Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon has recently denounced a bunch of online commenters for harassing two of the show's female writers.
The harassment has reached such an extent that the trolls even dared publish the personal information of those two staff-members, Jane Becker and Jessica Gao.
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Upon the release of the third season of the adult anime show, a reddit-user shared a thread in a Rick and Morty subreddit throwing shades at its female writers. The user blamed them for the third season apparently turning out to be somewhat bland.
Entertainment Weekly spoke to Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon about the issue.
Harmon, who is clearly upset about it, called out the attackers and explained his repulsion at the matter.
I was familiar going into the third season, having talked to Felicia Day, that any high-profile women get doxxed, they get harassed, they get threatened, they get slandered. And part of it is a testosterone-based subculture patting themselves on the back for trolling these women. Because to the extent that you get can get a girl to shriek about a frog you've proven girls are girly and there's no crime in assaulting her with a frog because it's all in the name of proving something. I think it's all disgusting.
Harmon went on to explain that plenty of women have been involved in the creation and production of Rick and Mory since the beginning of the show.
Hence, "whatever issues you have with the showpast [sic] 2 episodes, it has nothing to do with the writers' genders. The fact that this is even getting brought up is absurd. Interdimensional Cable 2, Needful Things and Raising Gazorpazorp didn't get crazy stellar fan reactions, and no one brought up the writers' dicks as being a factor," he said.
Harmon also said that it's incredibly stupid that these trolls singled out the two women just because they were credited as writers of the episodes "Rickmancing the Stone" and "Pickle Rick." Not only this, what irritates him the most is that these "knobs" watch his show.
"These knobs, that want to protect the content they think they own — and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender," Harmon told EW.
"It's offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there's some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by 'protecting' my work."
He added, "I've made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It fu****g sucks. And the only thing I can say is if you're lucky enough to make a show that is really good that people like, that means some bad people are going to like it too. You can't just insist that everybody who watches your show get their head on straight."
Moderator elastical_gomez addressed this situation in the subreddit thread, saying smear campaigns would be removed and all the offenders banned temporarily.
