoy the goof.”
This appears to be the resting state of the awful Rick And Morty fan at this point—at once terribly misunderstanding the appeal of the show they claim to love, and wondering why other people don’t “enjoy the goof” in the same way they do. The great Szechuan Sauce Debacle of 2017 has proven to be the final dividing line in this community, with posts like this:
And this:
And this:
Turning into swamps of angry rhetoric and Pickle Rick references. While these divisions have existed for awhile among the fandom, seeing it all spill out into the real world somehow mobilized both sides to both do more embarrassing shit and castigate other fans for doing that embarrassing shit. At this point, the cringe-worthiness of Rick And Morty fans is a bigger meme than anything inspired by the actual show, with people trading screenshots of made-up arguments and plangent musings about the show’s genius for little more than mere schadenfreude. The battle lines are drawn between “high IQ” superfans and meme-loving superfans, both of whom are terrible in their own way, with all of the other people who watched and enjoyed the show just sort of quietly backing away. This will definitely all end well.