Dan Harmon Lays Into Sexist 'Rick And Morty' Trolls For Harassing Female Writers

Behind every powerful woman are legions of disgruntled male trolls trying to tear her down. It's unfortunately a common sight on the internet: a female writer, social media personality, or women in the limelight find themselves subject to increasingly violent threats for a misspoken statement or badly-received work.

It's even worse when it's in a traditionally male sphere, like the case of Rick and Morty's new female writers. Jane Becker and Jessica Gao were part of a group of four female writers hired onto Cartoon Network's Adult Swim show in season 3 — which until then had an all-male writers' room. But this shift in the status quo led some Rick and Morty fans to lash out aggressively against Becker and Gao, harassing them on Twitter and doxxing them (publicly revealing their private information). And that has earned them the wrath of Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon.

Dan Harmon was livid over the way that his writers have been treated, and rightfully defensive of his show's decision to work towards gender parity and shatter Adult Swim's long-running issue working with women behind the scenes.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Harmon went off against the trolls, calling them "disgusting."

"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."

Gao and Becker are part of the group of new hires brought on earlier this year including Erica Rosbe and Sarah Carbiener. They found themselves the subject of harassment by Rick and Morty fans after a few season 3 episodes with their names credited ("Rickmancing the Stone" and "Pickle Rick") earned ire for one reason or another.

Harmon derided the fans' "total ignorance of how writing a television show works," explaining that each episode is a collaborative effort, with no single writer responsible for an episode's voice or quality. The writer who gets credit for the episode is often the one who put in the most work, but to blame a single writer — in this case, to single out the female writers — is stupid.

Harmon continued telling it how it is, remarking that these trolls harassing his writers are likely immature or actual children who live with a dangerously regressive mindset:

"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 ... 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."