“I Loathe These People”: Dan Harmon Called Out “Knobs” Harassing Female ‘Rick And Morty’ Writers

Dan Harmon, one half of the team that created crazy/brilliant sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty, has come out in defence of the female writers on his staff who are enduring buckets of harassment online from the show’s Fragile Male Fans.

“I think it’s all disgusting,” Harmon told EW recently, when asked about the harassment. “It fucking sucks”.

This season of Rick and Morty, which has aired on Adult Swim for two seasons and is currently airing its highly acclaimed third season on Netflix in Australia, is the first season of the show written by a gender balanced writers’ room. Like many other showrunners (BoJack Horseman‘s Raphael Bob-Waksberg included), Harmon and his co-creator Justin Roiland decided at the end of their second season to shake up their male-dominated writers’ room by adding an equal number of female writing staff to their stable.

So far, the addition appears to have paid off. Two of the female writers, Jane Becker and Jessica Gao, are credited for writing two of the season’s best episodes: the Mad Max thunderdome parody ‘Rickmancing The Stone’, and the best Rick And Morty episode thus far, the absurdist dream, ‘Pickle Rick‘.

However, it appears not everyone is thrilled by the new additions to the writing staff. Who could possibly object to what is clearly a great and smart shake up to an already brilliant show? Say it with me: men. Men!

That’s right, heartsore male Rick and Morty fans have taken to Twitter to air their unsubstantiated disappointment at the show employing female writers, trolling and harassing both women and also doxxing them (releasing their personal information online). As ya do.

“I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people,” Harmon told EW. He has… not minced words in expressing his disdain at the situation.

“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.

“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 fucking 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.”

Attacking people online because they are women and you don’t like that is bad, folks. Don’t do it.