History Characters / RickAndMortyRickSanchez

** He rekindles a romance in "Auto Erotic Assimilation" with the HiveMind Unity, a NewOldFlame, and has very clear, real feelings for it. At the end, it leaves Rick when it realizes what a ToxicFriendInfluence he is on it, breaking up with him via notes in a gentle-but-honest ReasonYouSuckSpeech about how he can't change. Rick is so distraught by this that he's DrivenToSuicide, only failing because he passes out drunk before he can die.

* ExtremeMeleeRevenge: When Rick has [[spoiler:Rick Prime, the murderer of his original wife and Beth,]] at his mercy, he forgoes any inventive method of revenge and simply beats him to death with his bare hands, spending several minutes reducing the man’s skull to a mass of gore until Rick’s coat head-to-foot in his blood.

* VengeanceFeelsEmpty: Rick has dedicated most of his adult life to [[spoiler:hunting down and killing Rick Prime, the man who murdered his wife and daughter. Though he’s gives up on finding him by the start of the series, events in season 6 motivate Rick to start hunting Prime again, culminating in Rick successfully beating Prime to death halfway through season 7. However, just as Prime [[DefiantToTheEnd mocked him while dying]], Rick’s search for Prime gave him purpose, vengeance defining his life. It’s only after Prime’s dead that Rick realizes Prime was right, and he doesn’t know what to do with his life fine that his nemesis is dead and his wife is still gone. Rick spends the end of the episode watching the rest of the family happily going about their lives while he sports a ThousandYardStare.]]

* LonersAreFreaks: Rick is a loner even by the standards of other Ricks. The Council of Ricks deems him a renegade because of his non-cooperation, and Rick specifically mocks them for being too cowardly to go it alone. However, while he's against the council itself as a whole, he's cool with a couple of the head members. It's ironic yet a given his attitude towards the Council is like this...[[spoiler: since ''he'' was the one united them together and founded the Council and was involved in the Citadel's construction.]]
* TheLostLenore: [[spoiler: It is revealed in Season 5 that Diane and Beth were killed in Rick's younger years, which proves that "false memory" he showed to the Galactic Federation in season 2 was indeed real. He never got over the deaths of his wife and child, and devoted the rest of his life to finding and killing their murderer, Rick Prime.]]

* LonersAreFreaks: Rick is a loner even by the standards of other Ricks. The Council of Ricks deems him a renegade because of his non-cooperation, and Rick specifically mocks them for being too cowardly to go it alone. However, while he's against the council itself as a whole, he's cool with a couple of the head members. [[spoiler: It's ironic yet a given his attitude towards the Council is like this...[[spoilers: given ''he'' was the one united them together and founded the Council and was involved in the Citadel's construction.]]

* LonersAreFreaks: Rick is a loner even by the standards of other Ricks. The Council of Ricks deems him a renegade because of his non-cooperation, and Rick specifically mocks them for being too cowardly to go it alone. However, while he's against the council itself as a whole, he's cool with a couple of the head members. [[spoilers: It's ironic yet a given his attitude towards the Council is like this...[[spoilers: given ''he'' was the one united them together and founded the Council and was involved in the Citadel's construction.]]
* TheLostLenore: [[spoilers: It is revealed in Season 5 that Diane and Beth were killed in Rick's younger years, which proves that "false memory" he showed to the Galactic Federation in season 2 was indeed real. He never got over the deaths of his wife and child, and devoted the rest of his life to finding and killing their murderer, Rick Prime.]]

* LonersAreFreaks: Rick is a loner even by the standards of other Ricks. The Council of Ricks deems him a renegade because of his non-cooperation, and Rick specifically mocks them for being too cowardly to go it alone. However, while he's against the council itself as a whole, he's cool with a couple of the head members.

** [[spoiler: he constructed the Central Finite Curve to trap his nemesis in a limited portion of the infinite multiverse]]

* GoalInLife: The end of Season 5 reveals Rick's primary goal is [[spoiler:hunting and killing the Rick that murdered his family, spending decades searching every universe for his whereabouts]].

