just stories (or, a eulogy for bojack horseman)

“I got into this business because I love stories. They comfort us, they inspire us, they create a context for how we experience the world. But also, you have to be careful, because if you spend a lot of time with stories, you start to believe that life is just stories, and it's not.”

— Princess Carolyn, “What Time Is It Right Now”

BoJack Horseman finished this month. I watched through the entire back half of its final season in a night, in a weird little echo of how I watched the first three seasons — back to back, preparing for a trip that I knew was going to be rough, trying to shake loose all the sadness before I had to put on a brave face. It’s hard to explain what this show has meant to me without that kind of anecdote, which I recognise does not say much for my critical objectivity. I promise I am capable of being smart and articulate about media, albeit only when it matters to me less.

I remember disintegrating in the final moments of the first season, when BoJack says “I really wanted you to like me, Diane,” and Diane responds only with a quiet “I know.” I remember pausing to sob into my knees when BoJack finally answered the phone for his mother, only to have her tell him that he was born broken; that’s his birthright, and there isn’t any cure. When a series I’d relied on for comfort became fraught and complicated, I went right to BoJack, because I knew it would understand why all the reassurances felt hollow to me. Starting to think critically about restorative justice and the hope of redemption, I tore through season five in a fit of desperation, unable to tolerate the thought of stopping without knowing what happened in the end. I have been ride or die, for want of a better turn of phrase, for this show from the beginning. It’s strange knowing that there won’t be any more.

All of this to say that I was surprised by the tone of a lot of the discussion I saw around the show. Specifically, I was completely thrown by the total confidence with which people announced that BoJack was meant to be a unilaterally bad character — that the only people who sympathised with him were shitty men, and that his function in the story was to facilitate suffering and (therefore) growth for characters like Diane and Princess Carolyn.

To be clear: I love both Diane and Princess Carolyn. But I love BoJack, too. Call this my apologia, if you like.

BoJack sucks. This much is on the record, and reasonably so, as fact. He’s careless even with the people he professes to love; he’s an outright asshole to everyone else. His reckless, self-destructive behaviour puts everyone around him at risk. He’s emotionally unavailable; he’s unreliable; he pretty much never has anyone’s back when it matters. The show is forthright about this. A late episode in the most recent season goes directly in on all of BoJack’s flaws, setting them all out one by one in a clear and measured tone; he gets defensive, he tries to clap back, but ultimately even he accepts it. Yeah, he admits, at the end of the episode. Confronted by his worst self, he can’t deny it: that’s him.

There are two ways to respond to a character who sucks, when you love them anyway. Here’s the first: I suck, too. You heard me! I am pretty terrible. I frequently neglect to think my shit through. I throw myself into stupid plans and cross my fingers that I won’t break my neck in the landing. I’ve literally been broken up with for being unreliable and emotionally unavailable; half the time, I know I’m doing it, and I do it anyway. Why would I not sympathise with this bad horse man?

And here’s the second: BoJack’s journey toward sucking as hard as he does is also pretty fucking clearly delineated. Because the show is not exclusively about how men hurt women; it’s not setting out to be polemical about that one specific form of harm. It’s about the horrors of living in public. It’s about addiction, and intergenerational trauma, and how childhood abuse can shape the adults who survive it. It’s about the limits of emotional support between friends. It’s about a black tar pit of an industry, swallowing everything good it ever touched. It’s about how a cute kid in a sailor suit can age into a grown man who can only barely function in the world. It’s about all of these things, in the person of one character who tries (sometimes) and fails (often) to be better than the people and places he came from.

Most characters in BoJack’s orbit are forced to deal with his shittiness, one way or another. Princess Carolyn thanklessly does her best to wrangle his career into shape, only to be held at arm’s length whenever she pushes for care or support in return — and guess what? I’ve been there, too. Diane’s association with BoJack variously threatens her career, her marriage, and her mental health, right up to the end of the show; there is no easy way for her to be around him without either enabling him or being enabled in her own worst foibles, which is also a whole-ass mood. Todd’s good nature and enthusiasm are exploited, undermined and wounded almost every time he shares a storyline with BoJack. Kelsey Jannings faces severe professional consequences for BoJack’s stubbornness; Herb Kazzaz faces the same, for BoJack’s unwillingness to hold his ground. Sarah Lynn spirals until she dies. Charlotte and Penny are clearly shown to never be the same again. The list goes on. All these characters — a majority of them women — are vivid and real portraits of what it means to be around someone like BoJack; it isn’t a show that shies away from showing its audience his fallout.

But I still have beef with the notion that to be sympathetic to BoJack is, by default, to be unsympathetic to everyone he hurts. Specifically… you do know it’s possible to extend sympathy to multiple places, right? Sometimes you can even do so simultaneously. That’s the fun and cool thing about media content, and also — dare I say it — about being a person in a morally complicated world.

“You come by it honestly, the ugliness inside you.”

I love BoJack the way I do because it not only acknowledges that complexity; it leans into it, actively, to tell a story that’s hard to sum up by way of any one moral position. It asks big, bleak questions about what warrants forgiveness, and who warrants forgiveness, and how often forgiveness is possible before a line has to be drawn. It doesn’t always answer them. Sometimes it answers them more than once, showing a different set of workings every time, and allows both answers scope to be true together. I can see as much of myself in a careless, self-absorbed, traumatised mess of a (horse)man as I can see in a brutally efficient career (cat)woman who’s convinced she’s going to die alone, or a depressed and neurotic writer clinging to her own inability to compromise — because it’s good, actually, to have the space to acknowledge the broken parts of myself. It’s good to see them and acknowledge them, every once in a while; it’s good to have fiction out there that facilitates that acknowledgement, and provides a safe way to go about it.

Life isn’t just stories. Stories aren’t life. And I suppose what I am saying is that it’s good to have stories that resist being mapped straightforwardly onto life, the way BoJack does. I will miss it. I hope it lives on in more stories that try to do the same.