A point-of-view character had never done anything of importance out of sight of the audience before. To suddenly bring that into the story years after the episode (in-story and in real time) was horseshit. I can't take it seriously.
He obviously meant because he suggested they take enormous amount of drugs together. He was stupid and irresponsible and someone else suffered for it irreperably and he has to live with that. Changing it to manslaughter-by-negligence is moronic.
And it was a change. There is no way I'd believe they intended this shit about him waiting too long to summon aid in order to suddenly reveal it that many years later.
An episode in the final season said that after he realized Sarah Lynn had become unresponsive in the planetarium he didn't call for help for 17 minutes because he was worried he would get in trouble, meaning he didn't care very much if she lived or died. It doesn't add up.
An alternative that would have been more fitting IMO is to have had him still be high and waste 17 min trying to resuscitate her himself before remembering / realizing he should call 911.
Then you get to have Bojack’s main character / sitcom delusion in play, get to gave the sucker punch that those 17min were life and death, and to boot don’t need to make your nuanced main character an irredeemable piece of shit coward.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>Bojack’s main character / sitcom delusion
It never did this idea in a coherant way. Things like him being flummoxed that cancer guy rejected his apology seems more like him wishing life was simple and easy, which hardly requires him to be deluded that life is like a sitcom.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
That’s fair, and maybe even just a better way to describe it.
Part of what he liked about TV was how everything ends up with a nice bow on it, he doesn’t have to actually be mentally ill to wish things were simpler.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Todd's or Mr. PB's storylines often did turn out like sitcom gag plots so what is that saying?
and times it was clearly trying not to be like a sitcom, like when Princess Carolyn fired her excellent secretary because he usurped her authority to save her seems showy and pointless. "Hey guise, we're NOT a sitcom". So what?
I think they just didn't know what to do with Todd. I don't even think the ace thing was bad, they just couldn't seem to write any really good story around it.
It especially felt pointless because everything about his story had nothing to do with his eventual ending. The thing about his family and that the childcare job came out of nowhere. I like that he found a partner that could work with him but even that felt underdeveloped.
I think there's not much story to tell beyond general 'this is a thing that exists'. It's defined by not doing something, so after the psa there's not really anything to talk about.
As an asexual myself I just found the whole addition kind of meaningless to his whole character, other than to make him look like an even weirder loser, so I really disliked the need to point it out. Most asexuals identify with the goofy, high-spirited characters obsessed with their passions anyways. Him being literally me, a rich and extremely financially lucky stoner, didn't even help because I hate pointless pandering to that degree.
This show was poisoned by the creators going on the internet and seeing people praising Bojack for being a nuanced protagonist. They saw people identifying with his depression and self-destructive behaviors right in the wake of MeToo and went >FRICK NO, HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE A BAD MAN, NO NO NO YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO ROOT FOR HIM
so they basically built the entire last two seasons around retconning Bojack into being an objectively bad person rather than a guy who acts out because he had a hard life (but he wants to do better).
The creator became self-conscious because he met Harvey Weinstein who told him he liked the show. The last two seasons make Bojack irredeemable and scold the audience for identifying with him. The message isn't one of hope like many had anticipated but that broken people cannot truly change and the best possible outcome is for them to be isolated so they cannot hurt anyone else.
>The message isn't one of hope like many had anticipated but that broken people cannot truly change and the best possible outcome is for them to be isolated so they cannot hurt anyone else.
The worst part about the whole deal was they had shown him changing and becoming a better person more than a few times up to that point. S1 Bojack sure as shit wouldn't have held back on his mother in Time's Arrow, he was well on his way to becoming less self-centered and actually starting to care about other people besides himself. S1 Bojack couldn't understand why PC couldn't be both his GF and his agent, S4 Bojack had managed to pull himself together enough to realize they were poisonous for each other and cut ties.
To show that sort of character growth, only to turn around and say "NO, HE HASN'T CHANGED AT ALL AND NEVER WILL!!!", it was just insulting to the audience's intelligence.
The ending is about letting go of toxic attachments. Bojack's relationship with his mother is a metaphor for his relationship with Horsin' Around. He has a hard time letting go of his mother even though she was a horrible abusive influence. Horsin' Around was similarly a negative influence. His need to keep Horsin' Around successful is what caused him to betray his friend and start his spiral into being a terrible person. Even teaching an acting class was ultimately a connection to Horsin' Around. This is why in the end he has to lose EVERYTHING to be truly free.
