#jack is still so goddamn fucking annoying with this production i am not on his side but

[nicollekidman]

so far this is midnights if midnights didn't suck..... what's going on...........................

[bitch-i-migth-be]

Crash Course | Chapter 03: Ready?

Fandoms: Danny Phantom, Batman,  

Relationships: Danny Fenton & Jazz Fenton,

Characters: Danny Fenton, Jazz Fenton, 

Words: 2′246

Tags: BAMF Danny, BAMF Jazz, Sibling bonding, Shenanigans, Swearing

Summary: He swore his sister was trying to make him go into cardiac arrest - considering his halfa status that was quite the accomplishment-

But there was no other explanation to his sister’s stubbornness, and if he knew her at all there was just no talking her down from interning at goddam Arkham.

A/N: I appreciate the comments, guys. :33  Let me know what u think.

CHAPTERS: 1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7

Danny might not be the smartest person out there but he sure was crafty as fuck.

He had needed to be even before the ghost entered the picture. Then, after the portal was up and running the habit of thinking on his feet and the fine art of rolling with the punches had been added to his skill set.

So, Danny knew from experience that no matter how good you could get at improvisation, it was always better to prepare beforehand if you had the opportunity. Because if you let something to chance, it would probably come back later to fuck you over. Or some annoying ghost would get in the way out of goddamn nowhere. He could deal with them, but it was just a waste of everyone’s time. Better get going before someone interrupted him.

Normally one small thing or another would backfire anyway because of his salted luck, but he preferred not to poke sleeping dragons when he could.  

Taking into account all of that, he had decided the first order of business in the Fenton Crash Curse for Suicide Missions: Start packing all the shit they would need to take with them.

Because It’s never too early to pack for the road to hell.

Especially if you are already in a hell all of your own.

-.-.-.-

“What do you mean you are coming with me?” Jazz murmured from the threshold of Danny’s room, eyes wide open, as she watched her little brother try to pack all types of random things into suitcases.

Since she had announced at the Fenton Family Dinner her plans of going to Gotham University and accepting an internship at Arkham, Danny had been behaving like he was possessed, which considering the portal in their basement was not that far fetched; he had started carrying around a book-like-journal and would not stop murmuring about survival-of-the-fittest. Jazz was not going to lie, she appreciated the concern but that part was a little bit concerning. Not the survival in general, they had been playing that game since forever in this house, but they had never really needed to write anything down.

Until now, apparently.

It was kind of weird witnessing all this. Weird as in she wasn’t used to him fusing so much over her. A normal amount, yes. But most of the time it was the other way around, she was the big sister after all. Also,  with the ghosts around and him going all hero on their behinds her brother was in dire need of all the support she could dispatch. So, yes, she wasn’t expecting this reaction at all, and she was even less prepared for her brother declaring his intentions of joining her in Gotham.

She hadn’t asked how he was planning on dealing with the ghost problem yet, but considering he was already packing when she, they now, weren’t leaving until the end of the summer Jazz thought her brother must have had something in mind already.

She didn’t even know how they could need some of the things he was putting in there but it appeared like Danny was on a roll and she wasn’t going to be the one stopping such, umh, productivity.

“I said what I said”

Jazz frowned lightly.

“Are mom and dad aware-?”

“I told them I was going to be your assistant with the research; mostly the field part because I don’t think they trust me with the equipment after what happened the last time,” Danny answered while still hunting down for more essential items to put in bags, those things were handy as fuck. “also, get a job or something”

“A job?” jazz raised an eyebrow and leaned against the doorframe.

“It’s on the list,” Danny waved his journal/diary/thing in the air. Huh, so they were survival tips. “considering you are the only one with a scholarship and I´m not going to school anyway it seemed appropriate.”

“excuse me? you are not going to what?”

“May as well-” Seeing his sister’s expression he quickly backtracked, “but I mean, if you are really that opposed there is always online classes”

Danny tried to smile in her sister’s direction, but his nervousness made it come out more like a grimace. He kept trying. Jazz kept staring at him. Danny kept grimacing back.

Then she smiled back. A proper, full toothed smile. Oh fuuck

“I think I can do you one better” And with that, she turned on her heel and left.

Danny blinked two times. one after the other.  

“D-Do me one bet-? Jazz, wait!”

But it was already too late, his sister had another ball to start rolling.

-.-.-.-

Her brother was not stupid.

If her brother choice to appease her by taking online classes had been born merely of a strategic need, and hence the best course of action to take, Jazz wouldn’t have rebuked at all, there were, after all, some pretty good online options that her brother could take. But alas, that was not the real motive of his decision.  

It pained her and enraged her to see people belittle her little brother without even knowing him. See them think they had any right to decide whether he was worth something.

And it nagged at her than even knowing the basics of what was wrong with her brother’s low grades, she couldn’t help him more than she currently did. Not really. Unless she wanted him to end up in the hands of the G.I.W.

Fat chance of that.

But if there was a thing a Fenton was not it was a settler. And like hell she was going to let these people bring her brother down.

The first order of business would be to scout out the G.S.U. properly, some phone calls could prove useful, after all those who search shall find. 

-.-.-.-

When Jazz had retreated to her quarters earlier Dany had been left on his own with an uneasy feeling nagging at his gut. It felt a bit like foreboding.  

Like most things in life that inconvenienced him when it came to family issues he decided to ignore it until it came back to bite him, so he continued with his preparations and eventually took a seat among all the clutter that had become his room. After that, he didn’t have to wait long.

His sister had come back strolling decisively into the room, only pausing briefly to warily give the evil eye to the sheer number of things spread all over the room that appeared to have multiplied since she left the place.

She stopped right in front of her brother’s seated form and trusted her phone into the smallest Fenton’s unsuspecting hands.

“Look! There is still time to apply to a full-ride scholarship at Gotham Academy” Danny blinked up at her without a word, and at his sister’s insistence looked down at the phone to start reading, then he did a double-take and started re-reading.

Jazz had got to be kidding him.

“You want me to apply to some posh elite school?” He looked up incredulously at the redhead “Elite, Jazz? Me? With my grades and the amount of time I would get to study for an entrance exam I would be failing this just by applying.” grumbled the boy.

“That’s the best part.” Said the girl smiling like the Cheshire cat. “This particular exam is practical in engineering”

Danny froze. His eyes shot back to the phone.

“Practical you say?”

“Yes, lately there have been more scholarships granted for demonstrating a great gasp in the practical portions. Gotham is a little, umh, hard to handle, I suppose, and there have been situations in which people with the knowledge to accomplish great things have been turned down because of a lack of proper school background or support. So they decided to start implementing this.” She explained while her little brother continued scanning the document up and down.

Eventually, Danny shook himself back together.

“Ok, look, let’s say I had a shot at this.”

“Which you do-”

“Which I might.” The younger interrupted her, “This still requires to prepare at least three proposals for the faculty’s designated table of judges to evaluate and grade to get the green card, and this is like two weeks -two weeks!- from now, it doesn’t even specify what they are gonna have the applicants doing for the final test. How the fuck am I-?!”

The redhead decided to cut in before he could drive himself into a frenzy.

“Well if you are that sure about joining me then you won’t have a problem acing this, will you?” she smirked, then it softened into something more fond. “I know you can do this Danny, and so do you. And if you are that worried about the time, I can help you, we can start tag teaming together for ways to deal with the ghost from the get-go. It may not be permanent, but it will have to do.”

Her brother started biting his own lower lip and still looked somewhat unsure, so she decided to use the final big gun.

“Did I mention that Gotham Academy is right across the road from Arkham?”

Danny’s shoulder slumped.

“Ughh, fine!”

Jazz beamed down at him.

“I will leave you to it then!”

-.-.-.-

“Also, those things are not going to fit anywhere if you don’t organize them”

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

-.-.-.-

So. Jazz did have a good reason to believe her brother could get the G.A. scholarship.

The Fenton thermos technology was not only useful for capturing ghosts but could also store other things. That’s to say, more tangible things.

And her brother was the one who made it happen.

Danny has been tinkering with his parent’s things a lot more than some people would be comfortable with. The truth is, some of the things Jack and Maddie have invented could be fucking useful for everyday life if you took out most of the ghost shit or rearranged them a bit, it could have gained them a pretty penny, but like we all know the Fentons are not interested in anything if it’s not ectoplasmic.

Danny, on the other hand?

As much as he ends up believing all the bullshit others say about his sister being the only genius child of the family, he had never been afraid of dismantling and mounting up again some of his parents’ equipment. For him, it was not a question of whether or not he was qualified to do so, after growing up watching his parents tinker random machines all over the house he had inevitably started to pick up their ways almost as if via osmosis.

