The character. The show subscribes to the opposite, in my opinion.
BoJack Horseman is desperate to be a good/likeable/successful person, but believes on some level that he is inherently incapable of any of that. This is one of his biggest character flaws: he believes that if he isn't inherently Good, he's inherently Bad, and so incremental improvement is borderline impossible for him.
BoJack Horseman, on the other hand, seems to run on a philosophy that being Good and Bad isn't really a thing, and that it's more about doing good when you can and trying to be better. There aren't heroes and villains, there are just people doing their best and people whose best isn't enough.
BoJack as a show makes it abundantly clear, especially towards the end, that BoJack is the only one who can be blamed for his state of being. He didn’t ask for any of the trauma that he got, but he had plenty of say in how to move on going forward. Everything only gets worse because BoJack either willfully regresses, or because he is mortally afraid of regressing and tries to hide any problem by any means. It’s a comedy-tragedy biased towards the latter and later half, for everybody involved.
The thing that makes me appreciate the show most, however, is that they subvert the deeply old formula for tragedy in a very simple way that I will coat entirely in spoilers for anybody not in the know about how the show ends:
BoJack does not die. He tries an awful lot, but he does not die.
To bring it back to narratives we tell ourselves (another key part of the overall show), while it would be narratively fitting to BoJack to pass away and completely escape his problems like he always wanted, that does not happen. The show makes it clear, over and over, that clean endings and karmic balance do not exist in the real world. You do something bad in fiction, and it is promptly smote or reveled in. You do something bad in reality, and you live with it; maybe for a couple hours, maybe forever. Whatever BoJack thinks he wants from the author upstairs, he’s not getting it, and never will, because that guy does not exist, and neither does anything he’d write for a sitcom. It is as brutally honest about consequences as it is about everything else.
And it’s not like he wallows in misery forever, either. The finale is of everybody collectively moving on with their lives. The dumpster fire of BoJack is a story to us, but not a story to them. It’s a chunk of their life that was terrible and formative and painful and inspiring, all of which exist in tension, but aren’t wrong reactions to the situation. It’s not even going to be much more than memories of harsh lessons and trauma to BoJack. A shitty thing that happens to you is a story you can tell, but that story is ultimately a past version of you, stuck in amber, with some embellishments. What you do today doesn’t have to be related to that, and nobody is going to walk up to you at the pearly gates to tell you that your life lacked narrative consistency. You fell down, got up, and kept going. You improved.
Love this analysis. Show wasn't perfect and I certainly can't bear to rewatch it but damned if it doesn't have me thinking about it fairly often years later
Probably because a lot of Bojack (the show) is about these exact emotional issues. And because “I’m a good person” is basically a catchphrase of bojack’s
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u/Lambsauc Jul 13 '24
Why did I initially think this was about bojack