‘Rick and Morty’ Co-Creator Dan Harmon Denounces Fans Who Harassed Female Writers’: ‘I Loathe These People’
“Rick and Morty” now has gender parity in its writing room, which has unsurprisingly come as unwelcome news to a certain segment of the animated comedy’s audience. Jane Becker and Jessica Gao were reminded of this the hard — and all-too-common — way when they found themselves not only harassed but the victims of doxxers who leaked the two writers’ personal information online.
“Rick and Morty” co-creator Dan Harmon spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the incident, calling it “disgusting” and thoroughly denouncing anyone and everyone involved: “It’s offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by ‘protecting’ my work.”
“I 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,” he said. “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.”
He held even less back as he went on:
“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. It’s offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by ‘protecting’ my work. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It f—ing 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 … And I’m speaking for myself — I don’t want the show to have a political stance. But at the same time, individually, these [harassers] aren’t politicians and don’t represent politics. They represent some shit that I probably believed when I was 15.”
Read the full interview here.
