Thomas Ligotti and H.P. Lovecraft

 I just finished Thomas Ligotti's Teatre Grotesco. I have previously read a collection of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. I loved the first one, love Teatre Grotesco even more. But it's a bit odd to me how Ligotti is constantly compared to H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, he's written some stories that refer to the Cthulu mythology, so that's an obvious connection. And, broadly speaking, it's the same genre of cosmic horror. But the way people constantly invoke Lovecraft when they discuss Ligotti gives the impression that they're really similar; if you like one, you will certainly like the other, and vice versa. 

I'm gonna write about the differences.

I really like Lovecraft (yeah I know he was racist and evil and all that, gotta throw in that caveat, now, let's move on). But I like him in a pretty different way from how much I love Ligotti. We have these three massive Lovecraft collections at home, and I reread them from time to time, often when I'm on vacation. I think of it as cozy reading, though I realize it's not what people normally call "cozy". For starters, the characters don't drink lattes, and from what I understand, latte-drinking is pretty essential to the recent cozy fantasy trend. And then there's all the death and decay and an evil uncaring universe that drives people mad etc etc. So in what way, really, can Lovecraft be cozy? I had to think about this for a while, but here's my answer in four points:

1. First, it just seems so nice to be a wealthy man in New England over a century ago who doesn't have to work, who can spend all his days dabbling in art or science or scholarship as a hobby. Of course, I'm a woman of a working-class background, so the nearest equivalent to myself in this old-timey New England wouldn't have had much fun. But I identify with the main character when reading. (Also, I grew up in an 800-year-old-village: Lovecraft would see it and immediately faint in shock from so much age.)

 2. Now, obviously, this wealthy hobby scholar tends to encounter something that is just too much for him and then he goes mad at the end. But this is also, in a way, a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy ... Paul Lodge and I wrote about it in our co-authored paper "Strategy, Pyrrhonian Scepticism, and the Allure of Madness", European Journal of Analytic Philosophy (can be read for free here). Some types of madness, like Paul's, have an obvious appeal - what if I could just open my mind further and further and further until I understand everything? For a philosopher, in particular, the prospect of reaching an ultimate, cosmic insight is tempting. But there can be some tempting aspects even to terrifying forms of madness. For instance, you achieve at least a partial escape from this world.
Now, for most of us, that escape is somewhat illusory. You're not gonna remain in a state of absolute florid psychosis forever. And once you're back, you've got all your old problems to deal with plus the ones directly arising from your stint of psychosis. Most madpeople simply trudge on and deal with shit, day in and day out.
Lovecraft's characters, on the other hand, go mad and then that's the end of the story. 

3. This "go mad, end of story" in the individual case has a parallel on the societal level, or world level, in the idea of a grand apocalypse that puts an end to the whole world. This idea is obviously appealing to people, or else it wouldn't pop up again and again all over the place. And yeah, the Lovecraftian apocalypse with the return of the Great Old Ones etc isn't the same as the Christian rapture or anything. But it's still an end to this overwhelming terrible world, and that's enough for the concept to have a certain appeal.
I read Alan Moore's Providence a couple of years ago, and IIRC, a character outright says that maybe this change will be for the better, who knows? as the entities from beyond take over and reshape the world. And yeah, there's this guy who cuts the hands and heads off of people and other brutal violence, but it's nothing like real-world atrocities - the decapitated bodies keep dancing around to the music and seem happy enough in their new state. 

4. As cold and uncaring as Lovecraft's universe is, it's also grand, in a way. Sure, at the centre of the universe, there's the blind idiot god Azathoth, really supposed to symbolize that everything is completely meaningless. But even so, Lovecraft can't help but imbuing his universe with a certain grandness. And there's something nice about grandness in itself, I think.

Now, on to all the ways in which Thomas Ligotti differs, in particular Teatre Grotesco which I just read.

