One thing I absolutely find inspirational about Gen Z is their inate ability to joke about mental health. I just watched a Reel where the person says “Maybe if I love my anxiety, it will also leave me.” As a millennial with lots of diagnoses, this is hilarious. Just treat your mental health issues as someone you’re dating, haha.
Because I think a lot of our Gen Ys still feels a bit of shame having mental health problems, even though we are all shifting from that. I also still feel a bit awkward when I generally say, “I have a therapy appointment, and that’s why I can’t go to your baby shower” or just canceling plans in general.
So I think embracing your mental health in this manner is awesome. It’s also a great way to disconnect from your emotions. It’s a therapy technique called cognitive defusion (basically, distance yourself from your thoughts/feelings) and it’s just clever.
Okay, sorry for the long post to basically say: keep being you Gen Z! Awesome stuff, too proud. ❤️
“The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly you’ll see their flaws. That’s just the way it is. This is why marriages fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last. You might think you love someone until you see the way they act when they’re out of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake. Love is something different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is patient and kind, love is deliberate. Love is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.” The Great Kamryn
IDK IF I’LL EVER SHUT UP ABOUT THIS, BUT Y’ALL KNOW HOW MUCH WE BKDKS HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS MOMENT! BONES DID SUCH A GREAT JOB AND ESP THE VOICE ACTORS ;;; THE TRANSITION, KATSUKI’S “Izuku” AND THE “I’m sorry for everything.” I JUST- ASDFGHJKL
Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.
I know there is a lot of discourse ™ around this right now but listen to me
sometimes you do just have to lie to children.
If, when my toddler is, you know, toddling around saying “mama? Big ball?”
If I were lean down and say “unfortunately the big beach ball for some reason fills you with such an unadulterated rage that is beyond human comprehension that you scream until you pass out, so mama had to remove the beach ball from the premises until you can better regulate your emotions” she would simply stare at me like I had 3 heads full of equal betrayal.
So, for now, instead “big ball went night night!”
Please understand when I say “removed the ball from the premises” I mean I popped it in a fit of exhausted confusion. I murdered the beach ball.
See I’ve lied to you all too and it was better this way.
you can’t just leave this in the tags etc.
You can’t be funnier then me on my own posts, I’m in tears from laughter
Why should we as autistic people waste our time with (often unintentional) “autism coding” and Sheldon Cooper bullshit when we can watch a show about an actually autistic character created by an autistic man (Dan Harmon) instead? 🤔
One Rick and Morty criticism I see often is that the show takes a while to get into serious character development while other shows start in the first season. Admittedly, the season one characters are a little flat, but the fact that Rick takes so long to change makes his character development feel EARNED.
As you watch the first four seasons, you start to think that Rick’s never going to change. His family starts calling him out a little, but they still put up with his bullshit, giving him no reason to grow up. He’s also got a huge fanbase that wants him to be an asshole, and they’re giving the show tons of free advertising and dropping half their paychecks on merchandise.
That’s why it’s so rewarding when he starts to open up and drop the bullshit in seasons five and six. He undergoes a slow, gradual transformation instead of suddenly being nicer at the end of season one. Nobody thought he could do it–not even him.
Also, I don’t think that jamming a character arc into the first couple of seasons would’ve helped the show anyway? We needed time to see what Rick’s like and how he influences (and abuses) the people around him for his transformation to have significance.
He also needed a few ass-kickings to get his act together. If Beth cursed him out in season one, he would’ve freaked out but probably manipulated his way out of it. Rick changed not because of a couple of fights but because tensions slowly increased until the people around him (his family, Bird Person, Evil Morty) exposed all his vulnerabilities.
“Analyze Piss” was a great episode but not what I expected, which made it hard to write a review at first. I assumed that most of the episode would take place in Dr. Wong’s office with Rick hashing out some of his issues. Admittedly, I guess that’s what happened in a more indirect (and more entertaining) way.
When Jerry’s fight with Pissmaster went on for a good couple of minutes, I was like…are we seriously spending valuable screentime on this? But I guess we needed to see Jerry being a badass and humiliating Pissmaster to understand why the world was fawning over him.
The topic of change keeps coming up this season. People tell Rick that he won’t change, and he doesn’t want to, but he IS changing. Unfortunately, no one seems to notice.
