I know Bojack shouldn’t have invited her on that bender. I know he shouldn’t have given her that heroin. I know he should have immediately called 911 when she overdosed. I know he shouldn’t have gotten her hooked on alcohol as a kid.
But can we stop acting like the blame was 100-0? Fact of the matter is Sarah Lynn was a grown woman who had multiple stretches of years away from Bojack to work on herself. She chose to “cheat” sobriety and drank throughout her “sober” period and still collected her AA chips. She immediately hopped onto the bender, which, yes, is a choice. She also chose to take heroin which is well known for being fatal in certain doses.
As a fandom we’ve experienced each others reactions to Bojack’s almost-death in TVFHD and regard it as generally his fault and acknowledge that it was wrong of him to break into a family’s home, (kinda) overdose, and then burden Diane with it. So why doesn’t Sarah Lynn get held to a similar standard. Yeah, her addiction was influenced by Bojack, but Bojack was influenced by his parents.
tldr: Sarah Lynn was fully grown at 32 years old and made a series of conscious choices that led to her death and she’s not exempt from judgment just because she died young
I prefer to say that Bojack was complicit in her death. Is it a semantic distinction? Probably, but I think it reflects a bit more of the nuance to the situation.