The main characters are often working-class and quite poor. Those who are artists are still struggling economically. They're often mentally ill and heavily medicated already when the story begins. No awesome story-ending mad breakdown here, just the ever-lasting hum-drum of struggling day in, day out with symptoms and meds. They encounter uncaring psychiatrists who seem more invested in economy and cost-cutting than helping people.
One MC is first prescribed a long train journey because he must get out of his comfort zone and face his agoraphobia. After an absolutely dreadful journey he's met by another doctor who prescribes him a job, you gotta work and keep yourself busy for your mental health! (This really echos a common sentiment where I grew up: madness afflicts those who "think too much"). He thinks it's an odd way to get a job, but turns out that this doctor is a regular supplier of new employees to this company.
Several stories feature factories and factory work. Quite relatable to me. 

As a teenager, I worked two summers at the local sausage factory. I was assigned to "the batter", an underground hall where the sausages are made before going off to the smoking room. There was blood on the floor. Large bins full of stinking sheep guts. Some still had shit in them, but no one cared - everything went into the sausage machines. Machines so loud that no one could speak to anyone else except during breaks. Three people worked each machine, alternating between three different braindead movements. During lunch, people told stories about what happened at night in that basement room. Said that rats always made their way in to eat the meat batter. They tried to run out again before the first employer in the morning pressed the button to start all the machines, but some always got caught and gave up piercing screams as they were ground down into sausage. On our way between the changing room and the hall, we would pass a locked door saying "cold storage 66". No other "cold storage" room was locked. We would joke that protesting workers ended up behind that door.
And people still ate that sausage for lunch, while cracking all these jokes. Because the pay was shit but employees got to buy sausage extra cheap.
So, this place was morbid enough. But I also did this two-week internship at a different factory - we had two weeks in school where everyone was supposed to be at a workplace and learn what it's like to have a job, and that meant "factory" to a lot of us. This place made parts for trucks. What I'm gonna say next is wholly unoriginal, Marx blablabla, but still - there is something weird about the kind of job where you constantly do just one part of a much bigger project and have no view of the whole. There were these parts that were supposed to be fitted into each other and clicked in place. Same parts, over and over, all day long. This is the exact kind of job that the main character in "our temporary supervisor" works. He and most of his colleagues are all ill, all medicated, and their regular supervisor is huge, fat, and lethargic from all the psych meds he's on. It's brain dead, alienating work, but at least they're used to it. Then, the normal supervisor is replaced by a temporary one, who seems to be some sort of bizarre horror (he's always in his office, they only see his bizarre-looking silhouette vaguely through thick frosted glass). Another worker steps into the office and confronts the supervisor, and seems to suffer a Lovecraftian mental health crisis that prompts him to commit suicide. The main character refuses to think about it. Because if he thought too much about it, he might not be able to go back to work, and he must go to work because else he can't eat or pay the rent! Or afford his meds. If you're out of meds, you can't function, and you can't get out of this world via overdose either!

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe were more focused on shifting realities, layers upon layers of dreams, and one person's reality being another person's dream (or nightmare; these earlier stories featured much more violence and gore). Teatre Grotesco has some of that too. There's a parallel to be drawn here to Lovecraft's dream-focused stories, and the idea that our world might be something Cthulu dreams. But another difference is that there is nothing grand in the world of Ligotti.
In "the clown puppet", the main character works night shifts at a pharmacy, but he's haunted by the titular clown puppet. He's suffered this for a long time and is pretty used to it now - reasonable, people can get used to almost anything. The puppet doesn't terrify him, but it frustrates him - he repeats over and over that it's such nonsense. It has followed him here, from his last job, his last place. Everywhere he goes, there's just more clown puppet nonsense. He still holds on to a sliver of hope that there's something special about him, and that's why this bizarre other-dimensional puppet follows him around - but at the very end, it randomly abducts his boss and disappears. 
In "the gas station carnivals", things really slide back and forth between different versions of reality, who said what to whom, at least some of the people in the story must be delusional, perhaps all of them are. But the story-within-the-story is, once again, about something utterly ridiculous and completely devoid of grandness: old, rural gas stations that try to attract more customers by also having some sort of mini-carnival attached. Like a Ferris wheel that's too small to be impressive to begin with, and doesn't even work. 