His parents, of course, had never fully noticed the fluffy-sweater clad toddler waddling after them from time to time watching them work, at first this happened when Jazz was otherwise occupied in extracurricular activities and couldn’t keep the boy successfully distracted somewhere else.

If at the time, Jazz had realized what was going on, she may have panicked and stopped her sweetly feral summer child of a brother from getting anywhere near their parents in the middle of a craze. As it was, she had not noticed in those first years, and by the time it had come to her attention even she had to concede that if her little brother had managed his recon missions without no one the wiser - Her brother was sneaky like that -, then he deserved the benefit of the doubt.

And, had that not been enough to convince the big sister, that had been the moment the sudden realization than her brother, unlike her, was more of a hands-on learner hit her full force, which would have been enough to make her relent. Learning was always good in her books.

Later, Danny would find most of the classes being imparted in Casper high boring as fuck. Not necessarily for the subject, but the way they were imparted. The youngest Fenton needed a good explanation along with a hands-on approach applied to something he found interesting to fully commit to something. At school, the most he could get were the theory and the occasional practical classes.

If the classes had been related to something interesting, say, rockets, stars, maybe NASA, it would have been easy to pay his full, unconditional attention to the teachers. But not one of the teachers had bothered to try and link the lessons to the interest of the alumni, not surprising, considering public school stuck to basics and had a timeline to complete and the classroom never seemed to learn things at the same rhythm so concessions had to be met.

It was still boring as fuck. But if he wanted to someday make it into NASA he would have to suck it up and force himself to survive with relatively good notes this torment.

Then the ghost fights had entered the picture and his motive to keep up the grades had all but vanished, and the little time left behind to work with was not enough to make, at least, an average grade. He didn’t have enough reasons to strive for more.

For this though? A new chance far from the ghost and he could keep protecting her sister?

He had the brains. He had the passion. And a good damn motive to drive him forward.

Once he was done, the luggage - and Loony town - wouldn’t even know what hit it.

-.-.-.-

NOTES:

 Also, the thing about Jack & Maddie not trusting Danny with the equipment was one of Danno’s secret tries at messing around with the things. Needless to say, that one time didn’t stay a secret.

Oh well, it was not like he asked for permission in the first place.

-.-.-.-

“fluffy-sweater clad toddler”

Not gonna lie, I made myself crave some cuddles from toddler danno, so. fucking. cute.

There he goeees just waddling like a little duckling asdfghjkl

-.-.-.-

If someone here is a fan of the Gotham Academy Comic I greatly regret -not really- to inform you I’m only taking hostage the place for my evil fanfic purposes. I don’t know if there is going to be references but that particular comic is not the focus of this story, SO. You have been forewarned.

[amorremanet]

omg u've watched rick & morty!! what are ur thoughts?

Well, with the caveat that I literally just watched all of it for the first time yesterday (barring a handful of episodes that I’d seen pieces of because they happened to play when my Dad fell asleep in front of the TV with Adult Swim on), and with fair warning that most of this is a lot of me being a pretentious nerd about philosophy?

I love Rick. I expected to either not love Rick, or to love him but in the detached, intellectual kind of way where it’s like, “I appreciate you as a character but any attachment to you is more of a morbid fascination with you and wondering what you’re going to do next” — but yeah, no. That didn’t last. It did take a while to get there (I mean, I could feel it happen, but I didn’t have to give up and accept it until the end of the Unity episode, with Rick’s onscreen bungled suicide attempt)

I hate myself for being so goddamn predictable and for having such a Type

But I’m so weak for both well-executed fictional douchebags and more so for the whole, “this person is a genius or somehow special, and it is actually a very miserable, lonely existence because one of the things that people tend not to understand about being deemed, ‘special’ in any capacity? is how much it sets you apart from all the people around you and fucks up your ability to connect with anyone without factoring in other shit like, for example, depression, [C]PTSD, substance abuse and/or addiction, and/or being on the spectrum (which can then fuck it up for you even more on top of being “special,” both in its own right and in terms of how it makes other people react to you)

“—and see, despite what a lot of people like Rick and Albus Wulfric Percival Brian Dumbledore [and sometimes me] try to say, it is actually horrible to have your ability to connect with other people compromised like that. Like, there is a wealth of evidence from several disciplines — psychology, biology and medicine, sociology, history, the list goes on — that shows how it is completely terrible for people not to be able to connect with others. It’s isolating, it’s lonely, and it will fuck you straight to Hell, psychologically speaking but WUBBALUBBADUBDUB, NO WORRIES FOR THE GENIUS, AM I RIGHT” trope

I also really love Summer, Beth, and Morty. For different reasons all around — and if I had to pick a favorite out of them, I’d probably pick Summer, though I will say that it’s really close between her and Morty — but I love them, they’re all a lot of fun to watch

Show needs more ladies. I could pretend that I’m saying this out of a sociopolitical conviction that having more gender diversity among the major recurring characters would be a good thing, but I’m totally not. I am 500% saying this because holy fucking shit, I want to have some goddamn femslash with Summer in it, but one of the only f/f ships available is Summer/Tammy

—which isn’t to say that I’m not open to Summer/Tammy, since it would actually fit pretty nicely into a trope that I love

Namely, the, “everything looks all chill and pleasant and domestic and happy, but it is, in fact, actually pretty deeply fucked up” trope (which was what I loved about, for example, the relationship that NBC!Hannibal painted between Hannibal and Jack Crawford for the early part of season two, though… pretty big difference in scale and emphases between these two ships)

—I’m just saying that I’d like a little bit of variety here, too, you know?

Jerry is the only main character that I’m just kind of, “meh, whatever” about, and I’m not holding my breath that the Beth/Jerry divorce will actually stick? But I personally wouldn’t mind if it did, because I don’t hate Jerry? But the nicest thing that I can say about him is either, “Well, he has a fair point sometimes, I guess. Statistically, it has to happen” or, “Well, I don’t hate him.”

To be fair? I wouldn’t say Jerry’s presence holds the show back — which I would say about some characters that I actually like, albeit from different things (like how I think The Joker needs to go on another ten-year hiatus like he did back in the mid-20th century because…… okay, he’s Batman’s most iconic villain, but atm, the world is sort of in a Joker hangover and he is actively holding back Batman, and by extension most of DC in all of its current media incarnations, because Batman is, duh doi, their biggest and bestselling property)

—and I think that Jerry definitely brings something to the show that helps enhance it, sometimes (e.g., I like how they use him as a foil to the rest of his family at different turns, like how he’s the bumbling loser sitcom dad who is super not-chill with most of the shit that’s out there in the bigger universe unless it’s nice to him like Sleepy Gary or the scammer aliens’ simulation thing, and who could be totally happy spending the rest of his life at Jerryboree vs. Rick, who is…… well. Rick;

or Jerry, the naïve egocentric loser whose view of what’s good or bad in any situation always comes back to himself and his family [but that is seriously a secondary concern to himself] vs. Morty, the naïve egocentric loser who is actually coming into his own and getting to not be a loser, and his egocentricity is more a product of him being a teenager who’s trying to orient himself in the universe than any deliberate lack of concern for other beings [like you see in both Jerry and Rick, though Rick is at least upfront about it], and who at least tries to do right by other beings, even sacrificing his own desires for them, like when he would’ve rather not killed Fart but did it to prevent Fart and its species from annihilating all “lesser” lifeforms)

I wouldn’t even say that Jerry is holding Beth back, which I felt like I was going to end up thinking when I went into this, since I had seen enough to know that Jerry is a bumbling sitcom dad (and bumbling sitcom dads usually hold back their spouses to some extent, and sometimes hold back everyone around them, too), and I’ve found some of their B-plots to be both interesting and pretty neat character pieces for Beth (like their B-plot with the deer in “A Rickle in Time” and looking at themselves across alternate dimensions, like in “Rixty Minutes”)

……I just don’t particularly care about Jerry as himself, so if he and Beth actually stay divorced and it maybe limits the amount of overall Jerry-time on the show, I don’t think I’d mind

I’m cautiously hopeful about the promise of Summer getting to go on more adventures and Beth maybe coming on any adventures at all, from Rick’s rant at Morty at the end of the Mulan McNuggets dipping sauce episode — especially for the Summer part.

One thing I enjoyed seeing with the progression of Summer’s character is how she embodies the whole, “teenager trying to figure themself out” thing, and how she’s trying to decide who she wants to be and where she wants to fit into the universe.

