Can Everyone Be a Bojack?

Animation was a new world for all of us—the dreams, potential, scope and creative aspect of it have proven to be endless. Adult animation, childhood comfort shows, action-packed fantasies and its own separate genre of anime has audiences of all ages in a chokehold. And yet, the way all of these different sets of audiences react to the same genre or sub-genre of entertainment varies by a long margin.

Objectively speaking, Western Animated Media and Japanese Anime have been two sides of the same coin: exploring diverse themes while being the most prominent and widely appreciated animation forms all over the world. It's a universally acknowledged truth that theatre, cinema, films or shows, even animated or especially animated shows transcend the boundaries of the fictional and turn imaginary worlds into something real that binds communities together. Now, this is because animators start off with a huge advantage–creative and visual liberty that no live action or film can otherwise imitate. Not to say that any form of art is superior to the other but abstract ideas and psychological dilemmas can effectively be translated into animation, combined with good writing and relevant visuals, in a way that really drives the point home for viewers. This perception of animation has been much more prominent in GenY and GenZ, particularly since the 1980s where animated shows took on a new level of depth.

Bojack Horseman, South Park, Akira, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Simpsons, Dragon Tales…The list goes on. But what has made and has kept Animation so relevant and so popular till date? What makes it special? In any case, the answer to this question is the target audience or the ‘fandom’ as per recent terminology. Fandoms can be described as “communities built around a shared enjoyment of an aspect of popular culture, such as books, movies, TV shows” which is all fair and vanilla until their power to engage with said media, interpret it and relate to it comes into question.

You see, the beauty of being a part of a fandom lies in the power of its subjectivity. You can like Eric Cartman and I can hate Eric Cartman just the same but we’ll all still be homies. Why? Because at the end of the day, we still like the same show. But this reality, when Internet discourse enters the chat, shifts into something completely different. Increased access, fan expectations, growing impatience and commercialisation have all commodified the otherwise simple act of appreciation. Policing others for having different opinions, moral flattening of characters and the discourse around them, puritan culture and misogyny entering discussions and viewing characters as idols or looking at them with a black and white lens are just a few sides of the sphere.

And perhaps nowhere is this shift more visible than in the way fandoms have begun to interact with trauma. Animation has always had the strange ability to make the invisible visible. Give an animator a psychological breakdown and they can turn it into a collapsing house, a distorted face, a black hole, a horse falling endlessly through the sky and so on (metaphors). The issue here is not that people are relating to this, understanding the depth of these characters or atleast trying to; In fact, that’s one of the bigger pros of adult animation these days— it addresses our psychological complexities and heavy topics such as depression, that it reinforces the fact that yes, life is indeed not all sunshine and rainbows. The issue arises when the audience stops seeing these things as representations of pain and starts seeing them as aesthetic.

"You can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it okay."

— Todd, BoJack Horseman

A quintessential example of this would be Bojack Horseman. Now on paper, that guy is impossible to like. He's rude, selfish, jealous, cruel and ignorantly hurts the people closest to him, all the while managing to convince himself that he's the victim. Nonetheless, this character has come to be recognized as one of the most easily identifiable faces of the “I am mentally ill and thus I make bad decisions” sub-community of the internet. The depression, alcoholism, self-destructive behavior, and child abuse he has suffered are all real elements of his personality, but the community culture has sometimes simplified this difficult character to something more palatable: “BoJack is literally me.” Bojack’s ruined love life? “Literally me.” Bojack’s traumatic childhood? “Literally me.” Bojack’s avoidance? “Literally me.” People find one archetype of the character relatable and ‘adopt’ the whole character. Instead of understanding and holding Bojack accountable, the community finds it cool how relatable he is than seeing how much therapy he needed as an individual.

Let’s take another example. Eric Cartman in an episode of South Park seeks revenge on a ninth-grader bully by…make your guesses. Right. He seeks revenge by tricking the kid into eating his own parents by cooking them in Chilli and later rejoicing in the kid’s mental trauma. Everything is fair game for a joke in South Park, be it a social or political crisis, a character’s mental health and the likes. South Park will probably make a joke about it before you've even finished processing what happened.

And this isn’t something that’s limited to adult animation when it comes down to it. Dragon Tales, a very popular show in the 2000s which follows two siblings, Emmy and Max, who find a magical dragon scale that transports them to a whimsical fantasy world called Dragon Land has a similar hidden premise. The problem?

“Max? What are you doing?”

“Hiding.”

“How come?”

“Well, if Mom and Dad can't find me, I won't have to go to the new school tomorrow.”

— Dragon Tales 1999-2005

Max doesn’t want to go to school, engage with real people and relationships that exist apart from Emmy or his parents or his dragon friends; So much so, that he hides in a box for hours to avoid having to go. Their adventures in Dragon Land, however fun and beautiful they may be, have made these children completely dissociate with reality and become unwilling to engage with it. The fandom forgets, or rather romanticises the fact that Dragon Land, however imaginative it may be, is still a means of escapism for the children.

It's obvious that our relationship with media is no longer the same. It’s changing rapidly and Animated shows might be propping up a much-needed mirror in our faces. We don't simply watch characters anymore. We diagnose them, defend them, cancel them, make edits of them, turn their dialogues into reaction images and occasionally construct entire personalities around them. We turn everything into: “Oh, but what does this say about me?” And what this does, in turn is, casualise and normalise some unforgivable actions many of these gray characters might take and influence others to do. Or worse yet, make it harder for people who are actually experiencing these issues to be taken seriously.