xius2018-blog

[xius2018-blog]

Rick and Morty: Final Post - We Are All Morties

Rick and Morty is one of the few shows that I feel has such an active fandom that’s also supported by the show’s creators. That being said, I wanted to focus my project for the show a bit on the things that happen in the show, so those who haven’t seen it could be introduced and maybe become more invested; a bit on what makes the show good, so the philosophy and deeper analyses into characters and episodes and philosophy; and a bit on the active fandom that exists outside of the show.

It’s been, by no means, a comprehensive project. I think there are tons to talk about--a deeper character analysis into Rick, talk about theories as to why he is the way he is (Season 3 Episode 1 tried to give him an origin story only to rip that rug out from under us like a couple minutes after it’s revealed to us). But I hope that, by the end of this project, readers of my blog are more able to understand why Rick and Morty has the intense fandom that it does--the type of fandom that’ll mob McDonald’s and wait patiently for a year and half for season 3 to come out.

I want to leave off with this:

I’d like to believe that we are all Morties. Individuals who mean well and who have grown through our various experiences with what life throws at us. We are most easily able to sympathize with Morty, who really isn’t as big of an idiot as some characters on the show will have us think.

And so, I would like for us all to keep chugging along like Morties do, live our lives and grow from our experiences. 

Keep it Schwifty, y’all.

[xius2018-blog]

A Character Analysis on Beth Sanchez

The mother of Morty and daughter of Rick was a character on the show that, until Season 3, I always felt didn’t really have as much depth as some of the other characters on the show.

Well, okay. I take that back: I think there was a depth to Beth that’s always been there and hinted at since the beginning of the show. But the focus was never really on her, so we never got to dive too much into what type of person she was.

And as Season 3 revealed: she’s kind of a terrible mother and has an immense sense of pride. Aka, she’s exactly Rick’s daughter.

I think the episode that best dove into Beth’s character was the Season 3, Episode 9, “The ABC’s of Beth,” which focuses more on the dynamic between Rick and Beth, and gives the two an adventure. This is interesting, as this has never happened before, and gives the audience a look at Beth from an all new perspective.

But before I get into that, I’ll talk a little bit about what we knew about Beth before Season 3, so we can kind of keep track of her growth.

Since Season 1, we’ve always known that Beth has taken after her father in terms of being an intelligent person. She’s a horse heart surgeon, and as “Rixty Minutes” showed, would’ve been a human heart surgeon had she not been tied down to Jerry early on in her life. But something else that’s made abundantly clear is the fact that she’s had abandonment issues all her life, which is the reason she clings onto Jerry, a man who is insignificant, simple, but someone she knows will never leave him. 

But she doesn’t appear satisfied with her life--she’s always arguing with her husband, and always wonders what might’ve been, even though she was shown in “Ricksy Minutes” that it’s not been that good in other realities. 

Season 2 reaffirms what we know about Beth--she’s a capable woman, but easily manipulated and taken advantage of by her father because of her abandonment issues, and will allow Rick get away with the most outlandish shit just because she doesn’t want him to leave again.

But in Season 3, we see that in “Pickle Rick” that she holds Rick in high regard, especially the fact that he is able to take care of all the problems he has solely on his own. And so, she aspires to be like him. However, as the season progresses, we see more and more that Beth is really just like Rick--selfish, proud, and arrogant. Morty calls her out on this during “The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy,” (an episode that features Rick and Jerry in the A-plot (which is also super interesting haha, but I guess we won’t get into that right now)), and she herself realizes this in “The ABCs of Beth.” This growth and realization eventually leads her to understand that she doesn’t need Rick around in her life, and she rekindles her love with Jerry (who, oh yeah, I forgot to mention, they get a divorce in the Season 3 season premiere), effectively moving Rick from being the patriarch of the family to being the lowest ranked member of the group. 

Season 3 dove a lot into character development and world building, and proves to the audience that there is still a TON to cover in the Rick and Morty multiverse. Beth’s character development is only one example.