Originally, it was just the world — which we see really well in her relationship with Mr. Needful in “Something Ricked This Way Comes” — but now that she’s seen more of the multiverse out there, she’s trying to figure out where she can feel most at home there (it has to come down to how she feels about it, if the, “Nobody belongs anywhere” idea from “Rixty Minutes” still holds true)

—and I love watching that idea develop and play out in her relationships with Rick and Morty, and how those relationships are changed and tested by their adventures together and what Summer sees and experiences out there (like, learning that freedom means that people have the right to do things that suck, when she tried to free the planet from Unity, and actually coming to think that her grandpa is the bad influence on Unity), and I really love exploring the parallels and points of difference between her and Rick

oh my god, that is how you do an absurdist tv series RIGHT. seriously, most shows that try to go to the absurdist place are just pointlessly loud and asinine with no rhyme or reason to anything, and they think that this is the same thing as making the point that ~there is no inherent meaning~ when actually, they are making the point that they’re fucking obnoxious and don’t know how to tell a joke and try to cover it up in pretentious crap

(—for the record, I’m thinking of shit like Tim and Eric when I say this. It’d be really easy to bag on Family Guy, but the thing is that Family Guy doesn’t actually pretend to be making any philosophical kind of point about anything.

There isn’t any annoying, pretentious crap going on in Family Guy like there used to be in all of the Tim and Eric shows. I mean, there’s a LOT of crap, but it’s pandering, populist crap that has no creative integrity and is openly just concerned with grossing people out and getting away with as much as they possibly can, surviving on sheer popularity factor.

Shows like the Tim and Eric family wanted to pretend that they were deep and intellectual, when actually, they were just BAD and acted like they were bad on purpose like they were a bunch of baby Dadaists.

I would say, “all due respect,” but I have no respect for them)

like, I’m not going to say that Rick and Morty is a perfect series by any means, or that there aren’t things I wouldn’t have done differently — though, I had plenty of criticisms for Community and Dan Harmon has a much sweeter life than I do, so I think he can handle me having criticisms here (and I know nothing about his co-creator) — but

A big reason why I went, “Okay, fuck it” and just watched the series was that it combines a lot of things that I know I enjoy (sci-fi, magical realism, cosmic horror, dysfunctional family tragicomedy/dramedy/whatever, etc.), and I kept hearing and reading about the philosophical themes going on in the show and how they were both more overt than in most series but also handled with more finesse than a lot of other pieces of media where the philosophical ideas are just right out in the open

I’m very pointedly casting a judgmental sideways glance at you, Christopher Nolan.

I’m doing this because on one hand, I am really tired of how you handle all your big-budget attempts at having in-depth philosophical discussions in cinematic form with the grace, tact, and finesse of a huge steamroller, and how you don’t just shove the audience’s faces into all of your themes like Jerry shoving Snowball’s face into his own urine, but you then try to actively tell the audience at your movies what we’re supposed to think, rather than using your power as an ~auteur~ to start a conversation and trusting the audience to think for themselves

—like, my problems with JK Rowling have their own damn tag on my blog, but for fuck’s sakes, at least she knows how to start a conversation, rather than being a didactic pain in the ass with an over-inflated opinion of herself and her own creativity, Christopher fucking Nolan

(…which is pretty laughable, given how much he’s ripped off from other artists. Not built on or remixed or played with in his own way, but just straight-up ripped off)—

and on the other hand, I’m picking on him right now because Rick and Morty also picks on him not-irregularly, which makes me more inclined to do so, because that’s just a part of Rick and Morty’s text

Anyway, as I was saying.

In particular, I saw a lot about how the show plays with the tension between existentialism and absurdism — and I am going to super over-simplify both of these schools of thought right now, and how the show approaches them, but in general

Existentialism and Absurdism have a lot of things in common, and one of them is the idea that life is inherently meaningless and the universe is a cold place that can’t even accurately be called, “cruel” because that would imply that the universe gives a shit about individual lives, which it doesn’t

Where they most differ from each other is in how each school of thought deals with the ensuing question of, “okay, so what do we do about the fact that we live in this meaningless world in a meaningless universe where our lives and existences have no intrinsic value or meaning”

Existentialism can come in a variety of flavors, from the hella Christian existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard and Russian Orthodox proto-existentialism of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to the massively misunderstood models of Friedrich “actually, he was AGAINST antisemitism and supremacist bullshit, and he would think most of the people who quote him in their justifications for being nihilistic douchebags are *jean ralphio voice* THE WOOOOOORST” Nietzsche and Jean-Paul “yes, Hell is other people, but not in the way that you probably think this quote is saying” Sartre

—but they all generally agree that, in the end? The universe may be devoid of inherent meaning, but human beings create meaning in all kinds of weird little ways, and the meaning that we create has value because it matters to us, and because we can build and do things inspired by that meaning which affect other people and the course of history and so on (and possibly to Jesus, if your name is Kierkegaard, though to be fair, I’m way oversimplifying him right now, more than I’m oversimplifying all the other shit in this discussion)

Basically, a good way to think of Existentialism’s (INCREDIBLY OVERSIMPLIFIED) approach to these questions is to think of the Nietzsche that you can find when you actually read any shit by Nietzsche. Like, when you actually read him, he isn’t saying that God is dead and life is meaningless so let’s everybody just be assholes to each other and the biggest douchebag on the proverbial playground gets to be the Übermensch.

He’s more saying that life is inherently meaningless until human beings go inventing meaning, but because we can invent that meaning through various systems, like friendships and family and civilizations, the inherent, fundamental meaninglessness of life, the universe, and everything is not a valid justification for being an asshole to people

Absurdism, on the other hand, does have a few different flavors and it’s associated with a few different creative movements in history, even though it wasn’t actually directly related to all of them — but its biggest luminaries are Albert “the stranger, the plague, the myth of sisyphus” Camus and Antonin “actually, he was a surrealist, but reading The Theatre and Its Double, it’s hard to tell that he wasn’t an absurdist, and it can start feeling a bit like the often arbitrary distinctions made between goth and emo, or between different flavors of goth or emo” Artaud

If you view philosophical schools as being on a spectrum (and you really probably shouldn’t, because it’s more complicated than that, but for the sake of the visual metaphor, let’s pretend it isn’t), then Absurdism is closer to Nihilism than most of the other schools that can get lumped under the big Existentialist umbrella (which both Absurdism and Nihilism can be and have been, depending on who you ask about the definitions all going on here)

Absurdism’s answer to the question of meaning or lack thereof is basically to flip the middle finger and blow a raspberry, because to the Absurdist view, there either is no inherent and guiding meaning to anything in the universe, or if it exists, then it’s so wildly incomprehensible to humans that its existence will not matter to us because we will never be able to understand it so everything will, effectively, still be meaningless to us — but where the Existentialists latch onto the idea of creating our own meanings by doing human stuff and attaching significance to it, whether fairly or not, for better and for worse, “Life wouldn’t be perfect without you, Unity, but it would be life”?

………Yeah, Absurdists instead go, “Fuck that noise. Trying to create meaning in the universe is an understandable refuge, as it can be terrifying to grapple with the fundamental complete lack of meaning — but it’s still ultimately cowardly, and the best way to exist in the universe is to acknowledge that your life has no meaning and the universe is hostile and the entire world has no point to any of this, and to continue living and thriving and leading a good life because fuck the universe, THAT’S why”

The Myth of Sisyphus is regarded as the foundational text of Absurdism by a lot of people, because it’s the essay in which Camus…… basically says everything that I just said but longer and with more argument, examples, etc.

In it, he also acknowledges the fundamental paradox at the heart of his philosophy, namely that accepting the meaninglessness of the universe and of human life is still aligning oneself with a system that ascribes meaning to all the fundamentally non-meaningful happenstance that’s all part and parcel of existing in the universe

His response to said paradox is, essentially, “Fuck it. No one else has any better ideas and anyone who refuses to lead an unexamined life [i.e., a life where they live only in a protective bubble of confirmation bias, ignoring as many of the things that they don’t like or find challenging as they possibly can; or in so many words, to be a Jerry, but also to be a Rick or a Summer in different ways]? Yeah, they will have their ideas, their ideals, their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs, their values, and their philosophies constantly tested or called into question by literally any and all of the people, places, events, and things that they might ever encounter and engage with

“—so, really, the fact that I’m aligning myself with this rejection of meaning — which is itself a way of creating meaning in a meaningless universe — only means that I’m human and have to constantly question myself about that inherent meaningless thing or else I’m going to fall into the same cowardly cop-out that Dostoevsky did when he had Ivan Karamazov find God”

(……which. ……that’s. ……okay, Albert is missing some pretty big deal pieces of context in his reading of The Brothers Karamazov, and it’s fair to point out that good ol’ Fyodor didn’t actually think of himself as an existentialist because the term wasn’t in his vocabulary — but I do still respect that Camus went, “Yep, my philosophy here does have these internal contradictions and paradoxes” since?

