‘Rick & Morty’ Co-Creator Slams Trolls For Harassing Women Writers

The return of Rick and Morty brought more hilarious, mind-bending adventures of the multiverse’s smartest man and his not-so-intelligent grandson, and many fans have responded positively.

But some are actually angry at the new season and have begun harassing members of the writing staff, specifically the women. Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon strongly denounced their actions in an interview with EW, calling the harassment “disgusting.”

“I’m on a Twitter sabbatical, so the last thing I saw about that was [the Reddit thread detailing the harassment], and I’ve seen the tweets they’ve sent to the female writer,” said Harmon. “I was familiar going into the third season, having talked to Felicia Day, that any high-profile women get doxxed, they get harassed, they get threatened, they get slandered.

“And part of it is a testosterone-based subculture patting themselves on the back for trolling these women. Because to the extent that you get can get a girl to shriek about a frog you’ve proven girls are girly and there’s no crime in assaulting her with a frog because it’s all in the name of proving something. I think it’s all disgusting.”

Get Your Head On Straight

Writers Jane Beeker and Jessica Gao were respectively credited with writing the second and third episodes of the season, called “Rickmancing the Stone” and “Pickle Rick.” Shortly after the episodes aired, someone posted the writers personal information. They’ve since been receiving hate mail.

“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,” Harmon said. “It’s offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by ‘protecting’ my work. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people.”

Harmon added that he understands that a show as popular as Rick and Morty is going to attract people from all walks of life, but he does not support those who would target women over a misguided sense of ownership.

“It f—ing sucks. And the only thing I can say is if you’re lucky enough to make a show that is really good that people like, that means some bad people are going to like it too,” Harmon said. “You can’t just insist that everybody who watches your show get their head on straight…

“And I’m speaking for myself — I don’t want the show to have a political stance. But at the same time, individually, these [harassers] aren’t politicians and don’t represent politics. They represent some shit that I probably believed when I was 15.”

How A Writers Room Works

Regarding the response to those episodes and the writers who were credited for them, Harmon revealed how all writers contribute to an episode of Rick and Morty and whose name gets attached to a particular one is determined by a few factors.

“It’s total ignorance of how writing a television show works,” Harmon said. “It’s frustrating enough having run Community for several years to see threads like, ‘Oh well, it makes sense this episode was written by Andy Bobrow because when Hilary Winston wrote her episode she tends to linger more on dialogue and Andy is better at the I-want-to-hold-you moments.’ And I want to scream at my computer: ‘You idiots, we all write the show together!’”

Harmon takes pride in the fact that the series is meant to be seamless, and those who think they can determine who is responsible for what undermine the entire production’s work.

“If you can tell the difference between one writer and another on a show I’m running I’ve probably gotten so lazy that it hasn’t all been blended and refined in the usual process,” Harmon said. “The reason one person’s name goes on an episode is that someone has to and everyone deserves one of those times at bat where they have to do all the grunt work — they have to do all the outlining, sometimes, if they’re willing to, they can expand into the post-production process.

“There’s a bunch of reasons why we don’t accurately reflect how many writers contribute to each episode in the credits.”

Regardless of how much one may or may not enjoy the show, once it goes to vitriol being spewed using a creator’s personal information it’s definitely time to get a new hobby.

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