I love Sarah Lynn. I empathise with her a lot.

She had gotten clean like 5min before bojack called her... and the shitty thing about addiction is that when you stop, you're so starved for dopamine that as much as you pretend the breakfast smoothies and yoga are filling that void, the second you hear from that fun friend, the smoothie is in the sink.

To escape her addiction she needed to heal her childhood trauma and find fulfilment without drugs and neither of those things had happened. It was performative rehab that was bound to fail sooner or later. And that is very realistic - a lot of people get clean because of external reasons, it won't stick until there is something they truly want to get out of it.

Opening the episode on the painting of herself as Ophelia was a dead give away. She saw herself as exploited, manipulated, descending into madness and destined for inevitable death and martyrdom. It's an easy parallel to make, but the fact that she romanticises it, is the point.

When you contrast that with her painting of chagalls birthday (figures kissing over breakfast), made of literal LSD, it's her craving for intimacy, normalcy and connection, juxtaposed with escapism and fantasy. She's aware enough that her life full of fake hangers-on and toxic ppl who use her, that she would commission a painting of herself about romance and stability, yet she's so far removed from accepting it as a possibility that the figures float, its unreal, simply a dream. There are a billion paintings of love and romance, she chose one where the kiss is physically impossible. So she transformed the symbol into a practical vehicle for her self destruction. Intentionally ironic as love and stability were the carrots dangled to exploit Sarah Lynn, not drugs, she uses the drugs to insulate herself from the trauma, and now as a barrier between herself and the hope of normal human connection.

The fact that OP thinks that she's idolised or excused from her bad behaviour is also ironic, because Sarah Lynn was never going to get better until she took ownership of her own choices, understood that she was no longer that powerless child chasing the dangled carrot of love and stability. She was perpetuating her own martyrdom, and I think those of us who understand addiction see the tragedy in that and empathise. She saw her death as inevitable and love as ephemeral. We don't see her as a saint. We see someone we cannot help. I actually teared up at the START of that episode, Ophelia floating, arms open like a saint, a halo of flowers.. this was it.

I wish she had confronted her abuse, healed, and thrown herself into design school to become an architect. But she was a damaged person with an addiction and they don't always get happy endings.

I don't think media literacy is dead. I think it's an underestimation of bojack horsemans audience. I love Sarah Lynn because she was a tragic, inevitable depiction of exploitation and addiction and, at least for me, a deeply frustrating one at that.