He tries to tell Jerry that acting like a superhero is a bad idea. The family boos him. He tells them at the end of the episode that he knew Jerry’s adventures would fall apart, and they boo him again.
Rick tells them that they’re only praising him for trying to change because they want to feel superior–and maybe he’s right. In their minds, THEY don’t have to change anything. HE does. And it’s 100% true that Rick’s fucked up a lot of shit, he’s been abusive, he’s hurt Morty in ways that he probably can’t atone for, and he needs therapy more than anybody.
But they talk about his therapy visits in a condescending way, like “Aww, that’s so cute! Are you going to change for us, Rick? Are you going to be docile and passive?” They praise him when they think that Rick concocted some crazy plan to boost Jerry’s ego for no reason. When they learn the truth, they turn on him again.
I won’t say that he doesn’t deserve it. They don’t owe him anything, and they’d be well within their rights to kick him out of the house and never talk to him again. But Rick didn’t create the toxic family dynamic that Beth and Jerry had been cooking up for 16 years before he showed up. I think they’re telling themselves that everything that happens is his fault, and he’s getting to the point where he’s kind of letting them think that.
Rick smiles to himself when the Smiths leave with Jerry on his ship (although he does drink from his flask) and ignores a couple of the bad guys tailing him. When they start fighting each other and leave him alone, he thinks that he’s got it all figured out.
But inevitably, he starts to fall apart. He gets drunk and hears people at the bar mocking Pissmaster. “Who could relate, being that much of a piece of shit?” Rick can. He and Pissmaster aren’t that different–they provoke people, they’re pieces of shit and everyone wants them to be the villain. He’s going to visit Pissmaster so they can drink beer and bond over their shitty lives.
He arrives to find that Pissmaster killed himself. Through the door, Rick hears Pissmaster’s daughter apologize and say that she’s worried about him, she loves him and she’d blame herself if something happened to him–all things that Rick would love to hear from his own daughter, and probably never will hear. At least not in that same fretful, emotional tone.
Everything goes to shit for everyone except Pissmaster’s daughter, who believes that her father died a hero. Admittedly, Rick shouldn’t have told Morty about the note–it’s understandable that he’d want someone to know the truth, but he can’t trust a 14-year-old kid with that information, and he needs to stop seeing Morty as his peer anyway. He should’ve taken it to Dr. Wong.
But telling the truth just makes the Smiths turn on him again. And after all that, why should Rick change? Why be honest? Why not play the roles that they want him to play: the aggressive villain or the docile old man, or both?
Sometimes, the people around you don’t want you to change even if it’s for the best. I don’t think the Smiths want anything to change. That would force Beth and Jerry to face their shitty marriage and the ways they abused and neglected their children, especially Morty, and that’s not going to happen.
Just keep blaming everything on the drunk old man in the garage.
But Rick IS changing. In seasons 1-4, Rick would have taken the fact that they believed that he was always Pissmaster as an opportunity to gloat and manipulate everyone. Here, he just looks at them sadly. He tries to talk Jerry out of doing something that he knows will end badly. He desperately tells Morty the truth because he’s sick of lying. And the entire premise of the episode is based on Rick willingly going to therapy.
Seasons five and six have countless moments that show that Rick’s trying to grow up, show affection, be a father figure, admit to his fuckups and treat Morty gently. Even in season four, he was starting to cut the bullshit a little.
And it must be hard on him. Everything was easier when he was a monster. Beth loved him, Jerry was out of the way and he did whatever he wanted with no guilt, fear or regret while suppressing his trauma and shame. Wouldn’t it be easier to be the heartless patriarch who can manipulate his family into doing anything? Go on adventures? Cook and clean for him? Stop talking to Jerry? Show him affection? Actually want to be around him? Make him feel human again?
There’s no going back even if he tried–they know him too well now. And he shouldn’t go back because he was a monster destroying his entire family. But he needs the Smiths’ affection and encouragement if he’s going to get anywhere because he’s not going to get it from himself.
Rick becoming the Pissmaster follows the same arc as his backstory: he starts to give up, gets a sudden burst of inspiration and builds technology so that he can accomplish something for his or Pissmaster’s daughter. He didn’t step into Pissmaster’s shoes as much as he just stepped into his own. The only difference is that one arc was about vengeance while the other was about heroics.