There's a connection to make here, to what Wouter Kusters and other philosophers label "hyper reality" and "hypo reality" respectively. When reality goes hyper, everything is incredibly vivid and full of mysterious connections and profound meanings. When reality goes hypo, everything is flat, faded, fake, disconnected, and completely pointless. Like in a Ligotti story.

So, there's not a single atom of coziness in Ligotti's stories. And that's one big reason I love them. 

Subjective feelings and (semi-)objective quality in fiction

Background: Thi Nguyen visited Umeå University for his Burman lectures. This lead to discussions about aesthetics, a topic Nguyen has published influential papers in. I, on the other hand, have zero background in aesthetics, and therefore not very considered judgments on the topic. 

During a conference dinner, I said something about how I think art appreciation is mostly down to subjective feelings that can vary a lot from person to person depending on the individual's life experiences etc. Bram Vaassen protested that this view didn't seem to fit with this post I made about the Barbie movie a while ago. I sounded much more objective there, about what's good and bad. I said hm maybe I am more of an art objectivist? I don't have very considered views since I haven't published philosophy papers about this, just blog posts ...

My more considered view might be something like Kant's. With the huge caveat that I'm drawing on an old memory of Critique of Judgment, which I haven't read in ages (no, this would not fly in a peer-reviewed paper, but that's the beauty of having a blog as well). Kant's aesthetics is more sentimentalist than rationalist. It's ultimately about the feelings that art invokes. However, that doesn't mean all art judgments are completely subjective. Some are heavily tied to personal experiences that others need not share. Others are more universal, more shareable (doesn't mean perfectly universal, doesn't mean I could share my judgments and have others agree with me across any gulf of time/space/culture). I also think there's value in trying to distinguish, in one's own case, between the more subjective and more objective judgments. It just makes for better communication with others. 

Personal example: I'm a big Star Trek fan. But I think this depends, to a large degree, on particular personal experiences. When I was a little kid, I read popular science articles about how we'd colonize Mars in the twenty-first century, stuff like that. Being a child who knew very little about science (TBF, I was probably knowledgeable for my age, but that doesn't mean knowledgeable period), this seemed entirely plausible to me. Being generally dissatisfied with life, space fantasies made for good escapism. Fast forward to my early twenties: I lived with husband and rabbits in a tiny cheap studio flat. We had very little money, and survived only because everything was cheap in our neighbourhood of shabby old concrete buildings. Star Trek Voyager aired on Swedish TV, and it made for such awesome, futuristic and optimistic space escapism. The local video store had the back catalogue on VHS and we watched it from the beginning. And there were other features about Voyager that hit just right: I was really mental back then (not the happy, productive, professional maniac that I have since become), but Voyager has an overall good track record when it comes to mental health. (Not like certain other Star Trek shows I could mention - looking at you, DS9! Overall a well-written show but damn did they treat mental health issues terribly, over and over.) And captain Janeway! People love to talk about Buffy and how it was groundbreaking at the time to have someone being simultaneously badass and feminine. Maybe. But people sometimes forget that there is such a thing as being pressured to conform with traditional feminine gender roles (once again, see my Barbe movie review for a discussion). I got lots of shit growing up for not being sufficiently girly and feminine. So I couldn't really get into the adventures of hyper feminine vampire slayer Buffy when it first aired - but Janeway was both a woman and a space captain and it just wasn't a big deal. 

So, Voyager will always have a special place in my heart. And I pride myself on being, perhaps, the first philosopher to reference Star Trek Voyager in a philosophy paper, namely The Agential Perspective: A Hard-Line Reply to the Four-Case Manipulation Argument in Philosophical Studies. People have referenced the Original Series and the Next Generation plenty of times, but I don't know of anyone else who cites Voy! 

