BoJack Horseman/YMMV

These things about  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 . The worst part is that BoJack was completely right to warn Hollyhock that Beatrice is a monster, especially when it's revealed that.
 * 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..
 * Season two has him . Know how bad this is? . Pete later recounts the first part to.
 * In season three, his moments of crossing this involve And somehow, this gets worse thanks to season six.
 * Season five has him
 * 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. . In-universe, this turns all of Hollywoo against BoJack, 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
 * 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
 * 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 It haunts BoJack for the rest of the series.
 * "That's Too Much, Man!" features
 * "Time's Arrow" has a two-fer: Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter
 * "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
 * 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.