Index10Horseman Episode 09 Review
Did you get it?
Why I watched it:
I guess I'm just horsing around.
Did you laugh yet? Did you get it? It’s because horsing around is the name of the TV show and Bojack is a horse. Did you get it? Did you get it? Did you get it? Did you get it? Did you get it? Did you get it? Did you get it? And it’s just a page of this.
How it works:
I've said a lot over the years on this blog for gentlemen. I've talked about the famous Nuremberg trials and how they affected international judicial process. I've talked about the consequences of the nuclear bombings of Japan, and how they "lowered the standards", so to speak, in regards to how war have gone from an honourable pursuit to a disastrous ideal. And most importantly, my piece which got me a job working for The New Yorker, the corruption of the Nobel Prize committee, and the scandals which makes any award given by this committee of Swedish illegitimates, a source of shame and not pride.
Just kidding, it's actually a weeb blog made by a furry about cartoons. However, this is not to say that my time here on earth is not wasted. I have talked at length about how Bojack attempts to cuck Mr. Peanut Butter. I could also talk at length about how supposedly "high culture" pursuits such as history are considered by an uneducated and ignorant population to be more worthy than "low culture" pursuits as animation, and how that reflects classism in our society, butt fuck it.
Bojack Horseman tries to cuck Mr. Peanut Butter for three episodes in a row, and it is no secret that this is the reason why the show has increased in quality over the past few episodes. When Gawker launched The Cuck? Their groundbreaking article, "How Accidentally Choosing a Female Avatar on Pokémon Go Changed My Perspective on Feminism", won so many awards that they had to rent out a separate warehouse just to hold them all. When Homer cucked Marge? That's when The Simpsons really got into their groove. The secret to a great show is to just find somebody willing to fuck somebody else's wife, and let them.
Bojack comes up with a bunch of plans to foil the wedding between Diane and Mr. Peanut Butter. Apparently you can't kiss a girl without her thinking you're an asshole, so the whole tension between Bojack and Diane shows up during this episode, as well as the jealously between what is obviously three kids in a trench coat and the cat who is okay with fucking them. It doesn't make sense in context. It's a joke that went too far (it's actually the best joke in the series).
So it's another one of those episodes where it's less about the endgoal but more about what happens during it. Seeing Bojack try to engineer a fantastic series of plots that fail miserably really shows what the character of Bojack is about: a desperate man doing desperate things in an attempt to not be so lonely. Who can also acquire cyanide pills.
So all of his plans fail, Todd discovers the receipt from episode 04, and gets pissed, the two get married a year earlier than expected, and Bojack realises that you have to accept that what's good for other people may not be what you want. Until he eventually does cuck Mr. Peanut Butter, which I assume will a series finale more watched than the Super Bowl.
What I felt:
The funniest show isn't the one which is the most sustainable. I found Rick and Morty pretty funny, but it devolved rapidly into a series of nonsense plots and flanderisation, making me quit after the first season. I don't think fondly of it now, even though South Park is just as funny and I think of South Park so highly, but that's because it creates stories which encapsulates the banality of the American life, making me like it because of its cultural relevance.
While I like Bojack Horseman for its comedy, it isn't the reason I'm here. I was promised "feels", which is a perfectly good word if not a meme, and a storyline that makes our time worthwhile. While I was entertained these past few episodes, this included, I didn't feel like I was learning some grand new concept that will change my whole fucking life. The lessons we learn should be dead obvious to any respectable man, such as "don't bring your friends down for your own sake", and as a result this show doesn't feel really revolutionary.
The continuity meme, where it has an overall series arc, would be special to audiences who only grow up on American cartoons where very few, if any, have any continuity or consequences for their actions. Having learned of these truly fantastic things called "books and anime", where things don't happen just for dicks but because it's part of an overarching story, this meme wears thin, and though I appreciate very much a show that has a story, it's also worthwhile to get that story off the ground running instead of bumming around for six episodes before it gets good.
So while Bojack Horseman is entertaining, very much so, it would be little more than a dopamine receptor in my brain if it didn't make me feel something. Episode 07, the one where Princess Caroline realised that she can't please everybody - including yourself - got to me, because I understand there are very many people who want to be better than to deal with basic emotions, and yet come crashing down to earth because they're trying to be happy with themselves and who they are in life. It's a good story, because it's a representation of what so many people know and feel on a daily basis.
This episode, which features a bunch of zany adventures on the backdrop of two people who are worried about marriage and one coming out from two failed ones, doesn't feature many topics at all which I felt strongly about. Is this just because my opinions on love are pretty solid, being that you should be willing to dump somebody if they turn out to be a bad choice and so should never arbitrarily restrict yourself in marriage, and so immovable?
I know how to be a respectable man to the point where I can't see a man like Bojack as anything more than a caricature of what men shouldn't be - namely a backstabbing, immature, undeservedly arrogant attention whore - and so it is very hard for me to have any feelings for this horrible, horrible man that aren't related to seeing him get the shit kicked out of him, and so he has to work his bollocks off to prove that he has the potential to develop into a respectable gentleman.
At the crux of this issue, we have a comedy show that is currently very funny and has a bunch of characters who we want to laugh at without respecting, chained down by a dramatic story arc that doesn't say anything revolutionary and is constantly being mired down by a show that feels a need to be funny all the time without breaks. The problem with the dramedy is that you have to know when to separate your comedy from your drama, as a show which indiscriminately throws in both is a show without a consistent tone - although I welcome a relatable chuckle after a particularly interesting scene (thanks, Vincent).
What I learned:
Once again the approximation of the review lends itself to sacrifice something out of the original episode. I've maintained that the purpose of a review is either give a dissenting opinion of a popular work, or to give a recommendation to a high-quality work without regards for popularity (except if it's something like Ocarina of Time or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas which everybody knows about). For the latter case, it can also be implied that the review is supposed to make you want to watch the bloody thing.
There are some games or animations with a concept that makes you want to watch a thing, such as everything in this video, actually (don't judge me), but also Harvey Beaks supposedly being a super sweet show about a bunch of kids playing around. It's that Calvin and Hobbes quality of imagination which makes me interested. But when you don't have the privilege to be poking around YouTube looking for shit to watch, it's the purpose of the mighty review to help you determine what to spend your fat cash on. Unless you're a pirate, in which case your life is fucking awesome.
The purpose of the review is also to help content creators make better content, and its in this ideal that you have to be a role model to the youngbloods out there who want to make good work. Everything you say has to be double-checked by you to be true, and you have to reconsider certain opinions if you're not confident that they're entirely accurate. I must stress that you WILL make mistakes, and it is an entirely natural thing to predict (fear of making mistakes is the #1 dream killer), it's not good to produce content that you know is shitty given your limited experience.
Like I remember the whole ending spiel with Haruhi in episode 14. It seems like a simple thing I could just bang off in a few minutes, licky-spitty, but I had to spend more than two hours thinking about if what I was saying made sense, because it was such a deeply ingrained opinion that an ending has to be damned good. While I am still of the opinion that everything in a series has to be damned good, I don't know if it's worth it to focus all your efforts on making either an ending that your audience will remember, or an overall series being of high-quality while only putting as much effort into the ending as your other episodes.
So if this review, and similar reviews of animation, don't end up fulfilling the purposes of either "Help people find work that they would really like, and why they would" or "Help creators find flaws in their work, and stamp them out through positive examples", then it's not much use to anybody, is it? So I suppose my overarching goal is to make my reviews not useless.
Did you get it? - Froghand.
Today's page was updated on September 13, 2016!
DIDUGETIT.
