A Brief Analysis of Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Repeat

   

     Well bois, we did it. After two years of waiting, Season 4 is upon us. Hopefully you spent that time doing something productive instead of just sitting around and shitposting like an incel. If you haven't already watched the season premiere, I suggest you do so before reading this analysis. Working (and legal) link here: https://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty/

     Roiland and Harmon clearly put their time into making this premiere well worth while. I didn't know what to expect after waiting 2 years, but I definitely wasn't expecting something this grandiose, and was not disappointed.

     Our misadventures begin as has come to be expected at this point: at the breakfast table. This time around, however, the remnants of family drama in season 3 are at the forefront of the scene. Rick is no longer "Completely in control" of the family as he was in the beginning of season three, and is clearly still peeved about it, but I will touch more on that later.

     As the episode progresses (without too many spoilers), we see firsthand some dynamic character changes. Firstly, Morty is no longer the helpless, pathetic 14-year-old from previous seasons. He has grown increasingly cynical of Rick and forgoes all caution, striving only to satisfy himself, no longer playing the role of a mindless sidekick, as is reinforced also by the new family relations.

     At the same time, Rick experiences closure to the old way the Smith family functioned. It becomes clear that his threat of always switching to a better reality is rather empty as he is repeatedly cloned into alternate realities, where he experiences Ricks and Morties who take on exotic roles, from hardcore fascists to insect killing wasps. Wasp Rick tells C137, "When you're born that big an asshole, the least you can do is have a little empathy. Now come have dinner with my family." As C137 has dinner with the Wasp Smith family, he undergoes some self-reflection as he sees how well the Wasp Smiths get along and agree with each other. "We're Wasps, not Monsters," Says Wasp Rick.
     "I guess I don't have it as bad as I thought," says C137 to himself.

    After a wild battle sequence involving a Giant holographic Rick made flesh, the episode concludes with the gang deciding that it is important to both plan ahead and live in the moment, a theme we will likely see repeating later this season.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

 - The creators successfully managed to make light of extreme left/right wing politics that have arisen in the US today. Not only were these themes appropriately handled, but were comedic regardless of the viewer's political ideology, a feat which is rarely seen today.

 - Many references of lore were used throughout this episode. Whether this will continue throughout Season 4 is yet to be seen, but it was refreshing to see the levels of continuity in which the creators will go to.

 - As was implied by Rick's multiple reality shifts, we will likely see multiple Ricks again this season, and possibly Evil Morty.

 - Despite previous concerns, the show remains as edgy, charged, and graphic as ever, which should please many hardcore fans

 - The show continues to break the fourth wall on a semi-regular basis, again continuing themes from previous seasons.

 - Mr. Goldenfold is still one of the most iconic and humorous characters in the series, in my humble opinion.

Pain as Pleasure

A friend of mine recently recommended an episode of Black Mirror to me, in which a doctor is able to feel his patients' pain. The doctor finds himself enjoying the pain, to the point where he is unable to perform his job correctly. Eventually, he realizes he can enjoy pain by hurting himself, and the rest of the episode features him "cutting bits of his body off."
Though I'm not a masochist, or into self harming, I do identify with the doctor in some way. Take hot-sauce, for example. Plenty of people enjoy hot-sauce, and I can't speak for any of them, but personally, I enjoy the pain. I remember eating crushed ghost peppers sophomore year in track season: I told my pals it invigorated me, but I just enjoyed the pleasure I derived from the pain.
My first memorable exposure to enjoyment of pain goes back to visits to the D.O. as a child. As the doctor pressed and pulled the muscles in my neck and back, I found myself relishing every moment, especially the uncomfortable ones.
I should clarify that this is not sexual pleasure, but a unique, mild euphoria that is exclusively induced by pain.
Another similar physical experience is the use of a TENS unit. I'm not sure what these are typically for, but I have enjoyed many hours on the table at the chiropractor being zapped by this pleasure-generating pence machine. When turned all the way up, the TENS keep forcing one's muscles to contract, and can hurt quite a bit. At points, it's so pleasurable that I am basically laughing and drooling into the face towel while convulsing uncontrollably. It sounds disgusting, but feels extraordinary.
These physical pleasures are lovely, but they are nothing compared to the enjoyment induced by emotional pain. At this point, it becomes more about the aesthetic than the pleasure. Imagine an artist making a beautiful art piece, and then destroying it in a creative, unique way. Was the art the piece that was destroyed, or does the art encompass both the destroyed piece and the entire act? Obviously, half the artistry is the creative act of destruction