Well. I mean, he’s right in saying that literally every human system of thought has internal contradictions and internal paradoxes and questions where it will get snagged and be forced to choose between its bedrock ideas and most treasured values — the debate of freedom vs. security is one of the most constant refrains of this throughout most of human history — but……?

Hey. At least he admits it and tries to deal with it, as opposed to people who act like their philosophies are totally unimpeachable and without question or paradox or anything that might be intellectually, ethically, spiritually, morally, emotionally, psychologically, etc. difficult for folks)

Regardless of the different conclusions, though? Absurdism and Existentialism both agree about the whole, “the universe is cold and can be harsh and it doesn’t give a fuck about humans or our lives, so what do we do now” thing — which comes up a lot in Rick and Morty, so we’re gonna unpack it a bit more

Like, given the massive difference in scale between THE LITERAL ENTIRE UNIVERSE and individual lives, which are but tiny specks of dust relative to the THE LITERAL ENTIRE UNIVERSE…… uh, can you really blame it for not caring?

I mean, for one thing, we’re assuming that universe itself is sentient (which?? it might be? it might NOT be? who the fuck knows? well, certainly not me, but I’d be super-interested if anybody else has any insights here) and that it cares about literally anything

—which……… again? If the universe itself is for reals sentient, then might care about anything or it might not, there’s no way to know for sure

But if the hypothetically sentient universe does care about things, then we still can’t really blame it for not caring about individual organisms with our individual lives, because there are hundreds of billions of us out there — like, fuck, there are almost 7.5 billion individual human lives just on Earth, and that is just the humans, it’s saying nothing of the other beings here who have different degrees of sentience, let alone all of the other lives that may or may not exist on other planets, in other galaxies, etc.

If the hypothetically sentient universe cares about things, then it probably cares more about particularly big black holes or solar flares (or for the more comic approach: it cares about whether the other sentient universes at sentient universe high school are gonna make fun of it for being the last one to get a pair of Univernikebok sneakers, or if the sentient universe it most has its proverbial eye on will go with it to the sentient universe prom)

Point being: the hypothetically sentient universe, if it really cares about anything, will most likely only care about things on its own scale and not on ours

Like, yeah, it sucks for us a lot of the time, because as the master, Douglas Adams, observed in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, having a sense of proportion can be actively detrimental to the psychological and emotional well-being of individual organisms, and being exposed to just how insignificant we are in the grand totality of all the things ever?

………Yeah, that can be a fate worse than death for us (unless we’re Zaphod Beeblebrox and can come out of the Total Perspective Vortex still thinking that we might as well be the center of the universe)

In a pretty fundamental way, most individual organisms are incapable of handling the idea that we are not actually that important. We can handle the idea that we’re not the literal center of the universe, but if you tell someone that they aren’t important in the grand scheme of things, it will not go well

On one hand, this is part of why you have sci-fi stories in which, for example, The Doctor goes, “Oh wow, in all my adventures, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before” or Dr. Manhattan realizes that individual human lives are actually more miraculous than air turning into gold because, as small as we are and as quotidian as our existences are (especially relative to a being who exists so far outside of our ability to comprehend things that he has essentially become a god), it is statistically more likely for oxygen to turn into gold than for each exact human being on Terra to exist in the exact way that they do

(—which is, y’know, part of the underlying theory that makes Rick and Morty’s mega-multiverse thing plausible. Because there really might be INFINITE alternate realities and timelines out there.)

(……and now I’m thinking about how Rick would most likely school Abed on how Jeff didn’t actually create seven alternate timelines when he tried to roll a d6 to see who would go get the pizza; there are, in fact, infinite timelines that could’ve resulted from that because there are all kinds of other factors at play, here

Like maybe Jeff rolled the d6 off the table and it somehow triggered Abed’s rolling boulder Indiana Jones model and then Pierce slipped on said model-boulder and broke his neck

Or maybe Jeff rolled the d6 in such a way that it landed down Annie’s shirt and she broke up with the Study Group because she was tired of everyone but Shirley constantly being up in her tits like that, even though it was legitimately an accident this time — not that anybody would necessarily believe Jeff Winger about that because he has a precedent here

Or maybe Jeff rolled the d6 in such a way that it landed down Annie’s shirt, but instead of her breaking up with the Study Group, the Study Group split into everyone who took Annie and whoever took her side (Troy, Abed, Britta, and Pierce) vs. Jeff and Shirley (because Shirley is one of the characters who I can most easily see defending Jeff over this legitimate accident, even possibly in timelines where it wasn’t an accident and Jeff totally meant for the d6 to go down Annie’s shirt)

Or maybe that thing I just said, except instead of it being a mostly realistic community college nonsense hijinks adventure, Jeff and Shirley band together to come back stronger and end up taking over the world as Queen Shirley and her loyal consort/legal adviser/“guy who pays her bodyguards because she has seen Jeffrey fight and knows that he cannot keep her safe in the way that she deserves”

Or maybe Jeff rolled the d6 and it turned air and certain miscellaneous objects into gold in La Casa Chez Trobed and the Study Group got filthy rich by selling all the gold but it drove a huge wedge between them because some of the things that turned into gold were like, Abed’s Batman costume or Britta’s lighter

Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, LITERAL INFINITE POSSIBILITIES, NOT JUST THE SEVEN OFFICIALLY CANONICAL TIMELINES WE SAW IN THAT EPISODE [—though that just raises once more the question of whether those timelines should really be considered official canon, because aside from the Darkest Timeline, they were all Abed’s imagined take on how things would be different if certain members of the Study Group were gone and reflections of how the group’s balance works]

But that’s beside the point)

On another hand, people’s inability to really deal with the idea that we might be insignificant is part of why, “you are important and you are valid” posts are so popular on tumblr dot hell. Like, there are a LOT of other factors in play there, too — especially because those posts are so often made for people who belong to oppressed and/or marginalized communities — but the underlying logic of those posts is to counteract human-created hierarchical systems (like those found in neoliberal capitalism) that prioritize certain kinds of people while dismissing others as, “invalid,” “wrong,” or, “unimportant and disposable”

Those posts try to counteract those hierarchies and promote a sense of mental and emotional well-being — or foster a sense of belonging, or several other vaguely similar options — by going, “no, all of that shit you’ve heard about how you’re unimportant due to how you are a member of this group, or how you engage in these unfairly maligned and harmless behaviors (like black girls wearing their natural hair)? it’s wrong. you are totally important and your choices are valid and you matter”

Which can totally be an encouraging message to hear and I’m not trying to disparage or criticize these posts at all (I could criticize them for other reasons, but that’s an entirely different post and for now, I’d rather not)

But when you put those posts into a conversation with literally cosmic-level shit — and, in the case of Rick and Morty, literally multi-cosmic-level shit, since we have a canonical mega-multiverse to consider in this show — they come off as pretty egocentric and anthropocentric (i.e., egocentric but focused on all of us people instead of looking at us in the context of the rest of the universe), because of the difference in scale

Those kinds of positivity posts can work (even if they don’t always work) because they’re operating on the human scale. They’re sort of stuck between the microcosmic and macrocosmic scales — which… is unfortunately pretty tricky terminology right now, due to the involvement of literal cosmoses in the Rick and Morty conversation?

But I’m using the terms that are related to the idea of microcosms (i.e., the smaller-scale ways that ideas and systems play out, such as in individual lives or small-group scenarios that can reflect the whole) and macrocosms (i.e., the larger-scale discussions here, like entire countries vs. life in one particular province, or life on Earth vs. life in Canada, or life in the Milky Way vs. life on Earth)

—so, what I’m trying to say is that those kinds of, “you are valid and important” positivity posts try to work on both the smaller, individual or small-group level (by talking to the members of certain specific groups but doing so in a way that also addresses the individual reader who sees a post while browsing tumblr), and the bigger, broader group level (due to how they tacitly address larger systemic issues of sociopolitical inequality, oppression, marginalization, and so on)

And their preferred mechanism of doing so is trying to reaffirm and emotionally support people who are taught by the different aspects of socialization, indoctrination, and social conditioning of neoliberal capitalism that they don’t matter — which is, what a shock (not really), psychologically damaging to hear and see, day in and day out, especially when it gets to be so blatantly fucking arbitrary as the divisions of society and social groups promoted by neoliberal capitalism

—none of which is actually of interest to Rick and Morty, at least not a big deal, pressing interest.