The theme of letting go is also reflected by Diane and Mr Peanutbutter. PB has trouble letting go of people even when the relationship is toxic, which he realizes in the end and decides to get therapy for it. Diane realizes that her activism was borne of egotism and moves to a new town with a new husband, and settles for a steady career writing children's books.
>He has a hard time letting go of his mother even though she was a horrible abusive influence.
The same mother he ignored whenever he got a chance, and only bothered to visit when he absolutely NEEDED to ask her something? The same mother he barely tolerated for half a season before shoving her into the worst nursing home he could find? The same mother he shit-talked through the majority of the eulogy?
He let go of her a long time ago. He was looking for closure he never got, but he stopped putting himself in a position where his mother could hurt him ages ago. He may have let go of his desire for revenge against his mother at the end of Time's Arrow, but he did leave her there in that dump.
Him hating his mother‘s guts and yet never stopping to try and win her approval are not mutually exclusive concepts.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
But he wasn't looking for her approval by the time the show started, he gave up on that long ago. He just wanted to tell her off. The only reason he bothered trying to get the baby doll back was because he was trying to win approval from his half-sister(who he thought was his daughter). He was smiling when his mother fell apart and started crying. He didn't feel guilty until Hollyhock expressed her disgust at his actions.
but it ended with him making up with Todd, living with Mr Peanut Butter, and having a comeback lined up at the end of his sentence due his so bad it's good movie he did with that one guy. Other than his relapse during that interview he's still acting better than when the show started and has a network of friends and fans. So if irredeemable is what he was going for he did a shit job there showing it.
Production groups that are not accountable to success but rather maintaining social credit and appeasing very wealthy people and their pet ideologies.
It’s the same reason “diversity” now means “what I see in urban SoCal”.
It’s not about pleasing viewers, it’s about pleasing patrons.
The show should have ended at the halfway point of the last season. Contriving a reason for Bojack to lose everything and undoing all the progress he'd made turned the whole show into a pointless waste of time.
For the record I don’t hate the ending, in part because I love “The View From Halfway Down”. That poem alone is worth all the dumb shit around it.
It would have been very courageous to end off with Bojack having won a couple wins, course corrected at least some of his awful tendencies, and still have the demons of his past weighing on him.
We could have had a rare instance of an ending where the hero learns he can’t undo the evils he’s done, but he can try to make something decent with what he has ahead of him.
Imagine a last episode with: >Bojack selling the house to escape LA because he’s gotten some gig at an art college in Seattle or something. >He’s spent the season learning not to try and force friendship on PC, Diane, and Todd. >Nevertheless he’s hopeful they’ll come around in time. >Maybe a reprise to ‘stupid piece of shit’ where he’s got his inner voice - debates going and getting shitfaced while the movers finish >Sees monkey bro >”Neigh way, jose” or some other cringe thing bojack thinks is cool >Smash to credits and themesong
Basically anything that ends up with a road ahead of him and the possibility of success.
Before it turned to shit everyone said the first season was the weakest and was a stumbling block for entrym but in retrospect I like it more because it's simple and complete; a has-been butthole actor gets a crush on a younger woman which goes nowhere but forces him to confront what an butthole he is without any more excuses. "I really wanted you to like me, Diane" is a great final line to the story.
Bojack isn't a depressed basketcase addict who's literally never been happy for a single moment, he's just some jerk.
I kinda agree.
I liked the deeper depths of later Bojack but there’s something really charming about “Prick who sounds like Will Arnett learning to be less of a prick”
He fabricates a story of how he was at home and SL had called him before overdosing. We then learn that he had waited 17 minutes before actually calling an ambulance just so that his alibi would be more believable
It was a bit reactionary and heavy-handed but ultimately it fits.
Anyone that thought the show was building to Bojack becoming a good person or anyone getting a magic storybook ending wasn't paying attention to the show at any point. Herb literally spells it out for the audience when Bojack visits him: Life isn't a sitcom. There is no wrap-up. There is no neat and tidy conclusion. No emotional epiphany or heartfelt speech is going to suddenly make everything alright. Life doesn't have these artificial conventions, it simply marches on.
That's not what people take issue with because like you said it was established early on and was a recurring theme of the show.
It was the diabolical behavior of Bojack that went against his prior characterization. He was always a dickhead and prone to making terrible decisions but a woman-beater? Also we literally see an image inside Bojack's head where he is carrying Sarah Lynn's lifeless body just to have that retconned. It feels like they had to amplify his bad traits even if it contradicted itself. Like we get he's a bad guy but he wasn't so close to a Weinstein type so they started throwing bad traits against the wall and grafting them unto Bojack. Perhaps if they had thought the show out better from the start it could have worked but it comes across as a case of dramatic shifts in writing that are ultimately unsatisfying.
