The Anatomy of Failure: What BoJack Horseman Reveals about Ourselves

I watched BoJack Horseman for the first time this year.

Even though I had known about the show for years, I could never bring myself to start it. Not because of the animation style or the humor, but because I was afraid of myself.

The short clips I occasionally saw on TikTok triggered strange, uncomfortable and painfully familiar feelings. They hit a place I had spent years trying not to touch—something I had pushed so deep inside that I didn’t want to think about it at all.

The show forces us to watch the antics of someone we are encouraged to despise—only to realize that what we really dislike about BoJack is the part of ourselves we recognize in him. That is its most brilliant, brutal and honest offering. BoJack is not a story about an anthropomorphic horse. It’s a story about what happens when we stop running from the reflection staring back at us. That’s why the series feels heavy, uncomfortable, necessary—and strangely healing.

What makes BoJack Horseman the most realistic portrayal of depression isn’t the dramatic moments or the shocking scenes. It’s the opposite. The show is painfully accurate because most of what BoJack goes through is ordinary. These aren’t events unique to an animated world. They’re the small, slow, almost invisible slips that anyone who has ever stood at the edge of their own life will immediately recognize.

BoJack shows us the side of depression we don’t want to see. The side we aren’t socialized to sympathize with. The side that doesn’t look sad, but repulsive. We dislike the way BoJack acts—and that’s exactly the psychological point. Television usually portrays depression aesthetically: tears, silence, loneliness, empty stares. Feelings we’re trained to empathize with.

But BoJack shows a depression that hurts. A depression full of passivity, self-absorption, and aggression—turned inward and outward. A depression that exhausts the people around it, frustrates them, and pushes them away. And that’s what we can’t handle as viewers: We recognize ourselves in BoJack too easily. We get angry at him, but what we actually hate are the parts of ourselves we refuse to look at.

The show forces us to accept that depression isn’t just quiet suffering.

It’s the selfishness we don’t want to admit.

It’s the apathy we can’t explain.

It’s the inaction that destroys relationships before we notice.

It’s failure after failure that looks like a moral flaw rather than an illness.

In an interview that still lingers in my mind, creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg described one of the most disturbing reactions the show ever received. Someone told him that Harvey Weinstein—long before the public knew the full extent of his crimes—was a fan of BoJack Horseman. He specifically praised the underwater episode, calling it brilliant.

The team’s reaction wasn’t pride – it was fear. A visceral, stomach-dropping fear that the show’s message had been misread in the most dangerous way possible. If a man who spent decades abusing power could see himself in BoJack, then perhaps the show had not been holding up a mirror to warn people—but offering a refuge to them. A place where self-pity could be mistaken for accountability, and where pain could be used to justify cruelty.

That moment changed the trajectory of the entire series. Seasons five and six pull away every layer of softness, every easy excuse. The writers refuse to let BoJack be the tragic antihero audiences love to forgive. They make us sit with the full weight of his harm: the manipulation, the entitlement, the moments where he weaponizes vulnerability to escape consequences.

And suddenly, the show becomes bigger than the character. It becomes a critique of the culture that enables men like Weinstein—a culture that confuses charm with goodness, apology with change, and trauma with absolution. A culture where the people who hurt others the most often feel the most understood. In exposing BoJack fully, the creators weren’t just finishing a story – they were correcting the misinterpretation that terrified them.

And that’s why the series hits so hard: It shows depression without filters, without romanticism, without soft lighting—exactly as it looks when a person lives it, not when a camera frames it.

One of the most intelligent—and underrated—layers of BoJack Horseman is the choice of animal species for each character. It never feels random or like a visual joke. Every species represents a personality trait, a psychological pattern, a trauma, or a way of functioning that, in a fully “human” form, might feel too sharp, too close, too real. The animal world allows the creators to show us our flaws from a safe distance—only for us to later realize, with a sting, that the story is about us.

BoJack is a horse because he spends his whole life running.

Princess Carolyn is a cat—elegant, competent, endlessly multitasking, and quietly lonely after the work is done.

