#just felt like some Divorced alien grandpa

[griffincastle]

Your service to the overlords is appreciated :^)

[kittyspring-creates]

Long ago back in 2016 or something ben ten omnivers was still a thing and i was super obsesses. Recently got reminded how obessesed so hers some headcanons i remember.

Warning for angst, mind sucidle tendencies.

° ben is bi

° in be 10 alien force he and kevin were having a secret relationship, it was mildly abusive emotionally as after being with ben kevin woukd openly pin for gwen. Without her knowing it was a push and pull of which tennyson hed end up with.

°when omivers started ben thought kevin had finally accepted he loved ben more and was going to stay in town. But the night he waved off his cousin for collage kevin admited he was going with her. Assentially breaking up with ben all together

° when ben met rook he was dealing with a break up to a relationship no one knew about so he admits to himself he wasnt the friendliest person at first. Also becuase he was dealing with abandenment issues and didnt really want anything one new in his life at the moment

° past headcanon when ben was like 13 he started realizing how much he hated his own body, assentially when cleaning out his moms closet he found out he liked the female aspect of things. Later that year finding out what trans was

° the first person he told was his grand pa as he was ashamed of how he felt, max talked him through all if the possibilities till they landed on ben was really a girl. In private max started calling him britney and ben really enjoyed it. Max even changed bens pronouns when they were alone.

° but becuase of the time, place they lived in and later ben being a galactic star he never felt comftorable with anyone knowing anything about him they didnt already assume. Expecially after and warning abusive father alert. Kirby tennyson found ben wearing lip stick it started a huge fight between the family to which ben let slip he was trans. His dad couldnt comprehend the idea saying the omitrixs messed up bens mind and when ben explaied the dna portion of how he felt kirby marched out to demand max abd the plumers change bens dna back.

°when he got to maxs trailer he was beyond reason and max was furious that he coulsnt just accept his child. It was max that gave his iwn son the ultimatime to accept his family as they are or to leave so they can grow in peace. Eventually Kirby left and ben blamed himself fir the divorce and his grandpa losing a son despite max telling him it was kirbys fault for blaming instead of accepting

° no one told the real reason fir the divorce just that the tennysons werent in love anymore.

°in alien force ben tried his best to be 'normal' when kevin broke his heart to many times he tried ti date juilie, she was cute and fit and loved sports like he did. She even disnt mind the alien thing. But there was no spark there the way he and kevin had which caused a distance to start in their relationship. Untill ben was avoiding her sometimes. In her break up story ben cane across way more selfish then he was but he didnt correct her, thats how he saw him and thats how hed always be to her.

° one thing ben gets annoyed with is when people push relationships in him. Like ester or kai and majorly when the four arm princess wanted him as a husband. He liked ester alot but enough to know it wasnt a good idea, he was use to girls falling for him at first then seeing how selfish he was or unattentive and getting annoyed with him. He usually waited it out till they stopped wanting to hang out

°with kai it made him uncomftorable. Sure she was strong willed and he loved that aboit people. But he also knew she disnt like all forms of him, she was meh about how he was born she was meh aboit most of his alien forms except ben wolf. Thats what she was in love with and he wonderes why no one else saw it. All they saw was that darn future version of himself that kept popping up.

°he hated his future self, he was all big and muscly and had a beard. Ben disnt want any of those. He wanted to be like his mom, slim and with an aura of grace, a good cook and makes a killer punch everyone raves about. A woman that glows from head to toe. But seeing his future self always made him feel hopeless.

° ben has a secret closet that he has for all the things grandpa and later his mom even got him. Lots of cute outfits, his mom got him a bra with build in breast not to big she says. After learning to tuck she got him more form fitting underwear when he asked ever so sheepishly. Sometimes hed wear the stuff only in the house. When he knew no one would come to visit. But its the tennyson house hold they always have someone dropping by unannounced.

°ben has special contacts for going out. Purple ones to cover his green eyes He'll put a sweat band over his omnitrix and it usually hides it well enough. He liked to curl his hair till its a curly version of his regular mop.

° when dressed up like this ben likes to go to clubs in the under ground city, there people dont really know human anatomy to much so when he ends up with someone for the night they dont question his body, but he never takes off his shirts. He'll be the first to admit hes kinda slutty but he likes it that way.

° ben didnt want to admit it but he was falling in love with Rook, he was just so diffrent from everyone ben met. There was no real pressure from him to be better or Rook losing his temper and there were times Ben was waiting for it. He was funny without knowing it. The way he talked or woukd even light up when he talked about his home planet. Sometimes he got a sad look about him when hed mention how farm life was like he liked the memories but didnt want it to be his life.

°when ben came with him to visit family he was over joyed that rook trusted him enough at that point he was starting to develop a crush. Imidiatly he adored Rooks siblings despite the large man being annoyed by them. When ben was told the story of rooks first love and watched as the two walked away for the celebration he tried not ti be sad about it. Saying its just a silly crush and rooks not his type anyway.

° later down the road when ben tried not to be hoplessly in love with rook. He found he when rook disnt like something it hurt him alot more then when other people didnt like him. When rook reveiled he wasnt fake fighting in the under ground city to throw off a villian at the time. It crushed ben to know he really felt those things about him. That he really thought ben must be a disapointment compaired to the galactic show that was broadcast about him. And after the fiasco with albedo ben pretending to be him. He didnt want to talk to rook after the fact. Knowing that rook couldnt tell the difference becuase he wanted ben to be something he is not. So despirate for ben to be this made up hero rook has in his head that rook couldnt even tell when there was an imposter

°eventually ben pushed it all down like he did everything else and pretended he was fine with it. But hes not ever fine. More times then he liked to count hed cry at night wishing things were diffrent that he was what everyone wanted him to be becuase he did nothing but disapoint people around him. Thats what he convinced himself

° as a last few notes for bens trans life. Durring one of rook shars visits her brother was to busy to really hand out so she searched for ben tto be her earth guide. Accedentally uncovering his closet of secrets. He was scared at first untill shar asked if they coukd get matching earth outfits since it seemed he was into girlish cloths. She didnt understand but ben never passed up the opertunity for a fashion show. They ended up dressing in matching outfits. Short shorts that went up to their stomachs and showed off their legs with a red pokadot white button up that was tucked in. Big sunglasses and a scarf tied in a bow for the mall, a long butter yellow dress with flowy short sleeves, flats and tied back hair with curled bangs for the park. Short overals and pink shirt with bens favorite dusty blue boots for hanging out at mr smoothy. And for their sleep over, bratz inspired shirts. Ben wire pretty princess symbol as he was a pretty princess and little pink shorts. Shar was given one with angel with angel wings and purple shorts to sleep in. They did all the sleepover things ben wanted to do. Taking quizes from magazines, doing eachothers nails, watching movies, having deep convos.

° in there conversation ben tells her about being trans and swears her to a pinky promis bot ti telk anyone. He goes on to tell her how everyday gets worse and he fells trapped in his public image and male body. About how he hates his future self. Shar tells him the future is never set in stone and he could be Britney Tennyson if he really wanted but bens afraid that his future version is what others force him to being ause no one can or has acceoted him for all of him before not his human form plus all his alien forms cause they are a part if him. Shar tells him stories if the farm and her neighbours transititons. How gender is never a box its just a way if expression on her planet. If someone says they are a girl then they are infact a girl no matter what their body tells them otherwise. Its the first time ben has openly cried infront of someone other then his mom and grandpa.

°shar tells him when he is ready rook blonko will be just as accepting. The two echange numbers and often share photos of what their doing with one another. Its nice to finally have a female frined and not a girl trying to romantisize him for a change.

°later down the road Shars wors were true. When Rook was infected with fistricks body chemicals, after their mission ben was told he had to watch rook till the effects wore off. It was alot harder for him to be aroind Rook as now he was exactly bens type. Meat head he loved em big and dumb and right now thats what rook was. All rook coukd talk about was going to parties until ben 'convinced' him to just go to bed. When he thoigh rook was asleep he left the mans home to go get ready for his own party. Dressing up in tight jeans a green crop top over a black long sleeve crop top. Hair extentions to make his hair way longer and a purple cap with his purple contacts. He left for this our door concert like party some people were having. In the mix of the crowed his good mood was ruined when he bumped into fist rook. Without thinking of how he looked he tried ti drak rook out if there lecturing him of how iresponsible he was being. It took rook a moment to realize it was ben dragging him and not just some chick.

When ben realized he was in one of his briteny otfits he started feaking out at rook seeing him like that. Fistrook told him to chill out that he was to uptight and ti not let a hot outfit go to waste. Some how convincing ven to continue parting and somehow parting with him. Eventually ben did calm down and rook started taking photos with bens phone of their night. They hung around the concert, went to a soap party and bounced in a trampolen full of foam, went roller blading, danced at an age apropriate rave, where rook dipped ven and in a moment of pure adrenilen kissed ben. Much to his suprise. But he couldnt dwell on it mich as he was dragged ti the next party.

° then ended up at a dennys where they ate pancakes till the sun came up. Both adrenilin hung over and to tired ti care where they were. Eventually they went their seprate ways. Ben crashed on his couch and woke up a few hours later remembering the kiss. He bulted up, changed to look like his public figure then raced out the door. But when he got to the plumers head Quarters rook was back to normal in the infermery as he didnt remeber the last few days and he was worried something was wrong. Till the grey matters explained everything and how ben watched over him. Rook expressed his thanks. Ben was disheartened by it all. Rook had no memory, no recelection of britney or the kiss and so everything went back to business as usual. Ben chopped up the kiss to being fistricks dna in rook and not an indication that maybe just maybe rook liked him to

[ghostly-cabbage]

Frigid (Chapter 5)

Genre: Horror, Angst, Enemies to Friends (to maybe more??? ohoho) 

Chapter Rating: T (Language, Canon Typical Violence, Brief Mention of Underage Drug Use) 

Word Count: 6,554

AO3 FFN

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The black and white dashed pavement was all Wes saw. It moved underneath his clumsy feet in slow motion. 