>a woman-beater?
This is kind of a disingenuous way to talk about what happened. He's not a "woman beater" and he didn't wantonly attack his costar, he was in the middle of a psychotic break.
Ironically I think people are too harsh on Bojack's portrayal in the final seasons, even the seventeen minutes can be interpreted as a drugged out Bojack legitimately being unable to process the situation.
They added in several scenes like him punching the wall, grabbing his assistant and her pleading that he's hurting her etc. Just behavior that was never shown in the early seasons yet were inserted towards the end and we're supposed to pretend that it's coherent characterization.
As for the 17 minutes, he specifically says that he was trying to cover his tracks. He didn't know she was still alive so that takes a bit off of him but ultimately his need to save his image and career trumped Sarah Lynn's well-being and prevented potentially lifesaving service from reaching her.
Shame the whole trajectory of the story had to be derailed with these stupid retcons because Raphael heard Weinstein likes the show
A point-of-view character had never done anything of importance out of sight of the audience before. To suddenly bring that into the story years after the episode (in-story and in real time) was horseshit. I can't take it seriously.
But it subverted expectations.
In the episode right after Sarah-Lynn died BoJack flat out said he killed her. It wasn't a retcon
He obviously meant because he suggested they take enormous amount of drugs together. He was stupid and irresponsible and someone else suffered for it irreperably and he has to live with that. Changing it to manslaughter-by-negligence is moronic.
And it was a change. There is no way I'd believe they intended this shit about him waiting too long to summon aid in order to suddenly reveal it that many years later.
can i get a ling to what you're talking about? i remember the his charge being breaking and entering, not manslaughter
An episode in the final season said that after he realized Sarah Lynn had become unresponsive in the planetarium he didn't call for help for 17 minutes because he was worried he would get in trouble, meaning he didn't care very much if she lived or died. It doesn't add up.
An alternative that would have been more fitting IMO is to have had him still be high and waste 17 min trying to resuscitate her himself before remembering / realizing he should call 911.
Then you get to have Bojack’s main character / sitcom delusion in play, get to gave the sucker punch that those 17min were life and death, and to boot don’t need to make your nuanced main character an irredeemable piece of shit coward.
>Bojack’s main character / sitcom delusion
It never did this idea in a coherant way. Things like him being flummoxed that cancer guy rejected his apology seems more like him wishing life was simple and easy, which hardly requires him to be deluded that life is like a sitcom.
That’s fair, and maybe even just a better way to describe it.
Part of what he liked about TV was how everything ends up with a nice bow on it, he doesn’t have to actually be mentally ill to wish things were simpler.
Todd's or Mr. PB's storylines often did turn out like sitcom gag plots so what is that saying?
and times it was clearly trying not to be like a sitcom, like when Princess Carolyn fired her excellent secretary because he usurped her authority to save her seems showy and pointless. "Hey guise, we're NOT a sitcom". So what?
>So what?
Life is easier for some people.
i want to squeeze her love handles
How many fat rolls do you think Diane has, and can she fit chips beneath them?
The show went downhill soon as they made Todd asexual. They were jokes about Todd having ex-girlfriends and looking at porn.
Earlier than that, but that was a part of it.
What was the point of that anyway
No good jokes, stories or commentary came from it.
I think they just didn't know what to do with Todd. I don't even think the ace thing was bad, they just couldn't seem to write any really good story around it.
>hey just couldn't seem to write any really good story around it.
Probably too afraid of getting attacked for not treating it with kid gloves
Honestly Todd is so dysfunctional as a human bean it didn't bother me, but it still felt totally pointless
It especially felt pointless because everything about his story had nothing to do with his eventual ending. The thing about his family and that the childcare job came out of nowhere. I like that he found a partner that could work with him but even that felt underdeveloped.
Sometimes life is just a set of loosely related stories.
They never had a good story for Todd.
What the frick did Todd ever have to do with Reddit?
I think there's not much story to tell beyond general 'this is a thing that exists'. It's defined by not doing something, so after the psa there's not really anything to talk about.
As an asexual myself I just found the whole addition kind of meaningless to his whole character, other than to make him look like an even weirder loser, so I really disliked the need to point it out. Most asexuals identify with the goofy, high-spirited characters obsessed with their passions anyways. Him being literally me, a rich and extremely financially lucky stoner, didn't even help because I hate pointless pandering to that degree.