[xius2018-blog]

On The Origins of Rick and Morty

Now that I’ve written three posts detailing more of the actual plot details to the show (at least for the first season), I’d like to take a look what makes it different from other animated comedies (in my very non-expert opinion), the origins of “Rick and Morty,” and how the idea for the show came to be.

I recently read a Reddit post saying they don’t quite understand why “Rick and Morty” has received the acclaim that it has. “It doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. There were shows that were both funny and talked about life before ‘Rick and Morty.’”

And that’s certainly true, especially in recent years. “Bojack Horseman,” a Netflix animated comedy featuring an anthropomorphic has apparently delved into similar theories. And it happened before that too, with “The Simpsons,” and “Futurama.”

But what I think makes “Rick and Morty” so different is the fact that each episode is so consistently good quality, and there never really being an episode wasted on purely slapstick, crude, or offensive comedy.

Additionally, the world of “Rick and Morty” is incredibly easy to build fan theories from, that fuels discussion outside of the bounds of simply watching the show. And this discussion is fully endorsed and supported by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon.

Which brings me to my next point in how the show was originally conceptualized. Justin Roiland, several years back, created an animated parody of “Back to the Future” called “The Adventures of Doc and Mahrti.” It was with this parody that he created the voices for “Rick and Morty,” and several years later, Adult Swim asked Dan Harmon for a show idea, and recruited his longtime friend Justin into creating this show about a drunk grandpa and his imbecile grandson.

There were difficulties along the way, with an Adult Swim executive initially not liking Morty’s character, thinking he was far too compliant and too much of a pushover in early drafts. And yeah, in early versions of the show, Morty is really annoying, and completely lacks a spine. And it was because of this that you now see the Morty that is often at odds with his grandpa (an example they used to pitch a more assertive Morty made it to the pilot of the show!)

But I think what Justin make Roiland and Dan Harmon most unique is that they were content creators on the Internet before the age of YouTube, and it’s especially endearing to see two regular bozos having fun in their small apartment, making dumb videos, eventually go on to become showrunners of one of the most critically acclaimed shows currently on air.

It’s no wonder that they’re so supportive of creativity from the fanbase, since they used to be like that themselves.

There’s a whole two part documentary that goes into way more detail on the origins of “Rick and Morty” that I’ll link below.

But anyway: I really think it’s the fandom outside of Rick and Morty, and the amount of knowledge and look fans are allowed to see behind the scenes that really make the show special, and the fanbase a fanbase that will mob McDonald’s and dress up as pickles for Halloween. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ076dVvHm8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLQPgnHhOjw&t=6s

[xius2018-blog]

Sparknotes of Rick and Morty Season 1 - PART 3!

The last three episodes of Rick and Morty continue to explore the concepts of alternate dimensions and also begins to bring attention to some more philosophical themes. But before we get into that, let’s just see what happened:

EPISODE 1.9: Something Ricked This Way Comes 

Morty, at the suggestion of his mother, Beth, asks his father Jerry to help him with his science fair project (“your father is insecure about his intelligence”). Jerry suggests they build a model of the solar system, and is dismayed to discover Pluto’s non-planetary status. He insists that Pluto can still be a planet, even calling NASA to express his outrage, which cause Plutonians to come around and pick his son and him up to go to Pluto, where he acts as a promoter for Pluto’s planetary status. 

Rick is again paired up with Summer, who he takes to work at a gift pawn shop. The pawn shop sells magic items with curses on them and is apparently run by Satan. Rick, ever the believer in science, opens a shop across the street that cures all the magic items of their curses, leaving the owners of these items with cool magic tools. 

EPISODE 1.10: Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind 

Another episode delving into the universe of multiple universes. Rick is accused of traversing different dimensions and murdering his alternate-universe counterparts by the Council of Ricks, a governing organization that heads the Citadel of Ricks, an interdimensional stronghold created by various versions of Rick from alternate realities. Rick and Morty must travel various dimensions in search for clues of the real killers in order to clear his name. This episode is another that I think ranks high up as far as the series is concerned, and it’s because it spawned a vast variety of fan theories. Spoiler alert: it introduces Evil Morty, a fan favorite. 