There is actually probably a lot of really cool meta to be milked out of how Rick and Morty engages with these kinds of immediately sociopolitical discussions and economic politics (e.g., the Meeseeks; Mr. Needful; “Look Who’s Purging Now”; how Rick-Prime and the Council of Ricks deal with each other; all of the, “Rick, Birdperson, and Squanchy are deemed terrorists for fighting the Galactic Federation, and lbr here, the Galactic Federation do seem like a bunch of dicks, even if it isn’t so cut-and-dry as that” backstory; Unity and its entire episode, full stop)

But for the most part, a lot of the philosophical noodling in Rick and Morty is concerned not with political philosophy, social philosophy, economic philosophy, etc., but with the metaphysical questions like, “why are we here,” “what are we,” “what does this all mean”

—and it works on an even bigger cosmic horror scale than Howard Phillips “racist grandpa of popular cosmic horror, Cthulhu mythos except he wanted to name it something different because he kind of though Cthulhu was a loser, blah blah fuckeddy blah blah blah, tentacle shit” Lovecraft

Like, the horror that Lovecraft intended to build into the Cthulhu mythos wasn’t the questionable writing or all of the racism (—I mean, he put that there pretty intentionally, but he didn’t mean for it to be horrific, even though he was so racist that other 1920’s racists were like, “Dude, that’s not cool”).

The horror that he intended to be there was the entire existence of the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods, who would characterize the greater universe as a place that is fundamentally hostile to us because it doesn’t give a shit about humans or Earth

—note that the GOO’s and EG’s didn’t really become evil ‘til August Derleth decided to fuck up everything by adding a Christian sense of morality, which is and will almost always be fundamentally anthropocentric, since Christianity rests on the premise that there is a being out there — let’s split the difference and call it Elohim — and it exists on the same unfathomably, overwhelmingly powerful level as all the weirdos like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Hastur, et al.… and it is actively concerned with the fate of humanity

—maybe it’s not actively concerned with the smaller, day-to-day minutiae of our lives, though that varies depending on which Christians you ask… but Elohim is still out there and actively concerned with us, and that’s why it actively intervened in human history and why it sacrificed its only begotten child — who was part of Elohim itself — for our benefit. Because, you know, all-powerful beings giving that much of a shit about humans doesn’t sound like a theory that is overly focused on humans

……except that it does, which is my point, here.

Lovecraft was working with the idea that humans are inherently NOT important and that the universe does not give a shit about us. It looks hostile and even evil to US because the GOO’s and EG’s do things that kill us and because they have the power to destroy our planet and end all life on it (and some of them may want to do that, though usually not out of active malice so much as, “that’s just their nature, it’s what they do and we are literally powerless to fully stop it. Postpone it? Eh, maybe we can do that. But we lack the ability to completely prevent it”).

For him, the big wide universe is horrifying because we don’t matter and no amount of, “you’re a star! you’re valid!! your choices matter and should be respected unless you do something that i don’t like personally uwu!!! you are important and loved and magical i don’t make the rules stay hydrated!!!!” style tumblr positivity posts will change that.

Also, there are tentacles everywhere and these gibbering fleshbags that consume everything in their paths and “humanoid abominations” that are described in really not-subtly racialized terms and who are the result of fish-people males (who are described in even less subtly racialized terms) breeding with (white) human women, because oh yeah, did we mention that he was a huge fucking racist

(I’m not kidding. Go read “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and try to tell me that he didn’t use specifically anti-black language and tropes to describe and characterize The Deep Ones and the Deep One/Human hybrid people)

(And if you want to read something of his that isn’t horribly racist, try “Pickman’s Model” — it has nothing to do with the Cthulhu mythos and the big reveal is probably one that you can see coming, but it’s one of his better stories overall, in addition to not being a huge screed against interracial marriage that’s gotten dressed up as a horror novella for Halloween)

For Derleth, the universe is horrifying because these creatures are actively evil and they’re coming to get us because we exist and they are evil

(This isn’t to laud or condemn either Lovecraft or Derleth more than the other, because frankly, both of them had some interesting ideas but also several shitty ones, both of them contributed immeasurably to the development of contemporary sci-fi, horror, and Gothic fiction but have also unwittingly held it back in certain ways*, both of them also had major flaws as writers, and both of them were also huge douchebags as people, albeit usually in different ways from each other.

[*: For example? I mean, I’m sure that Howard thought he was helping advance things by being a huge racist all over everything, but I’d disagree with that, since in addition to the racism — which is already bad enough — he unwittingly spawned a bunch of fans of these genres who won’t even acknowledge that he was a racist piece of shit (much less, whenever they recycle some of his ideas without trying to challenge them or change them, that they are themselves perpetuating a variety of racism that was too racist for most other 1920’s U.S. racists), and thus help spread and exacerbate racism in geek culture and communities……

……all because Lovecraft contributed a lot to the development of the genres here, and this apparently means that we can’t also point out that he was a huge racist because of reasons or something asinine like that.

Like…… no, Brad, that’s not how it works. HP Lovecraft contributed immeasurably to the development of contemporary sci-fi, horror, and Gothic fiction, and he was a massive racist. The statements are NOT mutually exclusive.]

Personally, I find Lovecraft’s take on the (a)morality of the Cthulhu mythos more intriguing while I find Derleth’s version kinda boring and overly simplistic, but the current state of Cthulhu mythos fiction — and mythos-influenced fiction, that isn’t actually set in the mythos specifically like Rick and Morty — wouldn’t be what it is without both of them, so they’re both historically important for the genre, and both of them also suck.

It’s like Rick mathematically proving that Morty and Summer are both pieces of shit, except that there is actual clear evidence — as opposed to Rick using math to make his feelings seem objective when they fundamentally aren’t — that Lovecraft and Derleth were both huge pieces of shit. Historically significant pieces of shit, sure — at least, they are if you’re into sci-fi, horror, and/or Gothic fiction — but they’re both huge pieces of shit)

—Which all goes back to the kind of level that Rick and Morty is working on when it approaches its metaphysical questions, because it’s working on a mega-multiversal super-cosmic scale that makes HP Lovecraft’s view of the entire universe look like it’s working on a microcosmic scale

Let’s break that down as simply as possible, so we’re all on the same page

Rick and Morty is an animated series on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block that initially seems like it’s a mix of wacky sci-fi adventures, wacky dysfunctional family hijinks like a traditional dysfunctional family sitcom, and jokes about sex, farts, genitalia, and violence

It not only approaches serious metaphysical questions in the first place, but does it on a scale that makes Howard Phillips “the universe is a cold, harsh, uncaring wasteland in which human beings are fundamentally insignificant and lbr, we’re all probably gonna die in the near future and there is fuck-all that any of us can do to stop it because we are up against powers that are way bigger, stronger, and smarter than us, most of which we can’t even begin to fully comprehend and none of which really give a fuck about ANY of us” Lovecraft

—Like, HP Lovecraft, the guy who’s talking about how the universe is so huge and unforgiving that we can’t even really fathom how huge and unforgiving it is, like there is more huge, unforgivingness than your body has room for

—yeah, the super-cosmic scale of Rick and Morty makes it look like HP Lovecraft is complaining about how Suzy didn’t ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance and she’s going with Janey instead and how dare she enrage his sense of white male entitlement by being a lesbian GAWD while Earthlings are making first contact with Vulcans, or there’s some looming Armageddon that will destroy the entire Milky Way, or something

The super-cosmic scale of Rick and Morty makes HP Lovecraft’s macrocosmic, universal scale look like kid stuff

—Which all goes back to the tension between Existentialism and Absurdism because not only does Rick and Morty make HP Lovecraft look like kid stuff in terms of sheer scale, it also makes him look like kid stuff in terms of how it approaches the same metaphysical questions that he was answering in how he built up the Cthulhu mythos

(……I mean, we may not like any of his answers, because he pretty much answers, “No” to any metaphysical questions we could come up with, even when he actually isn’t faced with a yes or no question? But he does provide answers to them, and those answers generally have big, nasty tentacles and they want to eat you and might also make your brain start leaking out your ears because you are just that fundamentally incapable of understanding shit about shit about even a fraction of their existences, much less the totality of them)

(HP Lovecraft sometimes makes Tara “My Immortal” Gillesbie look like she has chill, and frankly, comparing the two of them is an insult to Tara, because…… okay, sure, HP Lovecraft could spell, had a bigger vocabulary, and he influenced several major genres of fiction so much and so deeply that you’d need a series of monographs to get all of it documented…… but Tara wasn’t, afaik, an enormous racist douchebag who was such an edgelord that Kylo Ren would have told her to take some deep breaths and calm down and try to find her center

HP Lovecraft was exactly that kind of edgelord and to that same extent. So…… I’m just saying.)

Anyway, Rick and Morty makes HP Lovecraft look like kid stuff in its approach to the questions of existence and meaning and the horror of living in our fucked up universe (or literally any of the multiple infinite fucked up universes out there), because in all the places where HP Lovecraft would just start screaming at you about how everything is terrible forever and it’s all so scary and your mind can’t fucking take it?

