BoJack Horseman/YMMV

These things about BoJack Horseman are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.

Acceptable Targets:
- Pro-lifers in Brrap Brrap Pew Pew. They're all portrayed as ignorant, if not malicious and misogynistic. Incidentally, they're also all portrayed as men, which also makes the male gender an Acceptable Target inside one, since in the United States of America 42 percent of pro-lifers are women.
- News media. Whether it's the mainstream newscasters like Tom Grumbo or the new clickbait sites like GirlCroosh, the news exists to shock and titillate people. That's why it's a shock in season six when journalist Paige Sinclair actually does pursue a news story, being the exception to the rule and even she is utterly ridiculous, being a 1920s caricature in the 2010s. Her sister asks why the heck she talks like that.
Alternate Character Interpretation:
- Diane has many people, including herself, question how much of her moral crusades are done out of genuine sense of righteous fury or because she wants to make a name and validate her existence. Stefani Stilton spells out that Diane holds everyone to impossible standards, and is the hardest on herself which is why she's never happy.
- Is BoJack a narcissist? He has a narcissus painting that features him watching himself swim.
Crosses The Line Twice: A throwaway joke in "The Dog Days Are Over" shows Stefani Stilton tenting the GirlCroosh building because the roaches in IT wanted to unionize; this is her form of "negotiation". Diane is disturbed when she hears agonized screams from inside the tented building, but Stefani casually asks her if she can work from home.
Designated Hero: Diane in season one, and season two actually deconstructs this trope. While BoJack does cross some boundaries with her, such as kissing her after the disastrous meeting with Herb and making her super uncomfortable because she's in a committed relationship with Mr. Peanutbutter, she also broke the terms of her ghostwriting contract by writing a biography of BoJack that starts with some embarrassing anecdotes that she witnessed. BoJack was too harsh in telling her to fix it, but her response was to pettily leak the first two chapters to BuzzFeed. "Hank After Dark" features BoJack calling out Diane for this, saying she's a Hypocrite for saying she wants him in her corner but she couldn't respect his requests about the book to not make him a laughingstock. The same episode has Diane pursue a pointless crusade against the title character, while on book tour and ignoring both BoJack and Mr. Peanutbutter's pleas to let it go. Hank himself tells Diane that she can try her hardest to dethrone him, but the Hollywoo machine will protect him as a moneymaker and all she will do is cause people to hate her.
Moral Event Horizon:
- This trope may as well be Beatrice Horseman nee Sugarman. While she was a nice kid and progressive for the time period, she ended up shotgun-marrying a Californian scalawag named Butterscotch, while he was hoping to work on the next Great American novel, after he made her very pregnant. Beatrice comes to resent their son, BoJack, for...being a kid: crying as a newborn, demanding affection, and wanting love. She blames BoJack for ruining her, when it was her choice to not have an abortion, and emotionally abuses him during their seasons one-four onscreen interactions. When Butterscotch died, she couldn't even appreciate that BoJack dropped everything to reassure her and arrange the funeral. In-universe, whlle Beatrice Horseman was definitely a shitty person, the moment that showed she was not redeemable was in "Lovin that cali lifestyle!" when BoJack figures out she was poisoning the communal coffee pot with amphetamine diet pills to make Hollyhock lose weight, under the guise of "helping" her. that she was senile was no excuse, and BoJack knows it. He kicks her out of his house, driving her to the worst nursing home he can find, and prepares to leave her to rot. The worst part is that BoJack was completely right to warn Hollyhock that Beatrice is a monster, especially when it's revealed that Beatrice was Hollyhock's stepmother by proxy, not her grandmother as Hollyhock mistakenly assumed.
- The writers wanted to see how often BoJack could cross this in the show, so once per season except in seasons one and four, he does something that is meant to turn the audience against him. In-universe, these events usually do cause characters to turn against him:
  - In season one, it was him having sex with Sarah Lynn after she reminded him they aren't actual father and daughter, skeeving out Todd as he's forced to watch and extricate himself. Sure she's thirty, but BoJack is way older than her, and she's young enough to be his daughter. When Biscuits finds out about this in season six, and BoJack tries to justify that they were intoxicated, she says that it sounds like he groomed Sarah Lynn and took advantage of her lowered judgment.
  - Season two has him buying alcohol for Penny's friends, leaving Maddy and Pete at the ER when Maddy gets alcohol poisoning and instructing Pete to not tell the paramedics who bought the alcohol, and then nearly sleeping with Penny. Know how bad this is? Penny's mother Charlotte kicks him out of the house, telling him that he is not to contact her family again or she will "Fucking kill" him. Pete becomes so traumatized he becomes a teetotaler, and Penny has frequent panic attacks. Diane is disgusted when she hears BoJack confessing about this on tape.. Pete later recounts the first part to Hollyhock at a party to explain why he doesn't drink, making Hollyhock super uncomfortable around BoJack when he gets a job at the college she's attending.
  - In season three, his moments of crossing this involve convincing Sarah Lynn to break her nine months of sobriety, despite knowing that once he called, she would dive into the vodka and drugs. This would lead to her fatal overdose. And somehow, this gets worse thanks to season six.
  - Season five has him choke Gina while high as a kite on painkillers, instead of faking it for a stunt on Philbert. That he was under the influence is no excuse, as Gina and Todd put it in the next episode. BoJack himself is willing to go to jail and confess when he sees the footage after the buzz wears off, but Gina tells him that she doesn't want to be known forever as the girl that BoJack Horseman choked.