They probably wanted something to make him more than a reddit parody but couldn't think of anything really impactful
This show was poisoned by the creators going on the internet and seeing people praising Bojack for being a nuanced protagonist. They saw people identifying with his depression and self-destructive behaviors right in the wake of MeToo and went
>FRICK NO, HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE A BAD MAN, NO NO NO YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO ROOT FOR HIM
so they basically built the entire last two seasons around retconning Bojack into being an objectively bad person rather than a guy who acts out because he had a hard life (but he wants to do better).
The show was good until it became reactionary.
Wait I tapped out at like season...3? What the frick?
The creator became self-conscious because he met Harvey Weinstein who told him he liked the show. The last two seasons make Bojack irredeemable and scold the audience for identifying with him. The message isn't one of hope like many had anticipated but that broken people cannot truly change and the best possible outcome is for them to be isolated so they cannot hurt anyone else.
My, how uplifting
>broken people cannot truly change and the best possible outcome is for them to be isolated so they cannot hurt anyone else
This is true though.
It's still a story and has to have a satisfying conclusion.
>The message isn't one of hope like many had anticipated but that broken people cannot truly change and the best possible outcome is for them to be isolated so they cannot hurt anyone else.
The worst part about the whole deal was they had shown him changing and becoming a better person more than a few times up to that point. S1 Bojack sure as shit wouldn't have held back on his mother in Time's Arrow, he was well on his way to becoming less self-centered and actually starting to care about other people besides himself. S1 Bojack couldn't understand why PC couldn't be both his GF and his agent, S4 Bojack had managed to pull himself together enough to realize they were poisonous for each other and cut ties.
To show that sort of character growth, only to turn around and say "NO, HE HASN'T CHANGED AT ALL AND NEVER WILL!!!", it was just insulting to the audience's intelligence.
What? How did you even get that out of it?
The ending is about letting go of toxic attachments. Bojack's relationship with his mother is a metaphor for his relationship with Horsin' Around. He has a hard time letting go of his mother even though she was a horrible abusive influence. Horsin' Around was similarly a negative influence. His need to keep Horsin' Around successful is what caused him to betray his friend and start his spiral into being a terrible person. Even teaching an acting class was ultimately a connection to Horsin' Around. This is why in the end he has to lose EVERYTHING to be truly free.
The theme of letting go is also reflected by Diane and Mr Peanutbutter. PB has trouble letting go of people even when the relationship is toxic, which he realizes in the end and decides to get therapy for it. Diane realizes that her activism was borne of egotism and moves to a new town with a new husband, and settles for a steady career writing children's books.
>He has a hard time letting go of his mother even though she was a horrible abusive influence.
The same mother he ignored whenever he got a chance, and only bothered to visit when he absolutely NEEDED to ask her something? The same mother he barely tolerated for half a season before shoving her into the worst nursing home he could find? The same mother he shit-talked through the majority of the eulogy?
He let go of her a long time ago. He was looking for closure he never got, but he stopped putting himself in a position where his mother could hurt him ages ago. He may have let go of his desire for revenge against his mother at the end of Time's Arrow, but he did leave her there in that dump.
Him hating his mother‘s guts and yet never stopping to try and win her approval are not mutually exclusive concepts.
But he wasn't looking for her approval by the time the show started, he gave up on that long ago. He just wanted to tell her off. The only reason he bothered trying to get the baby doll back was because he was trying to win approval from his half-sister(who he thought was his daughter). He was smiling when his mother fell apart and started crying. He didn't feel guilty until Hollyhock expressed her disgust at his actions.
but it ended with him making up with Todd, living with Mr Peanut Butter, and having a comeback lined up at the end of his sentence due his so bad it's good movie he did with that one guy. Other than his relapse during that interview he's still acting better than when the show started and has a network of friends and fans. So if irredeemable is what he was going for he did a shit job there showing it.
>Wait I tapped out at like season...3
My brother.
Apparently it was the correct move
>It's more important that certain people not like something than to make something good that people like
Why do I keep seeing this mindset and what is causing it?
Production groups that are not accountable to success but rather maintaining social credit and appeasing very wealthy people and their pet ideologies.
It’s the same reason “diversity” now means “what I see in urban SoCal”.
It’s not about pleasing viewers, it’s about pleasing patrons.
unnecessary, or atleast, if they were going to put it in, they should've left it more ambiguous
The show should have ended at the halfway point of the last season. Contriving a reason for Bojack to lose everything and undoing all the progress he'd made turned the whole show into a pointless waste of time.