Rick and Morty throws up both middle fingers and goes, “FUCK YOU, WUBBALUBBADUBDUB, WHOOOOO, LMAO COSMIC HORROR CAN’T FUCKING TOUCH ME, IT WISHES IT COULD FUCKING TOUCH ME, WUBBALUBBADUBDUB!!!”

To paraphrase one of the Wisecrack channel’s, “Philosophy of Rick and Morty” vids on Youtube: the show doesn’t ask viewers to be terrified of our own insignificance or the cosmic horrors out there that can and probably will attempt to destroy us; it asks us to laugh at them and shows how, really, they’re just as banal and silly as humans are (……most of the time)

The tension between Absurdism and Existentialism (and every so often, also Nihilism), as it plays out on Rick and Morty, is… kind of a lot

But it most often comes out in how the different characters all respond to grappling with their own existences, and the threats that arise against them, and, whether they:

want to die (like the Meeseeks and Rick)

or destroy shit but mostly Rick or whoever their creator is (like Abradolph Lincler, and Morty Jr. until…)

or try to channel their potentially not-good impulses into more constructive things

(like Morty Jr. when he decides to become a writer instead of destroying people — which is one of the single funniest moments in the series for me, personally, because… I’ve been saying since I was about twelve that being, “a creative of some kind!!” is one of the best ways to avoid giving in to any intrusive thoughts and not-good impulses that you’d rather not let rule you, and it was just like, “YEAH THAT’S RIGHT”

—or like Unity trying to help the people and planets whom it assimilates, and even leaving the people’s individual consciousnesses more or less intact and trying to better their lives by removing the shit like… y’know, race wars and pedophilia)

or try to impose some semblance of order on things to various effects

(like: the Galactic Federation,

the Council of Ricks,

the Evil Rick who was being controlled by the Evil Morty,

Beth in her own way,

Mr. Needful — since his whole shop is about him cursing people to be punished for their “sins” in a very direct and poetic justice-laden way that upholds the idea that bad shit should happen to certain people for certain reasons that follow a logical and easily comprehensible order,

Rick when he insists on the supremacy of science above all else in the universe despite any evidence that might be a challenge to his beliefs in the meaninglessness of it all and how it can be boiled down to chemical reactions or physics principles or whatever else is on his mind at any given moment [including non-scientific but still systematic logical shit like going, “Well, [Beth]’s MY daughter, Summer; I outrank you. Or, family means nothing, in which case, don’t play that card”],

the female Gazorpazorpians,

Principle Vagina when he goes, “all the old religions are dead” and creates the Headism cult based on the cum hoc ergo propter hoc and post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacies [which I don’t feel like explaining myself right now because this is already too long, so here’s a link to the Wisecrack video on “Get Schwifty,” where 8-Bit Jared specifically talks about those exact logical fallacies in the episode],

Morty whenever he tries to be a more conventional do-gooder,

Summer when she falls into Headism or tries to fit other people’s ideas of who she should be if she wants to be popular,

the Meeseeks, who only want to kill Jerry so that they can die because they are created for a specific purpose and can’t fulfill it (thanks, Jerry!!) and don’t know how to cope with what we understand as a full existence in the universe (y’know, one that exists outside of one specific purpose),

and oh this list never ends, it goes on and on and on and on)

or try to hide from everything (like Beth and Rick when they drink, even though Rick acts like he isn’t hiding from shit — which we know is a lie, thanks to Birdperson and how he clarified that, “wubbalubbadubdub” means, “I am in great pain, please help me” — and far more visibly, like Jerry, who would rather live in Jerryboree or the scammer aliens’ 5% processing power simulation than in his actual life)

or any other multiple options that come up throughout the series

—and in the different ways that the show either embraces or rejects any attempts at attaching meaning or significance to the adventures we see in the episodes (like, at the end of “Raising Gazorpazorp,” when Rick tries to go, “this was all pointless lol” so Summer tries to go, “don’t you think it made you think a bit about how you’re being a misogynistic turd to me,” and Rick then tries to go, “no, that’s just your feminine insecurities” — which is creating a meaning and attaching significance to shit, even though Rick literally just went, “it’s all pointless lmao”)

We see this in a BIG way with Rick throughout everything — we can’t not; in a lot of ways, he embodies the entire, “Absurdism vs. Existentialism vs. Nihilism” tension in one character — and in how he reacts to things, how he develops or doesn’t as the series goes on, how he tries to tell himself that he isn’t having any character development but he is but not always in any kind of positive way, and so on. I mean……?

My personal read on him, on an in-character and an in-universe level, is that whatever Rick’s backstory actually is and whatever his motivations actually are, he’s been out into the grand-scale universe — and that could fuck with anybody’s head, but he’s even gone beyond that, into the mega-multiverse, and seen his place(s) in everything, seen the thing(s) that the other Ricks have done*, seen all the possibilities that could’ve been for him**, and seen just how insignificant he actually is, in the grand mega-multiversal scale of everything ever

—and while Morty-Prime can look at being confronted with this shit in “Close Rick-counters” and conclude, “When I first saw all those Ricks and Mortys [at the Council of Ricks], I thought, ‘Gee, that kind of devalues our bond.’ But then I realized it just means that our relationship must be pretty special to span over all those different timelines,” Rick has seen too much to deny the randomness of existence and/or think that he can believe in something comforting like anything being so cool or so special that it spans multiple universes and timelines without the risk of having it painfully ripped away from him

So, basically, when Rick tries to reject having any semblance of meaning attached to his actions or adventures, he’s trying to do the Absurdist thing of embracing the fundamentally random and meaningless nature of the universe and of life itself, and he has seen enough to make him think that this is just how it all is — but he’s also struggling with that because he doesn’t want it to all be meaningless, and he doesn’t know what to do with the fact that it might actually be meaningless.

I mean, he’s a scientist. He’s dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth and knowledge and meaning. It might seem like cynical or even a reaffirmation of the inherent meaninglessness of life, the universe, and everything, but he wants the meaning to be there in some form — so being confronted with as much evidence as he’s seen that there isn’t any intrinsic meaning to anything that isn’t projected onto it by beings observing those phenomena? That would probably fuck him up even more than how isolated and alienated he is from other sentient beings

And he’s already pretty fucked up from that — I mean, he rarely sees his bff Birdperson, his relationships with his family (except for Jerry) are in a perpetual cycle of needing them but shoving them away since he hates that he needs them and devaluing all their relationships by trying to dismiss them based on what he needs from them or not, and connecting with other people as Tiny Rick requires him to be in intense pain while his real body is slowly dying in a stasis tube, while connecting with other people in the party in “Rixty Business” or with Unity in “Auto Erotic Assimilation” requires him to be fucked up beyond all belief on sex and drugs, and it’s still not enough to let him hide from how much pain he’s in, wubbalubbadubdub

(which gets me so hard, just. I am so weak for this trope. it hurts and I love it and I’m weak for it because I’m actual trash garbage.)

—so, like? Rick might feel like he’s certain of everything, as he tells Morty and Summer in, “A Rickle In Time,” but the reality of his situation is probably more that he overcompensates and he tries to reassure himself that he’s certain, and he might be in an immediate small-context moment…… but overall, he’s actually perpetually uncertain, because everything he dedicated his life to wound up completely undermining the sacrifices he made in pursuit of truth and knowledge (……and the Mulan-themed, plum-flavored, promotional McNugget dipping sauce)

…but acknowledging the inherent meaninglessness of it all is itself a way of ascribing meaning to the situation (*points above to our dear friend Albert and The Myth of Sisyphus*), which would probably mean, to Rick, that there is no such thing as truth or even necessarily reality (not least since he has firsthand evidence that every single thing we take for granted in our own dimension isn’t actually as stable as we think, so all of it could be completely different in another universe, so who’s to say that anything we care about is real when, as real as it is to us, it is equally not-real to a different version of ourselves from another dimension)

……which would mean that his entire pursuit of anything, ever (from knowledge to love to Mulan McNugget dipping sauce) is a pointless lie, because it could still be objectively proven that he doesn’t have these things in another dimension (I mean, the existence of Doofus Rick proves that Rick doesn’t always have knowledge or ridiculous super-intelligence, and the fact that Evil Rick was actually being controlled by Evil Morty shows us — if not Rick himself — that his belief in the stability and typical patterns of his and Morty’s relationship isn’t right, either), which would mean that he doesn’t conclusively have these things and that he doesn’t conclusively “win”