A [[SociopathicHero jaded, morally-unsound]] [[BunnyEarsLawyer yet brilliant elderly scientist and inventor]] living with his daughter's family, and Summer and Morty's maternal grandfather. Rick constantly drags his grandchildren and their parents along on adventures that serve purposes rarely expressed. He has access to all sorts of technological marvels he's supposedly invented all on his own, and he is (in)famous among aliens as one of the most intelligent beings in existence. Despite that, [[TheAlcoholic he drinks]], has a whole suite of more-or-less lowkey mental health issues, and generally isn't the nicest or most pleasant person to be around most of the time, and finds that his inventions are really cut out for bigger problems than found every day in the family, though when the two combine, the result is never a pretty sight.

!!!'''Voiced by:''' Creator/JustinRoiland (Seasons 1 to 6)

!!!'''Voiced by:''' Creator/JustinRoiland (Season 1 to 6),

** His stated goal in "The Rickshank Rickdemption" was to supersede Jerry as ThePatriarch and focal point of Morty's life as well as the family's lives in general. [[spoiler: The end of "The Rickchurian Mortydate" sees all of that fall apart as Morty decides to stay with his family and help his (possibly-clone) mother, who has gotten back together with Jerry after some ill advice from Rick regarding her possible nature as a clone sent her into an IdentityCrisis that led her back to Jerry as the one simple constant in her life. At the end of the episode the status quo at the start of Season One is restored and looks like it's going to stick since the family is genuinely happy now instead of the near-dysfunctional state they were in back then.]]

* CharacterizationMarchesOn: Early in the show he was a drunken lunatic whose inventions [[BunglingInventor worked well enough to be dangerous]] but who clearly wasn't nearly as smart as he thought he was, more resembling a very dark caricature of [[Film/BackToTheFuture Doc Brown]], culminating in him [[spoiler: causing ''the destruction of the world'']] through sheer incompetence in "Rick Potion #9". After that, he quickly became a lot more competent and settled into his characterization of the bitter, amoral, InvincibleHero.

* CorruptedCharacterCopy: He's based on Doc Brown from ''Film/BackToTheFuture'', but unlike the NiceGuy Doc who is just more absent-minded than malicious and is encouraging towards his teenage sidekick while wanting to use science to help mankind, Rick is a cynical jerk with utter contempt for other people who is emotionally abusive to Morty while using science to get away with whatever he wants.

* DoctorWhomage: A darker take on the trope, being a ScienceHero who travels through dimensions and regularly takes down foes with nothing but his gadgets, his wit, and a lot of TechnoBabble. Though technically speaking he's based on Doc Brown from ''Film/BackToTheFuture''. The show also deconstructs the archetype, as Rick's experiences and knowledge of the universe and nature thereof has left him with an extremely nihilistic world-view, blatant mental health issues, a general fear of emotional attachment, rampant alcoholism and other kinds of substance abuse as coping mechanisms, and self-destructive tendencies to the point of being outright suicidal at times. Like the Doctor, he doesn't like to go back to places he's been before. When we get to see what's happened to a few of those places at the end of season five and it's really not pretty, whereas with the Doctor, his return visits usually show places improved by his meddling.

* OlderThanTheyLook: He's 70-years-old, and while his balding and pale skin does indicate that he is of old age, Rick looks more like he's in his mid-40s.

[[Characters/RickAndMortyTheSmithSanchezFamily The Smith-Sanchez Family]] ('''Rick Sanchez''' | [[Characters/RickAndMortyMortySmith Morty Smith]] | [[Characters/RickAndMortyJerrySmith Jerry Smith]] | [[Characters/RickAndMortyBethSmith Beth Smith]]) | [[Characters/RickAndMortySchool School]] | [[Characters/RickAndMortyTheCitadel The Citadel]] ([[Characters/RickAndMortyEvilMorty The President]]) | [[Characters/RickAndMortyOthers Others]] | [[Characters/RickAndMortyOneOffCharacters One Off Characters]] | [[Characters/RickAndMortyOni Oni ComicBook]]-]]]]]

