First they came for the women scriptwriters, then they came for the McDonalds servers.

It has been an ignominious few weeks for fans of Rick and Morty, an American animated sitcom about hyper-intelligent mad scientist Rick Sanchez and his grandson Morty Smith, which has been shown on Cartoon Network’s late-night slot Adult Swim since 2013.

Though the show is only viewable to British fans on Netflix, recent viewing figures show it is the most popular television comedy among millennial viewers in the United States, thanks to its wacky storylines that combine Back to the Future with Beavis and Butthead.

That popularity has come with several problems, however, which have caused even the show's creators to disavow some parts of the fanbase for their behaviour, which has been negatively equated with modern movements such as Gamergate and the alt-right.

First, a subsection of Rick and Morty’s fans – predominately young Americans – suggested that a perceived decline in quality in the third and latest series correlated with the arrival of a range of new, female writers on the show, which previously had been written by men alone.

Users of the social news site Reddit claimed that the series had been “forced” to hire “female SJW writers”, using a term, SJW (or social justice warrior), that has previously been used by alt-right troll movements such as Gamergate, which singled out women in the video game industry for harassment. The women writers were then threatened, harassed and “doxed” (their personal details shared online without their permission).