The Full Speech/Text from Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It

There’s no feeling more intense than starting over. If you’ve deleted your homework the day before it was due, as I have. Or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back, after spending an hour in the commute. If you won some money at the casino and then put all your winnings on red, and it came up black. If you won an argument with a friend and then later discovered they just returned to their original view. Starting over is harder than starting up. If you’re not ready for that, like if you’ve already had a bad day, then what you’re about to go through might be too much. Feel free to go away and come back. I’ll be here. Alright, thanks for coming with me on this trip. I’ll understand if you have to take a break at any point… Just find a safe place to stop, and quit the game. Don’t worry, I’ll save your progress, always, even your mistakes. This game is a homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled ‘Sexy Hiking’. The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-Games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they’re often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products. In a certain way Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It’s built almost entirely of found and recycled parts, and it’s one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time. In it, your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer. The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game it’s flavour. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything. Anyway when you start Sexy Hiking, you’re standing next to a tree, which blocks the way to the entire reset of the game. It might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up. There’s a sense of truth in that lack of compromise. Most obstacles in videogames are fake - you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method of the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time. In that sense, every pixellated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real. The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I’m not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing and it’s authentic to the process of building a game about climbing. A funny thing that happened to me as I was building this mountain: I’d have an idea for an obstacle, and I’d build it, test it, and… it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn’t bring myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault as a player, rather than as the builder. Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it’s our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real. When you’re building a videogame world you’re building with ideas. And that can be like working with quick-cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with and in the process of playing with them they begin to harden and set until they are immutable, like rock. At that point you can’t change the world - not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas. For years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a void. For the most part, that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean they look bad or they’re badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds. Overtime we've poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh and untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age. You can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture. B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy. Maybe this is what this digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity's fountain. A landfill with everything we ever thought of in it. Grand, infinite and unsorted. There's 3D models of breakfast, gen-xer's fanfic novels, scanned magazines, green-screen Shia LaBeouf, banned snuff scenes on liveleak, Facebook's got lifelike bots with unbranded adverts, and candid shots of Kanye, and taylor swift mashups, car crash epic fail gifs, Russian dash cam vids, discussions of McRibs, discarded, forgotten, unrecycled, muddled, rotten, and untitled.
Everything's fresh for about six seconds, until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there's years of persevering, disappearing into the pile, out of style, out of sight. In this context it's tempting to make friendly content, that's gentle, that lets you churn through it but not earn it. Why make something demanding, if it just gets piled up in the landfill. Filled with bland things? When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone's turned off by that, they want to burn through it quickly, a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless. But that's not your, you're an acrobat, you could swallow a baseball bat. Now I know most likely you're watching this on Youtube of Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you, like a baby bird being fed chewed up food. That's culture too. But on the off-chance you're playing this, what I'm saying is Trash is disposable but maybe it doesn't have to be approachable. What's the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don't hate it if you got this far Feeling frustrated it's underrated.
An orange is sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That's not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness, its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice. It feels like we're closer now, composer and climber, designer and user. You could have refused but you didn't. There was something in you that was hidden, that chose to continue.
It means a lot to me that you've come this far, endured this much. Every wisecrack, every insensitivity, every setback you've forgiven me is a kingly gift you've given me. We have the same taste, you and I. It's not ambition. It's ambition's opposite. An obdurate mission to taste defeat. You'll feel bad if you win so I put this snake in for you. https://youtu.be/0KbdJ9LeXXM Have you ever thought about who you are in this. Are you the man in the pot, Diogenes? Are you his hand? Are you the top of his hammer? I think not- where your hand moves, the hammer may not follow, nor the man, nor the man's hand. In this you are his WILL. His intent. The embodied resolve in his uphill ascent . Now you've conquered the ice cliff, the platforms, the church and the rectory, the living room and the factory, the playground and the construction site, the granite rocks and the lakeside. You've learned to hike. There's no way left to go but up and in a moment I'll shut up, but let me say I'm glad you came. I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far. I give it to you with all my love.