Someone was holding his hand; he could feel the heat of their palm enveloping his. His hand was small in theirs. His shoulders were heavy, weighed down by a backpack. 

He wrung the padded red strap with his free hand. The person leading him tugged him along after them, insistent, but not unkind. When he looked up, he couldn’t see who it was. The sun was too bright, glinting in his eyes and allowing nothing but the dark impression of a silhouette. 

He had to get home, Wes remembered faintly. They had to get home or they’d be in trouble. An odd feeling crept up his legs, and he stumbled over an untied shoelace. The person with him made sure he didn’t fall, pulling up on his arm. 

“Silly Wesley, I thought you said you knew how to tie your shoes?” The person said. Their voice sounded muffled, like he was underwater. It sounded… familiar. Somehow. Like Wes should recognize it. 

They kept walking across the street, the far side growing no closer.

Wes swallowed, his throat dry. 

“Something’s wrong,” he said. His tongue felt clumsy in his mouth. He tried to look up at the person guiding him. They weren’t looking at him, and the sun drove his gaze away again. He looked back at the road, then over his shoulder where the blurry shape of school became more distant with every step.

 “Please listen to me this time, something isn’t right,” he tried again. His voice was small in his throat. His chaperone ignored him, or maybe they just couldn’t hear him. 

Cold panic seeped into him and he tried to resist against the person guiding him. He dug his heels into the rough hot pavement. He twisted and pulled at his hand, gripping the person's wrist in hopes he could slow them down. 

“It’s okay, Wessie! Your friends will be there when you come back,” came the voice, happy and completely oblivious. “I know it’s sad, but you’ll see your friends again, you’ll see.” 

“No,” he protested, the fear condensing into a lump in his throat. “No, we can’t keep going.” He didn’t know why. He just knew they had to stop. 

They had to stop before it happened. 

It ached deep in his bones, the dread and the sirens. His vision swirled and he blinked furiously against the tears. 

“Please,” he pleaded. “Please, stop, you have to.” He yanked on them, but they showed no sign of being inconvenienced. A wail rose in his throat. 

Why were they not listening?

“Maybe your Mom will let us have some fruit snacks when we get there, how’s that sound?” 

And then it was too late. 

His guardian gasped, and yanked him back. It sent a painful jolt through his arm. He stumbled backwards and hit the ground so hard it rattled his brain. 

The sound he could never push from his memories filled the world. The squeal of tires and a wet crunch. A squeal: high pitched and girlish. The solid thunk and crack of a body hitting the pavement, skidding and rolling and breaking and—

Wes sat bolt upright, strangling back a scream. 

Panic tingled over his skin and he clutched at his chest, fingers curling into the cotton of his nightshirt. His breath came in rapid gulps and his eyes darted around his room. Like he was expecting to see— 

He screwed his eyes shut and bit into his bottom lip until he tasted blood. God… He hadn’t had one that bad— that vivid in a long time. He focused on the beat of his heart for several long seconds, forcing his breathing to slow. 

God. He hated nightmares. 

He opened his eyes, taking in the dimly illuminated shapes of his dresser, desk and footboard. His curtains were drawn, and the weak light of morning tried in vain to worm it’s way into the room from behind the fabric. 

Wes reached for his phone on his bedside table. He unplugged it from the charger and winced against the light of the screen, 6:31 a.m. Friday. 

They’d had the last two days off from school due to damages to the plumbing system, but apparently it was all fixed up because school hadn’t been cancelled today. 

After that, going back to sleep was a lost cause. 

He shook his head and peeled his covers back. Might as well get an early start on getting ready for school. With a yawn he opened his door and glanced down the hall. 

Kyle’s door wasn’t open yet, which wasn’t surprising. Kyle was late most mornings; he liked sleeping in about as much as he liked weed… he slept in so much because of the weed more specifically. 

The house was chilly and quiet. 

That was until Wes heard footsteps and the sounds of drawers opening and closing in the kitchen. 

His right hand slid along the guide rail, the polished wood still smelling of lemon. Reaching the bottom of the stairs he poked his head around the corner of the wall and into the kitchen. He blinked. 

It was his dad. He was standing at the toaster, a butter knife held in his hand. Neatly ironed suit already on. 

Wes walked in without announcing himself and went to the cupboard. His dad jumped, catching a glimpse of him over his shoulder. 

“Oh, Wesley.” He cleared his throat and shifted towards him. “You’re up early.” 

“Yep.” 

He got a box of cereal and closed the cupboard. He turned his back to his father to get a clean bowl. 

“Right. Uhm. Did you… want toast?”

Wes nudged the cupboard door closed with an elbow. 

“No, I don’t want toast.” He put his bowl on the dining table and filled it with cereal. His dad watched him. 

“There’s eggs in the fridge too if you—” 

“Dad, it’s fine.” Wes didn’t look at him, and put the cereal box away. He got the jug of milk from the fridge and poured it over the sugary monstrosity that had the audacity to call itself a balanced breakfast. Other than the sound of the milk glugging, the kitchen was tense and silent. Wes screwed the cap back on the milk and put it back in the fridge, getting a spoon next from the silverware drawer. 

The toaster popped, and his Dad startled. 

Under different circumstances Wes might have laughed. 

He pulled out a seat at the table, its legs scraping over the hardwood floor. He sank down into the cold chair and started eating. He pulled his phone out from his sweatpant pocket and scrolled without really paying attention to the images and text that slid past. 

“Aren’t you late for work or something?” he said. His dad stopped scraping the butter on his toast. 

“Now that I’m finally settled into the office a bit more I don’t have to be in till seven.” 

Wes clicked his tongue. “Oh. Joy.” He shoveled another spoonful of cereal into his mouth. His dad sighed, and he could see his shoulders slump out of the corner of his eye. 

“Your uh, tryouts are today, right?” 

“Why’s it matter? Not like you ever have time to come to my games anyway.” He said it hoping it would hurt. It was childish, Wes knew it was, but he just wanted his dad to get it for once.

“Wesley, kiddo... I know this has been hard on you and your brother—” Wes snorted. His Dad pressed on. “But this job was an amazing opportunity, I really think it could do a lot of good for us.” 

“We were fine with the job you had.”

“I thought a change of environment would help after everything that happened. I’m only doing what’s best for the two of you. For all of us, as a family.”

Wes laughed. It was empty and brittle. 

“Well, that’s news to me. We’re hardly even a family anymore.” 

“Wesley,” his dad’s voice took on a stern edge. 

“You didn’t care about us, if you did you would have asked what we wanted.” 

“And this is exactly why I didn’t.” His Dad gestured jerkily towards him with the butter knife.

“What’s that mean?” Wes slapped his phone down and glared up at his dad.

“It’s clear that you’re still too immature to deal with this like an adult. I’m doing this with your futures in mind, Wesley.” 

“By ripping us away from home? From all our friends? From Grandma and Grandpa? Uncle Ronnie?” Wes’ heart was thumping in his ears and he wanted to scream, flip the table over, something to make the pressure in his chest go away. 

His dad scoffed. 

“Don’t raise your voice at me. I told you when we moved that we would visit for the holidays.” 

“That just makes it all better. Doesn’t it?” he pushed through grit teeth. He squeezed the handle of his spoon in his fist, the cool metal pressing indentions into his skin. 

“The world doesn’t revolve around you and what you want. It’s no one's fault but your own that you’re choosing to learn it the hard way.” 

“You’re such a fucking hypocrite.” 

“Wesley!” his dad snapped. “One thing you won’t do is speak to me like that under my roof, you understand me?”

Wes held his dad’s gaze, not backing down.

“After tryouts you come right home and stay here for the weekend.” 

“What? Seriously?!” 

“Yes, seriously.”

Rage whirled in his throat and he bit down on his tongue. He stood up, his chair skidding backwards. Fucking bullshit. It was fucking bullshit. 

He threw his spoon down onto the table. It clattered and bounced off the side of his bowl. He snatched his phone and stormed away from the table and back up to his room. He slammed his door behind him and stood there seething, his hands balled into fists. 

He stood there as the seconds ticked by, eyes roaming over his room for something he wouldn’t mind breaking. The buzz of his phone distracted him, and he looked down, turning on the screen.

If it was from Dad he was gonna—

Alien Fucker: ? 

Oh. Right. 

It made sense that he’d probably woken up Kyle. He typed a message back into their chat. 

Basketball Freak: Nothing

Alien Fucker: Didn’t sound like nothing 

Basketball Freak: Dad grounded me again 

...

it’s whatever at this point  

Alien Fucker: F in the chat

…

want me to talk to him?  

Basketball Freak: no, its fine 

Alien Fucker: K just lemme know 

Kyle always felt like he had to be the mediator. In the year leading up to the divorce he was the middle man between Mom and Dad, despite Wes telling him that it was ridiculous. Their parents were grown-ass adults. They shouldn’t have fucking needed their seventeen-year-old-son to deliver messages back and forth because they couldn’t stand to talk to each other. And Dad called him immature. 

Kyle hated the tension, he took on the peacekeeper role like a job, trying to hold them all together in vain as the family crumbled around him. Wes probably hadn’t helped any, looking back. 

He picked fights with Dad like it was his job. 

And Mom… He still didn’t talk to Mom. 

He tried to get where Kyle was coming from, he really did. But pretending that shit wasn't fucked wasn’t going to unfuck it. 

Their parents deserved to know what they'd done was wrong. And if hating them was what it took, then goddamnit, Wes was going to do it.  

Wes tossed his phone onto his bed and started getting dressed for school. 