EPISODE 1.11: Ricksy Business 

Rick, Morty, and Summer are left alone at the house while Beth and Jerry spend the weekend away at a re-enactment of the movie “Titanic.” The parents threaten that if anything happens to the children or the house while they’re gone, Morty will not be allowed to go on any more adventures with Rick. 

Despite this, Rick and Summer host a party, where we’re introduced to a variety of wacky characters, including Squanchy, a bipedal cat alien, Bird-person, an alien that looks like a mix between a person and a bird (duh), and Gearhead, a race of people with gears all up in their bods. The house gets inadvertently transported to another dimension, and gets trashed. 

Morty, frustrated by Rick’s hijinks, forces Rick to take the house back and end the party. The house plops back into existence and guests leave just before Beth and Jerry return from their weekend getaway. 

Morty convinces Rick to “do something,” and Rick responds by freezing time, effectively allowing the three as much time as they’d like to clean the house. The episode also reintroduces and consolidates one of Rick’s catchphrases, “Wubba lubba dub dub,” which in Bird-person’s native tongue, means “I am in great pain. Please help me.” 

These three episodes really serve to explore more deeply into the philosophical depths of Rick’s character. In Episode 9, the Devil says “I may be the devil, but your grandpa is the Devil.” I interpret the line to be indicative of Rick’s determination to remove any sort of meaning that could be derived from human experiences. Initially, when Mr. Goldenfold visits the shop and takes cologne that makes him irresistible to women, but leaves him impotent, he is forced to reflect on his sins. But this is not to last, as Rick swoops in with an antidote to the negative effects, and Goldenfold leaves the shop, a harem of women close behind, screaming “I haven’t learned a thing!”

Similarly, this idea of life’s meaninglessness continues to episode 10, where we see multiple versions of the same Rick and Morty spanning across infinite universes. Rick uses this as proof to say that nothing about what we as humans deem to be special is reallly special--the same thing is happening across countless universes, infinity times over. Nothing really matters. 

We are able to gain an inside look into Rick’s psyche in the next episode. He is tortured by this “understanding” that nothing matters in the universe. He is in great pain, cursed by being “the smartest man in the multiverse.” 

Still, I don’t think the showrunners believe in this notion. There are too many examples in the show that run counter to Rick’s beliefs, and too many contradictions in Rick’s behavior that say otherwise. Rick refuses to give up on life, and values the adventures he has with Morty. Why would he go to such lengths like freezing time to clean the house so his adventures can continue otherwise?

Thanks for reading through to the end of this three-part thing! I hope this spurred more interest in the show and leads to you wanting to watch season 2 and season 3, if not also go through and watch season 1 to experience it all in full :)

[xius2018-blog]

Sparknotes of Rick and Morty Season 1 - Part 2!

PART TWO! 

Here we go, continuing from where we left off last time. These next couple of episodes are where we really start to explore goofy concepts with alternate realities and Rick and Morty really establishes itself as a ricksy and explorative animated comedy.

EPISODE 1.5: Meeseeks and Destroy 

Morty is sick of Rick dictating all the adventures the pair go on, finally cracking after a particularly traumatic adventure where he has to kill alien-ghost-shapeshifting monsters that look like his family. He strikes a deal with Rick: he’ll take the reigns on the next adventure, and if it’s successful, he gets to dictate what they do every 10th adventure. 

Before heading off on their next adventure, Rick provides the rest of the family with a Meeseeks box, which summons beings called Mr. Meeseeks whose sole purpose is to complete their requested task and then disappear. Rick warns to keep the tasks simple: “they’re not gods.” Beth and Summer request things that would seem difficult to attain like “being a more complete woman” and “being more popular at school.” Ironically, Jerry ends up having the hardest time with his simple request to take “two swings off his golf game.” This is really just a testament to how much of a pathetic idiot Jerry is.

 EPISODE 1.6: Rick Potion #9 

The episode where shit goes down. It’s flu season, and Morty’s school is hosting a “flu season dance.” Morty wants to ask his crush, Jessica to the dance, and asks Rick for a potion that will cause Jessica to fall in love with him. Rick obliges, creating a formula using vole DNA, due to voles mating for life. 