Todd is an axolotl trapped in a human life—an eternal child, an outsider who never fully grows into the world that keeps demanding decisiveness.

Mr. Peanutbutter is a dog—loyal, impossibly optimistic, incapable of grasping the depth of human sadness, yet sincere in every emotion.

And Diane is human—the only one who carries the full weight of reality, because her role is to be the mirror, not the mask.

This symbolism works precisely because animals let us absorb harsh truths without resistance. If BoJack were human, his failures might repel us to the point of rejection. But as a horse, he seems absurd, harmless, even funny—so we don’t defend ourselves. Only later, once we’re already attached, do we realize we’ve been watching a version of ourselves.

That’s why the animal universe is so powerful— it’s not an aesthetic choice, but a psychological strategy. A way for the creators to smuggle in truths we would immediately shield ourselves from if they came in a realistic form.

If there is one storyline in BoJack written with surgical precision, it’s generational trauma.

BoJack’s relationship with his parents isn’t just background noise – it’s the structural foundation beneath every choice he makes, every failure, every act of self-destruction. BoJack isn’t just a broken man—he is a reflection of what happens when a child grows up in a home where there is no love, no safety, no listening, and no forgiveness.

BoJack lives inside the consequences of something that began long before he did. And that’s where the show is brilliant: it makes clear that generational trauma is not an excuse, but an explanation. Hurt is not the same as guilt, but responsibility still belongs to the one who carries it. That’s why watching BoJack interact with the people around him is so painful. Not because he is simply “bad,” but because he is the son of someone who was also hurt, someone who never learned how to be gentle.

The show reminds us of one of the harshest truths about the human psyche: the child of wounded parents must become the adult who learns to love themselves entirely from scratch.

And BoJack captures this with a depth that stings—because we see how desperately he wants to be different, and how deeply he remains the child still waiting for his parents to apologize, to hug him, or to tell him he is enough.

If we look at BoJack only on the surface, he seems impulsive, reckless and constantly hurting the people around him. But if we pause, pay attention and set the anger aside, we notice something much darker: every harm he causes someone else is an attempt to harm himself.

BoJack doesn’t sabotage others because he wants control. He sabotages them because self-punishment is the only place where he feels safe. It’s a learned reflex. In his childhood, pain was the only form of attention he ever received—the only response that returned to him consistently. Over time, he learned to associate pain with love, with worth, with the feeling that “something matters.” Pain became his compass.

And when a child receives nothing but pain, they grow up repeating it—not out of cruelty, but because it is the only language they know. BoJack hurts others the way he was hurt. The incomprehensible becomes inevitable.

This struck me the most, because I once lived in the same pattern. I sabotaged myself until it spilled into sabotaging others. And eventually I ended up alone—not because I wanted to be, but because I didn’t believe I deserved anything other than punishment. Pain became familiar. Safe. A mode of living I knew how to navigate.

BoJack exists inside this exact cycle. He hurts others to confirm his belief that he is a bad person. He hurts himself to feel something that resembles love. He keeps choosing what destroys him because it’s the only thing that feels known.

And once a viewer understands this, they stop seeing his actions as simple selfishness—and start seeing them as the automatic, painful survival mechanism of someone who learned love through suffering.

Many viewers don’t understand why Diane is depressed when she’s the “rational” one, the “empathetic” one, the person who “gets social issues.” But that is precisely her tragedy. Diane isn’t depressed despite seeing reality clearly. She’s depressed because she sees only the part of reality that hurts.

Her perception of the world is accurate, but one-sided. She notices injustice, suffering, political conflict, inequality—all the dark, intense parts of life. But she doesn’t register what is quiet and good. She doesn’t see the small forms of love, the subtle victories, the slow progress that isn’t dramatic. And when someone watches only the darkness long enough, they start believing it is the entire world. Not a piece of it—the whole thing.

Her struggle is not idealistic but existential. And her biggest conflict isn’t with BoJack—it’s with herself, with a version of reality that is true, but painfully incomplete.

