this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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People who like Rick and Morty.
People who look up to Rick.
I love Rick and Morty but all the main characters are not good people. I don’t blame Morty or Summer since what else can you expect growing up surrounded by that family?
People who like American Psycho because it is a brilliant satire of the sociopathy of the elite.
vs
People who like American Psycho because 'I'm just like Patrick Bateman, fr fr.'
...
Its the same with Fight Club, Falling Down, Taxi Driver...
Its possible to enjoy and be a fan of these movies without actually idolizing a psycopath... maybe you sympathize or empathize with them to varying degrees, but you don't hold them up as idealized character role models, you realize these are all very flawed, often tragic characters who ... basically become villains in (semi?) plausible ways, that showcase how brutal and broken society is...
But, so many people do actually idolize these trainwreck characters that now we've spent basically the entire era of internet based cultural dominance/exchange where any kind of admiration of these 'cautionary morality tale about a disaffected man' type movies is just immediately, often instantly viewed as a red flag by a whole lot of people.
To people who like American psycho: read the book and get cured, it's one of the worst books I have ever read (long story short, I only had that one book over like months, so I finished it. A scoolkid could have written it + some unnecessary ultra violence, IMO).
American Psycho satirization of the cold and unfeeling aspects of 1980’s yuppie culture. Bateman might have hallucinated the entire thing and Paul Owen really could have been in London given how frequently Bateman is mistaken for another person by colleagues. It’s not about the sociopathy of the rich.
I mean... your plot notes are on point... but 'yuppie' derives from 'YUP', which means 'Young Urban Professional'.
At the time, the 80s and 90s, yuppie was synonymous with ... the people making huge incomes in white collar jobs, in large corporations, by being cutthroat businessmen, usually earning their keep by orchestrating deals, layoffs, mergers, downsizing/rightsizing, etc... stuff that was good for the shareholders and execs, but bad for pretty much everyone else.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying?
I don't see how you think yuppie culture and sociopathy of the rich... are any different, I don't get why you are drawing a distinction there, or what the boundary is.
Yuppie culture is sociopathic, and the young rich people of the era ... were largely yuppies.
Bateman is a yuppie, he is a rich person, and he is a violent sociopath/psycopath... or at least, he seems to think he is... he may just be utterly delusional.
The way I see it is ... he is a hollow person, a husk, with no actual values, but is a brilliant actor, acting out the fake corporate/socialite norms... which are fundamentally built on a kind of sociopathy: Nothing matters other than the pursuit of profit and status, superiority in all aspects is the goal, any means to achieve this are justified.
Thus he is the uber yuppie, the ur yuppie, the 'perfect' yuppie... and he cannot maintain sanity as a 'perfect' yuppie.
When Bateman snaps, we're seeing the violence that is normally done indirectly, sanitized through the layers of corporate governance and influence upon government and society as a whole... all of the complications of politics and economics are removed, and we see a disintermediated, rich corporate mad man in a suit (or his birthday suit) just directly doing the violence that is normally obfuscated and done via societal systems and layers of bureacracy.
You show the truth with a lie, kind of idea.
Maybe a more succinct way of saying what I'm trying to say:
Yuppie culture was the culture of the rich, or at least a prominent subculture of a prominent subset of the rich, in the 80s and 90s. Bateman is basically a cariacature of this, thus the movie is a character study of a person who represents an entire class... of wealthy people. (We also get to just see the culture outright via Bateman's interactions with others in that culture)
2)Bateman might be a psychotic killer OR it is all a delusion. Multiple events in the book happen that make it pretty clear that Bateman might just be crazy and bored and isn't killing people. That bit about Paul Owen being seen alive in London could be real because just like people think Bateman is Halberstam people also mistake him for Paul Owen. This is because everyone is so shallow and replaceable that no one really knows anyone so it is heavily implied Bateman might just be crazy like his lawyer tells him.
Where we differ is I don't think anyone other than Bateman and maybe Owen show signs of sociopathy. The average yuppie was no different than the average bro of today. They just had better whiskey and worse haircuts.
Rick and Morty bangs and had some subtle anti-capitalist elements to it.
But yeah Rick is a nihilist with severe empathy problems. Although he is showing some very minor character development.
Honestly all the characters in that show suck. Except that one girl morty time-looped himself out of marrying. She seemed normal.
Oh and Planetina. There is only one solution to earth's pollution.
I quite liked her methods tbh. Morty was just not willing to solve pollution.
He wasn't willing to do the things that need to be done to save the biosphere for as many creatures as possible.
I've only seen a few episodes, but isn't that part of the joke of the show?
Weirdly, I haven't seen a lot of people who think The Gang in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia are cool role models. I guess the difference might be that Rick is canonically a genius where The Gang are canonically morons.
As far as I know, yes. If it's not, then I should probably stop watching...
But they get pretty self-aware at times, they don't make any of the characters really look like they're doing the "right thing" for too long before they curb back around.
Is there a big connection between them and "Dark Enlightenment" chuds or what?
They'll glom onto any super smart asshole character and pretend that's what Elmo is like.