As Breaking Bad was reaching its operatically violent climax in 2013, New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about a certain strata of the show’s audience she termed the “bad fan”. “All shows have them,” she wrote. “They’re the Sopranos buffs who wanted a show made up of nothing but whackings (and who posted eagerly about how they fast-forwarded past anything else). They’re the Girls watchers who were aesthetically outraged by Hannah having sex with Josh(ua). They’re the ones who get furious whenever anyone tries to harsh Don Draper’s mellow.” In Breaking Bad’s case, the bad fans were cheering on Walter White’s descent into villainy rather than recoiling from it, whooping with glee at Heisenberg’s quest to dominate the meth trade.

The showrunners knew such bad fans existed, said Nussbaum, but it made little commercial or logical sense to call them out. At most they would bury meta digs at them in the programmes themselves, as Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan did during a climactic phone call between White and his wife Skyler, the subject of fan hate throughout the series.

All of which has made Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon’s recent righteous tirade against a “disgusting” subset of the animated sci-fi comedy’s audience all the more remarkable. “I loathe these people. It fucking sucks,” he told Entertainment Weekly. Harmon had good reason to unleash such invective. This wasn’t just a case of fans rooting for the wrong person or cheering a grisly gangland assassination. For Rick and Morty’s third season, Harmon and co-creator Justin Roiland had added several female writers to the show’s previously male-dominated writing staff. That very act stirred up the hornet’s nest of white male trolls that tend to congregate in the internet spaces where fandom is at its most fervent. When said trolls detected what they saw as a drop-off in quality in some episodes (coincidentally the ones credited to female writers) they decided to take it out on the new writers, creating Reddit threads about them, harassing them on Twitter, even subjecting them to doxxing (sharing their personal information online). This was a new weaponised form of bad fandom.

What’s more, it was patently wrongheaded. As Harmon pointed out, the trolls’ ire was evidence of their “total ignorance of how television works”. Television is a collaborative medium and a credit is usually just a reward for one writer doing what Harmon calls “grunt work” – developing the outline of an episode, for example. “I want to scream at my computer: ‘You idiots, we all write the show together!’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘It’s offensive that there’s some white male fan out there trying to further some creepy agenda by “protecting” my work’ … Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon. Photograph: Adult Swim

Moreover Rick and Morty’s third season, which concluded this week in the US, was its strongest outing yet, stretching the show’s Back-to-the-Future-parodying premise – a drunken inventor and his put-upon grandson gallivant across the galaxy in search of adventure and strange alien narcotics – to ever more absurd lengths. One episode, The Ricklantis Mixup, was the strongest to date, a fantastically inventive send-up of cop dramas and Stand By Me-style coming-of-age tales set in the Citadel, an intergalactic meeting point for every alternative reality version of the show’s titular lead characters. In the Citadel, the dysfunctional relationship between Rick and Morty is imprinted on to an entire society, with Ricks reigning supreme while Mortys are treated as second-class citizens, victim to institutional brutality. The Ricklantis Mixup managed to nod to hot-button topics of racial discrimination and political instability but also something smaller and more personal, though in its way just as significant: the breakup of the nuclear family.

Themes around abusive relationships and toxic masculinity have been a recurring presence since Rick and Morty’s very first episode, but this season they’ve gone supernova, infecting every aspect of the show, from Rick turning himself into an actual pickle to avoid family counselling to his daughter Beth’s dangerous idolising of her selfish, neglectful father. It’s these raw personal family dynamics that elevate Rick and Morty (and the equally thoughtful Bojack Horseman) above the rest of the adolescently minded animation pack. Without them, it would just be a gleeful gross-out comedy, full of extreme violence, inside baseball genre riffs and fart jokes. But with them it becomes something deeper.

The problem is that Rick and Morty’s bad fans – like the Walter White worshippers before them – are tuning in for the gnarly stuff, and missing the fact that the show is actually an implicit commentary on them. After all, it’s not exactly a stretch to notice the similarities between Rick – cynical, cruel, endlessly expecting the world to accommodate his every whim – and the many stripes of entitled white males seeking to dominate the internet, from the gamergate mob to the alt right.

Harmon knows whose side he’s on. “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 ... that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by ‘protecting’ my work.”

In many ways this is a larger fight over who gets to control how culture is consumed. In Rick and Morty’s case, there have been some positive steps, with fans on Reddit joining Harmon in calling out this toxic side of the show’s audience. It’s a battle that needs to be won. Otherwise bad fans are in danger of ruining a good show.

Rick and Morty is on Netflix in the UK now, with the final episode of season three airing on Saturday 7 October.