Fine, I’ll do one on Fccin Rick and Morty

Disclaimer: Nothing I’m saying here hasn’t been said before, I just feel it should be written out in full for once. People who do write this kind of piece tend to miss the significance of the fact that these are fictional characters though, so I guess I’m trying to be slightly corrective as well.

Okay, so,

Basically, they aren’t assholes, because TV isn’t like life. They’re offered to the viewer as cool because they’re assholes, but because their actions don’t have consequences, it feels strange to say that they’re actually presented as assholes.

The obvious objection from someone who doesn’t really think about this stuff is “But they still act like assholes even if they don’t have to account for their actions”- well that would be the case in real life, but in a show what we say about what a character is doesn’t really depend on their actions, it depends on the entire intention of the presentation.

Rick and Sherlock are all like “compassion is a lie”, and when someone tries to be nice to them they throw it back in their face as a nicety, because they use impractical entry level nihilism to be “beyond the social dogma”. At the same time, they’re cool because they’re smart, and they’re powerful because they’re smart, Rick and Sherlock’s super cool complicated plans are created by them alone because they’re so smart. So the formula is:

“I’m cool because I’m smart, and I’m so smart that I’m an asshole, so being an asshole must be cool”

The big issue here is that none of these pieces link up because the characters aren’t even nearly fully formed. A fully formed character is an extremely rare thing that can sometimes be created by the very best authors. You know it when you see it. But Rick and Sherlock are just a collection of “moments when they’re assholes” and “moments when they’re smart” etc. In real life you wouldn’t be able to be an asshole and get away with it because you don’t also have smart-superpowers.

But when kids watch these shows they tend to put themselves into the positions of the main characters as a power fantasy, and then that infects their behaviours afterwards, but because the pieces of the character aren’t fully linked up they just end up thinking that a bad role model is a good one, or that nihilism is being smart, or they’re as smart as the show because they understand it, when in reality the cleverness of plot construction is the show’s cleverness, not theirs.

Dan Harmon hasn’t really done enough to show that Rick is a very bad role model, because that was meant to be the point originally, but the show became exaggerated and tumblr-ified to the point where (and this is the same thing in Sherlock and other shows) he became omnipotent- the theme of season 3 seems unwittingly to be Rick’s total power over everything. I can’t blame the show’s creators- your show will be more popular with a superhero in it, to be sure. But they’re still playing to a dumb person’s fantasy of what smart people are like:

1. No one is smart enough to improvise power

2. You can’t get away with being an asshole by having a few moments where you are obviously nice

These two points are again, very close to the main point which is “people forget that it’s a show”.

The ultimate irony of this is that the characters, as western characters, would be totally unsustainable without Christianity: Rick, the Doctor, Sherlock etc. are all Jesus figures who absolve their own sins by dying and coming back to life. Rick sacrifices himself to prison/to the void/to whatever on numerous occasions, as does Sherlock in I think 5 episodes? There’s the fall, the hospital, the getting shot, the waterfall again, then when he’s about to shoot himself, plus others. Even the end of the first episode is pretty close to a self-sacrifice. It’s like no one is actually paying attention anymore. So tell the dumb atheist kids who watch the show that they’re just watching a retelling of Jesus.

I mean, on a basic level you couldn’t get away with these characters without the moments when they reveal affection to Watson/Morty whatever anyway, and those moments come as reliably as their sacrifices do, so pretending that they’re anything else but pretty tame, and not even good depictions of assholes, is failing to understand how these anithero shows are just superhero shows.

I adore Rick and Morty very much, I think it’s the best thing on TV at the moment by an absolute MILE. But it’s clever in whole other ways than being clever because you can live your life by it.

Anyway, like lots of things, this issue isn’t really a big one because it just comes back to kids being dumb. They’ll grow out of it. Four years ago it was Sherlock, four years from now it won’t be Rick and Morty.