However. I will never argue that Voy, or Star Trek in general, is The Best TV Ever and everyone must watch this or they're Really Missing Out. Because I don't think that's true. From an objective standpoint, there are many reasons why it's not The Best TV Ever.
- The acting varies a lot. You've got great actors, middling ones, kinda bad ones.
- The worldbuilding is inconsistent. Once in a blue moon, the transporter can be used to resurrect people from the dead, but mostly it cannot, and dead people stay dead. Most of the time, Star Trek is a moneyless communist utopia, but once in a while, we're suddenly supposed to pretend that poor people exist and there are materially based class differences - not just on bad capitalist planets like Ferenginar, but on Earth! The inconsistencies vary somewhat over time and between series, but they've been there from the 1960s to the present day.
- There are also some inconsistencies in values. It's mostly progressive values, occasionally racist, sexist, etc.
- When it is progressive and down with social justice, Star Trek - especially the older series - can get pretty preachy about it. There's this weird internet complaint that Star Trek Discovery is insufferably woke, but it's the older Trek series (mostly TOS to DS9) that let characters explicitly preach about some social justice issue. I can sort of appreciate that they're not holding back, but at the same time, it doesn't make for the objectively best TV.
- Later Trek, like Disco, has other problems; because they're less episodic and do longer archs that are meant to really hang together over seasons, inconsistencies and plot holes become more glaring.
Some later Trek also try to go darker than the old series, and often, they just don't pull it off very well. 

These are just a few examples. As much as I love Star Trek, I could critique it all day long. It's not, objectively, The Best TV Ever. It certainly has lots of good objective qualities too, it's not the worst TV either, far from it! It's objectively good, just not the best. I can distinguish between my subjective love and more objective quality judgments.

However, from time to time, I come across people (mostly in geeky internet communities) who seem utterly incapable of drawing this distinction.

For instance, I've had Buffy fans insist that I give Buffy another shot, because it's just so good. So I tried watching it. And I don't have a problem with the hyper feminine MC anymore, not at all. My childhood/teenage years where I was constantly pestered about not being feminine enough are long gone now. It still bothers the hell out of me when ostensibly feminist media push the idea that feminists must be feminine, because not feminine equals internalized misogyny - feminist should get rid of restrictive gender roles, not enforce them! - but I didn't get that from Buffy. So I'm fine with Buffy herself, she's a cool MC. Sarah Michelle Geller also did a good job in the role. And some of the monsters of the week were kinda campy fun, I guess. But it really wasn't good enough to keep watching after I had pushed through a season and a half.
- the acting really varied. Allison Hanna sounded like she read all her lines from cue cards (I'm sure she gets better down the line, but she was crap for as far as I watched).
- there's this weird running joke about how Giles is basically from the past because he's from England (???) which just didn't land with me.
- Cordelia came across as a really misogynistic portrayal of "hot popular girl" to me. I'm sure the character gets much better later on, but ... She's like Jane from the British sitcom Coupling but played straight.
Coupling had three fun seasons and a fourth that was pretty so-so - one of these shows I watched and laughed at despite the frequent sexism (stereotypes of women are like this and men are like that). The character of Jane, though, was 100% good fun. It was so obvious that she wasn't a parody of a certain kind of woman, but a parody of ideas that some lonely frustrated men have about popular hot women. It was super clear to me even before I saw an interview with Steven Moffat where he said as much - she represents what he thought that hot popular girls were like when he was an embarrassingly sexist teenage boy. Early seasons Cordelia, though, comes across as if Josh Whedon hadn't moved on as an adult, like he still thought "ok I'm gonna write a hot popular high school girl, and they're honestly this terrible".

I could go on. Anyway. From a more objective standpoint, Buffy is probably about as good/bad as most of Star Trek. It's got both strengths and weaknesses. But I personally love Star Trek because of personal idiosyncratic reasons. I couldn't get into Buffy, because it doesn't have any personally relatable stuff to draw me in.
However. I read an internet post by a middle-aged Buffy fan who was desperate because her teenage daughter had watched a few Buffy eps but didn't like it. How can I make her realize how great Buffy is? And then other middle-aged Buffy lovers suggested, as far as I can tell in all seriousness, that the mum should bribe her daughter to watch Buffy with her. They thought that if only the daughter could be made to sit in front of the TV for enough episodes, the objective greatness of Buffy would eventually affect her, and she would become a fan too. And they thought this was important, because otherwise the teenage daughter would miss out on the objective greatness that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This is a blatant example of failing to distinguish between more objective aesthetic judgments and your personal feelings for something. 

