Dan Harmon, creator of Community and the currently on-air Rick and Morty, knows that you can’t choose who your fans are. Meaning: Some fans suck a lot, and in the case of Rick and Morty, the fans who suck the most are (almost definitely all) dudes who think the third season’s more gender-balanced writers room is hurting their beloved show. After some Rick and Morty fans attacked episodes credited to female writers, and harassed and doxxed those writers in the process, Dan Harmon is speaking out against the toxic aspects of the fandom. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Harmon called out the “testosterone-based subculture patting themselves on the back for trolling these women. I think it’s all disgusting.â€
He also wants the trolls to know he thinks they’re trash, and that he doesn’t need their help policing his art. “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,†he 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. It fucking sucks.â€
At a process level, Harmon points out that those critiquing the writing styles of individual episodes — claiming that certain installments feel feminine or masculine based on the lead writer credited — are operating with “total ignorance of how writing a television show works.†“I want to scream at my computer: ‘You idiots, we all write the show together!’†he said. “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. 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.â€
So, fans who suck, Dan Harmon is going to need you to evolve: “They represent some shit that I probably believed when I was 15.â€