elbow deep in circumstances

The third season of Rick and Morty began with a convoluted story in which series villain Rick breaks out of prison before breaking up his daughter’s marriage. There’s also a huge battle that includes many Ricks from other dimensions as the story folds back over itself and past seasons, and the whole thing ends with a wonderfully nonsensical speech about how this all happened so Rick can get more of a promotional dipping sauce from McDonald’s.

The joke, which plays with the show’s theme that Rick is empty, alone and despondentdespite having everything he could ever ask for, is that all that work was done for a silly, arbitrary reason. There is no plan, and there is no meaning. It may as well be a dipping sauce.

This flew right over the heads of some of the show’s biggest fans, and McDonald’s stepped right up to take advantage of this fact.

McDonald’s is struggling. It’s an older brand that has become synonymous with low quality and disposable culture. Sales are down, and the new CEO needs to get them back up. So why not turn to the internet?

What started as a silly joke about Rick’s hollow soul became a marketing opportunity, and the best part was that McDonald’s didn’t have to pay Adult Swim anything to cash in. The promotion was never officially tied into Rick and Morty in any way, although McDonald’s did everything it could within the bounds of the law to connect the two brands.

“Look at that art, look at the font,” Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon told Polygon. “Look I’m not being sarcastic when I talk about this. If anyone from McDonald’s is reading this, I don’t see anything wrong with what they’re doing and clearly neither does their legal department.”

But of course the fans revolted. McDonald’s either underestimated demand for the sauce or tried to manufacture scarcity of an old product that was already meant to be promotional — the sauce was originally supposed to tie into the Disney film Mulan — and ugly scenes broke out as fans waited in line for hours only to be told that their location was out of the sauce.

This is a weird situation for everyone, because Adult Swim had nothing to do with the promotion, nor did anyone from the show itself get a heads up about how McDonald’s would try to take advantage of the joke. McDonald’s, for its part, didn’t seem to understand what it was tapping into when it leaned into this gag.

No one was prepared for the enthusiasm of Rick and Morty fans, who are already getting an online reputation for, believe it or not, narcissism and toxicity. And they took that toxicity out on McDonald’s employees, who had little idea of how bad their day was going to get.

Rick and Morty superfans, the ones who are giving the rest of us a bad reputation, like to “joke” about how you have to be smart to understand the show while proving over and over again that they don’t understand the show. Rick wasn’t saying the sauce was important, he was saying that nothing is important. Why not destroy a family over a sauce? Why do or don’t do anything?

The fans responded by giving the subject of that joke an absurd amount of importance in their lives. They felt real anger over not getting their sauce, and they don’t mind taking it out on McDonald’s.

It’s funny because McDonald’s is attempting to reference how Rick talks without paying the creators of Rick anything while making both brands look bad while also highlighting how quickly online fandom can turn into angry mobs in real life. OK, maybe this isn’t funny at all. Maybe the whole situation is sick, and you’re right to feel a little sick when you read about it.

Because the fans don’t understand any level of what’s going on. If they understood Rick, they wouldn’t care about the sauce because no one in the show really cares about the sauce. It was never referenced in the show again. Dan Harmon himself explained to us that the line was put there just to rip on co-creator Justin Roiland’s love for the sauce. If they understood Morty, they would be kinder to the McDonald’s workers who didn’t ask for any of this.

And if they understood the point of the show so far — that living only for yourself is destructive and selfish no matter how smart you are — they would be ashamed at how they’re acting.

But these Rick and Morty fans don’t understand anything about this situation. Not the way commercialism stepped in to cash in on nihilism, nor the irony of how they’ve given something intense meaning and value after being told by a fictional character that it had meaning as a way of illustrating that nothing has meaning.

They’ve turned into Fight Club fans who start their own fight clubs, not understanding that the point of the movie is how easily white male anger is co-opted for violence and mindless support of empty and hateful causes.

Guillermo Del Torro: this lady fucks a fish man

Our country has fascism. This is the creator of rick and morty and community saying he’s not a nazi and you should too. To actually stand up and say no.

The discourse is over. Nazi white nationalist whatever the fuck they want to call it now are terrorists.

Their entire platform is to get rid of minorities. 

They’re fucking Nazis. . It’s the bedrock of humanity. It’s so low that the worst people in the world find it, and that’s where they rally. And it’s so low

We have gotten so bad, that a 1/3 of our country has gotten there! 29% of the people are fucking Nazis! Let’s face it. That’s a minority. We can beat them! We have to say, ‘I’m NOT A NAZI’ though!”

2/3 of the country doesn’t want to be political. It’s not politics to say you’re not a Nazi! It’s like taking a shit. You just do it or you explode! You die if you don’t shit and you die if you don’t say you’re not a Nazi. Fascism is a fucking cancer, it will eat your country unless your country kills it.

Here’s what happens when you get cancer: nothin good. nothing. There is no way out of it. I’m your country’s doctor. You’ve got cancer. You have fascism. You are going to suffer. You are going to fight. You are going to feel pain. You are not getting out of this. We have fascism. It is happening. We’re fucking dead maybe, or maybe they’re dead. That’s about it. There’s not a continuum. It’s not a grey area. It’s not a fad. Fascism doesn’t pop up and then recede when it finds out no one’s into it. It doesn’t respond to love. It doesn’t respond to hate. It doesn’t respond to ignoring it. It doesn’t respond to timeouts. It doesn’t respond to attention. It doesn’t respond to lack of attention.

You stab it. You cut it out. You bombard it with poison or you die. And in any case, you will probably die. Don’t die talking to cancer! Don’t die hanging out with it. Don’t die arguing with it on Twitter. It’s fucking fascism. ENOUGH! Team up. Stop bitching about Bernie Sanders. I don’t care what flavor you want your democracy to be. It’s democracy versus motherfucking fascism! You can be as Bernie as you want! You got to do it later man. You’ve got to do it fucking later. You got to do it later.”