Tonight’s new episode of Rick and Morty, “The Final Temptation of Jerry,” isn’t secure for the sex-negative.
Some of the irritating and inescapable conversations on social media is over the function that sexuality ought to play in TV, motion pictures and music as an increasing number of youthful audiences push again towards depictions of intercourse and nudity in popular culture with puritanical fervor. Many members of Technology Z have, to this point, confirmed themselves to be about as averse to intercourse in media as Will H. Hays, a pattern that’s prompted a relentless deluge of think-pieces and opinion polls and brought about the movie trade to cut back on the steaminess.
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In tonight’s episode of Rick and Morty, the present’s writers drew a direct line from the Christian roots of anti-sex sentiment in American tradition to the up to date eye-coverers who name for fewer nude scenes on Twitter each time HBO drops a brand new collection. In line with a brand new piece of Rick and Morty canon, the very basis of Christianity rests in a race of alien prudes who despatched Jesus to Earth to cease the Easter Bunny from making us all fuck like rabbits.
In “The Final Temptation of Jerry,” the butt of the Smith-Sanchez household’s jokes is contaminated with a mutagenic illness that turns him right into a horrific, highly effective Easter Bunny able to manipulating different folks’s intercourse drives to the purpose the place society devolves into one big pixelated orgy. Throughout their seek for a approach to reverse Jerry’s transformation, Rick and Morty encounter a race of Christ Troopers who’ve been combating towards the planet-destroying Easter Bunnies for hundreds of years, and whose style in TV, motion pictures and music align with a lot of at this time’s twenty-somethings TV-watchers.
“My species doesn’t like intercourse,” Christ Trooper Basic Reinhardt Kincaid explains to Rick and Morty. “We expect it’s gross.”
“I don’t like seeing it in motion pictures or TV!” one other Trooper provides.
A 3rd then chimes in, “It upsets me when after they reference it in pop songs!”
Quickly thereafter, mutant Jerry murders your complete squadron of Christ Troopers and leaves their common torn in two, as a result of individuals who squirm at inventive expressions of sexuality one way or the other aren’t practically as turned off by excessive violence and gore.
That is removed from the primary time that Rick and Morty has launched the viewers to an alien race who’s uncomfortable with nudity and sexuality. Season One’s “M. Evening Shay-Aliens!” featured Zigerian scammers who can’t convey themselves to gaze upon one other’s genitals, however the Christ Troopers really feel like a way more pointed satire of prudish sensibilities in fashionable tradition, particularly contemplating that they’re, canonically, the progenitors of the Puritan Motion that first established squeamishness in American tradition lots of of years in the past.
Given the present’s indulgent and demented depictions of intergalactic intercourse over the past eight seasons, it appears unlikely that any such prudes are nonetheless watching Rick and Morty in 2025, however, if they’re, I’m certain that we’ll quickly see a viral Twitter thread about the way it’s immoral for Dan Harmon to make them watch a person give his motorbike a rim job.