Unfortunately, the effects of the potion are transferrable (unless they’re directly related to Morty) if the original recipient has the flu, which Jessica has. Pretty soon, the whole world is obsessed with Morty. Rick saves Morty from being mobbed by those at his school and tries to alleviate the problem by creating another potion, whereby he uses mantis DNA (“the opposite of a vole, Morty!”), and spreads it all over the world. 

It temporarily fixes the problem, but then leads to people turning into mantis people that rip each other’s heads off. Rick tries again to fix the problem with a strange cocktail containing things like dinosaur DNA, but this just continues to perpetuate the problem, making the world “Kronenberged.” 

The duo, forcing the world past the point of no return, are forced to leave their home dimension and take the places of a Rick and Morty pair that managed to fix the monster mutation problem, but die soon after. This has lasting repercussions on the show, and Morty, and is one of the defining moments of the show that establishes Rick and Morty as a truly groundbreaking and intense show.

EPISODE 1.7: Raising Gazorpazorp 

At an intergalactic pawn shop, Rick buys Morty a robot sex doll. Morty accidentally impregnates the doll, which is actually a birthing machine, and gives birth to a human-alien hybrid. Rick decides to investigate, with Summer, Morty’s sister tagging along. This is the first episode that focuses on developing Summer’s character. Meanwhile, Morty decides to raise the human-alien hybrid, whose alien roots give him violent tendencies. 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really enjoy this episode. Maybe it’s the whole weird alien sex thing. But yeah, don’t have a lot to say about it.

EPISODE 1.8: Rixty Minutes 

This episode is a clip episode (and therer are repeats of this in the next two seasons as well). Rick provides the family with an upgrade to the family’s cable network to allow access to channels in other dimensions, and he and Morty watch the shows from those universes (a universe where everyone is corn, etc). While scrolling through channels, they see a version of Cloud Atlas where the main character is played by Jerry. This leads to Summer, Beth (the mother), and Jerry asking Rick for a pair of goggles that scan their retinas and allow them to see their lives in other dimensions. This is the second episode in the series that really explores the philosophy behind “what ifs” and alternate realities and brings to attention the fact that Rick and Morty ditched their old dimension and came to this new one.

The middle half the season really forces the duo into adventures that are not your typical sci-fi adventure romp. It does a good job and beginning to develop characters outside of the eponymous duo, and does so without seeming forced. I’d say “Rick Potion #9″ and “Rixty Minutes” are two of the best episodes from all of Rick and Morty, just because of how much they take advantage of the fact there are alternate dimensions in the show.

This concept also calls into question: are we always following the same Rick and Morty pair throughout the show? Episode 6 definitely forces audiences to think about this more. If we think back to the cold open of the very first episode, there might very well be a universe where Morty is unable to disarm the bomb set by Rick, and a quarter of the universes out there have extinct Earths.

It’s solely this feature of Rick and Morty that forced the fandom into creating various wacky, outlandish, but viable fan theories. And the best thing about it is that the creators let them run, a great example of how the creators and fandoms get along and work off of each other.

[xius2018-blog]

Sparknotes of Rick and Morty, Season 1 - PART 1!

I realize that most of the posts on this Tumblr have been somewhat sparse in terms of depth of content, as well as details about the actual plot to Rick and Morty. 

That being said, these next three posts will just be an episode play by play for the first season of Rick and Morty. I originally thought about doing all three seasons, but I think season 1 is already a great representative of what the show is like. Plus, I definitely would rather leave you guys (whoever’s reading this) intrigued and interested in what happens in the show, to pursue the show itself, rather than me just dump everything on. 

Besides, these posts would get HUGE if they were for each season. 

FINALLY as a challenge to myself, I’ll be doing this ALL from memory (with occasional prompting from the episode titles, of course). REALLY QUICK THOUGH: Each Rick and Morty episode title is usually a pun/word fusion that combines “Rick and Morty” with phrases/titles of other pop culture works. You’ll see that as we go. 