Another example of the same thing: Many people younger than me are really into Harry Potter. For my own part, I've never read the books, because I was already an adult when the first one was published and I don't have kids. Alexander and I watched all the movies a few years ago because we felt we had to, in order to understand the millions of Potter references people constantly threw around online. They were decidedly so-so, very generic portal fantasy about magic and wizards. Now, lots of fans will say "but the movies don't hold a candle to the absolutely amazing, groundbreaking books!" Well, as a present-day human with an internet access I have inevitably come across extracts from texts too, and it seems to be completely normal, serviceable children's book prose. So unless there's something amazing about the actual plots that the movies completely changed or left out, I'm gonna assume it's just so-so children's fantasy, with a main character carbon-copied from earlier fictional instances of the chosen English wizard boy with dark hair and glasses . Still, it's not surprising that millions of people worldwide have strong emotions about the series. It's escapism, it's about outsiders-who-are-actually-cool (lots of kids feel like outsiders and wanna believe that they're actually too cool for normal kids, because they're magical or super in some way - me too as a kid!), and this big and intense internet fan community soon emerged around the books. 
However. Now I see people talk about the serious moral dilemma they face with their children. Should they introduce their kids to Harry Potter, and support Rowling's evermore hateful bigotry and political campaigning against trans people? Or should they not do that, and have their kids miss out on the objectively greatest children's book series of all time? Should they impoverish their children's childhood by not giving them Harry Potter?
They really seem to think this is some serious moral dilemma worth discussing at length ("maybe you can find the whole book series second-hand ...? Borrow it at the library ...? That way, you're not giving her money!") instead of a complete non-problem. You don't wanna support Rowling? Fine. Just don't. Your child won't grow up with a big gaping hole in their soul where Harry Potter should have been.

So, to sum up: My considered view on aesthetics (or, like, semi-considered - I still haven't read much aesthetic philosophy, and still haven't written actual philosophy on the topic, just this blog post) is that we can meaningfully distinguish between our subjective feelings about a piece of fiction, and more objective quality judgments. And also that it's often useful to be able to draw this distinction, instead of mistaking subjective feelings for objective judgments.

Cosmic comfort

"Cosmic horror" is a recognized genre. I'm thinking there's also an opposite genre, or perhaps more of a trope than full genre but still -- cosmic comfort. (So, I'm still struggling to coin new fictional trope names -- see "grimdark preach" and "hot fair slut", that I mentioned in my Poor Things review, for previous efforts.)

 If cosmic horror is showing the universe to be cold, uncaring, evil, incomprehensible, maddening -- one or several of the above -- cosmic comfort shows everything to be kinda nice and safe at the end of the day. It doesn't count as cosmic comfort unless the story goes into cosmic stuff -- I'm not thinking of cozy stories exclusively concerned with earthly matters here. Moreover, I think cosmic comfort can be divided into two sub-genres or sub-tropes: first, it might show a cosmos ruled by nice guys. Semi-nice, at least, not evil, and perfectly comprehensible and relatable. Second, it might show a cosmos ruled by assholes, but they're weak enough for humans to defeat.