  - Remember the season three moment? Season six goes further: Biscuits Braxby is willing to fix BoJack's reputation, as she has for other disgraced celebrities, but then Paige Sinclair gives her some new information. Interview two goes south for BoJack because Biscuits confronts him for a horrifying revelation: Sarah Lynn didn't die in the planetarium. She was unconscious but not dead. BoJack, to cover his ass that he was there and gave her the drugs, grabbed her phone, made a call, and then waited in the parking lot. For seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes. Only then did he call the paramedics. Biscuits points out that if he had dialed immediately, she could have been saved, as the human body can go seven minutes without oxygen. He also wouldd't have been in trouble since paramedics have a Don't Ask policy. Instead he lied, and Sarah Lynn paid for it. In-universe, this turns all of Hollywoo against BoJack for a year, and Princess Carolyn knows this isn't a mess she can fix.
- "Hank After Dark": Whatever Hank did to his secretaries, it's so bad that a Google search of the allegations makes an entire crowd gasp in horror. He also uses one of them to secure a private audience with Diane when she decides to crusade against him, warning her in Villain Has A Point mode that he's too valuable for Hollywoo to eliminate.
- Carol Himmelfarb-Richardson and her bear husband crossed this in two different ways. First is that Carol put her three-year-old daughter into show business, ignoring little Sarah Lynn when the latter gushed about how she wanted to be an architect. She and BoJack separately pushed Sarah Lynn to believe that she would only be good as a performer and that no one would love her if she stopped "dancing," complete with her forcing her underage daughter to stay rail-thin and sexy at the age of sixteen. A BoJack hallucination reveals that she may have sold nudes of Sarah Lynn, when the latter was too young to consent. Sarah Lynn would later recount that her mother would have her stepfather tutor her rather than let her go to school or even the mall, meaning her only friends were the Horsin Around co-stars. Mr. Richardson may have molested her given he was acting weird in her dressing room and she can identify bear fur by licking it. All this trauma turns Sarah Lynn into a spoiled, broken washout who doesn't even consider going to college to pursue her dreams when she has more than enough money for it, and she recounts regularly overdosing at parties because the yes-people let her get that far. Though Carol sincerely sobs after Sarah Lynn dies of a drug overdose, saying that she was a terrible mother, she doesn't seem to understand what she did was wrong on a moral level. The minute two journalists uncover that BoJack was responsible for the overdose, and that he waited seventeen minutes to call 911? The parents file suit and start using Sarah Lynn's image for advertising revenue.
- Executive producer Angela Diaz doesn't cross this when she convinces BoJack to not walk in support of Herb after he gets fired from Horsin' Around. She pragmatically pointed out to BoJack that, in addition to killing his own career prospects, the kid actors and crew would also lose their jobs if the network decided to cancel the show. No, the moment that shows her crossing it is when she invites BoJack to her house in season 6 to convince him to sign away his rights to Horsin' Around in exchange for a lump sum, so that they can edit him out of the BluRay release and capitalize on Sarah Lynn's memory. Why is this bad? Because during this same meeting, she gets BoJack drunk despite knowing he's mentally unstable right now, and reveals she was bluffing. The show was never in danger of being cancelled if BoJack had walked. Angela was greedy, plain and simple. Unsurprisingly, BoJack manhandles for this and nearly burns the contract; Angela only saves herself by pointing out to BoJack that she manipulated him but isn't responsible for all his mistakes, and she owns that she is a Manipulative Bitch while he can't accept his actions have consequences. This meeting also leads to BoJack nearly drowning himself while hopped on drugs and alcohol.
Signature Scene: Each season has one:
- Herb's The Reason You Suck Speech to BoJack in "The Telescope," where he rejects the horse's apology for turning his back after the former got outed as a gay man. It sets the tone for the more serious themes that the show discusses, like the running theme if BoJack can ever fix his mistakes.
- The climax of "Escape from L.A.," where Charlotte finds her daughter about to undress her ex's best friend, after said friend confessed to Charlotte that he had feelings for her. It haunts BoJack for the rest of the series.
- "That's Too Much, Man!" features Sarah Lynn succumbing to a fatal overdose while cuddling with BoJack in the planetarium and watching a post-midnight show. And the ramifications of this scene would have an impact on BoJack's later arcs.
- "Time's Arrow" has a two-fer: Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter realize their marriage is over after he makes a Grand Romantic Gesture and builds her a Belle room, even though she hates these gestures. Meanwhile, Hollyhock calls BoJack and forgives him for his mother overdosing her, saying that she wants him in his life as a brother, since they are sibling. BoJack gives his first sincere smile in ages.
- "The Showstopper" has Gina in BoJack's dream singing "Don't Stop Dancing" as he sees a Mushroom Samba of his past mistakes and current paranoia about Philbert.
- The titular poem from the "View from Halfway Down" certainly makes an impact, as BoJack's father, while merged with Secreteriat, sings about his regret about jumping off the bridge. It's haunting and eerie, as Secretariat starts panicking.
Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Quite a few show up in the show:
- No birth family can demand obligation from the next generation. Diane is pressured to go back and arrange her father's funeral, only to find that her family opted to skip the festivities and turn her father's corpse into chum. She has a meltdown, and BoJack tells her she did the right thing by leaving her family. We also have BoJack's relationship with his mother, and it's established that keeping her at a distance is one of the healthiest decisions he has made.
- You can't keep blaming your flaws on your upbringing or addictions. BoJack gets this a lot, with Todd having the epic The Reason You Suck Speech, but so do the other characters about how they let their trauma affect their actions. Mr. Peanutbutter's desire for laissez-faire to not think about getting old or wives leaving him means that he can be a selfish husband, something that he realizes towards the end of the series. Stefani Stilton says bluntly to Diane that she can't allow herself to be happy due to holding everyone at a high standard, including herself, and getting depressed as a result.

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