***

The school day passed by uneventful. Mia had the scoop about some couple that had broken up over the two day break that Wes hardly paid attention to. He helped her set her shutter speed and they took pictures of fast moving objects outside. 

At lunch he sat with Kyle and his stoner friends. 

In chemistry, Wes got there after Danny. He set his stuff down, scooting his stool away from him. They ignored each other the best they could as people got settled for class. 

 Wes bounced his leg on the stool’s rung and kept an eye on the clock. Two more classes until tryouts. 

Mrs. Merriweather erased the notes on the board from last class and once the bell rang her iron gaze flicked over the class to make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be. 

“Once I take roll, you’ll work on writing your findings from the last lab in a short essay.” An unenthused murmur filtered through the class. Wes glanced sideways to see Danny grimacing. 

Hah. Served him right. 

“Mr. Fenton. You can make up for your absence last class in an hour's detention after school today.”

Some of their classmates turned to look at Danny, half smiles and shared glances. Nothing was more unifying in a classroom than someone who wasn't you getting in trouble. 

Danny hunched his shoulders and sighed.

“Yes, Mrs. Merriweather,” he said.     

Sucked for him, but really, what did he expect? Skipping class was a risk he decided to take. 

Wes used his notes from the lab he’d done by himself, and started writing his short essay. The class quieted and the only sound was the occasional whisper and the shuffle of papers. 

Danny was quiet, fiddling with a pencil and looking at his phone under the table when Mrs. Merriweather wasn’t watching. Wes couldn’t tell who Danny was messaging, but if he had to guess it’d be the other two-thirds of his friend group. Eventually, Danny pulled out papers from a beat up binder and started working on it. From the corner of his eye he’d guess it was history homework.  

All Wes cared about was that Danny didn’t bother him. He wrote his essay with his mind half on the words and half on the growing excitement of hitting the court. Finally, finally he’d be able to do one of the only things he was good at. The minutes dragged past and around the fiftieth time he’d glanced up at the clock Danny shifted next to him. 

“Dude, chill out, you’re making me nervous,” he said quietly. He didn’t even look up from his homework when he said it. 

Wes lifted his head from his partially done essay and narrowed his eyes. 

“Mind your own business, Fenton.” 

Fenton rolled his eyes but said no more. 

Class wrapped up twenty minutes later, Wes turned in his sloppily written essay and bolted out of the room. The hallways swelled with students as they poured from their classrooms. Econ was all that stood between Wes and tryouts. He swung by his locker, grabbing his books. 

He was about to turn to leave when he bumped into someone. They both stumbled back and Wes recognized the pungent smell coming off the other person. 

“Whoa man, sorry ‘bout that.” Said a guy with blond hair and a beanie slouched over his head. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Wes said, trying to get around him. 

“Hey wait, you’re Wesley, right? Kyle’s lil bro.” 

Well, that explained the smell. 

“Uh, yeah that’s me. Sorry, but I’ve gotta—” 

“Dude, sweet. Name’s Robbie, I’m pretty chill with your brother,” he said. 

“That’s nice. Well, nice to meet you and stuff.” Wes stepped around the stoner and headed towards his class. 

“Yeah, totally! I wasn’t here for lunch but Kyle said you hung out with the group today—” Robbie said, following after Wes. 

He pushed a breath between his teeth. Great, guess this was happening now. 

“—but like Kyle’s told me a lot about you, man.” 

“Cool?” Seriously, why was this guy talking to him? 

“Yeah, I just wanted to say the group’s mega on your side.” 

“Uh-huh. Cool.” 

Wait. 

“On my side about what?” Wes slowed his pace.

“The ghosts, bro!” 

“What about them?” 

“Pf, bruh. We’ve lived in Amity Park for like, ever? We’re trying to convince him that this ghost stuff is legit.” 

Wes scoffed. “Good luck with that. I’ve been trying since I was like six.” 

Robbie shook his head. “I know what’cha mean, bro. Dude’s like a steel trap... or however that saying goes.” Robbie shrugged. 

Wes chuckled. “Let me know if you guys make any progress with him,” he said. He’d meant it as a joke, but Robbie nodded seriously. 

“Hell yeah, dude, that’s what’s up. You can count on me.” He held out a closed fist to Wes. 

He rolled his eyes but didn’t hide his grin. He fist bumped Robbie. 

“Okay, well… I’m going to class now.” 

Robbie held up his hands. “Oh, yeah, totes. I should probably do that too, now that I think about it.”

“Probably.” 

Robbie turned and walked away in the opposite direction, a single textbook swinging in his grasp. Kyle’s friends were always friendly. Even if they were a bit annoying. 

Wes was almost late for Econ, thanks to the fact the class was on the other side of the building. He slipped into the room and sat down, letting out a breath when the last bell rang thirty seconds later. 

Mr. Brown took his place at the front of the class, voice as monotonous as ever. His button-up was wrinkled around his midsection, and he ran his hands over it like that would help.

“Alright class, we’re going to start talking about the stock market today,” he said, pulling up Google on the projector.    

Wes hardly absorbed a word from Mr. Brown’s lecture, which was a total snooze-fest. The stock market wasn’t exactly riveting stuff. He bounced his leg under his desk, watching the clock.

Mr. Brown was in the middle of describing the homework: picking three stocks and tracking their ups and downs through-out the weekend, when the bell rang. Wes had been about ready to start pulling his hair out. 

He shot up from his seat and was first out the door.  

Wes made a beeline for his locker. Or at least he tried. He got stuck behind kids walking at a snail's pace three times. He got a few dirty looks for pushing past people loitering in their groups. 

Eventually, he made it to his locker and fumbled with the lock. Once open, he stuffed his books and notes anywhere they’d fit. Papers crumpled and his notebook creaseed down the center. He pulled his bag from the hook and slung it over his shoulder. He headed to the locker rooms at a jog, back to bobbing and weaving around people in the halls.  

“Mr. Weston, no running in the halls!” He heard Mr. Lancer call after him as he went past the English room. He slowed down to a power walk, not caring that he looked stupid. 

He got to the locker room and got his gym clothes out. He changed quickly, ripping his shirt off and almost tripping over his jeans. 

There were other guys in the room, some he recognized and others he didn’t. Before he put his phone away he checked it, the screen lighting up. At the very top of the lock screen was a message notification. 

Mom: How was the first week of school?

His fingers tightened around his phone, pushing the blood away from his fingertips and leaving them pale. He stared at it until the screen dimmed. 

He didn’t want to think about it, not now—not at all. He tossed his phone into his bag and zipped it up. 

Out of sight out of mind. 

He locked up the rest of his stuff and left the locker room. He followed a few other guys into the gym. 

The overhead lights reflected in bright streaks on the polished wood floor. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the smell of cleaners and old set in sweat. He scuffed the toe of his sneaker on the floor. The high pitched sound echoed around the room; it felt like home. 

Mrs. Tetslaff was standing by the bleachers, writing something on a clipboard. A few students that looked like freshmen were wheeling out a wire cart heaped with basketballs. 

Wes walked towards Tetslaff, coming to stop a ways away. He shifted from foot to foot in anticipation. Within a minute or two there was a loose ring of guys waiting around. A majority were talking amongst themselves, joking around. Clearly they were last year’s team, bonded by hours of blood, sweat, and tears. Wes was on the outside. He felt a sour twinge in his stomach watching them. He wondered how his old team was doing… None of them had messaged him since he left. Not even Cole or Adam.

“Ay, new kid!” 

Wes turned to see a guy with short black hair and olive brown skin. The guy was a bit taller than him. He came up and clapped Wes on the back so hard it stung his skin. He stumbled forward a bit before catching himself. 

“I hear you played point in Cali.” 

Wes tapped the toe of his shoe against the ground a few times. “Yeah?” 

The guy smiled, dark eyes sparkling. He had a nicely structured face, the stubble on his chin making it a reasonable guess that he was a senior. 

“I’m José. Wesley, right? ” He crossed his arms over his chest. Wes didn’t know if he was intending to show off his biceps or not, but it certainly seemed like he was. “I was point-guard last year, and ain’t no way in hell some lanky California kid is gonna yoink my spot.” 

Wes carefully gaged for any hostility, but there was none. José was all smiles. A friendly challenge? 

“I guess we’ll just see about that, won’t we?” He smirked back. 

Somehow José’s smile got bigger. He laughed, his posture breaking into something more casual. 

“I like you already, Wesley.” He stuck out his hand for a handshake. Wes obliged. José grabbed his hand without mercy and shook so vigorously Wes thought he’d lose his arm.

“Just ‘Wes’ is fine,” he said with a wince. José released his hand. “Ow,” he muttered, shaking his hand out. 

“C’mon, you can hang with us, save you the embarrassment of mingling with the Freshmen.” José slung an arm around his shoulders and steered him into the inner circle of guys. He followed, mostly because he didn’t have much of a choice. As they got close the group looked up, varying levels of welcoming. 

“Wes, this is Mark,” he pointed to the dude the farthest from them. He was shorter than Wes, long brown hair tied behind his head. 

“‘Sup.” 

“Next we got Joseph.” José motioned to a guy with terrible posture, it made it hard to tell how tall he was. He looked familiar and it took a few seconds for the light bulb to come on. It clicked and Wes remembered he had Homeroom with him. “We just call him Jo or Joey though.” The guy in question threw up a peace sign. He had light grey hair, obviously the product of a good chunk of money and some bleach. 

Now that Wes thought of it, living in Amity Park, it was weird how many people didn’t have crazy bleached or dyed hair. Maybe it was more of a west coast thing? Or Amity was just behind on the times. Probably both.  

“This is Anthony,” José moved to the next guy. He was about Wes’ height and he had neatly cut and styled almond brown hair. He looked like he belonged in a boy band. His eyes were hazel green, and he looked Wes up and down. 

