Okay, first. Bojack is, ironically, a more realistic version of a crummy person. Most people think they’re decent and don’t want to confront what they are. And most people aren’t awful all the time. Eleanor was unapologetically bad, nearly all the time, and it was deliberately a bit exaggerated in style. Bojack was sometimes good, sometimes fun, sometimes bad, sometimes really bad. That’s why Eleanor reacted casually to bad things - because she’s something of a caricature. Bojack, meanwhile, reacts normally to watching someone be hurt, because he’s meant to be more realistic.
Two of your examples do not work. In the Bojack universe, Mr. Peanutbutter is an independent adult. The dog Eleanor took care of is not. Also, again, the show is exaggerated. No animal is actually going to look like that after one day. This couldn’t happen in the Bojack universe.
The T-shirt comparison is frankly insulting. Eleanor took advantage of someone being an asshole. That does not come close to being analogous to Todd’s sexuality.
As for Sarah Lynn… I think he sufficiently aided in fucking up Sarah Lynn. I think that terrifying speech he gave her to make her cry in front of a laughing audience is bad enough.
The closest things they did were the prom thing. Eleanor did not do anything directly; she took her cousin to the prom. Bojack, meanwhile, gave kids a bunch of alcohol, abandoned one with alcohol poisoning and tried to sleep with another. The long term effects were at least as bad.
None of this is to justify anything Eleanor did. The point is that Eleanor was over-the-top. She was bad all the time. Bojack wasn’t. He may seem more palatable because he reacted appropriately (sometimes) to bad things.
I agree. The show acknowledges that Bojack makes the wrong choices or hurts people without making him comically evil in doing so.
I think there’s a confusion and disconnect that a lot of people have when it comes to being “bad” or “good”. In media, characters are generally good or bad. And the bad characters are Disney-villain evil. The average person, who can at times be good or at others be bad, know their intentions are good or at least not evil, and so don’t process that doing the bad thing is, in practice, equivalent to being “the bad guy”. That just because you mean well or atone, or even just don’t intend to hurt anyone, doesn’t absolve you of being in the wrong.
To those who will say that I’m missing the point by simplifying things into “good people” and “bad people,” I’m talking about the perceptions that people have of themselves and those around them, not whether or not people are actually good or bad deep down.