………not that any of this is a competition (it isn’t even always a matter of competition for Rick), but it all seems to go back to an idea or a feeling like something being untrue in a different universe or timeline means that its truth isn’t a fixed construct in Rick’s own universe (or whichever universe he’s calling home at any given moment, since he’s no longer in Dimension C-137) — and if something isn’t always true, then it arguably can’t be said to be objectively true

…………and if nothing is objectively true — so much so that even saying, “this thing is not objectively true” cannot possibly be an objectively true statement — then this means that Rick’s entire life has been a pointless lie and all his work means jack squat, but then that invalidates the statement that nothing is objectively true, so it’s either the case that some of Rick’s work might have meaning and his life might not be pointless, or there is no objective truth

……………but if it’s the latter that’s true and there is no actual objective truth, then Rick invalidates his own work because he’s supposed to be a scientist and on the search for a truth that doesn’t exist (and we have to start this whole cycle over again because, “nothing is objectively true” is a fundamentally self-invalidating statement)……

………………but if it’s the former statement that’s true and Rick’s work might mean something and his life isn’t actually pointless, then that raises questions like what the point of it even is (where “it” can be literally anything), how Rick can even begin to know what the point of his life and work or of literally anything is, whether or not other Ricks lives also have meaning or purpose, do any of their lives mean more than the lives of any of the other Ricks, is he truly Rickest of them all, and so on

(there are some obvious issues with this line of thinking, in addition to the same paradox that Albert got into back in The Myth of Sisyphus, and I’ll get back to one of them in just a minute)

which yes, Camus could deal with because he was capable of handling that uncertainty and perpetual state of questioning all the things, but Rick can’t deal with that ambiguity, because he isn’t a philosopher — where he’d have to get comfortable with ambiguity and not having concrete answers, because frankly, most philosophers don’t, and the ones who try to say they do are the ones who are most likely to get humiliated when faced with someone who goes, “but hey, what about this obvious and glaring flaw in your theory” — but a scientist who is supposed to be working in the realm of the concrete, even if it is really out there and science-fiction-y to us, the viewers

So, TL;DR: Rick has no capacity for dealing with ambiguity or his own fundamental, underlying uncertainty, and part of why he is in so much pain is that he wants for things to mean shit but they don’t appear to, but even saying that they definitely for sure don’t mean shit anything is, in a way, ascribing meaning to them, and so, everything in his life seems like pointless, horrific suffering for no reason, and he acts like he can wrap his head around that lack of an underlying reason and his own inability to control all the factors at play in any given scenario, but on a deep, abiding level, he actually CAN’T and he HASN’T

—and, at some point, he probably wanted to do something good or remotely moral or ethical (even if he insists that the real reason is Mulan McNugget dipping sauce), because we know that he has scruples and lines that he won’t cross (maybe not very many of them, but they do exist), but in his view, he can’t do that thing, whatever it was or possibly still is. He never can, because literally everything in the universe is forever uncertain

And in his pursuit of shit, Rick has probably been forced to deal with the possibility that wanting to control all the factors in any given situation and shape them in his image (c.f., “Something Ricked,” where he forces Mr. Needful to play by his rules just for the sake of going, “neener neener neener, I’m better than you, suck it”; and the fact that he loses his shit over the beings in his microverse car battery creating their own miniverse, and doing the exact same thing as him)…… makes him not terribly unlike the Galactic Federation and the Council of Ricks, aside from issues of scale (but even that’s questionable when he can and has created literal universes full of sentient beings, whom he uses to power his fucking car/spaceship), oops

And without any internal sense of stability or anything else, Rick is stuck in this Limbo between the Absurdist mindset and the Existential mindset, and even if he weren’t, he’d have a whole fuck-ton of other problems — but this philosophical, “he stared at the abyss so long that they’re on a first-name basis and hit the clubs together on Friday nights” cosmic horror shit definitely isn’t helping

*: and despite claiming that he’s amoral and that he has no fucks to give, we see that this isn’t true when he does shit like reach back through a portal to shoot Jellybean King because of what Jellybean King did to Morty, or like when he and Summer specifically go after Neo-Nazis and bullies and animal abusers after they beat up Mr. Needful when he Zuckerbergs them, or like when he’s horrified by the fact that Evil Rick actually created a giant fortress of solitude using multiple Mortys as armor to protect himself from being found by other Ricks, or like when he’s deeply unnerved by the idea that Unity would blow up an entire city on its planet for the lulz until Unity goes, “Oh look, the people are all evacuated, and Morty and Summer weren’t there”

**: which fucked up Jerry and Beth and Summer badly enough in “Rixty Minutes,” when they got just a little taste of it, but Rick’s done this so much that he isn’t even fazed by burying a dead Rick in the backyard and taking his place, and sees the Council of Ricks as unimpressive and boring when they aren’t being a pain in his ass

—and Rick’s general attitude and demeanor are established as coming out of how he’s in great pain, so it’s plausible that his disaffection with the Council of Ricks is, in some ways or on some level, related to him being in so much pain over constantly seeing all the other possibilities, and wishing that he could just be numb to it, and lashing out because he isn’t

(…though it stands to reason that, somewhere, there are different Ricks who are genuinely numb to it)

and for all we have an entire Council of Ricks (who all kind of seem some degree of miserable, just like Rick-Prime), it stands to reason that, in the infinite universes, there are realities wherein Rick is actually happy

—and I don’t mean “happy” like Doofus Rick, who’s such a doofus that he probably would be pretty happy, if he could just hang out and chill with Jerry all the time, but Doofus Rick isn’t allowed to just have that.

Instead, he gets dragged into the Council of Ricks, where everybody treats him like crap [even Rick-Prime treats him like crap, and he completely rejects the Council of Ricks and their authority, and only sees a use for them because the fact that they’re a thing makes it possible for him to exist in opposition to them, which is crucial for his ability to deem himself the most Rickest of all possible Ricks]

—but yeah, no. I don’t mean Doofus Rick; I mean that, in the infinite multiverse, there must be some universes in which Rick is legitimately happy.

And true, one of the biggest points of the plot with Beth, Summer, and Jerry in, “Rixty Minutes”… is that it doesn’t matter what reality you look at, because the people in any reality will almost definitely spend at least some time just looking up at the sky and wondering what might’ve been if they’d done something differently

(……which, if we accept the logic of the infinite multiverse, can’t actually be constant in all universes ever, but it’s also unfathomable to most people that other people don’t necessarily wonder what might’ve been within our own single universe, much less if we are forced to confront the reality of other universes in which things are different for us)

—but, either way? Yeah, “Rixty Minutes” gives us a Rick and Morty spin on the good old, “lmao the grass is always greener on the other side” moral, but someone being truly happy isn’t mutually exclusive with wondering what could have been if you’d done something differently or if you’d only made different choices at certain points in life

I’m not really sure where the series falls on the question of whether someone’s life is:

an aggregate of all the smaller choices that they make (let’s call this the, “Spec Ops: The Line” approach to choice-making, because of how Spec Ops: The Line held the player accountable for every little choice that they make, even the ones where they don’t feel like they have a choice)

or more contingent on what bigger choices people make at crucial moments in life that are somehow more important than other choices for some reason (i.e., the idea that most contemporary fiction relies on but let’s call it the, “Colossus” approach to the question, because of that scene in Deadpool where Colossus tries to tell Mr. Pool Boy that being a hero comes down to your choices in four or five Big Deal moments, and you don’t have to brush your teeth as a hero)

or some kind of balance between the two extreme options here (and hey, let’s call it the, “Mass Effect” approach, because of how the original Mass Effect trilogy has a mix of both bigger deal “key moments” where your choices affect huge pieces of the story — like, for example, whether you have to fight Saren before fighting Sovereign, or manage to make Saren realize that he’s been Indoctrinated and then shoot himself so he can die as himself — and smaller shit that may seem like, “oh, it’s an insignificant choice on this one loyalty mission or fetch quest,” and then it comes back to bite you in the ass later)

—but wherever Rick and Morty ultimately falls, I maintain that there must be universes where Rick is genuinely happy, for better and for worse, and regardless of what shape that happiness takes? If Rick-Prime has seen it for his alternate selves at all, and possibly even seen how he can’t fit into those universes somehow, then that would do a LOT to fuck him up

Anyway, remember I said I’d get back to one of the biggest flaws in how Rick seems to approach the universe?