For the record I don’t hate the ending, in part because I love “The View From Halfway Down”. That poem alone is worth all the dumb shit around it.
It would have been very courageous to end off with Bojack having won a couple wins, course corrected at least some of his awful tendencies, and still have the demons of his past weighing on him.
We could have had a rare instance of an ending where the hero learns he can’t undo the evils he’s done, but he can try to make something decent with what he has ahead of him.
Imagine a last episode with:
>Bojack selling the house to escape LA because he’s gotten some gig at an art college in Seattle or something.
>He’s spent the season learning not to try and force friendship on PC, Diane, and Todd.
>Nevertheless he’s hopeful they’ll come around in time.
>Maybe a reprise to ‘stupid piece of shit’ where he’s got his inner voice - debates going and getting shitfaced while the movers finish
>Sees monkey bro
>”Neigh way, jose” or some other cringe thing bojack thinks is cool
>Smash to credits and themesong
Basically anything that ends up with a road ahead of him and the possibility of success.
Thanks to this monkey, I bike to work. Five miles, ten round trip, up and down hills. It was hard, very hard, but it got easier.
don't you smell at work?
>also fricked her whilst she was high and unconscious
That Weinstein compliment really got under his skin, huh
>also fricked her whilst she was high and unconscious
That never happened.
>We kept getting renewed for more seasons and we had no idea when the show would end button
Ironcially they wanted to keep it running as long as they could to cash paychecks, just like the sitcoms it mocks.
Imagine some terrible cash cow revival just to ride off the other revivals.
That's why the final episode is so open and vauge; they'd love to come back and get paid again.
Before it turned to shit everyone said the first season was the weakest and was a stumbling block for entrym but in retrospect I like it more because it's simple and complete; a has-been butthole actor gets a crush on a younger woman which goes nowhere but forces him to confront what an butthole he is without any more excuses. "I really wanted you to like me, Diane" is a great final line to the story.
Bojack isn't a depressed basketcase addict who's literally never been happy for a single moment, he's just some jerk.
I kinda agree.
I liked the deeper depths of later Bojack but there’s something really charming about “Prick who sounds like Will Arnett learning to be less of a prick”
Some draw the Goblins "I'm sad" meme but Bojack.
What happened I stoped watching the show when Sarah Lynn died. Like the second I saw Bojack poke her.
He fabricates a story of how he was at home and SL had called him before overdosing. We then learn that he had waited 17 minutes before actually calling an ambulance just so that his alibi would be more believable
Normal words
>Bojack getting canceled destroyed the redeemed life he built and caused him to spiral back to his old ways
Not sure the leftist writers of the show were forward-thinking enough to realize that.
It was a bit reactionary and heavy-handed but ultimately it fits.
Anyone that thought the show was building to Bojack becoming a good person or anyone getting a magic storybook ending wasn't paying attention to the show at any point. Herb literally spells it out for the audience when Bojack visits him: Life isn't a sitcom. There is no wrap-up. There is no neat and tidy conclusion. No emotional epiphany or heartfelt speech is going to suddenly make everything alright. Life doesn't have these artificial conventions, it simply marches on.
That's not what people take issue with because like you said it was established early on and was a recurring theme of the show.
It was the diabolical behavior of Bojack that went against his prior characterization. He was always a dickhead and prone to making terrible decisions but a woman-beater? Also we literally see an image inside Bojack's head where he is carrying Sarah Lynn's lifeless body just to have that retconned. It feels like they had to amplify his bad traits even if it contradicted itself. Like we get he's a bad guy but he wasn't so close to a Weinstein type so they started throwing bad traits against the wall and grafting them unto Bojack. Perhaps if they had thought the show out better from the start it could have worked but it comes across as a case of dramatic shifts in writing that are ultimately unsatisfying.
>a woman-beater?
This is kind of a disingenuous way to talk about what happened. He's not a "woman beater" and he didn't wantonly attack his costar, he was in the middle of a psychotic break.
Ironically I think people are too harsh on Bojack's portrayal in the final seasons, even the seventeen minutes can be interpreted as a drugged out Bojack legitimately being unable to process the situation.
They added in several scenes like him punching the wall, grabbing his assistant and her pleading that he's hurting her etc. Just behavior that was never shown in the early seasons yet were inserted towards the end and we're supposed to pretend that it's coherent characterization.
As for the 17 minutes, he specifically says that he was trying to cover his tracks. He didn't know she was still alive so that takes a bit off of him but ultimately his need to save his image and career trumped Sarah Lynn's well-being and prevented potentially lifesaving service from reaching her.
getting fat is soooo hot