From House to Horseman: Ace Representation Through The Years

If you ask any random person on the street what asexuality is, it’s very likely they’ll have no idea, or talk about cells, or mistake it for agender or some other form of nonbinary gender identity. These people aren’t stupid and shouldn’t be shamed for this. The onus is not on them, but on the complete lack of information and representation of asexuality in the media.

There are two other common responses I’ve had to coming out, and they involve two very different media portrayals of asexuality (and I also included a third bit because I remembered it mid-draft and it serves as a bland bridge between the two). Let’s look at them and do some comparisons, shall we?

“Oh yeah, they did that on ‘House’. You can cure that, you know.”

(And lest you accuse me of strawmanning, this is a real thing a real person said confidently to my face once.)

Quick primer on House for the uninitiated: Sherlock Holmes is a doctor and also a colossal jerkbag. That’s it, that’s the show.

Now then, let’s talk about episode 9 of season 8, aka Better Half, aka the bane of my goddamn existence.

Luckily, someone on YouTube was kind enough to throw together most of the relevant bits into one short video. Warning for individuals who’ve gotten this far without internally calling me a snowflake: the following video is known to elicit an average of 60 “Yikes” Per Minute (YPM) or 1 “Yikes” Per Second (YPS). Viewer discretion and clean hands to use for facepalming are advised.

You good? Take a minute if you need it. I usually do, after even thinking about this episode.

So full summary: This case is the B plot of this episode. The A plot involves a woman cheating on her bedridden husband and almost has nothing to do with this plot except that they both involve couples, so I won’t go into it. Dr. Wilson (instead of Watson, geddit?) is doing a pretty routine examination of a patient, Kayla, when she reveals that even though she’s married, she and her husband don’t have sex because (gasp!) they’re asexual. Wilson is surprised, but like a decent person, decides to do some research on it and share it with House. House, being the least decent person in the world, immediately laughs it off, and bets he can find a “real” cause for it. This involves ordering tests that the patient doesn’t ask for or is even aware of, par for the course for our boy Condo.

Throughout the episode, everyone else in the hospital keeps telling Apartment that asexuality is valid, and even if it isn’t, who cares? It’s not their business. But still, Dwelling persists. And finally, viola! Turns out her husband has thyroid cancer, and Kayla was lying the whole time to make her husband happy! Ace Husband seems nervous and doesn’t really want the treatment, but he eventually mans up and agrees to take it because his wife tells him “a girl has needs”. Lean-To wins the bet, and I spend an hour pulling out shards of glass from my ankle after kicking the screen.

Luckily, I’m not alone in my screen-kicking rage. That video has almost three times more dislikes than likes, and the comments can mostly be boiled down to, well, “Yikes”. The initial backlash it received from the ace community was mostly ignored due to less visibility, but that’s changed in recent years. And nothing is more emblematic of that change than the second response I get to coming out:

“Oh, that’s cool! You’ve seen that ‘Bojack Horseman’ episode, right?”

Nowadays it’s not just one episode, but several, but at the time, they were referring to the episode that ended like this:

There have been a few attempts at good ace representation before now, to be fair. I remember looking up if there were any at all when I was first coming out and was graced with a so-so exchange from a character on that ABC Family show Huge that starred the lead from Hairspray and was unmemorable in every other way. I can’t speak to how good it was, since I have no idea who this Poppy character is, though Wikipedia’s description of her as “ever-cheerful” and “fairy-like” on top of the show’s short run doesn’t give me high hopes that it avoids the “naive innocent ace” stereotype. But the point is, even in that small clip with no context, I felt nothing when I watched Poppy come out.

I didn’t have any context for Todd’s coming out either. I mean, who is this girl? How did they suddenly acquire all this money? Why are they even eating cheap sundaes at a diner if they’re apparently millionaires now? I don’t even know this guy’s name!

But even still, it hit me in a way Poppy’s didn’t. Poppy’s coming out was made into A Thing. It was a Big Dramatic Thing that weighed heavily on the guy she came out to who apparently wanted to get some. The focus wasn’t on Poppy so much as Disappointed Man In Hoodie over here. The Bojack scene, however, is entirely focused on the ace person and their coming out, and better yet, shows they aren’t all the way there yet. He doesn’t have the words for how he feels yet, but knows it’s not “gay” or “straight”, and can articulate enough to say it’s more like “nothing”. And instantly, he’s met with acceptance. No skepticism, no long list of questions, just surprise, then acceptance.

And that has continued, as you can see in the clip below.

I’m trying desperately to catch up on Bojack, but I can at least attest to the fact that Bojack shares a lot of the same problems as House — substance abuse, self-destructive behavior, lack of empathy at times, etc. But Bojack seems to criticize its titular character far more than House ever did, and we see Bojack adapt, change, and learn from his mistakes in the wake of those consequences.