** This is especially the case with Morty, since, unlike the other members of the family, he's kept the same one with him (the Morty native to the Cronnenberg dimension) throughout. [[spoiler:This is even more true when Season 6 reveals that Morty's native Rick is "Weird Rick", the one who murdered Main Rick's Diane and Beth, and Rick originally only came to Morty's dimension in the hope that Weird Rick would come back someday. Still, despite Morty being the real grandson of his worst enemy, Rick genuinely bonded with him and has kept him by his side ever since.]]
** "Rickmurai Jack" shows that Rick has spent most of his life since the deaths of [[spoiler:Diane and Beth]] refusing to move on, which led to his RoaringRampageOfRevenge trying to find the Rick who murdered them, to no avail. However, in "Solaricks", Rick admits to [[spoiler:AI Diane]] that he still doesn't ''want'' to move on from them, but has finally realized that he ''needs'' to, especially now that he has a family to go back to. He solidifies this later in the episode when [[spoiler:Morty tells him that, despite Weird Rick being his original grandfather, he considers Main Rick to be his ''true'' grandpa. This is enough to convince Rick to give up a potential chance on taking revenge against his original family's killer, in favor of leaving to rescue his current family.]]

* HurtingHero: Well...Insofar as Rick can be called [[SociopathicHero the]] [[NominalHero hero.]] However, his catchphrase "wubaluba dub dub" translates to "I am in great pain. Please help me." so at the very least, he's definitely hurting.

* TrademarkFavoriteFood: He's seemingly obsessed with the Szechuan dipping sauce ''[=McDonalds=]'' used to promote ''WesternAnimation/{{Mulan}}'' (he presumably also likes the nuggets themselves, but the sauce is the main draw). So much so that he himself has dubbed his search for it as the series' MythArc. He is also fond of a restaurant called Shoney's, so much so that he refers to it as being like home to him and visualizes his mind like it while he's being interrogated. Wafer cookies also pop up a lot as his favorite snack, a trait apparently shared by many Ricks of the multiverse. He also likes Eye Holes, and keeps a box of them on his private kitchen shelf, despite the danger of enraging the Eye Hole Man (he even tells Morty it's worth the risk).

* NormalFishInATinyPond: Rick created the "central finite curve" specifically to be this. Any world in the multiverse with anyone smarter than him is cut off from any world he inhabits. However, we learn this in the season five finale [[spoiler:from Evil Morty, who's not exactly unbiased about any Rick. Given Rick's self-loathing, it's entirely possible he views doing this as making himself and all the other Ricks SealedEvilInACan for the rest of reality]].

** The sixth season {{deconstructs}} this, because part of the reason Rick draws all this trouble to him is that he keeps responding to it. When he follows Dr. Wong's advice to just ignore the assholes who keep trying to draw him out, the result is actually peace and happiness as the bad guys end up finding people less likely to simply murder them into oblivion.

* MysteriousPast: The details of his life before he moved back in with the Smiths is almost entirely unaccounted for; all we know is that he was at least still living with Beth and her mother around the time she was a young child. Other than that, both his life before getting married and whatever he was doing while separated from his family is entirely unknown. Beth even alludes to his "incredibly vague backstory" at one point. It's mentioned in "The Wedding Squanchers" that Rick and others were involved in numerous atrocities fighting for freedom from the Galactic Federation, to the point of being labelled a terrorist. Exactly what these atrocities were are unknown though. Knowing Rick, probably best it remains that way. There's also a memory of him holding an infant Morty that doesn't fit in with the show's established timeline. Said past is finally revealed in the season 5 finale: [[spoiler: The Rick we know lost both his wife and his Beth, and spent years trying to hunt down their killer, ''another'' Rick! This lead to him meeting Birdperson, becoming embroiled in the resistance against the Federation, and eventually escalate into an all-out war against his alternate selves, which didn't stop until he agreed to help them with the foundation of the Citadel and the Council Of Ricks in return for being left alone. He was never able to find the Rick who killed his family, and he finally drunkenly reunited with an adult Beth whose Rick left her during childhood, the same Beth he's living with when the series starts, which is implied to have been more or less at random. Except it wasn't random at all: The cronenberged dimension, where our Morty was born and where the first half of Season 1 takes place, is the home dimension of the Rick who murdered our Rick's family. Our Morty is our Rick's mortal enemy's grandson.]]

* HeroesWantRedheads: While Rick isn't what most would consider a "hero", he does seem to have a fetish for red-haired people as seen in "Auto Erotic Assimilation", in which he has his hive mind lover fill a stadium solely with redheads.
** It's also speculated that Beth's mother was a redhead, due to both the above reason and because Summer's existence means that the redhead gene runs in the family some way or the other.