“Hey,” was all he said. Wes tried not to stare too long as José moved on. 

“Last but not least we got our boy Isaac.” He had black hair, shaved on the sides and longer on top with loose curls. He had dark skin like José. Isaac pointed finger guns at him. 

“Yo, man, pleasure to meet ya,” he said. He had more of a detectable latin accent than José.   

José broke away from Wes to clap hands with Isaac and pull him into a one armed hug. 

“This here our inner circle, Joey and Mark are Juniors like you, but the rest of us ’re Seniors.” 

“It’s nice to meet all you guys, God, you don’t know how long it feels like I’ve waited for today,” he said. He rubbed his upper arm.  

“I just hope you ain’t rusty. I heard you got game.” Isaac said.

Wes shrugged a shoulder. “I mean…” 

“Humble,” José nodded. “I like that about you, Wes. I’m ‘bouta smoke you, make sure you stay that way.” 

The rest of the group let out a chorus of “oh”s. The gauntlet had officially been thrown down in front of witnesses. Wes didn’t fight his smile as he sank into the familiar feeling. 

“Cool, dude. Just don’t cry when I dunk on your ass, okay?” 

The group oh’d louder this time. 

“Dammnn, new kid! You got spunk, never would have guessed from class,” Joseph laughed. “Seriously, in Homeroom he never talks to anyone,” he told the rest of the group. 

“Hey, no judgment, Anthony’s been needing another introvert to keep him company.” Mark grabbed Anthony by the shoulders and gave him a rattle. 

Anthony waved him off. “Shut up.” 

The sound of a whistle pierced through the gym. They all cringed and turned to look at the source of the noise.

Mrs. Testlaff had her hands on her hips. 

“What’re you all waiting around for? You know the drill, warm-ups first.” She clapped a palm against the back of her clipboard. Her voice boomed through the gym.  “Two laps around the gym, go!” 

***

The amount of drills they did had to be criminal. Wes’ muscles burned and his hair was spiked with sweat and water from the fountain down the hall. He’d forgotten his water bottle at home, which he wholeheartedly blamed on his dad.  

It took a while, shaking off the rust and sinking back into his comfort zone. It felt like the court snapped into focus and all that mattered was the squeak of shoes and the fleeting touch of the ball against the curve of his palm. His body moved the exact way he wanted it to. He spun and dodged, nailed three point shots more often than not, felt like he was riding a high.

They practiced individual skills before they moved onto mock games. José was no joke. He moved like he could read the offence’s mind. It was frustrating and exhilarating at the same time. 

The group’s synchronicity of their plays made their history together obvious. 

The practice games were intense and competitive. For every layup and three pointer Wes scored, José would score the same. The others weren’t pushovers either. Isaac would shut him out with a shit-eating grin and Anthony was way faster than he looked. 

José blew past his sophomore defender and jumped, slamming the ball through the basket and holding onto the rim for a few seconds before he dropped. He bounced into a jog, whooping in triumph. Isaac and Mark high-fived him while Joseph and Anthony, who were on Wes’s side, groaned.

Mrs. Tetslaff blew the whistle and everyone stopped, turning towards her. 

“Alright, gentlemen, good job today. Take a five minute break. Go get some water and then we’ll move into cool downs.” 

Wes sighed, his shoulders sagging. Admittedly, he was tired, but he didn’t want to stop. His new friend group walked towards the corner of the gym to a bench where they had water bottles and towels. Wes, who had neither, just went for the company. Issac grabbed his shoulder as he neared. 

“Shit, man, you can actually play,” he said, giving him a shake.

“So can you guys,” he breathed. Wes grabbed the hem of his shirt and used it to wipe the sweat off his face. “You didn’t take it easy on me that’s for sure.” 

“Mrs. Tetslaff was impressed, I could tell,” Joseph said, sprawling out on one of the benches. 

“You think so?” Wes glanced back at the stern woman who was in the middle of yelling at a pair of Freshmen across the gym.

“For sure, bro. The way you played you might jus’ make varsity,” José said, smacking the cap of his water bottle closed. 

“‘Might’?” Wes quirked a brow. 

“Homie, yer gonna have to get past us to make varsity,” Isaac pointed out, gesturing to the rest of the guys. Wes blinked, looking at the five of them. 

“Damn, guess you’re right.” 

“It’s okay, you can take Joey’s spot, he won’t miss it,” Mark said, snapping his hand towel at Joseph. He squawked and rolled off the bench onto the floor with a thud. 

“Asshole! And what the hell d’you mean I wouldn’t miss it?” He pushed himself up to glare up at Mark. 

“Bruh, all last season you cared more about flirting with Tiff than showing up to practice on time.” 

Joseph’s cheeks flushed pink. 

“So? I still got better stats than you did. Plus who doesn’t lose track of time when flirting with a cute girl?”

“I dunno, man. Sounds like a straight problem,” Anthony said from Wes’ other side. Wes looked over at him, a little surprised. 

Joseph pushed himself up. “Shut up, Anthony, as if you haven’t been late because you’re flirting with some guy.” 

Anthony snorted. “At this school? Gimme a break.” 

“Whatever, dude, at least I don’t wanna fuck a ghost.” 

That managed to get a reaction out of Anthony. He stiffened, cheeks tinting red. His gaze darted around the ground before his expression hardened.

“If I remember right, Joseph, you retweeted Dash’s ‘Its not gay if he’s dead’ tweet just like everybody else,” he shot back, lifting his chin.

Joseph’s eyes widened. 

Isaac, Mark and José spluttered from behind Joseph. Anthony smirked and crossed his arms over his chest. 

“Because it was funny! It was a meme, dude!”

“No need to get defensive now, it’s okay. You can admit that Phantom made you have a gay awakening.” Anthony had an evil twinkle in his eye, like a shark that’d caught the scent of blood.

“What? Dude, no I— Guys come on, help me out here.” 

Isaac stepped up next to Joseph and threw an arm around him, pulling him closer by his neck. 

“Homie, no cap, I wasn’t bi till I moved here. That probably ain’t no coincidence, know wha’m’sayin’?  

Joseph looked stricken, like he could feel himself losing the argument. 

“Oh come on—what about you, newbie?” 

All eyes turned to Wes and he swallowed. Oh, God. Why were people in Amity so goddamn weird? Attracted? To a ghost? 

“Uhm… I mean. Uh. I’ve only seen him once…” He twisted the toe of his shoe against the ground. “Also he’s technically dead, right? Isn’t that like, messed up?” 

Everyone who wasn’t Joseph just rolled their eyes or puffed out a breath. 

“He’s new, give him a while, he’ll come around,” Isaac said, sharing glances with the guys in support of literally thinking a ghost was hot. Wes tried to hide his bewilderment. He seriously doubted he’d “come around”. What was wrong with these people? 

Joseph shoved himself away from Isaac’s grip and interlocked his arm with Wes’. 

“Fuck you guys, Wes is my new bestfriend now.” 

“Boy, you literally out here with silver hair, who’da fuck you think you foolin?” José said, jabbing a flat hand towards him.

“...Elliot said it’d help me get girls’ numbers,” he said softly, lifting his hands to tend it with a frown.  

“You actually listened to that clown?” Anthony grimaced. 

“Bro, I thought you said you liked it?” 

Anthony rolled his eyes. “Whatever.” 

“Oof, Anthony hit his word limit, guys.” Mark said. The guys broke into laughter. For the first time since moving to Amity Park, Wes actually didn’t hate being there. 

But because it was in-fact Amity Park, of course that’s when shit went sideways. 

There was an explosion from above them. Wes flinched, whipping around towards the source of the sound. The overhead lights flickered, and debris rained down on the center of the court. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling of the gym, sunlight streaming through. A huge shape flew down through the hole, stopping to float thirty feet up. The being glowed unnaturally and had what looked like a mohawk of green flames. The thing looked around, and then flew straight towards Wes and the group. Wes stumbled back into Isaac, his brain short circuiting.

“What the hell—” 

“Ghost!” someone screamed, and that’s all it took for the gym to descend into chaos. People scattered, fleeting through the nearest exits. 

But Wes and his new friends had nowhere to go. They all backed up, pushed against each other in the corner.

“Oh shit,” José said, voice hushed. “It’s Skulker.” 

“What? Who?” Wes whispered back. 

“Dude, shut up! He’s coming closer,” Joseph hissed, slapping a hand over Wes’ mouth. He didn’t even have time to be pissed about it before the ghost was right on top of them.

It grinned. The air felt heavy and Wes’ heart kicked in his chest. Its body was grey and sleek like metal. Out of all the ghosts that they could have, of course Amity had a fucking cyborg ghost. 

The ghost loomed over them. “Have any of you feeble little humans seen the Ghost Child recently?” Its voice was gruff and low, echoing horribly against Wes’ ears. Its eyes were disks of solid green burning into them as it stared. It was still smiling, jagged metal teeth gleaming in the dim reflected light. 

Wes wanted to say “no”, maybe that would make it leave, but Joey’s hand was still firmly over his mouth. The ghost leaned closer, its glare narrowing. 

“Well? Speak, you sniveling humans,” it growled. 

There was a moment’s silence, then: “recently? No.” 

Wes, along with the rest of the group’s attention snapped over in dismay to Anthony. He looked nonchalant, or would have if not for the rigidness of his arms and the tension in his brow. Their gaze slowly craned back over to the ghost, terrified of its reaction.

But the ghost leaned back, demeanor doing a complete one-eighty. “Huh, you haven’t?” Its eyes went cartoonishly big. He looked at a panel that appeared on the back of his wrist. “My scanners say he’s in the area.” The ghost tapped in the scanner a few times, before he gave up and shrugged. 

“No matter.” The cruel smile spread over its face again. “All I have to do is stir up a bit more trouble and my prey will surely appear.” 

