Me and Cartoons

for days on end now I’ve been searching for a quote of some sort to underline how much I appreciate the Bojack Horseman cartoon in troubling times such as these. For ends on end yet zilch, nothing. Don’t get me wrong now, the show’s a minefield of golden moments and epiphanies, but seeing them just plucked out of context on a Top 15 by BuzzFeed just diminishes their depths to me.

As highlighted by so many before me, the show really hits home because of its blatant, embarrassing ugliness that we come to recognise as the monsters in all of us. There is no censorship of depression, sexuality (or lack thereof), toxicity, or the various lifestyles in which the characters relay. There is no one perfect character, no heroic protagonist to move the show forward, because that’s reality. There is no escaping from the notion that the world revolves around us. We all like to think of tragic heroes who are byproducts of our toxic upbringing and superficial world. But as quoted by the great Todd Chavez,

"Oh great, of course. Here it comes, you can't keep doing this. You can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself, like that makes it okay. YOU NEED TO BE BETTER.

No...no..just stop. You are all the things wrong with you. It's not the alcohol, or the drugs, or all the shitty things that happened to your career, or when you were a kid. Alright? It's you, Bojack. It's you. Fuck man. What else is there to say."

And it’s a home run. It’s easy to brood and blame. It always has been.

Its heartening to see talking cartoon animals address their own toxicity, even going so far as to call themselves poison. Being afraid to let anyone close because they will only hurt them. and it heart wrenching to watch, as a third person, the struggles of an imbalanced marriage. The blatant portrayal of selfishness and misogyny in people we call family, and how it continues to haunt us till we’re old.