Gaiman's and Pratchett's Good Omens is cosmic comfort of the first kind. The antichrist is born, but he's a super sweet little kid! Couldn't hurt a fly! There's an angel and a demon but they're both so very nice and become the best of friends! There's some vague apocalypse threat in the background but what with everyone being so sweet and nice, it's easily averted in the end. (Btw -- that joke with the guy who can't get near a computer without wrecking it should really have been scrapped when they turned the book into a TV show. It made sense back when the book was written, when computers were far less user-friendly, and people often worried about the possibility of completely wrecking the machine if they as much as looked at it wrong. It makes no sense today.)
And it's not just this Pratchett collaboration. The Sandman is much darker than Good Omens, but still contains its fair share of cosmic comfort. The Endless are said to be inscrutable and ageless and quite different from humans, but they're shown to have completely human psychologies. They may be immortal and powerful sort-of-deities but don't you worry, they're not scary or inscrutable in the slightest, they're just like us! Dream is recognizable as a brooding goth boy, Death is recognizable as an annoyingly cheery kind of person -- this was really a big improvement in the TV show, btw, for I couldn't stand the comic book version. I'm not personally comforted by the idea of dying and being greeted by this manic pixie death goddess harping on about Mary Poppins and shit, and sprouting fake-profound statements like "you get what everyone gets: a life-time" to dead babies, but lots of other people love the character and she's clearly supposed to have this comforting role. 

Time to go off on a tangent before I move on: When I was young, there was Sandman merch you could buy, including an ankh necklace with "you get what everyone gets: a life-time" engraved. But this isn't a profound statement! It's fucking stupid! Imagine that I discover that other people at my job are paid twice or thrice as much as me. Angrily, I ask my boss why they get so much more money, and he just looks me in the eye and solemnly says: "You get what everyone gets: a salary". This isn't a profound answer! This is just him dodging the question and being an asshole!
Also, back when I was young (i.e., ages ago), when someone wanted to flatter me they'd say I looked just like Death. I always felt torn about this because yeah, I get it's supposed to be a huge compliment from goth to goth but I hated the character so much.
Fortunately, that stupid "you get what everyone gets" line wasn't in the TV show, big improvement on Death all around. 

Back to topic. All urban fantasy stories where there's heaven and hell and perhaps a whole host of gods but everyone is kinda okay, no one is truly evil, fall into cosmic comfort.

Then there are also those stories where Satan is evil and God is a dick but good news -- somehow, mere mortals are capable of taking them on and winning, so we don't need to worry about them too much. You can beat them if only you're manly enough (Preacher) or street-smart enough (Hellblazer) or, um, believe sufficiently hard in academic freedom, I guess (His Dark Materials, though I've only watched the TV show, not read the books). Writers start by painting this really bleak picture of the universe -- it's ruled by assholes, both from above and from below! -- and then back-pedal on the bleakness by showing that, at the end of the day, humans can beat the gods. 

Of all the stories I've mentioned, I enjoyed the Sandman comics overall despite some problems (Death, but not only Death), I've enjoyed the Sandman TV show so far, I read Preacher as it was published and really enjoyed it, Hellblazer has obviously been really uneven during it's super long run but I like lots of it too ... So I'm not hating on all of the above. (His Dark Materials, though, was a pretty-looking show but got increasingly stupid as it went on and was pretty much unbearably stupid by the end.) But I still dislike cosmic comfort as a trope. In my personal opinion, cosmic comfort always detracts a bit from the story. But your mileage may vary.

In any case, it really should be a recognized trope! Cosmic horror, and its opposite, cosmic comfort. 

One more musing, courtesy of my husband: When I discussed this with him he said "cosmic comfort -- or, as you might also call it, religion." First I protested and said yeah ok I get what you're saying, religions exist to comfort people about the cosmos, but I'm talking fictional tropes here, which is a different thing ... but then I realized this is an interesting point. Because stories like Preacher and His Dark Materials try really hard to be anti religion. So it's interesting that they still end up giving people these comforting messages about the cosmos.

Wish-fulfilment fantasies and real life

 The following scenario is widely recognized to be a wish-fulfilment fantasy: The heroine in some YA novel mostly read by girls has two hot dudes competing for her affections, and she must choose between them. It's such a common take now to go "they should just go poly and they could all be together", and sure, it would be cool with a wider array of relationships in fiction, but let's set that aside for now. The people involved don't want to have a poly relationship, and the heroine must choose.

