Rick and Morty mania: how toxic fans turned a hit cartoon into a hate movement

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).

Rick & Morty – viewership ratings

Show creator Dan Harmon told Entertainment Weekly that “these knobs [...] 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”. 

A former employee of the show who now moderates a large Rick and Morty Reddit community under the name elastical_gomez was compelled to slap down the more malignant elements of the fanbase, reminding them that "plenty of women have been involved with the creation and production since the beginning of the show" in an impassioned post on the website.

“Ideas spread like viruses do,” they told The Telegraph. “If you get someone with a platform saying the quality of Rick and Morty is because of these people, it’s going to spark that idea in other people.” (elastical_gomez asked not The Telegraph not to publish their name for fear of being attacked and doxed by the community they moderate.)

Then, last week, police were called to some branches of McDonalds  as a planned one-day promotion to give away an ultra-rare Szechuan dipping sauce referenced in the television show backfired because of low stocks. Hardcore fans of the programme, who had camped out and schlepped from city to city in order to get hold of the chicken nugget sauce, turned against McDonalds on social media and in person, forcing police to step in. (Those who did manage to snag a portion of the ultra-rare sauce have profited: one woman in Wisconsin reportedly managed to swap a packet for a car.)

Rick & Morty Szechuan Sauce timeline

For observers, these two incidents of an online fanbase turned nasty aren’t surprising, given the audience for the television programme.

“It’s the insularity and self-reinforcing nature of the group, and also one of these things where one of the characteristics of the online world is that you can – in many cases – be anonymous,” explains Grant Blank of the Oxford Internet Institute. “You can say a lot of things that you wouldn’t ordinarily dare say if they were attributable to you. This is one of the characteristics of online communities and encourages things like Gamergate to occur.”

Other academics also see parallels with Gamergate, which sparked into life in 2014 online. The misogynistic movement was ostensibly about ethics in game journalism, but quickly turned into a mob that revealed personal information almost exclusively about women working in the videogame industry.

“There appears to be this exclusionary tendency based around gender – it’s a boy’s club, and girls can’t come into our treehouse, which then overlooks fans who don’t think that way,” says Andrea Braithwaite of the Institute of Technology at the University of Ontario, who has written about Gamergate and geek masculinity.

Many of the more toxic elements of the Rick and Morty fanbase consciously identify as geeks, not least because of shared characteristics with the lead character in the programme. “The protagonist is a cynical narcissistic character who sees himself as superior to others and acts out of self-interest, and it’s possible some audiences think that kind of a representation is an endorsement,” says Braithwaite. “They maybe feel like it’s not being understood properly.”

Fans of Rick and Morty like to refer to the show as being for smart people – which has caused a backlash, with numerous websites listing examples of fans defending its supposedly highbrow humour against those who dare to take pops at the programme. (The show is full of subtle subtext, but by the same token it also has a character called Mr Poopy Butthole.)

"When someone tells me they don't get Rick and Morty and they think it's just a dumb show, that immediately makes me think they lack the brain cells to understand this nihilistic masterpiece," said one fan.

As one Twitter user put it, “after years of pop culture entrenching the notion that smart people are a--holes, people act like a--holes to appear smart”.

“There’s this sense that some fans can better appreciate what it’s doing on a deeper level than others, and this makes them ‘better’ fans,” says Braithwaite. “People think of themselves as gatekeepers.”

This isn’t a unique opinion in so-called fandoms: “Dedicated fans establish a particular perspective on a show as the way to read a show, and other takes on it are 'poorly informed' or 'miss the point',” Braithwaite explains.

But it does help explain quite how a positive, dedicated fanbase can transform into a hate movement. “The show exploded with popularity,” says elastical_gomez. “When I was working on the show we all knew that it was going to be a hit but we didn’t know that it was going to be that popular that quickly.”

That increase in popularity – and the expansion of the fanbase – resulted in a backlash.

“When things become widely known and popular it can feel like something that was once just special to you becomes less special,” says Braithwaite. “We see similar things playing out in all fandoms. When they go mainstream, there’s this sense of loss. If everybody likes it, we’re not special anymore.”

Even the fanbase is divided, with self-celebratory posts on Reddit about the intellectual heft of the show becoming forums for heated debate about the inclusiveness of the community.

“You have the dynamics of a group where there’s a lot of internal discussion and not much external contact,” explains Blank.

“It’s a Frankenstein,” says elastical_gomez. “In addition to the typical Rick and Morty fanbase doing their thing, you’ve got the anti-Rick and Morty fanbase, and that’s gone on so long that you’re getting the anti-anti-Rick and Morty fanbase. It just fractals off forever.”

People on Twitter are forswearing the toxic elements of the fanbase which have alienated some from the show – negative traits which Blank believes have been exacerbated by the internet.

“One of the characteristics of the online world is that you can in many cases be anonymous,” Blank says. “You can say a lot of things that you wouldn’t ordinarily dare say if they were attributable to you. Instead of being an ephemeral comment over beer one night it becomes something that can be seen by tens of thousands of people and becomes a permanent record.”

elastical_gomez and the team of moderators on Rick and Morty’s online discussion boards are still tussling with how to transform their maligned and divided community into a more positive power.

“These fans are just so hungry for more engagement from this thing they love so much,” they say. “I hope we’re able to reroute the enthusiasm into more healthy places.”

But to fix the problems with Rick and Morty’s fanbase, Braithwaite reckons more fundamental reform is needed. “We need to be better at dealing with difference,” she says.

That requires “understanding that people who have different ideas than us, or are different to us, aren’t bad… they’re just different. There is a value in competing points of view about the same sort of thing.”