Yeah, well, it’s pretty simple. His flaw here is that he doesn’t understand issues of scale and seems to see some things as being mutually exclusive when they aren’t

These two flaws really are one and the same, for Rick

Because on one hand, you have scale — which, for Rick, means that he looks at day-to-day human problems and sees them as pointless because he knows what’s out there in the big deal mega-multiverse, and so he has a more accurate idea than most beings do of how insignificant one being’s individual life looks in the grand scheme of things…… but he also can’t escape these problems and is, in several ways, bound to them

He would say that he’s bound to his family because he relies on the protective shielding from being around Morty’s brain and junk, but I’m actually thinking more like how Rick is dependent on the attention and reactions he gets from other beings to feel like there is SOME kind of point to anything he does (even if the point is just, “annoying Jerry” or whatever, there is some kind of point, because he can do a thing and get a reaction), and he is at least emotionally dependent on alcohol and likely other mind-altering substances because he’s apparently in great pain more or less all the time, and he wants to get away from that

And, I mean.

On a more nonspecific, basic logic 101 level, Rick might be the closest that any of the single-minded beings Unity’s ever met has gotten to truly understanding the hive-minded perspective, but he’s still a human. He is fundamentally bound to human problems due to simply being a human.

—and, on the other hand, you have Rick’s problem of seeing shit that isn’t mutually exclusive as being mutually exclusive. Like, yes, there are obviously situations where something that is working on a bigger scale is objectively more important, due to what the stakes are — e.g., while Rick is a lying douche about blowing off Morty’s concern for the rest of the family in, “Get Schwifty,” he has a point about needing to focus on their song, because they had six hours, and they needed to damn well be ready or the entire earth was going to be disintegrated by a giant space laser

—but at the same time, there are plenty of situations where the stakes are not actually like that just because one thing works on a bigger scale than something else. In other words, Rick has the same damn problem that a lot of characters who’ve Seen Some Things Out There In The Great Wide Infinite have fallen into, where they have trouble seeing how the day-to-day shit in life on the ground even matters when compared to the rest of what’s out there in the universe

You see a more humanistic and sympathetic take on this trope with Rose Tyler and how she grows increasingly distanced from her Mum and from Mickey Smith because of everything that she sees while traveling with the Doctor, and how she doesn’t mean to say that there is no worth or meaning in working in a shop in, “Parting of the Ways” when she wants to open up the TARDIS and Jackie and Mickey want her to chill out, but when Rose compares eating chips and working in a shop to all of the life that she’s seen in the rest of the universe, she can’t just sit idle by and do nothing, knowing that life needs the Doctor and the Doctor needs her

……Clearly, Rick is not Rose Tyler and his approach to this is a lot less concerned with the value of anything (because unless it has some kind of objective value like X amount of Y money, he would probably say that it has no value whatsoever, even if he doesn’t necessarily feel that way for real)

But the same underlying principle applies, where Rick has seen a lot of shit and knows that certain problems are on a smaller scale than others. The problem is that, unlike Rose Tyler, Rick… doesn’t seem to get (at least not consistently or on any kind of reliable basis) that the smaller-scale problems can be important and meaningful without invalidating the importance of the much bigger-scale issues

Like, Rick has seen so much and he acts like he’s unfazed by a lot of what he goes through, but: 1. he DOES remember, every so often, the importance of the smaller-scale shit, because he’ll run into SOMETHING that trips over one of the few lines that he won’t cross (at least not in practice, since he thinks about all the lines he won’t cross pretty often, apparently), or kicks him in one of his genuine emotions, or something — so he clearly is not as unfazed as he wants everyone to think (see also: the true meaning of, “wubbalubbadubdub”);

and 2. HOWEVER, most of the time, he behaves dismissively toward the smaller-scale problems, and the underlying logic of WHY seems to be, “Yeah, I know this is bad, but frankly, all of it could be a lot worse, and this is pointless anyway, sooo really? Who cares?” — which is probably aimed at himself as much as everyone he ever gives this sort of attitude to

And there IS a balance here — Morty usually strikes up a pretty good balance between concern for bigger picture shit and for smaller scale shit (or at least he strikes the best balance that he can, given what he is capable of doing in most situations), and he and Summer both want to encourage Rick to find some kind of similar balance for himself

Buuuuuuut there’s a pretty fundamental failure to communicate going on in the Smith-Sanchez family here, because even after the few glimpses they’ve had into their Grandpa’s adventures, Summer and Morty don’t really know what kind of level Rick is working on here (and in fairness to them, I don’t think that Rick really gets this, either)

Philosophy, fuck yeah

Seriously, though, if you read even 35% of that, please go have a cookie or something, I didn’t even mean to go on that long

Uh

I feel like I should wrap this up now

ngl, I kinda ship Rick/Birdperson but that’s probably the closest that I have to an actual ship for this show, because Dan Harmon is mean to me and won’t give me enough options for Summer femslash

Wubbalubbadubdub

Nothing to see here

Okay, you can go, now. You’re free

[awellboiledicicle]

buzzlam replied to your post “buzzlam replied to your post “me: [enjoying puppy bowl] [a vegan...”

Just saying that if it is economically and medically viable, a vegan/plant based diet can reduce animal suffering, the effects of climate change and in some scenarios can aid human health. Being angered about an inappropriate diet for a dog would be hypocritical if not angered by the inadequacy of a primarily grain diet for many 'farmed' animals; it's something to look into if you care about animals- and if you are able to obviously aha ✌️��

ok because im in this kinda mood.

Veganism, in terms of white people tapdancing around doing it, is not good for jack and shit. 

People in southern american are starving to death because white people are going “QUINOA NOW” and I know damn well how immegrant and migrant workers are treated in this and other countries to grow your organic veggies.

Animals being raised for slaughter are treated really fucking well because poorly treated animals do not grow well. Starved animals don’t grow, not milked cows are usually in pain after a day or so, uncared for animals that have been domesticated don’t do too fucking well on their own. Beaten or neglected animals don’t sell well because their meat and product reflects it. I know because my family raised beef cows, we ran a carving & meat smoking shop, and there’s enough dairy farmers up here that I am personal friends with one that took me on a fucking tour.  Dairy farms and others often have working dogs-- which they feed kibble with meat in it. The difference between feeding their dogs and their other animals? Their other animals are made, via their fucking biological makeup, to eat grain as part of their diet. Because grain is a grass. That’s all it is, just the seeds of it. No one is feeding their damn herds only grain, or only one grain and walking away. That would be like pissing in their wallet. They have formulated feeds to make sure their animals get a good nutritional meal, sometimes its grain and meal mix, sometimes it’s hay, sometimes there’s a mix along with grazing time. 

You know who’s a fucking hypocrite in this lil informal info to info pissing match you’ve jumped into? You, buddy my pal. Because i’m suspecting just a lil touch of “i don’t care about the animals i just want to point out i’m better than you because I don’t eat meat” here. Just a smidge. Just like Mt. Everest is a pebble, like that. Because let me tell you--- Being pissed that some woman is looking at her love of animals and thinking her dietary/moral bent should apply to a dog, and knowing it’s stupid and knowing she probably has no real fucking clue because sometimes Foster people have the basic knowledge enough to get a pass and the shelters are packed, along with hoping to high heaven someone explains it to her, all that? That can exist along with knowing damn well what is humane treatment of livestock and inhumane treatment. I am 100% against inhumane keeping of livestock, because i’ve seen it and i’ve gone toe to toe with someone over treatment of horses and cattle and physically blocked a woman from shooting my then 7 year old little brother because he was petting a donkey we were trying to rescue. Because the woman thought he was going to steal the donkey, even though we then rescued him and then shelled out money for the next 11 years because she’d broken his legs over and over again and his feet still aren’t right. I’ve raised rescued baby donkeys that fuckers have starved till they looked spindly and ‘cute’ and we had to get them off the side the road because their buyers realized they were sick. I’ve sat in the animal shelter spoon feeding animals because abusive owners kicked their faces in and this is the only way they can eat and drink. 

So I fucking dare you to say i don’t care about animals and easing their suffering.  Farm animals have a whole list of problems, i’ll grant that-- illness because not a fucking buyer in this country wants them vaccinated against preventable diseases, every time an antibiotic comes out that could make them safer or healthier the whole fucking world loses their minds no matter how safe the thing is, things like that. 

I care about animals. I care about animals more than I care about a lot of my own fucking family, if i’m being 100% honest, and not a fucking person on this goddamn earth will tell me that because I don’t live on vegan shit-- or for that matter, people who i know damn well care their fucking heart out about humans and animals-- don’t care. Because i’ll be damned before you can look me in the eyes and tell me that the people who slave away making sure white people running around playing the morality olympics are less important than animals we’re already working on ensuring the welfare of.

if y’all don’t want to work through this long ass post, i will sum up.

Vegans don’t own the monopoly on caring for animals, in fact the giant pull by white vegans increases the suffering economically and personally on thousands of people worldwide, and also playing That Vegan Recruiter is never a welcome thing and just makes you sound annoying.  Good day.