Asexual Sighting: Yolanda Buenaventura (BoJack Horseman)

This character was actually introduced on BoJack Horseman last year, but I waited until after this season to give her an Asexual Sighting because 1) she’s a minor character and 2) her asexuality is revealed in her final scene in season 4, so I needed the new season to have more to say about her (a few Yolanda-Todd-related spoilers.)

Todd first encounters Yolanda during a particularly-insane season 4 misadventure, his clown dentistry.  Yolanda is sent by the Better Business Bureau to assess his incredibly-dubious business venture and is pretty quickly established as something of an anti-Todd.  While Todd is kooky, imaginative, and optimistic to a fault (and I mean to a fault!), Yolanda is dry, pragmatic, and, of course, business-minded.  However, their association leads to Yolanda getting tangled up in Todd’s whacky adventure, and as their profession relationship concludes, Yolanda suggests pursuing a personal one.  When Todd explains that he’s asexual, Yolanda simply replies, “Yeah, I know, so am I.  That’s why I’m asking you out.”

This is where Yolanda’s purpose in the story comes in.  Less of an actual character, she’s there to be someone who dates Todd as a fellow romantic ace – one who’s clearly not right for him.  She’s a way for the show to demonstrate how tough dating can be for romantic aces, a point it spells out explicitly in the season 5 opener when Todd discusses the value of a potential dating app for asexuals.  He says that, without something like an app to bring different people together, romantic aces may just fall in with whatever romantic aces they come across, even if they’re not romantically compatible, for lack of other options.  And to be sure, the season later explores a will-they won’t-they between him and Emily, his sexual ex that he reconnected with in season 3 and kicked off his coming-out arc.  Those two have the opposite problem as Todd and Yolanda:  while their personalities and interests are fairly compatible, they haven’t figured out how to have a relationship in which both are comfortable and get their needs met.

As such, Yolanda herself winds up being more of a function than a character.  There are some amusing moments with her, like her flat admission that she once met Paul Rudd at a party and “did not find him charming,” and I like that she’s nervous about coming out to her extremely sex-positive family.  But really, the point of her is to be a romantic ace who’s wrong for Todd and possibly pave the way for a future relationship with Emily.  So… underwritten mid-game love interest?  Not the most exciting, and even as relatively-minor characters go, the show has had much better (Judah for the win!)

It doesn’t seem super-likely that we’ll see Yolanda again, and she’s never been more than a minor character.  But I do still appreciate her existence.  BoJack Horseman is the first story I’ve even seen to feature two asexual characters at once, and even if the plotline doesn’t serve her very well, it’s good to show that two people being romantic aces doesn’t automatically make them right for each other.  After all, I’m not about to say no to an explicitly-ace plot involving explicitly-ace characters!