Ahsia Hargrove

I'll be honest that I watched this movie after watching SaberSpark's video on it, but it's even better than what I thought it'd be. There's one linear, pretty simple plot but the substance in it runs -so- deeply. There's so many narratives to it, so many perspectives you can take out of it. A good movie has a good message, but a great one has several that all tie in together, and this one is definitely the latter. I CANNOT stress enough how good this is. Really, I highly suggest anyone even remotely interested to give it a watch.

I type this having just finished the final episode of the series, tears still in my eyes having just wiped them from my face. This show, put as simply as possible, is art. It's absolute art. It's a mirror, a presentation that didn't get diluted. It had MULTIPLE points and it told every single one in a way that's still open to interpretation yet still with the grand overarching point. This show is the single greatest display of mental illness I've ever seen in my twenty-one years of life, and while I know I'm young, I grew up around mental illness and am a Psych major. My mother battles with depression and lupus, my sister has manic-depression as well as other mental disorders I could spend a while listing. I grew up with my family in and out of mental institutions. I grew up hearing of belated suicide attempts, and the one thing I can tell anyone is that mental illness, even when it seems clear, never is. You can never truly, truly understand without suffering through it, and even then it's never cut and dry. Mental illness is so much more than a name or a textbook definition. It's beyond the medication prescribed or the therapy to become "better". There's a person that has the illness, and that person had a life before, during and after treatment, should they be fortunate enough to get any. Mental illness isn't a battle because it's hardly ever "won" but it can be lost. It's... surviving, really. It's living around it, living with it. It's never "perfect", you're never "free" of it, your friends are never "free" of it, your family, whoever... To the bitter or sweet end it's... a struggle, which is what this show is both figuratively and literally. This show is real. This show is hard. This show is, again, the best example of dealing with mental illness I could ever give someone. Relapse, guilt, anger, sadness, regret, panic, fear, disillusionment, stress, horrible decisions, having to weight consequences for now and for later and so, so very much more. This show had me laughing quite a bit, and while it never failed to punch me in the gut, it wasn't until the final two episodes I truly cried. In a way, it's relieving to know there's a team of people out there that understand mental illness so much as to encapsulate it in such an accurate and real way. It helps you realize even if everyone is different in their struggles, they're also not alone, which is a bit of a "meta beauty", but looking more surface level, they never take liberties for the sake of making a "happy" story. This goes without saying, even though I've said it several times now, but they made a REAL story. It has ups and downs, highs and lows, and even when the same mistakes are made over and over and over again by Bojack, the writers made it almost effortless to be able to empathize with him. In the moment he makes them, makes the same bad decisions, we're often in that moment with him. We take them one at a time, not the pattern, the grand signals therein. More often than not people are somewhat familiar with how mental illness can look like from the outside, but this show let's us see the inside. The bitter, confusing inside so that by the end, we can look at the outside the way we're supposed to and it's... beautiful. It's beautiful.