Why is this a wish-fulfilment fantasy? After all, it's not a fun situation in real life. She cares about both boys, and when you care about someone, you don't want to see them sad - but inevitably, the one she turns down will be sad and disappointed. Also, even if they try to be all mature about the situation and stay good friends, this is often difficult in practice.
The reason it's still an escapist fantasy that many like to read about (or watch) is that fiction need not treat the situation very realistically and really dig into these problems. Instead, it focuses on how desirable the heroine is. Girls learn from an early age that it's extremely important to be desirable to boys/men, and if you've got two guys who are hot themselves competing for your affections, that means you're super desirable! 

Once we realize that fictional scenarios need not be any fun in real life to provide wish-fulfilment and escapist fantasies to the audience, we can also see that there's so much more fiction that fills this role than just "YA heroine must choose between two hot guys".

Major clarification before I move on: It's possible to really enjoy some piece of fiction and still recognize that it has problematic elements worth criticizing. We don't need to choose between rejecting something, or embracing it while vehemently insisting that it's perfect. I'm gonna talk about Rick and Morty, and I love that show! I've enjoyed the hell out of it from the start! I can still criticize it! "This is perfect" and "this is problematic and therefore terrible and must be rejected" is a false dichotomy!

Okay, here goes: Rick and Morty is a great show but a substantial chunk of the fanbase are made up by terrible people. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since the titular Rick provides wish-fulfilment for nasty people.
Rick is a huge jerk himself, but he's simultaneously the smartest and bestest person in the world (at least in early seasons - later on, he sometimes looks stupid and pathetic, and he doesn't always come out on top anymore). Even when he completely fucks up, like that time he turned the world into a "Cronenberg nightmare" and had to hop over to a different dimension, it's the kind of grand fuck-up only the smartest and the bestest could make. As terrible as he is to other people, their ability to stand up to him and talk back tends to be limited by how inferior they are.
Now, if you're a terrible jerk-ass yourself, this likely has negative consequences for your social life and life in general. But if you're nasty and hateful, you don't want to fantasize about some shiny happy scenario in which you're popular and nice with tons of friends, because you don't like other people, so you don't want to be nice to them or friends with them. Instead, you'll fantasize about being as shitty to others as you like, but they must put up with it, and you get away with it without negative consequences. 

Now, I've seen people argue that douchebags for whom Rick is a wish-fulfilment fantasy haven't paid sufficient attention to the show, because we actually see that he's also lonely and depressed, and even contemplates suicide at one point.
And sure, being depressed or even suicidal isn't fun in real life (duh!). But it can still serve as wish-fulfilment in fiction that doesn't dig into a realistic portrayal of these terrible feelings, but instead just use them as a kind of jerkass license. When Morty feels that he's had enough of Rick's shit and it's time to stand up for himself, Birdperson explicitly says that he mustn't do that. You see, Rick feels bad, and therefore, everyone should keep swallowing all his shit and never talk back. He must be allowed to vent and shit on everyone else as much as he feels like, because he's depressed.
People can fantasize about being the smartest and the bestest in the world, but it's usually obvious that this is never gonna happen to them. But a situation in which everyone around you goes "oh, now I finally understand how hard things are for you! How grand your suffering! I will never again complain about your behaviour - from now on, I will show you nothing but compassion, understanding, and admiration for how well you bear your grand suffering, regardless of what you do or say to me!" might seem like something that could actually happen. So people can absolutely fantasize about, not suffering in itself, but having their suffering recognized as a valid license to be shitty.

This also goes for tragic backstories like murdered parents or a fridged girlfriend. Of course this would be terrible in real life. But if those dead loved ones only fill the narrative function of making the hero cool, dark and brooding and giving him a license to be shitty to others, such deaths can definitely serve a wish-fulfilment purpose. 

So why does any of this even matter? Well, I'm not gonna claim it's super important to be able to spot wish-fulfilment fantasies when you see them. But off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons:

1. If you're a writer, you might want to know whether you write something that works as wish-fulfilment, and if so, for which demographic. That way, you can make conscious choices instead of being taken by surprise by what kind of fans you attract.

2. Also, if you think wish-fulfilment stories are bad and should be criticized - you shouldn't just criticize stuff like Twilight, but stuff like Rick and Morty as well.