On Sunday morning,Russia Twitter was aflame with sauce controversy.
Fans of the Adult Swim cartoon Rick and Mortywanted their sauce. McDonald's didn't have enough. The fans were mad at everyone and everyone was mad at the fans.
I was lying in bed slightly hungover from spending the previous night carving a Stephen A. Smith tweet into a pumpkin.
Still half asleep, but feeling a duty to contribute to the discourse, I made a tweet.
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(I should disclose at this point that I am not the creator of Rick and Morty, nor have I ever seen an episode of it.)
I got up and got lunch, and found that after less than an hour my barely-thought-out tweet was getting a startling number of retweets.
Having nothing better to do on a Sunday, I leaned into the bit, changed my display name and bio to "Rick and Morty creator," and made an announcement.
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This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The fans were not pleased. As my phone began to sputter and overheat from thousands of new follower notifications, fans flooded my mentions and inbox with love for the show and horror at its imminent destruction by river.
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This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
As my follower list ballooned from a modest 3,800 to a respectable 13,000, I took the fans on a trip down memory lane, gifting them with previously unrevealed secrets from the production of the show.
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This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Like all good things, Rick and Mortyeventually had to come to an end. Monday dawned rainy and cold.
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This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
It was difficult to watch the show for which I spent years mastering theoretical physics, Narodnaya Volyaliterature, and the subtleties of Ivan Turgenev's 1862 epic Fathers and Sonsget carried off by a seabird, but I believe it was the right decision.
If anything, the experience only improved my view of the Rick and Mortyfan community. Before I decided to destroy the show, I mainly thought of the fans as considering themselves smarter than everyone else, and also for liking to yell, "I'M PICKLE RICK!!!!"
But once I announced that the show would be getting wet and wrecked by a river, the messages that flooded my inbox told stories of how the show had inspired fans, had helped them through difficult times in their lives, and had motivated them to better themselves.
I realized that I could not judge the show or its fans by a handful of bad pickles in the community.
At this point, I might even check out an episode or two.
That sauce still looks nasty, though.
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