

Oh, not at all. It would be very rude of me to describe C as a pathogen transmitted through the vector of Unix, so I won’t, even if it’s mostly accurate to say so.
Many high level systems programming languages predate C, like the aforementioned Fortran, Pascal, PL/I and the ALGOL family. The main advantage C had over them in the early 1970s was its relatively light implementation. The older, bigger languages were generally considered superior to C for actual practical use on systems that could implement them, i.e. not a tiny cute little PDP-7.
Since then C has grown some more features and a horrible standard filled to the brim with lawyerly weasel words that let compilers optimize code in strange and terrifying ways, allowing it to exists as something of a lingua franca of systems programming, but at the time of its birth C wouldn’t have been seen as anything particularly revolutionary.
Who could possibly dislike the smarmy fascist main villain of the story? Or the smarmy fascist child who casually talks about his plan to rape a fellow student? Or the smarmy fascist main character? Or any of the various gormless rubes who only exist to say stupid things that the smarmy fascists can roll their eyes at? Nearly incapable of writing these characters in a dislikeable way.