I remember Rebel Taxi made a video that compared the two, that’s the only time I’ve heard about it. Looks like it was a short and not a full show?

I don’t like to use the word “grooming” because I think his plan was only to get with Charlotte, or at least live vicariously through her family. His friendship with Penny may not have been appropriate (though I think intergenerational friendships can be healthy) but I don’t think he ever had sexual intentions or even expected to genuinely gain her trust. He just liked that someone didn’t expect him to act like an adult, without realizing that Penny did see him as an adult and liked the lack of boundaries he set because it made her feel more powerful. So it’s the sort of mentality a groomer does exploit, but I don’t think BoJack was self-aware enough to consciously groom her. A middle-aged man and a teenage girl can be friends and it’s not grooming if the teen girl develops a crush on him because she’s naive and desperate and trusts anybody who is nice to her. The issue is whether the man is responsible enough to set boundaries.

But obviously that doesn’t make what he did any better. He did eventually acknowledge the similarity between Penny and Charlotte, and it’s telling that he only left the door open after Charlotte rejected him. He lost his actual goal so he decided to throw caution to the wind and just do something shitty that would either A) burn bridges with Charlotte’s family so he didn’t feel tempted to come back or B) make him feel like he’s young again. People forget the “age of stagnation” quote from earlier this season – BoJack thinks he’s still young, he wanted to project young and immature Charlotte onto Penny because Charlotte matured and BoJack did not. He was very passive about it but he clearly wanted to give Penny the option so he could go numb and do nothing and convince himself it was her mistake. Despite the fact he’s the one old enough to know what he’s doing is wrong.

It’s predatory either way whether we use the term “grooming” or not.

Only things making me not lose my boxershorts is a) that he’s a horrible person and b) fictional as well as c) mostly straight.

I noticed the horse part isn’t listed here.

I think that’s a bit overly cynical. It’s more “large-scale change is nearly impossible unless you have the wealth for it, so don’t break your back trying to tear it all down, but you can make a positive impact in smaller ways and sometimes that’s good enough.”

Oof never thought of that, good call if true.

In that case it felt less like she was hesitating and more like she was still processing it, maybe even drinking it in. After all that was an outright love confession.

People really need to actually rewatch that episode before they start claiming Penny was totally mature enough to know what she was doing. She was already in an emotionally unstable position, possibly predisposed to anxiety, and her understanding of relationships was naive. And there’s just so much that happened that night that gets overlooked, namely the Maddy incident that you mentioned.

I’ve had anxious feelings about things that happened to me years prior that were far less severe than what Penny went through, it makes total sense. Do people think you can’t be traumatized unless you were actively raped? That even an emotionally charged, morally dubious, but technically legal situation where nothing happened can’t leave her traumatized That’s an abysmal mindset.

The earlier Netflix shows have a better break as they were novel and Netflix had faith in them to attract return subscribers. Once they started adding more and more stuff just to pad out the library, they were more willing to cut things super early.

Unfortunately by Netflix standards that’s a long-runner.