Wes watched in horror as long wicked green blades extended out from the ghost’s arms. It closed the small gap between them, a chuckle building up from its throat—or whatever ghosts had. 

“Why hasn’t someone hit the Ghost Alarm?” Mark whispered. 

“Shh,” José snapped. 

Wes swallowed, his mouth going dry and his knees shaking. 

Yeah, he absolutely hated it here again. 

The ghost lifted a blade, resting its tip just above his collarbone. Holy shit, holy shit, holy—

Wes caught the sight of movement from behind the ghost: a flash of black and white. 

“Skulker, leave them alone,” came another echoing voice. Instead of feeling hot and stuffy a chill spread over Wes’ skin as the temperature of the gym dropped. 

The metal ghost spun around, its absence opening up the group's line of sight enough to see none other than Phantom. He was floating some ten feet away, arms crossed over his chest. He paid them no attention, his eyes fully locked on the hulking metal ghost. 

“Oh thank fuck,” Joseph breathed, relaxing enough to release Wes. 

“There you are, Ghost Child,” the cyborg said, sounding pleased. “I was wondering when you’d decide to—” Phantom became a blur. The next thing Wes knew, the huge ghost was sent flying, crashing into a wall on the right side of the gym. 

Phantom was now occupying the space the cyborg ghost had just been. He shook out his hand before curling it back into a fist. “Seriously, how many times do I have to tell you not to drag people into our shit, Skulker?” There was a beat, and Phantom looked over at them, like he’d just remembered they were there in the first place. His eyes flicked over all of them, and Wes couldn’t suppress his shiver when the ghost looked at him. 

“Oh, ‘sup. You guys might wanna, ya’know...” He jerked his head towards the closest exit. And then Phantom was gone, reappearing across the gym. The group didn’t need to be told twice, the next second they were moving. They scrambled out of the corner, practically tripping over one another. 

Wes felt like he was frozen in place. He stared dumbly at where Phantom and the metal ghost were now locked in battle. 

“Dude, what’re you waiting for? Let’s go!” José said, grabbing Wes by the arm and hauling him towards the doors. 

“Wait—” he objected weakly. His legs felt like jelly as he moved. He wanted to see the fight, see Phantom. He didn’t know why, but something in the back of his mind was screaming at him. 

He had questions.

But his new friends didn’t stop until they’d dragged him out through the metal swinging doors of the gym and into the hallway. The door slowly swung back closed, and Wes caught a glimpse of green bolts streaking like comets through the air and Phantom colliding with the ground.  

[evilmortys]

Have you ever talked about/drawn/ have head among about c-136’s rick? His relationship w/ his family and morty? Is her better than other ricks or worse? Etc!

i’ve  never  talked  about  rick  c-136  much  extensively  come  to  think  of  it!  so  i  hope  you  don’t  mind  if  i  use  this  ask  as  an  opportunity  to  ramble  about  him  and  their  dynamic  and  their  dimension  in  general  a  little.  it’s  quite  divergent  from  what’s  typical  for  a  rick  and  morty  dynamic  in  places,  i  think.

first  off  i  wanna  lead  with:  morty  c-136  is  sixteen!  so  his  summer  is  of  course  older  too,  and  is  now  living  away  from  home  and  attending  college.  he  misses  her  a  lot,  but  they  still  call  a  few  times  a  week  and  bitch  about  their  parents  and  what’s  going  on  in  their  lives  and  bully  each  other  a  lot.  she  comes  home  sometimes,  usually  for  holidays  such  as  thanksgiving  or  whatever.  they’re  overly  sappy  for  a  minute  max  upon  reuniting,  then  she’s  kicking  him  in  the  balls  and  he’s  calling  her  a  dumb  bitch.

his  mom  and  dad  are  divorced,  and  have  been  since  he  was  ten,  so  jerry  is  not  really  in  the  picture.  rick  is  very  relieved  about  this  and  hates  jerry  about  as  much  as  is  typical  for  bastard  grandpas.  morty  was  sad  about  their  messy  break  up,  but  very  quickly  came  to  understand  it  was  for  the  best.  there’s  a  security  system  rick  set  up  to  kick  jerry  to  the  curb  if  he  ever  comes  around,  much  to  morty’s  aggravation,  but  it’s  not  put  to  much  use  anyway.  (usually  he  walks  over  to  his  dad’s  sad  studio  apartment  of  his  own  volition  for  custody  weekend  instead  of  being  picked  up,  because  his  dad  sleeps  until  late  noon,  so.  not  exactly  a  dependable  ride.  if  he  goes  himself  he  can  shake  jerry  awake  at  a  reasonable  hour  and ...  try  to  shake  some  sense  into  him  too.  so  he  doesn’t  come  to  the  house  much.)

c-136′s rick has a complex relationship with his beth.  she’s  still  very  much  wrapped  up  in  his  opinion  of  her  and  works  to  please,  impress  and  ultimately  attain  his  attention  whenever  she  can.  an  easy  way  to  do  this  is  back  rick  up  when  morty  backtalks  him.  if  morty  angrily  says  “shut  the  fuck  up,  rick”  within  earshot  of  his  mother,  she’s  very  quick  to  fly  to  her  father’s  defence  as  apposed  to  her  son’s-  “morty,  don’t  speak  to  my  dad  like  that!”  rick  plays  off  this,  recognizing  an  opportunity  to  make  beth  feel  like  it’s  them  versus  morty,  and  says  “thank  you,  sweetie.”  the  two  then  delve  into  conversation  about  how  morty  is  “out  of  hand”  as  if  he’s  not  even  there,  which  understandably  infuriates  him  further.  

it  hurts  him  a  lot  that  his  mom  is  so  desperate  to  feel  like  her  and  her  dad  get  along,  and  for  him  to  acknowledge  her  existence,  that  she’ll  invalidate  his  feelings  and  bitch  about  his  behavior  with  rick  to  get  it.  he  very  much  feels  like  his  mom  values  having  a  positive  relationship  with  her  dad  over  him  as  a  result.  morty  continues  to  love  and  care  about  her  even  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  it  feels  largely  nonreciprocal  at  the  best  of  times,  but  can  come  across  quite  cold,  dismissive  and  clearly  subconsciously  angry  with  beth  when  talking  about  her  at  times  as  a  result.  don’t  get  me  wrong,  they  go  see  the  occasional  movie  together  and  morty  helps  her  out  preparing  dinner  very  often.  he  cares  deeply  about  his  mom  and  he  loves  her,  of  course  he  does,  but  he's  also  felt  incredibly  estranged  from  her  for  most  of  his  life.  if  nothing  else,  they  can  always  at  least  bond  over  an  eyeroll  at  one  of  his  dad's  latest  fuck  ups  or  stupid  statuses  on  facebook.  there’s  some  stuff  about  his  childhood  i  could  tack  in  here  that’s  relevant,  but  i’m  very  conscious  of  how  long  this  is  and  i  haven’t  even  talked  about  rick  and  morty’s  dynamic  yet ...  adjaskjdfaksf  sorry!

her  alcoholism  worries  morty  whereas  rick  seems  a  little  indifferent  to  it,  or  considers  it  not  a  big  deal.  likely  because  he  knows  it  invites  accusations  of  hypocrisy  if  he  calls  out  her  self  destruction  via  these  vices.  

in  the  past,  morty’s  tried  talking  with  her,  watering  down  and  pouring  out  her  alcohol  stashes,  and  even  pleaded  for  rick  try  and  make  her  see  reason-  to  no  avail.  (his  grandpa  ended  up  cracking  a  joke  about  what  a  fucking  buzzkill  morty  is,  they  laughed  it  off  together,  and  they  both  went  out  for,  you  guessed  it,  a  fucking  drink,  or  more  likely  ten  of  them,  directly  after  the  fact.)

right  now,  beth  c-136  has  been  seeing  a  bartender  for  eleven  months.  rick  seems  to  idly  approve  of  him-  at  the  very  least,  doesn’t  hate  him  like  he  did  jerry,  which  delights  beth.  her  father  deeming  anything  in  her  life  a  good  choice  means  everything  to  her  because  she  fights  so  hard  to  impress  him  while  also  trying  not  to  look  overtly  clingy  and  needy,  because  that  seems  to  repel  him.  also,  he’s  her  genius  father  who  doesn’t  like  anyone,  so  how  the  hell  can  his  judgement  be  wrong,  right?  him  approving  of  this  guy  has  locked  him  into  her  life  for  the  forseeable  future.  again,  this  pisses  morty  off,  because  this  bartender  guy  encourages  his  mom’s  worst  vice  of  daydrinking  with  his  job  and  lifestyle.  he  makes  her  happy,  but  he’s  the  fucking  worst,  and  it  makes  morty  want  to  tear  his  hair  out.  him  and  summer  frequently  snipe  about  the  guy  in  private.  sharing  distaste  for  their  parents’  prospective  partners  is  very  valid  bonding  they  think.

c-136  rick  and  morty's  relationship  is  emotionally  flexible  at  the  best  of  times.  some  days,  so  very  rarely,  they  get  along  just  great.

to  name  one  wholesome  headcanon  before  we  Get  Into  It.  occasionally,  rick  will  pretend  to  know  absolutely  jack  shit  about  one  of  the  plants  in  morty’s  greenhouse  just  to  let  him  go  off  about  it  and  suddenly  seem  excitably  sure  of  himself  for  about  twenty  minutes  of  nonstop  infodumping.  95%  of  the  time  he  knows  absolutely  everything  about  the  plant  he’s  asking  about,  actually,  and  on  some  level  morty  is  absolutely  aware  of  it.  the  smartest  man  in  the  universe  apparently  doesn’t  know  what  a  flaxtius  olcum  is?  right.  but ...  he  still  appreciates  the  gesture  a  lot,  and  it  cheers  him  up  after  a  shitshow  adventure.

