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| “ | I don't want to fight you, Bojack. I just want to tell you I know. I know you wanna be happy, but you won't be, and--I'm sorry-- it's not just you, you know. Your father and I, we---Well, we come by it honestly, the ugliness inside you. You were born broken, that's your birthright. And now you can fill your life with projects, your books, and your movies, and your little girlfriends, but it won't make you whole. You're Bojack Horseman. There's no cure for that. | „ |
| ~ Beatrice Horseman. |
Beatrice Horseman (née Sugarman) is the main antagonist of the Netflix animated series BoJack Horseman.
She was the psychologically abusive mother of BoJack, as she constantly punished and scolded him all because he was born.
She was voiced by Wendie Malick.
Biography[]
From Troubled Beginnings[]
Beatrice Horseman was the daughter of Joseph Sugarman, a wealthy but misogynistic business owner and Honey Sugarman, a good hearted homemaker. When she was young, her brother Crackerjack was killed in WWII, leaving her mother emotional and distraught and her father not being able to control her emotions.
One night, after the battle was ended, Honey and Beatrice went to an army celebration where Honey got drunk and made a scene causing them to be thrown out. Beatrice, who was only a little girl at the time, was forced to drive her and her mother home, leading to a wreck. Joseph was outraged by this and blamed it on her not being able to control her emotions, leading to Joseph having her lobotomized. Beatrice was saddened by this and her mom made her promise to never love anyone else like she loved Crackerjack, or else she would suffer the same fate.
Scarlet Fever[]
Beatrice not only had a difficult home life, she was also regularly bullied at school by Clemilia Bloodsworth and her silver spoon friends for being fat and poor. One day, waking up from her sleep, she told her father that she didn't feel well. Joseph, however, felt that she was lying about being sick because she didn't want to go to school and be bullied by Clemilia and her friends so she made her get up anyway. Despite this, she ended up collapsing and it was revealed that she was suffering from scarlet fever. That night, she is woken up by the sound of her father scolding her mother for not being able to take care of her, blaming the lobotomy for making her stupider instead of helping her. Beatrice is of course distraught by this, but Joseph tells her not to worry, as the scarlet fever might help her lose some of that weight she's been gaining.
Pleasant Memory[]
One night, Beatrice is woken up by one of the servants taking her baby doll away from her. She gets up to go and retrieve it but is immediately horrified by the sight of the servants burning all her toys and belongings. She desperately pleads with them to stop but Joseph walks in and tells her to stop, claiming that, "crying was stupid," and that her sickness had infected everything and it was the only way to stop the others from getting sick. She begs and pleads her father not to burn her baby doll but Joseph ignores her pleads and tosses it in the fire, leaving it to melt. Beatrice begins to scream and cry but Joseph tells her that she needs to be strong and asks her, "You don't want to end up like your mother, do you?" Scared and anxious, she says no, and Joseph tells her that soon it will all be a pleasant memory. But despite this, Beatrice never seemed to have gotten over it, and this memory alone contributed to her hatred towards Bojack.
Personality[]
Throughout most of the series, Beatrice is portrayed as a malicious, abusive, sarcastic, bitter, and emotionless croon, who constantly makes it clear to BoJack that he was a mistake that ruined her body and destroyed her life. She often smoked and drank heavily to cope with her misery, right aftter BoJack's birth. This is shown in scenes where BoJack smokes a cigarette and his mother makes him smoke the entire thing saying she wasn't punishing him for stealing or smoking, she was punishing him for "being alive." She is also seen telling BoJack when he is nine that she was once beautiful before she got pregnant with him, and it shows that this isn't the first time she showed resentment towards the loss of her figure. Despite pushing him to succed to make up for all the "damage he did" to her, she made him feel like nothing he would ever do was good enough for her, putting him down and discouraging him from any endavor he tried out.
She apparently called herself a "great mom" seconds after she scolded and verbally abused her son. Along with Butterscotch, her addictions, bitternessand abuse are a perfectly big reason for why BoJack ended up the way he is, adopting the same addictions and bitterness as his mother. Other characters who were friends with Bojack agreed that his parents were harsh and abusive towards him. What makes her worse than her husband in the sense is that the only time Beatrice was truly nice to BoJack was in Time's Arrow, and even then it didn't make up for over 50 years of abuse towards him.
However, that's not to say that she doesn't have any redeeming qualities. When she was a young child, she was a positive and upbeat character, who constantly stood up for her mother Honey and loved everyone around her, Includer her brother Crackerjack, who died in World War II, which deeply affected her mother, who went stricken with grief and also went hysterical and depressed, while her father Joseph wasn't equipped to deal with her emotions and the grieving process. Honey eventually went mad with grief and endangered both her and Beatrice's lives by making her drive home after she got drunk during an emotional breakdown at a party celebrating the end of World War II. This led to Honey being lobotomized, which made her a dazed and an empty shell of her former self, and before she went catatonic told Beatrice to never love anyone as much as she loved Crackerjack. This is one of the reasons why Beatrice was so cruel to BoJack and never showed any love for him.