OKAY, HERE GOES! 

EPISODE 1.1: Pilot Okay, this one’s the only one without a pun title. The episode starts with drunk Rick pulling Morty out of bed. The show starts without explaining why Rick came back or where he was. All we know is that he just built a flying car/space vehicle with spare parts and “garbage” from the garage and now he’s flying around drunk, about to “hit the reset button” with a neutrino bomb. Some fidgeting occurs, and Morty manages to wrest the controls of the vehicle away from his grandpa and land the ship, and Rick passes out. The scene ends with a concerned Morty wondering what to do now with an increasingly loud and frequently beeping bomb in the trunk. 

That’s the cold open. 

Presumably, Morty is successful in disarming the bomb. He goes to school, but Rick takes him out of class to get mega seeds in an alternate dimension. At this point, we establish that “Rick and Morty” is a show that deals with alternate dimensions, alternate timelines, but never really does anything with time travel. And that’s remained consistent throughout the whole show. (“Rick and Morty” is great at keeping continuity details and canon, as I mentioned two posts back). 

EPISODE 1.2: Lawnmower Dog 

The episode’s title is derived from “Lawnmower Man,” a 1992 sci-fi, horror film that I have not seen. Here’s me being fake pop-culture savvy I guess. The A plot deals with Rick and Morty going to Morty’s math teacher (Mr. Goldenfold)’s house to incept the idea into Goldenfold’s head to give Morty As in math. They continue going deeper, layer by layer into different people’s dreams within dreams until they hit a “Nightmare on Elm Street”-esque scape where a “legally safe knockoff of an 80s horror movie character” hunts them down. 

In the B-plot, Rick, before leaving with Morty to incept good grades, builds a helmet for the family dog at the behest of Jerry (the father, and the resident moron). The helmet gives the dog heightened intelligence, and after the dog puts more batteries into the helmet, “learns of humanity’s subjugation of his species” and is determined to create a dog uprising. 

EPISODE 1.3: Anatomy Park 

It’s Christmas at the Smith family’s house. The title of this episode suggests a parody of Jurassic Park—which it is. This episode is Jurassic Park meets Osmosis Jones, and Morty is shrunk to the size of a bacteria and shoved into a body of a hobo who agreed to have a theme park built inside of him. Morty explores the park alongside Dr. Xenon Bloom, a phagocyte (?) played by John Oliver, and other staff members. Various rare and contagious diseases act as the velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus analogs in this episode. 

The episode ends with Rick being forced to take the hobo into outer space, enlarging it, and blowing it up to get rid of all the diseases-gone-wild and save Morty, leading to a very, very red Christmas. 

It’s because of the blood. The blood and blown up guts are what is making this a red Christmas.

EPISODE 1.4: M. Night Shaym-aliens! 

The episode begins with Rick in the garage and Morty commenting on the beauty of the day. Rick, scoffs and comments on “sloppy workmanship.” Turns out, the pair is in a simulation, having been kidnapped with aliens in the attempt to swindle Rick out of his recipe for concentrated dark matter, a fuel that allows him to travel through space faster than anyone else. The pair, who are constantly being surveilled by the aliens, are forced travel around in the simulation whilst in the nude, as the aliens have a particular discomfort for nudity. As the title of the episode suggests, there’s a wAcKy twist at the end that I won’t spoil. 

That’s all for the first part of this three-part series. I hope this was enough to make appetites for the show increase. Overall, it’s a fun romp through space that takes you to nostalgic places, while simultaneously bringing something new and preposterous to the table.

[xius2018-blog]

Fan Theories & Fandom with Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty is well known for having a REALLY active fandom (see this past weekend at select McDonald’s #SzechuanSauce). Sure, there are the obnoxious f***-bois on Reddit and Facebook claiming that “you really need a high IQ in order to REALLY understand a philosophical show like Rick and Morty” (https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/6sbkl3/you_have_to_have_a_very_high_iq_to_understand/) and saying how they, like Rick, understand the pointlessness of life and have transcended needing to care about life itself (which is super kind of ironic). But overall, Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland have both talked extensively about how they enjoy the fans and the discussions they’ll have on Reddit.