it's  not  too  clear  what  allows  these  occasions  of  treating  one  another  with  basic  respect  and  almost  fondness  to  arise-  maybe  his  grandfather's  in  an  uncommonly  gracious  mood,  maybe  they're  playing  minecraft  or  bashing  animal  crossing  together,  maybe  they're  snickering  and  exchanging  incredulous  glances  during  some  cartoonishly  evil  alien's  monologue  of  a  plan  as  it's  dictated  to  them  in  painstaking  detail …  regardless,  those  come  around  less  and  less  often,  these  days.

rick  secretly  considers  morty  to  be  very  capable  and  alarmingly  more  competent  as  of  late,  and  he's  not  sure  whether  to  feel  almost  proud  or  work  to  scramble  to  unravel  all  this progress  lest  morty  start  pulling  away  from  him  and  revelling  in  his  own  independence.  

they're  a  kickass duo  when  adventuring, very  in  sync.  morty's  less  of  a  whiny  burden  or  wide-eyed,  unremarkable  sidekick,  and  more  of  a  borderline  asset  at  this  point.  which  again,  makes  rick  feel  very  conflicted  over  how  that  skews  their  dynamic  in  a  way  that's  less  favorable  for  him,  because  morty  doesn't  need  to  lean  on  him  as  heavily  or  stick  as  close  anymore.  but  at  the  same  time,  there’s  less  inherent  risk  of  him  dying  while  they  adventure,  because  he  handles  himself  so  well.  they  can  split  up  as  needed  to  get  shit  done  faster.  morty  frequently  solo  adventures,  or  as  he  calls  it,  “runs  rick’s  goddamn  errands,  actually.”  he’s  outgrown  the  concept  of  getting  to  choose  an  adventure  and  instead  claims  the  portal  gun  every  twelve  adventures  they  have  together,  and  goes  off  for  one  of  his  own.

morty  speaks  his  mind  very  bluntly  with  rick  and  isn't  really  afraid  to  tell  him  to  get  fucked  when  he's  being  an  unreasonable  dick.  he  resents  rick  immensely  for  putting  him  down  and  pushing  him  around  all  the  time.

morty's  more  assertive,  yet  still  very  much  resigned  to  their  irrefutably  imbalanced  companionship ;  there  are  countless  factors  as  to  why.  but  primarily,  it  tends  to  boil  down  to  feeling  like  he  owes  a  lot  to  rick.  were  it  not  for  his  presence  in  his  life,  morty  knows  deep  down  that  he  wouldn't  be  half  as  interesting  or  even  marginally  as  intelligent  as  he's  capable  of  being  now.  he’d  still  be  stupid,  and  mediocre,  and  uninteresting.  unremarkable.  unworthy  of  anyone’s  attention  or  time  because  of  how  dull  he  is.

he's  at  a  point  where  (to  an  extent)  he  feels  distant  from  his  life  on  earth  at  the  best  of  times,  because  space  and  the  infinite  multiverse  has  encompassed  his  daily  life  for  so  long  and  on  some  level,  he  handles  himself  far  better  fighting  for  his  life  on  the  edge  of  the  universe  than  trapped  in  a  school  full  of  sweaty  teenagers  and  material  he  either  blitzes  through  or  can  barely  grasp.  plus,  rick  was  the  closest  thing  he  ever  had  to  a  friend  while  he  was  growing  up.  morty  cares  about  rick,  even  if  the  older  constantly  cites  reasons  as  to  why  attachment  is  moronic  and  sentiment  is  stupid,  and  he's  aware  that  rick  has  come  to  care  for  him  too-  even  if  all  his  pointed  jabs  about  not  giving  a  shit  and  aloof  front  makes  it  hard  to  believe  that  all  the  time.

the  issue  is,  once  morty  seems  to  waver  in  feeling  that  he  has  to  constantly  acquiesce  to  rick  and  falters  in  tolerating  rick  as  an  result  of  this  obligated  feeling  of  familial  love,  no  matter  how  slightly,  rick  then  begins  to  exert  control  over  their  relationship  by  other  means,  such  as  emotionally  manipulating,  gaslighting  and  outright  blackmailing  him  to  keep  him  in  line  with  what  he  wants  out  of  their  dynamic:  rick  and  morty,  a  hundred  years,  the  only  two  people  in  the  infinite  multiverse  that  truly  matter-  theretofore,  they  should  both  solely  consider  one  another  as  important,  and  worthwhile.  he's  willing  to  tarnish  any  other  connections  morty  might  form  beyond  their  duo  for  fear  of  losing  him.

he  grows  out  of  this  irrational  attachment  a  little  more  each  time  his  grandfather  lets  him  down,  disillusions  him  ever  further,  hurts  him  or  traumatizes  him  or  actively  fucking  experiments  on  him-  slowly  but  surely.  he'll  snap,  in  some  sense,  sometime.  when  exactly  can't  be  known.  what  precise  actions  he  might  take  to  pry  himself  free  of  their  codependent  dynamic  is  unclear.  but  the  way  things  are  headed,  the  two  of  them  splintering  apart  is  inevitable,  and  it's  unlikely  to  be  an  amicable  thing  at  all.  rick  often  actively  renounces  and  appears  repulsed  by  the  very  concept  of  familial  love  and  basic  attachment,  constantly  rants  and  raves  in  his  drunken  stupors  about  how  replaceable  everyone  in  his  life  is,  and  it's  hard  for  morty  to  bite  his  tongue  when  he's  behaving  like  that.

he  just  hates  that  he  feels  badly  about  himself  and  second  guesses  himself  around  rick.  strangely  enough,  when  he’s  having  to  push  through  crazy  shit  alone,  he  does  fine.  great,  even.  sure,  he’s  freaking  out,  making  everything  up  as  he  goes  along,  and  secretly  wishing  rick  was  around  to  guide  him  out  of  the  chaos  because  he  knows  in  his  heart  rick  would  probably  do  it  smarter.  but  once  he’s  with  rick,  he  feels  incapable  and  stupid  beside  him.  like,  being  apart  from  him  makes  him  feel  so  much  lighter,  allows  him  to  lean  on  the  intelligence  he  very  much  does  possess,  without  being  berated,  second  guessing  it,  and  reminded  it’ll  never  match  up  to  rick’s,  so  there’s  really  no  point  in  even  trying.

[monicalorandavis]

Review: “A Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood”

I had my doubts about Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers. Hear me out. While I trust Tom Hanks’ acting talent, and charisma, and all-around affability, Fred Rogers he is not.

And that’s no shade to Tom Hanks. It’s just that Fred Rogers was an alien - in the best sense of the world. A total original, he somehow managed to be a huge television star without sacrificing his moral integrity or sacrificing his vision for the show. He was never afraid to have the tough conversations, the ones about death, divorce, and war. And, it was because of his willingness to dive head first into things that he emotionally empowered those around him, children and adults, spiritual people and atheists, to express themselves too.

So, feeling the way I do about Mr. Rogers, and considering the Tom Hanks I’ve known in the last 33 years, I thought it an insurmountable task to portray a man as saintly as The Rog. There are no mere mortals (let alone actors) who are lovely enough to be the teacher, television personality, puppeteer, musician, producer, writer and minister (all on a paltry PBS budget no less!). And yet, Tom Hanks was tasked to do it.

Now, I will concede that Hollywood has no one better for the position. It’s true. Tom Hanks seems like the dream dad, or better yet, grandpa. He’s so, so funny and seems like he’s got a wealth of stories and perhaps a well-honed skill like skipping stones up his sleeve. He’s as good as it gets...in Hollywood.

But, to limit the scope of this film because I don’t feel like Mr. Rogers was absolutely, perfectly cast is sort of throwing the baby out with the bath water. The film is excellent. Tom Hanks is excellent. I just somehow found myself wishing I could stop the constant comparisons between the real Mr. Rogers and Tom Hanks. The performance Tom Hanks delivers is worthy of consideration come Oscars season - though I don’t think he’ll win. He opens up a chamber of his heart that feels personal and true and the only trick employed seems to be speed, i.e. the lack of it.

Yep, good old-fashioned silence bridges the gap between Tom Hanks’ natural snappy personality and the gentle quietude of Fred Rogers. Apparently, taking such time was torture for the actors on set. But, it was necessary. Long, silent pauses made the real “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” vibrate with human emotion. We don’t want to be quiet. We fill in the quiet with chatter. And Fred Rogers’ gift was being able to give you that space...until you couldn’t stand it anymore. With the pace slowed all the way down, Hanks feels like the gentlest, and least judgmental, church parishioner you’d ever wish to cross paths with. He’s not perfect, and knows life is full of ups and downs, and thus allows the broken people a glimpse of the light. Enter Matthew Rhys.

Everyone’s been trying to get me to watch “The Americans” and now I know why. Matthew Rhys not only has “Mr. Steal Your Girl” vibes (ask Keri Russell) but he’s got some magic combination of macho intensity plus intellectual arrogance that somehow does not come off nearly as horrible as that sounds. Whereas Tom Hanks was cursed with the constant comparison to his real-life counterpart, Rhys was granted the freedom to fly in any direction he pleased. His Lloyd Vogel was based on the real-life journalist commissioned to write an editorial about Mr. Rogers for Esquire magazine. He’s snarky and sarcastic and his wife and editor seem just about done with him. When Mr. Rogers meets Lloyd he intuits that he’s an untapped faucet of emotional pain. For someone like Lloyd this is as good a diagnosis as type 2 diabetes. Mr. Rogers is not deterred. He loves people like Lloyd. The broken ones.

