A lot of words are used by the fandom to describe Rick and Morty's relationship- codependent, toxic, controlling- but something i rarely see brought up is the parentification of Morty in terms regarding his dynamic with Rick.
One of the examples that this is easy to pick up is near the end of ¨Analyze Piss¨ when Rick feels like he has to tell someone about what really happened to Pissmaster and who he decides to tell about that?: Morty
And look, i think Rick was simply trying to be honest with someone about what was going on, or talk about what he saw and what he did, which is a good step from his part but the problem here is that he didn't look for a friend of his or tell Dr Wong about it. He told Morty.
And as expected Morty reacts like how a teenager acts at his age and goes to tell both Jerry and Beth about it- because of course, he is fourteen, serious topics like this can be too confusing for his own to handle and he is going to look for his parents or some other adult to process what is going on.
We know that Rick is someone who deals with a lot of trauma from seeing his Diane and Beth getting killed by Prime Rick all those decades ago and all the problems he developed trying to chase after Prime from all those years. As result Rick can be a lot to deal with, he is very volatile, dependent,etc. And Morty... well he is usually the one that ends up dealing with all these issues that Rick has, intentionally or unintentionally from Rick's part.
One episode that explores well Morty's parentification is ¨Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender¨ that Rick gets jealous of the Vindicators, gets very drunk and builds an entire saw trap to prove how much ¨the vindicators suck¨.
Through the episode we see Morty being the one that has to solve the puzzles while the adults kept arguing and fighting each other. Morty kinda has to act like the ¨adult¨ in this situation, keeping his focus in what is important and having to partially fix the problem on his own, a problem that Rick indirectly caused.
One of the most iconic scenes in this episode about this is when Morty sees that there is a neutrino bomb and goes to disarm it, hinting that he has done this before, getting Rick's attention from his reaction.
Rick asks Morty how many times he has done this, which leads to this exchange:
Morty has to disarm so many of these bombs in the past that he knows what to do or where Rick puts the cables to disarm it. It has become a habit to him having to clean up the mess that Rick leaves when he gets really drunk.
It makes you wonder what other types of things Rick has caused while being drunk that Morty had to deal with that we haven't seen on screen.
Another example that comes to mind is Morty helping Rick with searching for Prime in episode "Unmortricken". It may look kind of cute on the surface seeing Morty hanging out with Rick and helping him... but the context of what they are searching and for why makes it is rather depressing.
I would like to think that Rick turned down Morty's offer of helping him a few times until he allowed him to assist him. Morty probably just wanted to spend time with Rick so he used this as excuse to do that or probably felt bad about Rick spending all the day in the subbasement and try doing something about it.
This one is more subtle and i don't think it is nearly as bad as other cases through the show. However, there is still this feeling that Morty feels like he has to help Rick dealing with these issues he has a times or has to do this to ¨hang out¨ with Rick because he is too concentrated in searching for Prime to spend enough time with Morty.
The point i want to get across is that Rick often ¨dumps¨ his trauma and personal issues on Morty in different ways depending on the occasion and Morty has to deal with all of it. And he may feel like he has to help Rick working through these issues, and while it is sweet from his part at times, it can be a lot for someone of his age that should be worrying about more simple less complicated things.
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