This post will briefly touch on instances that fans had a pretty big impact on the show and the realm of the show.

(1) Season 3 April Fools’ Drop

So, I think it’s fair to say that this Karan Shah dude didn’t actually make Dan Harmon drop the episode (in fact, Harmon has said he just went around looking for a dude on Twitter to have that whole exchange with) but it does go to show that the showrunners really care for their fans and will do a lot to try and satisfy them in a ways that don’t come across as fan-service-y but still are enough. The April Fools’ season 3 premier drop of Rick and Morty is one of the things that propel this show into sort of legendary status, imo.

(2) Szechuan Sauce

As I’d previously mentioned, McDonald’s recently did this limited-time, for-one-day-only thing with Szechuan Sauce, which is this sauce that made it’s R&M debut in the season 3 premier, with Rick obsessing over how delicious it was back in 1998. 

Because of this unsolicited promotion by a super popular TV show, McDonald’s decided to jump on that shit, teasing for months that they might bring it back, even shipping a full bottle of it to Justin Roiland.

When they finally did release it, they did it in probably the shittiest way possible, limited supplies to limited stores across the country, for $12 for a little tublet of the stuff.  There was a ton of fan outrage, a McDonald’s apology, and a New York Times article.

(3) The “Secret”

In an interview, Dan and Justin mention that at the very beginning of the series, they had a discussion about having a “secret” that only the showrunners and writers would know about on the show. They came up with the secret only to have, 4 or 5 episodes into the show, someone totally figure it out on Reddit. https://tv.avclub.com/there-s-one-secret-the-rick-and-morty-guys-will-never-r-1798282209

It’s still not publicly known, but I think after that whole Reddit thing, they’ve since ditched having an official secret and gone on with just making the show.

(4) Callbacks, Payoffs, and Canon

Rick and Morty showrunners have promised that everything that comes up on the show will be revisted in the future. This was definitely seen to be true in “The Ricklantis Mixup,” S03E07, when Evil Morty makes his reappearance.

The showrunners are very dedicated to canon and continuity--ever since the season finale of Season 1, the Smith residence has had a crack running around the house to reflect that time Morty accidentally teleported the house to another dimension.  

Their interview with Inverse (https://www.inverse.com/article/34532-rick-and-morty-season-3-dan-harmon-justin-roiland), I think, really goes to show the extent to which they’ll take the fan’s desires and questions into consideration, with this Dan Harmon excerpt to sum it up pretty well:

“The best way I’ve been able to put it is, if you ask your parents, “Are we going to the zoo tomorrow?”, and if they say, “I don’t know yet,” they’re kind of being bad parents. If you ask a showrunner, “What state was rick born in?”, that’s a good showrunner who says, “I don’t know yet.” You want people to feel that affection for a show, but you don’t actually want all your answers determined at the beginning of some conference, six years before they’re important to the plot. We’re very dedicated to canon, though, and we try as hard as we can not to contradict and keep things sacred.“

I think one of the reasons why Rick and Morty is such a great show, apart from laugh-out-loud moments and philosophical discussions, is the care with which the showrunners put the show together and the enthusiasm the fans have for the show, and the consideration the showrunners have for fans creating these fandoms.

[xius2018-blog]

our class today...

[xius2018-blog]

Yesterday, “Rick and Morty” aired it’s penultimate episode of the season, and oo-whee, it did not disappoint.

This season’s been full of so many amazing pay-offs and continuations of threads that were introduced in earlier seasons. And that’s something that Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland take very seriously.

They’ve both stated that anything they deem/eventually upgrade to the official canon of Rick and Morty can be expected to make a comeback. And we’ve seen that from the very first episode.

So, despite most of the episodes from seasons 1 and 2 being standalone adventures, some episodes in season 3 have revisted characters, universes, and concepts that were initially established, examples including:

Evil Morty

Dimension C-137 “Kronenberg’d Universe”

The Citadel of Ricks

To celebrate the immense attention Rick and Morty pays to continuity details, here’s a video that brings up some of the more subtle and meaningful instances.