Lloyd is quickly enthralled by Mr. Rogers’ genuine goodness because he, himself, struggles to release the garden of anger he’s carried since his mother’s death. This realization, and dive into Lloyd’s childhood, bears some of the most touching moments of the film. Marielle Heller’s dreamy direction carries us in and out of the present, and into Lloyd’s dreams to harvest up some of the things he’s buried deep down. When we get to the pain regarding his mother’s death, we meet her, sick, in bed, but without any bitterness. Instead, she glows. She tells Lloyd, “I know you’re holding onto this for me” and we know what she means. The grudge. The hardness. The defense mechanisms. And with that, and the kindness of Fred Rogers, Lloyd softens.

I recently read a piece about the forgotten side of Mr. Rogers, the artistic side. He was apparently a perfectionist (as the best are) and devoted precious hours away from his family to create “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”. The impact that his children felt was immense. The impact that he made on countless other children was maybe larger. So how did he reconcile his life at home and his life as an adored public servant? He kept working. Not always the best strategy to bridge the gap widening between you and your teenage sons. And that’s where Tom Hanks and Mr. Rogers find common ground. Like with all good characters, you must find the humanity - the flaws, blemishes, and quirks that ground them in this mortal coil.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” was tasked with a heavy order that mostly delivers. It’s not the original. Oh well. But what it imparts on viewers, and hopefully viewers who never saw the original “Neighborhood”, are the glorious tenets of Fred Rogers and great performances by Matthew Rhys (serious Oscar contender) and Tom Hanks (medium Oscar contender). But if awards and all that jazz mean nothing to you and you need a film to teach your bratty nieces and nephews about kindness, then this is it.

[neuropathicgypsy]

I've been remembering things... like a normal person... and unlike a normal person and forgetting things also...

I keep remembering when Matt's grandpa saw me at Putt-Putt... at least twice.

The first time he kept touching me while I was playing this kiss the frog game... enough to where I punched him and pushed him nearly down cause he kept touching me behind me where I couldn't see him and then he grabbed my arm that's when I pushed him

Then he acted like nothing happened and asked me how I played the game. I told him I would move and he could play that's when he pushed against me again and I told him to wait and i would move and he said he didn't even want to play he just wanted to know how.

What the fuck was that shit? He walked away cause he was already Hurt cause I didn't look at him Like I play the games he does.

Then I saw him again on Joe's daughter's birthday and he was behind the counter and we had this whole discussion, Joe and I did about who he was and he just kept going off so he then pretended like he was Joe's dad.

He left the same time we did... I was there with my ex husband and daughter in my exhusbands car... I sat in the back seat because we were going to get divorced but I didn't trust him alone with my daughter so we did family things so I could make sure they could be social together and she could be safe.

Then another time in my parents town we went to walmart... which wasn't normal for us and we parked far from the doors and there was plenty of room near the doors... and when we left there was a white rental car parked next to ours but way closer than I felt should be normal... and I was all super paranoid while my kid got in the car and stood on her side of the car while she got in... a lot because she got startled by him... sitting in the car... on a laptop.

I knew it was the same guy I thought was Joe's dad.

But then i saw a photo of Matt's grandpa not too long ago...

Tonight I asked Matt.... are you sure I was pregnant with you kids and it wasn't your grandpa? Cause it really seems like your grandpa is a rapist and I don't remember getting pregnant by you and shouldn't that be something I remember?

I remember getting pregnant with my daughter and I must say it wasn't the best sex in my life and in fact I was quite tired and wasn't really into it but...

But I sense all this general badness wi th my getting pregnant earlier ...

I mean... my mom did get all crazy when she realized I was and we had to call the cops....

And we were in a lot of foster homes...

But it doesn't seem right...

---

His answer is: Matt your gramma will read that..

well it didn't stop him from getting his ass beat when his wife was at the putt-putt with him and their friends. I think she should know the truth about what her husband does. Quit hiding behind children. It also explains why the infants were murdered. Because before I couldn't understand. I've been thinking about it at least once a week for months.

----

So now Matt says we had had sex after I was pregnant, in a new foster Home and I had said "finally the first time we have had sex..." and I was very tired so I didn't finish

Matt thinks he's funny so he says "what?!? Those aren't my kids?!"

And I didn't know what to say because back then, I had amnesia a good portion of the time... I had gotten pregnant in the summer then sent back to my parents house to start school. And i no longer could button my pants and I knew zipping them up part of the way wasn't going to last long and I had to tell my mom I needed new clothes and it seemed like there was some alien weirdness inside me.

So then MATT also likes attention so he called everyone he knew to brag he had had sex.... and his grandpa said something about finding out when the DNA came out whose kids they were, his or his.

And Matt said "what are you telling me, you have been raping my woman?!"

And his grandpa snap hissed, "I told you I had sex with her, didn't i?!?"

He's that old plantation type that comes from negro slaves and that sort although his family was poorer than his wife's, he understood that a "man" got his sex however he pleased and a woman had no right to disobey him. Although if his negros went on strike and didn't do all his work for him, he'd been a poor man with nothing to his name so Idk who he thought he was that his duck was made of gold plated stainless steel cause it sure wasn't anything I'd write home about except to say everyone should stay away from it...

So to this terrible old white man, rape and sex was the same thing. If he was willing then she should be, too. And if she wasn't then she had her own problems that didn't matter to him and never will.

His problems don't matter to me, either. So whatever Matt's gramma has to do, his gramma has to do.

And his gramma has always known. That's why we went to foster care, I'm quite sure.

The story always was that since I was pregnant we had to be removed from the custodial care. Maybe my mom threw a fit but really she didn't and doesn't like me much so idk. But it didn't matter either because my dad had the upper hand being military and my father. And her just being a bitch.

And so the story was since I was pregnant the people we were with (his family and mine) didn't pay enough attention to us for us to be safe.

But we had sex in the foster hones and they knew and that was supposed to be the whole reason we had to be in foster care, because we had had sex.

And we were always placed together.

I know his gramma knew so this ass hole grandpa all saying "your grand MA is gonna read that matt" as if matts grandma's feelings had ever mattered to him is absolutely ridiculous.

"I told you I had sex with her didn't I boy" as an answer to "you raped her" ..... rape culture should never had a place in our history and shouldn't have a place in our future

---

His gramma is all distressed and I'm like what is the problem didn't you go to the lawyer?

And she's all yes I called but he said he can't see me till next week.

I told her do you can just do one online and it's not a big deal.

She says that's what Matt had told her.

So I ask Matt well did you? She seems really worried and he said yeah and you know my grandpa isn't home.

She said that he said he will come home immediately.

(Because obviously his 4th family isn't as important as making sure he gets his money)

So I'm all what's that short little man going to do to you.

She said something I can't quite remember

And I said "oh he's like Matt, he's got that Hagan charm, makes you want to forgive him as if it was that easy"

Then we go on and she can get all th documents to file for divorce quite easily and since his family was poor and her father protective of his daughter and his family assets she could file and leave him with nearly nothing.

Since he's got multiple families across the country I don't see why he should continue to scrounge off her.

Of course he would do the whole verbal abuse calling her a scrooge and all... but really what's worse the truth or manipulation? Always the truth otherwise there would be no manipulation

He is a rapist no one likes. He's a rapist which means he forces people to have sex with him.

She tried to protect me, Matt and babies she probably never met and he calls her a scrooge. Which is absolutely untrue. She sacrificed great grandchildren and her grandchild of a son whom was murdered and still her seriously scrooge manipulation husband had her great grandchildren killed because he didn't want to lose her money.

So since he did that then I think that absolutely she should divorce him and let him call her Scrooge cause the real scrooge is him and he has destroyed many lives for his own greed and to keep wealth that wasn't his.

Instead of allowing his ass to take money for his greed and multiple families and gambling she could create a charity or memorial or scholarships or all of the above and more.

And then we will all know who is really the Scrooge.

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

Life Story Part 9

I think it's time in my story that I talk more about my Grandma Marie – my mother's mother. She has always been kind of like a third parent to me, and I think the fabric of her story definitely is sewn into mine in such a way that her story is definitely worth explaining.

So, to go way back, my great great grandfather was Chief Geronimo's (the legendary Apache chief) cousin. I am not sure who exactly this guy was by name and I think from what I do know, Geronimo himself had a lot of children so I can only imagine that it would be somewhat tedious to narrow down who exactly in a very large family like that, but that is the story as it has been passed on and come to me. They put him in a reservation, and he wasn't having any of that. So one night, he stole a white man's horse, and rode away into the night, never to be seen or heard from by anyone who had known him again. He left his son, who was my great grandfather and his wife to be raised in the reservation.

My great grandfather grew up, and he became a miner in northern Idaho Kellogg area. He met my great grandmother. She was kind of an odd woman. No woman in my mother's family is very tamable by classic patriarchal standards. It's not because we really consciously adhere to feminism – though I do. There's just an independence about us going all the way back. She was extremely argumentative, and she was very well read as I have been told. I met her once and she was 96 when I met her. She was bedridden in a nursing home – I came to her bed to meet her and she called me fat. Then she died a month later. Anyway, my great grandparents argued a lot. They ended up having my grandmother, but neither my great grandma, or my great grandfather wanted to have anything to do with my grandma. Since they were so sick and tired of one another and neither one of them wanted to deal with the responsibility of the baby.

So, my grandfather swore off intelligent women after that. He consciously thought intelligent like my great grandmother were trouble, and he outright stated that he needed himself a stupid woman who wouldn't give him any hell. So he found himself – presumably – a stupid woman and he started a new family and have 12 children with her. He ended up dying in a mining accident pretty early on. Mining is a very dangerous operation, especially then.

My great grandma gave my grandma to her grandmother on her father's side to be raised. And there are rumors that she went on to be a stripper in Seattle for awhile. So my grandma was raised in the woods in a very backwoods and isolated area where there were mostly just miners and loggers. She never had any friends. Her grandmother was extremely strict, and this kind of instilled this sense of perfection in my grandmother that never went away. She often played in the woods by herself, and she swears up and down that she had a spirit guide as a child that would watch over her in the woods as she played.

