A short thread on a hated character:
Bojack Horseman’s Todd is the most loathsome character I’ve seen in 2010’s media. He’s everything Hollywood wants millenials to be: weak, indecisive, without self-control, sexless, a quirky eternal victim. This is what they want for you.

Dude lives with Bojack rent free for YEARS. Gets free drugs, food, lodging. But the one time Bojack wrongs him by giving him a video game he gets addicted to (kind of his own fault btw) Todd NEVER forgives him. He makes that betrayal central to their entire relationship!

In later seasons, Todd exists as a character independent of Bojack plotlines. He exists for all these “wacky” B-plots that are never really funny and usually feel out of sync with the rest of the show. He’s written as a kind of eternal child always getting into fun hijinks.

But this evaporates when he’s with Bojack. Suddenly he’s emotionally distant, verbally concise, even condescending. As the series goes on, this duality of character intensifies. He’s both a wacky hijinks character, and authorial stand-in explaining Why Prestige Drama Men Are Bad.

He delivers a shockingly harsh and loveless indictment of Bojacks character, couched of course in the atheistic language of intersectional struggle sessions a moment sure to have reified and deepened the hopeless self-hatred of many audience members.

If an old friend spoke to me like that while using intimate life details I’d go gorilla on is ass. But there’s no catharsis. You’re meant to agree. No ambiguity. You’re not meant to think that maybe he’s being too harsh. And this is supposed to be his closest friend!

I’m sure many of us have had Todds in our life: fairweather friends keeping tally and waiting for a slipup. It didn’t used to be like this but in our generations this is what most friendships are like: conditional, shallow, transactional. This is another thing they want for you.

I think this is at the core of my hatred for this character, that he’s modeling a dysfunctional model of friendship: friendship becomes about wacky business ideas and getting high. But when you’re friend does something immoral you should emotionally distance and Call Him In.

Overall he’s a bad person, just like Bojack. But he hasn’t accrued power and had consensual sex with countless women like Bojack, (unforgivable in the show’s atheist morality) He’s just a childish druggie who wasted his 20s, shittalks his friends, doesn’t talk to his parents.

The problem with Todd is the problem with Bojack Horseman: he’s an oversocialized individual with no real values besides hatred of what the culture tells him to hate, who balks before the magisterial prestige TV moments of the title character and drags them down with moralisms.