Bojack Horseman’s Todd Chavez is Possibly Asexual. Hooray!

Netflix original series Bojack Horseman has spent most of its three seasons juggernauting its way through various social issues. Most famous for its depictions of the depression, drugs, and dysfunction, it’s also featured abortions, relationship real-talk, and Keith Olbermann playing a barely-veiled parody of the corporate news machine (“Has women having a choice come too far? To discuss we have brought this diverse group of white men in bow ties.”) And now, at the tail end of the third season, the show has given us asexuality.

Todd Chavez (voiced by Aaron Paul) is lead Bojack Horseman’s on and off again best friend, roomie, and comedic foil. His favorite things seem to be extremely implausible business schemes, food, and shouting “Hooray!” whenever his presense is acknowledged. This season we were introduced to his former high school friend Emily. The show makes no bones about the fact that Emily has always been romantically interested in Todd, and he has accepted this up to a point, once even making out with her in a high school game of “Seven Minutes of Heaven.” But when Emily suggests they go so far as having sex, he ducks the issue. She finally confronts him, asking if he is gay. “I’m not gay,” he tells her. “I mean, I don’t think I am, but I don’t think I’m straight, either.”

As an asexual person myself, I find even this to be very, very exciting. Ace representation is few and far between. Most of it is headcanon on the part of fans, and most of the characters are, like Todd, white cis men. Think Stephen Moffat’s Sherlock, Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon, Star Trek’s Spock. Spock, of course, has gotten a girlfriend in the rebooted movieverse, Moffat has made it explicitly clear he is writing Sherlock to be straight but celibate, and Sheldon, though he does seem to present as asexual, has always struck me as problematic at best. Many fan theories depict Sheldon as being autistic, and the show has never been kind about Sheldon’s “strangeness.” It seems to me that Sheldon’s alleged autism is supposed to be some kind of brokenness, and his asexuality is just a symptom of that.

Todd, on the other, is not broken. In fact, despite his own strangeness he is one of the highest functioning characters on the show. He is a genuinely good, happy person. He is not made fun of for having no apparent interest in women, his goofy ideas are exasperating but at worst tolerated and at best sold for $8 million, and when he is wronged (for instance, when Bojack and Emily, frustrated with their circumstances, sleep together) is isn’t treated as a joke.

While the show and its producers have not, to my knowledge, gone so far as to use the word asexual, Todd’s journey is a familiar one to real-life asexual folk. When he and Emily are making out in the closet she asks him who he likes and he struggles to come up with a name off the top of his head. When, years later, both Bojack and Emily pressure him into having sex with Emily, he very nearly goes through with it before claiming illness and shutting himself up in the hotel room, alone. In the end of the episode montage he is curled up in the middle of the bed, looking sad and regretful. He finally tells Emily, “I don’t know what I am. I think I might be nothing,” but she responds by telling him that’s okay.

And, despite what other shows would have you believe, she is right. He is not broken. He is not nothing. He is just himself, and that’s all he needs to be.