Continued Griping About And Associated I Told You Soing Of To The Stupider Rick And Morty Fans

Look, not all the blog posts can have snappy titles.

I’ve talked before about how a lot of the theories about the ways in which Rick and Morty series creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland are trolling the audience are dumb. Many things are taken to be signals or jabs at the audience that pretty clearly aren’t (I’m not even fully convinced that the Red Grin Grumble gag is a shot at a segment of the show’s audience, even though it actually works as one). Certain fans regularly read troll moves or setups for them where there’s little or no evidence that they’re actually there. It seems like after the April Fools unjoke and a couple of troll promos, certain members of the audience have become convinced that “fucking with fans” is the only trick Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland know, to the extent that they’ll dedicate entire episodes or even season arcs to it. Harmon and Roiland were really fucking straightforward with the premise of Rick and Morty from episode 1. It’s a show about wacky high concept sci-fi adventures.

I’m talking about it again now, because smug self-satisfaction is easy and writing actually useful content is hard. Season 3, Episode 8, Morty’s Mind Blowers, has two different lines where Rick denies color-coding the memory vials being viewed. Despite this, the vials do in fact conform pretty exactly to Morty’s guess as to what the colors represent. Rick Sanchez, the character who’s often presumed to be the mouthpiece of the authors when giving an impatient, condescending lecture to Morty and/or Summer, is lying through his goddamn teeth. In several of the wiped memories he’s also depicted as doing something dumb, not in the “Rick’s crazy and does what he wants and dodges the consequences” way the show normally does, but in the “Rick loses a game of checkers to Morty” way. The idea that Rick’s condescension is supposed to be taken as a lecture to the audience by default is demolished, because his condescending assertions of superiority are revealed to be blatant lies.

I don’t think it’s particularly likely that the creators were specifically trying to sink this “Rick is the Harmon/Roiland’s soapbox” theory, I think it was just a dumb theory built on flimsy evidence that inevitably fell down as more information came in.