[xius2018-blog]

***SPOILER WARNING FOR SEASON 1**

Vulture recently published a list of all the separate dimensions that have appeared in “Rick and Morty” so far.

Rick always talks about there being infinite universes, so mapping out ALL of them would, uhm, be literally impossible.

But shit really doesn’t get REAL (#GetsScwhifty) until the end of “Rick Potion No. 9 [S01E06], when Rick and Morty effectively destroy their world by transforming everyone on the planet (save blood relatives) into Cronenberg-esque monsters and are forced to leave their dimension behind and find another one where the duo lucked out with finding a solution, but died tragically immediately after. And since that episode, fans are constantly wondering which universe a particular episode will take place in, whether or not it’s the one C-137 Rick and Morty escaped into or if they follow a different pair.It’s all uncertain, but that just adds to the immense amount of fun that makes the show great.

CAST OF CHARACTERS: Rick Sanchez - One of the titular characters, and self-proclaimed God. Dude can literally do anything (except, apparently, cure death--although I have a feeling he was just being lazy). Although the Rick we follow tries to put on a façade to give people the impression he cares little for Morty or the rest of his family, in reality, (as revealed in the most recent episode), he cares for and is attached to his grandson to what he considers to be a toxic degree. His catchphrase “Wubba lubba dub dub,” means “Please help, I am in great pain” in the tongue of the “late” Birdperson’s people (yeah, that’s literally his name). So. Obviously, this dude’s got issues.

Morty Smith - Initially kind of a pathetic, a little bit dim, horned-up teenage boy with a telltale stutter, Morty’s character arc has gone from him being somewhat useless to being a much more assertive, capable, individual (as seen in S03E04 and S03E05). There’s a fan-theory online that suggests that he’ll eventually become Rick. Or something like that. Who knows.

Summer Smith - Also, initially a fairly minor character who develops in her own right, Summer is your typical older, social-climby, 17-year-old girl. As the sister to Morty, she’s also had her fair share of adventures with Rick.

Jerry Smith - Morty’s father and Rick’s son-in-law. Got married to Morty’s mother early on after high school after knocking her up at Prom. Mythologued into a worm, Jerry is initially pathetic and a loser... Aaaand he’s not much different now, although his character has seen positive development after he and his wife, Beth, get divorced.

Beth (née Sanchez) Smith - Rick’s daughter and the only person Rick ever calls “Sweetie.” A horse surgeon who wishes she was a “real” surgeon and shares her father’s similar perspective on independence. Because Rick abandoned her as a child, she suffers from huge abandonment issues and will do anything to try and please her father. #GetXiuifty #Storyworld Characters #Storyworld Mapping

[xius2018-blog]

Introducing Rick and Morty

For this semester’s Storyworlds seminar, I’ve chosen the hilarious critically-acclaimed animated series “Rick and Morty,” a show where the titular characters are parodies of a similarly iconic old-man-young-teenager-duo and travel across space and through different dimensions with comedic results. Rick, a scientific super-genius and Morty’s alcoholic grandfather, is constantly whisking his grandson away on terrifying and incredible journeys, many, if not most of which, parody and reference various famous real-world sci-fi, fantasy, psychological, and philosophical works (“Anatomy Park” [S01E03] and “M. Night Sham-Aliens!” [S01E04] are obvious examples. But aside from being a funny and smart half-hour that people can watch on Adult Swim every weekend, it’s also attracted a cult-like fandom, and will touch on philosophical musings and theories such as simulation theory and the consequences of there being NO consequences; it will amake attentive viewers ponder and look at such clichéd questions like the meaning of life in a way that could only be accomplished by the childish, yet incredibly insightful minds of showrunners Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland.  Overall, I’m incredibly excited to dive in deep into this amazing universe that is “Rick and Morty” and explore everything from fan theories and philosophy, to behind the scenes and interviews. #GetXiuifty #Storyworld Origins