It would have been easy to write Bojack being a jerk about Todd coming out, especially since in-universe, they’re going through a rough patch in their friendship anyway. But again, after some initial confusion (that still manages not to discredit the notion of aceness), Bojack completely accepts Todd. Bojack tries to make some jokes to lighten the mood that purposely don’t land, but they’re not offensive, and the one that even has the possibility to be is instantly shot down by Todd, and Bojack apologizes.

The writers on Bojack understood what the writers on House didn’t: the reaction to the characters coming out is just as important as the coming out itself. The reaction of other characters, especially protagonists, provides a mirror for the audience. It doesn’t necessarily say, “This is how you should react if this happens”, but rather, “This is the expected response if this happens”. The reaction of other characters sets the status quo for people who’ve never encountered the situation in real life. Whether it’s framed as a good or bad reaction, it has still set the norm.

House set an incredibly dangerous precedent that ace people, myself included, still feel. This is a larger problem with the Smart Jerk character archetype as a whole that I don’t have time to get into, but for our purposes, here’s the simple problem: He’s a jerk, but he’s also smart. He is bigoted, rude, and violent, but he’s also a master at figuring out a cohesive diagnosis from a strange list of symptoms. The other doctors will go out of their way to call House if they are having difficulty figuring out what’s wrong with a patient. Flawed or not, he is treated in-universe as an authority. Thus, regardless of how many times the other characters say asexuality is valid, and regardless of the fact that this was just one case where he happened to stumble across something in his aphobic tirade, House is still, once again and as always, right. He says “the only people who don’t want sex are either sick, dead, or lying”, and behold: one of them was sick, and one of them was lying. It doesn’t explicitly say asexuality isn’t real, but the subtext is loud as a bullhorn.

It definitely gets better on Huge, but it’s still bland. The character being ace is little more than a plot twist, and the person most affected by her coming out, the person whose emotional journey we are told to connect to, is the guy who was trying to get in her pants. We don’t follow Poppy struggling with whether to say anything, whether this will ruin any chance of a romantic relationship with this person, whether it will result in the violence that happens all too often when men are denied sex. No, we follow Layers Man as he laments the fact that he will never get to boink her. Hell, Poppy doesn’t even seem all that fazed by coming out. She just sort of breezily mentions it while they watch a movie. It prioritizes V-Neck’s shock and blue balls over Poppy’s fear of systemic oppression or even over any kind of accuracy — Poppy’s description sounds more like aromanticism than asexuality, to me.

In Bojack, the character moments all belong to Todd. From the minute Emily asks him if he’s gay, the emotional focus is on Todd. Emily is just a listening and understanding ear. And in the scene with Bojack, even though Bojack is clearly going through a lot, he doesn’t try to derail Todd’s coming out. It sends a very clear message: even someone as messed up, selfish, and going through as many hard times as Bojack can take the time to not be an asshole to ace people. The episode ends not with the climactic (I’m assuming) moment of Bojack meeting his daughter, but with Todd going to an ace meetup instead of…going to his band show? Where they didn’t realize the chair was empty until the end of the piece? And it seems to represent him finding fulfillment where he wasn’t before? But he doesn’t really seem like the tie-wearing band type anyway so, like, what?

Obviously I’m missing a lot of context here, but that speaks volumes. I have far more context on House and Huge, the former because I watched a lot of it and the latter because it was so short that it wasn’t hard to glean a lot of info. And yet, I’m far more invested watching a guy I know basically nothing about slowly discover his asexuality than I am watching a major character in a show unambiguously come out, and certainly more than an alcoholic sexist doctor who should have been fired years ago for malpractice tell me I’m the one who’s fucked up. Funny, that.

So the two main takeaways:

First, media is a reflection on the society that makes it, so this illustrates the public’s changing perception of asexuality. Huge was actually first, premiering in 2010, that House episode was 2012, and the Bojack episodes were this year (2017). In less than a decade, it’s gone from “sick, dead, or, lying” to “okay” ,“great”, and “amazing”. It’s a sign of hope and progress in a year that’s been sorely lacking in both.

And second, to any writers, showrunners, directors, etc.: Learn from past mistakes. If you’re going to have any character from a marginalized group on your show, you should talk to at least one person from that group about it, bare minimum. It’s worth mentioning that the showrunners of Bojack Horseman brought on the co-executive director of Ace Los Angeles as a consultant for the episode and character, and I can’t find anything that suggested House or Huge consulted any ace people, much less advocacy groups. The difference between being what you perceive as a Good Ally and actually shutting up and listening to the needs of the people you’re trying to help is truly magic.

Representation matters, and bad representation of a group that’s already widely misunderstood and ignored has devastating effects. And good representation doesn’t have to be a dramatic reveal, or a bunch of people standing up to one bigot while ignoring the voice of the actual ace character you claim to want to lift up.

Sometimes, good representation is just an unremarkable dude with a beanie and a questionable idea for a sandwich, who is undeniably asexual.