When she was sixteen she met my grandpa Roy, and they were married a month later. On their wedding night, Roy told my grandma Marie that he was lying to her about anything romantic he might have said, and basically told her that if she made any 'mistakes' in the marriage he was going to beat her as he saw fit. So she was basically stuck, and she didn't know any better really. Women in the camp area she grew up in just took beatings, and it seemed natural for women to deal with abuse silently.

So my grandma had three boys, Rocky, Rusty and Rick, and my mom – Sandra or Sandy. And she was just abused and beaten and raped, thrown out of glass windows, forced into all manner of cruel situations. This traumatized my uncles and my mom. And honestly, a lot of my mother's issues are directly linked to her childhood. Her childhood in many ways was traumatic enough to where she never really advanced out of childhood in some subtle ways.

Eventually, after my uncles and mom thought my grandfather had killed her when her bus was late one night, she decided it had just gotten to be too much and she left Roy and filed for divorce. She might have done it a lot sooner, but women were discouraged from divorce in those times. After this, her life kind of fell apart. She dated men in logging camps. She left her sons and my mom to fend for themselves in the woods – which caused them to resort to eating frogs and small rodents. When my mother was a teenager she pressured her to get married to a man twice her age that my mother barely knew. It sounds terrible, but I don't fault her for this. I really believe that nobody taught her anything in regards to what women's purpose or place was. She had to figure out what we take for granted on her own.

Eventually, my grandmother married a very rich pilot. He was even more abusive than Roy and he tried to kill her eventually, but in the years that they were married, she had decided to start painting at the later age of 40, having no previous experience with anything but child-rearing. And within a year's time, she had perfected it. She became a successful painter in Coeur de' Alene Idaho, and she was able to make a pretty good living – on top of what her husband made. But then when he tried to kill her she divorced him as well.

She felt rather lost in life so she on a hunch, went and saw a local fortune teller by the name of Doris who was not really well known. Doris took donations, and didn't make a lot of money on her fortune telling because she would tell someone's fortune for as little as a dollar. Doris was a Native American who grew up in a tribe that raised her to be some kind of seer. So she had this invisible spirit guide with her at all times. And she had a lot of high profile mobster mafia guys who came to her quite frequently – which was partially why she moved away to Idaho to try to get away from some of them who she felt very negative energy from. Some of them eventually found her anyway.

Honestly, in my personal opinion, I don't know if Doris was really psychic. I have absolutely no gage on what reality actually is entirely. So I just accept the story for what it is. I don't put faith in it like a religion, or try to tear the situation apart. I am skeptical, but my skepticism runs both left and right on this story. I just accept the story for how the people involved felt and what they believed to be true, because that in many ways is it's own kind of truth.

So, Doris's husband had died not too long ago. My grandma saw a picture of him on the wall, and she wanted to paint him. Because she said this, Doris took it to mean that my grandmother Marie and her were meant to meet one another. I think Doris felt that people looked to her for guidance and didn't really ask how she was. So my grandma had kind of done that, and it made them fast friends. Doris taught my grandma a lot of the stuff she believed in. She introduced her to Hinduism and got her to be more in touch with Native American beliefs.

Doris had a friend who had worked at NASA named Carter. Carter was introduced to my grandma, and they became good friends. According to Carter on his deathbed, aliens are in contact with people on Earth, and there are many different kinds of them. He confirmed according to his personal testimony certain conspiracies. I guess he didn't feel like he had a lot to lose on his deathbed, though I am not really sure what the truth is. I do firmly believe my grandma would not lie. She is an extremely serious alert woman. She doesn't like attention, and her biggest weakness is that she is hardened by life, and that she is a bit too fearful for her own good. But she would not lie about what Carter told her. As for Carter himself, I really don't know. He could have lied, I never met the guy.

After a visit to the hospital, Doris explained that there was a race of small alien people who were visible only to her because of her heightened spiritual energy. They weren't like Greys, they were more small and elflike and came from a planet where they lived in perfect harmony with nature. They basically came from a culture so advanced in every way that they had developed teleportation abilities and telepathy, and they came to planets to help beings and life forms get to their level. She named them, and according to my grandma Marie, they lived with her, and sometimes would move things around the house.

My grandma started selling things online when the internet took off, and she made a lot of money initially between that and painting. She eventually got criticized for her paintings by another painter that she admired, and because my grandma is a fearful woman who is kind of easily shaken and looking for signs and meanings in all things, I think it kind of immobilized her creatively.

Her home was extremely fascinating to me as a child. She kept things incredibly clean. The paintings she kept around were elegant, framed, and often times spiritual. There were – are beautiful crystals around the house, as well as intricate ornaments and statuesque fancy knick knacks that were pagan, Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist and native American. She always kept Yorkies for pets. She had books on UFO's and ancient healing. I could not touch anything when I was little as much as I had wanted to. But when I got a little older I was sent up there more often for months at a time, and I became extremely obsessed with mysteries, cryptozoology, UFO's, aliens, telepathy, ancient secrets. We would talk to several hours into the night about spirituality and reincarnation.

It was really helpful to have my grandma in my life. She had a sternness about her on things that nobody really told me to do often enough, like folding my clothes, making my bed, brushing my hair. I went up there around sixth grade, and she noted that I continuously called myself stupid every time I felt nervous in conversation – which is often. She pretty much told me to knock it off. Basically saying -if I have to hear you call yourself stupid one more time, I swear! You aren't stupid! You will eventually make yourself stupid by saying that over and over again!' After awhile, I stopped calling myself stupid since it was legitimately annoying her.

At first it was hard. But I had gotten to where I instinctively called myself stupid 20-30 times a day over the course of the last few years. I hadn't realized it. And it was strange, but after I got to where I was not allowed to call myself stupid anymore, I stopped feeling as much like I was stupid. Which is sort of where I came to a point in my life where I became sort of aware that how we talk reflects how we think and how we think reflects our self perceptions – which eventually trickles into reality. We can do or become anything with the right mindset. It's not the other way around as much as it would make sense to be the other way around. If you smile you will feel happier. If you give yourself compliments you will most likely live up to those compliments. This concept helped empower me and get me through a lot of seemingly hopeless situations.

We often went auctioning together in Coeur de' Alene. My grandmother wasn't close to very many people, but she really felt that her and I had a lot in common. She isn't a friendly person. She's not sometimes even very correct in her assessments of people. Like a lot of fearful people, she's judgmental and doesn't feel comfortable with change, and she has a holier than thou attitude pretty much all the time and it's self evident in the way she does things. She can be snappy and pretty open about her judgment as well. Actually being raised by her might be kind of frustrating, to break the mold of her ideals. However, she, unlike many sorts of people you meet in life, actually gives a fuck about those around her. She has a very deep sense of love for people, and has cared about my specifically when nobody else did. I really truly appreciate what she has done for me.

Not to say I didn't love my other grandma Betty though. I was always fond of her in another way. Where my grandma Marie is harsh and strict with children, grandma Betty was always soft – sometimes too soft at times but little children and animals would flock to her. By this time in my life my grandma Betty was getting a bit older. She used to come to visit during Christmas, but watching my little brother and sister dance around the tree really shook her up one year. I think the last serious amount of time I really was able to spend with her was this one Christmas. We went to a resort that is pretty far into the wilderness area called Red River Hot Springs. Basically, it's this hot springs in the woods where they have a pool and a hot tub and a hotel. We took my grandma Betty up there and we played Yahtzee and Scrabble. It snowed all around us. The whole place looked – looks incredibly magic in the snow.  I remember laying on the bed and feeling as comfortable as I had ever felt since I was a small child. My grandma seemed to get this great joy from being with family, like something you might see on a vintage postcard.

Another older lady that I grew to like after a few years was my English teacher Mrs. Mathison – who I took classes from for about three years from fifth to seventh grade. Everyone pretty much laughed at her. She was an incredibly simple woman and she didn't seem to have a big imagination. She'd been teaching forever and was a bit older. She didn't like nonsense. She had a fro, she had sort of a hunchback – not incredibly noticeable, but as mean spirited preteens we noticed, and when she walked, she did so in such a way that her sandals squeaked. She had mixed feelings about me. On a very fundamental level, we had very little in common. Nonsense bothered her a lot. I have never gotten my fill of nonsense, as anyone who knows me would be able to tell you. I didn't do any of my homework, but I was one of the top readers at this point in the whole school. The only kids who outdid me had scary Christian parents who had harsh punishments for not reading.

I read voluntarily all the time just about to get away from the world for awhile – and find inspiration for art. I read about three or four times as much as I needed to. But I wouldn't touch my homework. I would take it home sometimes, even believing for an instant or two that I would do it. But then I would look at this crinkled piece of paper, and I could not imagine why I even was carrying it with me, or what was to be learned from having it. Mrs. Mathison really wished I was a better student. I was a contradiction to her concept of what it meant to be a decent student and a bad kid. And I will be honest, I didn't really like her most of the time. She seemed dull and grumpy to me. But I spent so much time after class, that I started sensing that there was more to her as a person than what we saw during class. Even where I think she was misguided in scolding me – I can look back and understand why. To this day I have her added to facebook.

One character I really liked at this time was Anne of Green Gables. Girls in my class would criticize me for reading the books and made fun of for some reason. I guess I just kind of related to her a lot. Anne was always expounding her ideas to those around her, and seemed driven by her imagination in a similar way as myself. I often times privately felt like I was a modern day version of her in some way.

If you want to read my life story so far, here are the previous parts.

PART 8 - http://tinyurl.com/ybl37utq

PART 7 - http://tinyurl.com/ybvo283g

PART 6 - http://tinyurl.com/kbc9dwu

PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

PART 4 - http://tinyurl.com/k9x8esg

PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

[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