Hvornår er existentialisme IKKE sørgelig?

During their argument about making a Council of Ricks, Widowermaker Rick told Rick C-137 that their multiverse is contained in a work of fiction, and that the only way not to get cancelled is to be interesting. C-137 Rick called it a bad Sliders parody, but WMR told him that if he was the star of the show, the authors would provide proof eventually.

Sometime later, as he drove home after picking up some Chicken McNuggets with Mulan promo Szechuan Teriyaki Dipping Sauce, a bomb dropped out of a portal and killed C-137’s wife and daughter. Rick tried to just mourn and forget the sci-fi nonsense, but the concepts ate at him. He’s seen clues throughout his life, but he didn’t pick up on them. Finally, he resigned himself to working out the rules of metafiction as the basis of his multiverse’s reality. Nihilism was the result, because it’s always the result of uninteresting metafiction. Life was meaningless unless he went along with the authors’ plans, the very authors who killed his beloved, irreplaceable wife and his wonderful little daughter. What’s worse, a fictional character can only ever break into the real universe and kill his authors if their universe is also a fictional universe. The barrier between fiction and reality is only porous in fiction, not in reality. If he had any chance at vengeance, he had to become interesting.

So, Rick became good at Mad Science. He developed the portal gun. He went on adventures, met and fought Story Lord to a standstill once before and refined his theories about metafiction, became best bros with Bird-Person, tracked and killed all the Ricks who knew about the Council of Ricks, and had a huge pseudo-climactic sequence where he ran through a maze killing Ricks. The link to specific other worlds, including the one with his family’s killer, was within his reach, but it was broken by a dying Rick. It turns out these decades of his life were only prologue to the real story, but they were as real to him as the adventures with Morty.

In seeking to become interesting, he had only fulfilled the tragic backstory requirement for a long-running tragicomic TV series. So he helped the Council of Ricks create the Citadel of Ricks to sequester the Central Finite Curve from the rest of the multiverse.

He’s built narrative detectors which detect narrative, in order to warn him when to be particularly interesting. He had trained his narrative detectors’ AI on interdimensional cable so that all possible forms of narrative worth watching can be pattern-matched. It was that adventure with Morty and the ass-seeds that made them sound an alarm for the first time, so he just kept replicating the formula of that episode, over and over: bad grandpa making Morty suffer. He has since learned to walk a tightrope between nihilistic drama and rick-diculous absurd action comedy. He’s figured out it’s all a TV show, so he talks about seasons and episodes, but he also knows he and Morty are occasionally exploited for commercials.

He knows the only way to survive to someday find his personal resolution is to make the audience happy enough to make the suits happy with their numbers. It worked. But the cost is that the status quo (alcoholism and distancing himself from his family, farce and drama) must be maintained. He makes jokes like not wanting to avenge his dead family and only go after the sauce, so that he doesn’t lose what little he still loves to the writers’ insatiable need for drama when it’s time for a season finale or a season opener.

He knows that someday he’ll have to face the drama of the very last episode, where someone he loves will die unless he gives his life for them, in a meaningless capitalist gesture meant only to wring tears from the viewing audience and make them buy the final season on Blu-Ray or Google Play. And he will hold off that day as long as humanly possible, as much because it’ll be cringey as because he doesn’t want to die. And it’ll probably be Morty he’ll die to save, which would make his death suck even more.