I've seen people talking as if Evil Morty found peace or happiness outside of the curve, and that's why it made no sense for him to come back and hang out with Rick. I'm a bit confused about this because we've known this wasn't the case since Unmortricken. It would've been good if we had another episode about Evil Morty before S9E1 to show us how he's doing, but that line in Unmortricken still makes it clear that he's not happy. "How's it feel? Better? No? Exactly the same? Yeah, it always does." Evil Morty escaped, but he didn't heal. Everything he's been through still happened and still affects him, and I'm not a professional in mental health or anything, but I doubt that spending the rest of his life in isolation (especially considering that he's 14) will make things much better for him
As a narcissistic abuse survivor I think I can answer this 💛
Once you are free, your structure crumbles into pieces. Your whole concept of love? it wasn’t love, it was abuse. The people that you used to care about? You just want them gone and you despise them now you see their true colours, no more excuses.The hopes and dreams, the future plans you had with them? They were never real . Your view of society as a safe place? Gone as well. aand the list goes on. So it’s completely normal for survivors to feel depressed, numb, completely disconnected from themselves and reality, because your brain needs time to literally create new pathways of familiar things, a new structure where you can feel safe enough to drop your survival mode and your dissociation and just enjoy life, maybe for the first time. In most cases escaping takes decades and when you are finally out, the idea of having spent so much time and effort basically just to live normally, with all the struggles that come with living by yourself in a difficult world, it just feels a bittersweet victory. So “how’s it feel?better?No? Exactly the same? Yeah, it always does.” truly resonates with how you feel at that point.
The brief moment when E.Morty sees the wonders of the infinity and just take a long sigh of relief:that’s the most accurate depiction of what, at best, your positive mood can feel once you are free(is not permanent, it gets better of course)You have short moments where u feel serene, not happy, not alive, just calm, after an eternity of just fighting and planning and surviving. You are exhausted and you just want to rest.
This doesn’t absolutely mean that you miss what you have just left behind. Not if you, as Evil Morty did, have come to the radical acceptance stage. Once you reached the radical acceptance there is no coming back. In time you might feel sorry for your abuser, you might check on them, you might help them out from time to time because you know how miserable they are without the help of a functioning person (yeah that was you, the morty in question), and your anger might turn into compassion, but you always know what you can and cannot expect from that person, you know who they really are, even if they are nice to you for an hour or two, and you know what they have done to you(and what they would do to you if they had the power to do it)
Consider that even the calm, the silence in the house, no one attacking you under your own roof, is something magical and unprecedented for a survivor. To be isolated from the world, completely alone, no friends and family, feels really bad but it will ALWAYS feel better than living near to your abuser.
Even his main theme perfectly represents what you feel as a survivor: you drag yourself out of this pit of misery and you are tired and depressed, but something still pushes you through, until you finally reach a quiet shore, safe (the music is Nocturne Op. 55 No. 1 by chopin, and the general feeling about this song is that of an exhausting, repetitive fight with peaks of grim victory and a reassuring final).
That’s why E.Morty is nearly(I would say totally) an offensive character in s9, because he should be a representation of a survivor and they turned him into another narcissist. And if you are wondering: okay, but doesn’t narcissistic people fight as well to get free from their abusers?Just like Rick c-137 did with Prime? the answer is some do, and if they do, if they do the work, if they accept that the abuse was real, if they see the flaws and go no contact or half no contact, their behaviour will be 100% WAY different than their abuser(example:maybe you grow up as a narc and you will be abusive in some way, but you will never hit your children as your parents did, because you chose not to do it, u feel it in your bones)
It is worth to mention that usually abusive people uses the narcissistic system just to impose themselves over their former abuser, they do not seek freedom, independence, they do not create a new way to live and they do not destroy the toxic system along with all its enablers, they use it and maintain it because they feel like their worth is only linked to the system, not to who they are as individuals. If E.Morty was this kind of character, you would have had a sadistic president Morty who just wanted to dominate over Ricks and run the Citadel as main personal aspiration, with no growth or rebellion and no CFC destruction.
There can be ups and downs in no contact, there is hoovering or even the common mistake of feeling strong enough to lower your boundaries a little bit, but you do not see anything like what was shown in the episode in no contact relapses. that’s simply not how it works, and it feels dumb as hell to see an episode like that. Once you have the radical acceptance and the perseverance to escape, you simply cannot wishing you abuser loved you more or craving for their attention, because you see them for who they are, you feel betrayed, you feel disgusted, you feel depressed for how miserable, petty and lonely they are, you see them. Even revenge stop mattering at this point because you know the biggest revenge you could take on them is indeed leaving them behind. And if you fall for the baiting, your nervous system is now trained to catch you quite quickly and make you disengage: you are adult and independent, why would you stay as soon as the baiting starts?
I hope I answered to all your questions, if you want to know more you can check Doctor Ramani’s work on narcissistic abuse (yt) cheers my dude ✌🏼
Thanks for the in-depth answer, it was really interesting to read!
I see your points and why this episode's portrayal of EM upset you. Personally, I don't think he reached the point of radical acceptance yet, and that's why he did what he did (pretty much what my post is about). It's gotta take more than physically distancing oneself from the person and the situation, right? We obviously can't know what exactly the writers intended here, though I've also read other people's thoughts and analyses on this episode, and the points about EM struggling to get used to the calm and safety after being forced to constantly fight for survival for so long, and him coming back to the chaos but on his own terms this time (having power over Rick) made sense to me. Some people said they related to this as abuse survivors, too "To be isolated from the world, completely alone, no friends and family, feels really bad but it will ALWAYS feel better than living near to your abuser." - I want to comment on this specifically because I realised that in my post it might've sounded like I think that staying with his Rick or in the CFC in general would've been better for EM, which... I don't. Leaving was definitely the better option out of the two, it just doesn't mean that both aren't bad in their own ways I guess it all boils down to the fact that people are different and there isn't a single pattern that everyone follows, so some related to this episode and some didn't. Doesn't mean that anyone's experience and feelings about the episode are invalid I might check out the YT channel you recommended when I have free time, thank you! And I hope this didn't come off as me accusing you of anything for disliking the writers' decisions!