Todd and Mr. Peanutbutter are two of the happier characters in the series—but only on the surface. When we look closer, their friendship becomes one of the most interesting psychological relationships in BoJack Horseman. They are two completely different people who get along precisely because they don’t disturb each other in the places where the world hurts them most.

Todd seems like an eternal child, but in reality he’s someone constantly trying to find his place. His identity is fluid, blurry, always shifting—like an axolotl that never fully grows up. He is kind, tolerant, sensitive, but almost never expresses his real disappointments or emotions. Not because he doesn’t have them, but because he has learned they’re “impractical.”

Todd survives only when he isn’t too demanding for the world. And that is a quietly tragic trait that often goes unnoticed.

Mr. Peanutbutter meanwhile is endlessly positive, energetic, loyal, devoted—but his optimism is a defense mechanism. It’s how he avoids the dark emotions he cannot face. He loves anyone who doesn’t disturb that mechanism. Mr. Peanutbutter can’t handle people who show him reality or uncomfortable truths—which is why he and Diane miss each other so completely. She reminds him of a world he doesn’t want to see.

And that brings us to the core of their dynamic: Todd doesn’t say the things Mr. Peanutbutter couldn’t handle, and Mr. Peanutbutter doesn’t look too closely at Todd’s imperfections.

Their friendship is not accidental, nor is it just comic relief. It’s the meeting of two people who give each other something very few others can: Mr. Peanutbutter gets a friend who doesn’t challenge his defensive optimism, and Todd gets a friend who doesn’t judge him for his stagnation or his messy, shifting identity.

Princess Carolyn is one of the most tragic characters in BoJack Horseman, even if it isn’t obvious at first glance. On the surface she is competent, elegant, tireless—a woman who handles everything. She’s a professional, a fixer, a manager of everyone else’s chaos, standing in the center of other people’s crises while smiling as if it doesn’t drain her.

But her real pain is simple—and therefore terrifying: Princess Carolyn saves everyone, but no one saves her.

She represents a whole generation that “gets it done” even when they’ve been exhausted for years. A generation that feels adult only when they’re fixing something that’s broken—just never their own heart.

BoJack Horseman isn’t compelling because it’s dark. It’s compelling because it reveals two truths our generation is afraid to name: not everything has a happy ending, and one unhappy ending doesn’t mean the next chapter can’t be better.

The show doesn’t offer false hope. It doesn’t close every wound or redeem every mistake. It shows reality—that sometimes we damage ourselves so deeply that we can’t go back. BoJack doesn’t encourage naïveté; it encourages responsibility. Even when we destroy everything around us, there is always another day in which we can try to live a little better.

One of the most important truths the show captures—and one society rarely discusses—is this: when someone’s trauma response is triggered, they stop responding at their biological age. They respond at the age they were when the wound was made.

That means a thirty-year-old can suddenly react like a seven-year-old.

A fifty-year-old can react like an adolescent. And BoJack, a grown man, often reacts exactly like the boy who was taught he didn’t deserve love.

This is the psychological brilliance of the show: It portrays not only who a person appears to be, but who they remain inside.

I wish I could say I know exactly which character I am. I wish I could point to one and say, “That’s me.” But I can’t. I have something of Diane in me—the part that sees reality so clearly it becomes exhausting. Something of Princess Carolyn—the part that saves everyone and forgets to ask for help. A little of Todd, a little of Mr. Peanutbutter, a little of every soul trying to survive a chaotic world.

And maybe that’s why BoJack fascinates me so deeply—it isn’t a show about one character, but about the fragments inside all of us that we’d rather keep hidden.

The hardest part was admitting this: I carry something of BoJack, too.

The part of me that gets tired of my own mind, that sabotages myself, that repeats patterns I never wanted to inherit. No one wants to be BoJack. And yet all of us are—at least partially, at least in the moments when we don’t know what to do next.

That’s why this show matters.

Not because it’s dark. Not because it’s bold.

But because it forces us to face someone we don’t want to see—and realize that it isn’t an animated character.

It’s us.