Beatrice was left in the care of her cheerful but emotionally distant and deeply misogynistic father, Joseph, who seemingly lacked empathy, filled her young mind with misogynistic ideas about a woman and her role and opportunities in the world, and seemingly only cared that she grew up beautiful and thin so she could be married off. He discouraged her from reading, and only sent her to Barnard to find a husband, and was disappointed she got a bachelor's degree. Prominently, Joseph traumatized her further by burning her baby doll, among with her other possessions, in front of her when she caught scarlet fever. With his typical calm and cheerful demeanor, Joseph chastised her for crying and told her to not let her emotions consume her or else she will end up like her mother. This further led Beatrice to become a hardened, unloving, and emotionally distant mother who refused to show vulnerability towards BoJack, and it caused her to be unable to abort him. While she couldn't lose another baby, she still couldn't love him or anyone else, due to seeing what could happen.
Beatrice's body image was an issue for her since a very young age due to the time period she was raised in, both of which put a lot of importance and pressure on a woman's physical appearance. Her school bully called her fat and her father saw her swollen throat from scarlet fever as an opportunity to lose weight. He also forbid her from eating ice cream, and her mother pre-lobotomy told her it was a "boys' food" and encouraged her to eat lemon wedges with sugar sprinkled on them as a healthy alternative. As a result, she would regularly take what she referred to as "pretty pills" to help her stay thin. This explains why she resented BoJack for ruining her beauty and figure, and why as a dementia-ridden elder she drugged Hollyhock with weight loss supplements, calling it an "old family secret" and said it was until she learned to take them herself.
She is shown to have a snarky and sardonic personality with a sharp tongue and a mouth full of sass, similar to her mother's, which was aided by her keen intelligence and would use against others. Much like her own son, this was also likely developed from her father abusing and traumatizing her and making her feel self-conscious and inadequate, which she compensated into meanness and sarcasm in order to hide any vulnerability from others.
She openly showed resentment towards her father, going so far as to groan and roll her eyes and express her annoyance with her father for his backward and old-fashioned thinking. Joseph was angered and disappointed with these traits due to his misogyny, and at that point in her life was only focused on marrying her off. He even admits to her he doesn't even care what she feels, and he would marry her off to literally anyone. He ironically wanted to marry her off to Corbin Creamerman, the son of a creamery owner, despite forbidding her from eating ice cream.
Beatrice also showed dissatisfaction with her high-class lifestyle and believed she was above it, calling lavish parties like debutantes “self-serving, garish wastes of money,” and felt it discouraged her from her educational interests, ideals, and the social issues she cared about, even mentioning wealth disparity.
When she met Butterscotch, part of the reason she was attracted to him was that, he was an aspiring author and admired the beatniks, as she obviously had a love for reading, and they both shared mutual spite for the world around them, despite him having only a vague idea for his novel which she calls him out on. She even showed a bit of vulnerability when mentions her mother "doesn’t think much about anything anymore", to which Butterscotch does too, revealing that his own mother died when he was little but remembered she had a diamond like Beatrice's, which made her happy a little bit. Beatrice ditches her own party to make love with Butterscotch as a way to rebel against her father and her high society life.
Her and Butterscotch's idealism comes into front after he gets her pregnant with BoJack. When she miserably declares herself a "ruined woman," he insists she isn't, and tells her a "story" of a couple who moved to California and lived happily together with their child, which wins over Beatrice and convinces her to accept his marriage proposal. The two would later get married and lived happily for a while.
However, Butterscotch ended up failing to help her escape from her old life of living in her father's shadow, as he found no success as a writer, and he was even delusional about his talent. During their marriage, he would emotionally abuse her, have multiple extramarital affairs, was misogynistic, and would berate her for doing a poor job with her duties as a housewife. He also refused to take a comfortable, decent, and well-paying job for her father at her family's company as he thought that living in the working-class would make his writing better and he resented the upper class society, even comparing higher wage jobs to "slavery."
Beatrice also regretted not marrying her debutante suitor, Corbin Creamerman, as the two began to share a connection on a date two weeks after her debutante, due to their shared resentment against their respective fathers shooting down their ideas and aspirations and feeling as if they had no escape from it. Ironically, if Beatrice had let her father plan her life out and marry the man he chose for her, then her life would've been more easier and even happier. In spite of expressing her disapproval of the upper-class lifestyle that her father was forcing her into, she had actually become accustomed to and dependent on it, because when she leaves that lifestyle to marry Butterscotch, she complains to him that he can't afford them a nanny or a maid to help her, and is miserable living a middle-class life with the low salary Butterscotch made at the fish cannery. She even berates him for his obsession with his novel and their low income during an argument and complains about having to do chores and take care of their son BoJack all by herself. She appears happy when he finally agrees to get a high paying job for her father's company, resulting in them getting rich. However, it is clear that they did not come together out of love or care for their child, but rather out of their disdain and hatred towards the world around them.
Her traumatic past and unhappy marriage led her to become an abusive mother to BoJack, taking her anger out on him and blaming him for everything that ever happened in her life.
When she had dementia, she was shown to be caring towards her, "baby," who was actually a doll, despite BoJack clearly being jealous towards it. This shows that when Beatrice was older, she started to show remorse for what she did. And because of this, she wanted to start over. Even though she did drug Hollyhock to be thinner, it's assumed that she had no control over that because she had dementia.
External Link[]
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 Villains
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Lead Characters Lead Characters' Families Celebrities Assorted L.A. Residents Gentle Farms (Gentle Farms Farmer) | Chicken 4 Dayz (Michael Morgan) | Secretariat | King Puss Puss | ||