There are few shows I know like Bojack Horseman. It’s not even something I recommend to everyone because I understand its content can be a lot to take in. But it’s also so good.
An extremely well written adult animated series full of black comedy, Bojack Horseman is set in a world where anthropomorphic animals and humans live side by side.
This show took risks, and that’s what I love about it. Episodes aren’t always told the same, and it’s the experimentation that keeps its exploration of characters so fun and enriching. Thankfully, the show isn’t just six seasons about a depressed alcoholic horse feeling sorry for himself (though his eventual character arc is truly fascinating), but starts to lean more into the characters closest to him, whom he affects, who are all trying to get better.
Take for instance the case of Diane Nguyen, who was once Bojack’s ghostwriter. Diane is a relentless liberal, feminist Asian American writer who has just moved to Chicago to live with her boyfriend Guy. She’s just begun taking meds for her depression and came to terms with being positive about her side-effect weight gain. She’s also determined to write her perfect book. She is dead-set on writing with the philosophy of “kintsugi,” the Japanese art of repairing broken bowls with gold so that damage isn’t hidden but proudly shown as part of its story.
I’ve also seen this art trending online, and there is no doubt about the inspirational message behind it. This perfect episode surprised me, though, with its very different approach.
Diane keeps sitting down to try to pin down that perfect book, but every time she tries, her thought process unravels and her inner self spirals. Shown through increasingly unstable, sketchy animation of herself (as in sketches on a page), her inner self is constantly bombarded by voices of her peers as she speculates them shutting down everything she says—perhaps even more so than they would in real life. The unraveling Diane on her blank pages is the best illustration of mental illness I had ever seen animated.
Then she goes to a clothing store absurdly named “Trauma.” Taking a break from her tortured writing block, Diane tries on clothes, overhears tween gossip, and experiences unhelpful service she asks for a bigger size because “we don’t see size here at Trauma,” and “it would help if you figured out why do you need to put a number on your body.” (A nice little dig at a culture of trying to sell trauma, simultaneously a dig at those who can’t understand how specific labels can be helpful.)
While her inner self continues to flail and drown on the page, the tween from the store shows up, all happy-go-lucky, spilling tea about a recent caper at the mall.
Diane stares at the page, bewildered at the upbeat children’s mystery she’s written instead.
Her boyfriend loves it, but Diane insists that she needs to write about her demons or else she could never be at peace. The more she insists she needs to go to a dark place, however, the more her inner self is actually unable to focus on writing. Animation contorts, voices attack, darkness consumes the page in angry scribbles. It gets to the point where Diane breaks down, confessing that she has stopped taking her meds in an attempt to access her trauma, questioning if happiness she got help getting is even genuine, infuriated at her own inauthenticity She describes her depression has taken a physical form, like a heaviness on her chest, and that she just wants to die. While her boyfriend comforts her, she murmurs that she just wants to be a good salad bowl.
Visited in her mind by her own fictional girl detective character, and later conversing with her PR connection Princess Carolyn, Diane comes to terms with the idea that there is actually no obligation to write publicly about trauma in order to validate it. That she isn’t betraying herself in treating her depression, nor selling herself short in actually writing about something bright and happy. Her own ability to create something new for future generations, to normalize imagination and having fun, is its own form of resistance and redemption.
What I love about this episode is how it challenges our increasingly jaded culture and offers another way to heal besides darkness and catharsis. We are in a world where we are newly open about trauma, and the conversation is good, but what happens when we romanticize pain as “part of who we are” and discourage ever getting better?
What if imagining and normalizing a brighter world isn’t naïve of us, but strength and power in its own right?
Ellen Huang (she/her) is an ace writer of spec fiction with a BA in Writing + Theatre from Point Loma Nazarene University, published in Prismatica, Awkward Mermaid, Vamp Cat, Sword & Kettle Press, and X-Ray Lit, among many others. She runs a blog where she explores the intersection of fantasy & spirituality, and despite introvert nature regularly meets up with cults called Goddesses of the Arts, Kaleidoscope, Dystopian Poets Society, Company of Wolves, Writers Gonna Write, one just ominously called 'Group,' and more. Follow if you wanna: worrydollsandfloatinglights.wordpress.com.