u/Ilikefiginggames

For those of you who don’t know, there is a terrible show called Family Guy. That show features a number characters who are, for all intents and purposes, god-awful human beings. No one in the show is a good person. No one is even close to being a decent person. Every character has committed heinous acts in the name of a cutaway gag that often doesn’t even land.

One of those characters, Quagmire, is a literal rapist who pervs on everyone and everything. His list of crimes is too long to count.

Brian is a talking dog. He was once the “voice of reason” character but has since evolved into a satire of fake intellectuals. He also is generally a bit of a deadbeat, and generally an idiot. 

In one episode, Quagmire and Brian go out to dinner, and Brian wants to know why Quagmire doesn’t like him. This results in Quagmire delivering a rant where he essentially says that Brian is a terrible person.

Whenever this scene comes up online, the consensus is always the same: Quagmire shouldn’t be the one to deliver that rant because he’s a worse person in every way. People argue that anyone else should have said it, etc, that it loses meaning with Quagmire, and that it would be better from anyone else because Quagmire is objectively worse.

But that’s exactly why Quagmire gave the rant.

He is a worse person, but the purpose of the rant wasn’t to say “you’re a bad person and you should feel bad.” It’s “you’re a bad person who pretends to be someone they are not.”

Because, despite Quagmire being a godawful human being, he is not fake. He is every awful thing you can imagine, and if asked, he will tell you. 

Brian Griffin’s character has essentially become a caricature of a fake activist, someone who is only invested in causes when they offer social clout, get him laid, or provide a reason to judge others. He doesn’t care about any of the beliefs he espouses. He often serves the role of mocking a certain type of modern liberal: a person who is slightly more educated than average, and who thinks that gives them authority over everyone else, when in reality, they know very little and do not actually care about the issue of the day.

The reason Quagmire delivers the rant is to highlight that, despite them both being awful and Quagmire being a worse person, Brian’s most significant issue is not being a bad person. It is being a fake one. 

TLDR: Quagmire was calling Brian a Reddit Activist.