“I want to scream at my computer: ‘You idiots, we all write the show together!’” Television is a collaborative medium and a credit is usually just a reward for one writer doing what Harmon calls “grunt work” – developing the outline of an episode, for example. As Harmon pointed out, the trolls’ ire was evidence of their “total ignorance of how television works”. What’s more, it was patently wrongheaded. This was a new weaponised form of bad fandom. When said trolls detected what they saw as a drop-off in quality in some episodes (coincidentally the ones credited to female writers) they decided to take it out on the new writers, creating Reddit threads about them, harassing them on Twitter, even subjecting them to doxxing (sharing their personal information online). That very act stirred up the hornet’s nest of white male trolls that tend to congregate in the internet spaces where fandom is at its most fervent. For Rick and Morty’s third season, Harmon and co-creator Justin Roiland had added several female writers to the show’s previously male-dominated writing staff. This wasn’t just a case of fans rooting for the wrong person or cheering a grisly gangland assassination. Harmon had good reason to unleash such invective. It fucking sucks,” he told Entertainment Weekly. At most they would bury meta digs at them in the programmes themselves, as Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan did during a climactic phone call between White and his wife Skyler, the subject of fan hate throughout the series.Īll of which has made Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon’s recent righteous tirade against a “disgusting” subset of the animated sci-fi comedy’s audience all the more remarkable. The showrunners knew such bad fans existed, said Nussbaum, but it made little commercial or logical sense to call them out. They’re the ones who get furious whenever anyone tries to harsh Don Draper’s mellow.” In Breaking Bad’s case, the bad fans were cheering on Walter White’s descent into villainy rather than recoiling from it, whooping with glee at Heisenberg’s quest to dominate the meth trade. They’re the Girls watchers who were aesthetically outraged by Hannah having sex with Josh(ua). “They’re the Sopranos buffs who wanted a show made up of nothing but whackings (and who posted eagerly about how they fast-forwarded past anything else). A s Breaking Bad was reaching its operatically violent climax in 2013, New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum wrote about a certain strata of the show’s audience she termed the “bad fan”.
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