rickorty is like Shrodingers canon
meta: the whole show is based around their emotional incest, they are "meta" married because their names are connected by an "and" and every third episode is about their relationship with each other as a couple. That's the meta. But every almost single buddy comedy is also about a meta marriage, meta marriages are not a new concept.
But if they suck faces on screen it has to be aliens with their voices and their bodies sucking face, and it has to be a joke and the punchline has to be incest shippers. Rick can be quite obviously interested in kissing Morty when he's drunk, and morty can canonically have a crush on Rick.
But if our Morty and our Rick actually kissed in character, it would break the rules the show started with, because relationships can never "really" change in a serialized story. Canon can grow and grow and fix itself and update, but the relationships between characters always have to rebound back to the original state.
One of the premises of the story was that it "makes fun of the incesty vibes" of back to the future, only now Rick and Morty's own canon is more culturally relevant than back to the future. So now the premise of the story is that it has to make fun of incesty vibes of itself. And that's why incest keeps popping up in other characters storylines, like a great big incest snake sucking its own tail, because the incest is a reference to the incest.
And that is why codependence itself is becoming the big theme of the story for the past few seasons, because from a meta perspective codependency is the perfect metaphor for the fact that writers are stuck writing characters who aren't allowed to grow. That's what 100 years of Rick and Morty is, it's metaphorically incest hell, an incest snake sucking itself forever.
Yes, its totally canon, because Rick breaks the 4rth wall and everything meta is canon, but incest always has to be a reference something else. Rick and Morty don't go on dates, they go on Adventures. But going on adventures with someone else is cheating. Rickorty is a crack ship. But the show wouldn't exist without the incest joke so its going to punch down at incest fans for daring to take the joke seriously (which might make it unfunny.) But they are also going to take it seriously because the show runs on Bathos, which is related to pathos, but its about the feeling of jump cutting from silly to serious and back again. Done well, it makes the experience of watching the show feel more meaningful than watching a bunch of silly/gross gags would be alone.
In some ways being a rickorty shipper is like being in a relationship with a gaslighter who feeds you cookies and then punches you in the face and laughs at you for licking up the crumbs.
Personally, I'm fine with this arrangement because they need us, they need rickorty taken seriously to give their silly show a soul
(we are morty in this metaphor)
