The First Leading Asexual Character May Be On ‘BoJack Horseman’

If you told critics five years ago that one of the most innovative, mature, and progressive shows of 2016 would be about an animated horse, you’d probably be met with laughter. However, as Season Three of Netflix’s BoJack Horseman has proven, it’s possible for all of those claims to be true and for a series to still remain funny. A lot of attention has been given to BoJack’s gorgeous silent episode and abortion storyline, but there’s one quiet subplot that has the potential to be BoJack’s most ambitious development of all. One of the show’s main characters has come closer than any other TV character before him to identifying as asexual. Season Three spoilers ahead.

In alignment with Season Three’s complicated tone, BoJack (Will Arnett) and Todd’s (Aaron Paul) crumbling relationship contains more nuance than ever before. Instead of watching BoJack hurt Todd so Todd can react a couple of episodes later, this season’s inflicted wound takes most of the season to fester before the odd best friend pair finally confronts it. And, as is typical with most of BoJack’s mistakes, all the drama revolves around a woman.

This season, we were introduced to Todd’s best friend, Emily, essentially a smarter, more driven version of Todd. Almost immediately during that epic 2007 flashback, it becomes apparent that their relationship is romantically one-sided. Emily (Abbi Jacobson) desperately wants to be with Todd, and though Todd agrees to date her, he sidesteps her advances several times. Of course, BoJack being BoJack, he makes things weird, sleeping with his best friend’s romantic interest after Todd rejects her for the umpteenth time. From a plot perspective, this is one of BoJack’s most gruesome betrayals, testing the already strained limits of his best friendship. However, this plot does something more interesting than that. It teases the possibility that Todd is asexual.

In the season’s last episode, Emily comes clean to Todd, finally asking him what his sexual “deal” is. Todd quickly reassures Emily that he’s not gay before delivering this line:

I don’t know what I am. I think I might be nothing.

Those six words, “I think I might be nothing,” may be the most revolutionary part of this impressive season. Though Todd has not yet defined his sexuality, the most straightforward interpretation of this statement is that he’s asexual. If that’s the case, than Todd Chavez, our favorite slacker and the mind behind Halloween in January, may be one of the first leading asexual characters to directly confront his sexual identity onscreen.

Todd isn’t the first speculated asexual TV character. Popular characters who are believed to be part of this underrepresented sexual minority include Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, the Doctor from Doctor Who, and Sherlock Holmes from Steven Moffat’s Sherlock. However, most of this is speculation. After all, more recent versions of the Doctor famously included love stories with Rose Tyler and River, and Steven Moffat has confirmed that Sherlock is neither gay nor asexual. Instead he chooses to abstain from sex. Likewise, though Sheldon has expressed asexual tendencies, his sexuality has never been directly discussed. Todd Chavez may be the closest a leading character has come to directly identifying as asexual, and what’s more impressive, he’s not criticized for it. Emily accepts him immediately.

During a recent interview with BoJack’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Decider asked if Todd’s sexual revelation was something the writers had planned from the beginning. “I think that’s something we kind of discovered through playing around with Todd,” Bob-Waksberg said.

“In the first season, [Todd] alluded to having a high school girlfriend, and there’s a flirtation he has in the first season with a Japanese woman who ends up ripping him off, so he’s definitely flirted with the idea of being a heterosexual man,” he said. “As we were thinking about the character, I think he kind of revealed himself to not be. I don’t know if there’s a less pretentious way to say that. It felt very natural for him to be something different. I guess I’m avoiding putting a label on him at this point because he’s yet to put a label on himself.”

Oddly enough, it’s this weighted focus on Todd’s unknown sexual journey that makes the season’s ending revelation so powerful. This character’s realization isn’t played off as a laugh, nor is it part of the storyline-of-the-week. Todd’s unspecified sexuality is now intricately connected to this character. “I think that’s something, hopefully, we’ll be able to explore in more detail further on, but it felt like an important journey to get him to even realize that about himself,” Bob-Waksberg said. “It felt very natural too. It didn’t feel forced.”

BoJack has never been a show to leave loose ends, so it’s not out of the question to speculate that Season Four will focus on, at least in part, Todd’s sexual journey. This time next year, we may have a leading character who identifies as asexual as well as a detailed narrative exploring the steps of this character’s sexual revelation. We have the potential to see a deeply personal story that has never appeared on television before. All of this may come from a cartoon character who once created a space-themed rock opera and who is voiced by an actor who made “Bitch” his catchphrase. As Todd himself would say, “Hooray!”

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Photos: Netflix