YMMV / Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" E2 "Ren Seeks Help"

• Awesome Art: The one thing most people will agree on is that whatever you think of the episode, all of the gruesome, horrifying imagery is animated very well.
• Bile Fascination: Gained notoriety through TV Trash's, The Mysterious Mr. Enter's and PhantomStrider's reviews.
• Bizarro Episode: This episode tries to be serious and delve into harsh real-world topics.
• Broken Base: It's the most polarizing episode in the series. Fans like it for its strong atmosphere, dark(er) humor, and stylistic qualities; detractors (especially The Mysterious Mr. Enter) hate it for its animal torture and excessively graphic visuals. Others just say it's the episode that sucks the least (for better or worse, it obviously had a lot more effort put into it than the other five episodes of APC).
• Damned by Faint Praise: Basically what the more positive opinions on this episode amount to. Pretty much nobody is arguing that it's a good episode on its own merits but if nothing else, it's a novel experience due to being a Black Comedy Psychological Thriller with good atmosphere and an actual plot, while the other five Adult Party episodes are little more than aimless Padding and Lowest Common Denominator humor.
• Dancing Bear: If there's anything nice (or at least not negative) that people who've seen this episode have to say about it, it's that the premise of a Zany Cartoon character like Ren going to therapy like a normal person is... unique, to say the least. To that end, John Kricfalusi and Richard Prusel succeeded.
• Fridge Brilliance: Ren being dressed as Mickey Mouse as a kid. Mickey wasn't any kinder to animals in his earliest cartoons.
• Glurge: In addition to the excessive physical cruelty, the episode's attempts to play said cruelty for sincere drama come off as shallow, if not even more disturbing.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The episode might as well be called "John Kricfalusi Needs Help". The whole thing feels like an on-screen confession about his unchecked history of abuse, mental instability, and Daddy Issues. Worse is that he later used his mental illness as an excuse for his child grooming (calling it "poor impulse control"), enforcing the episode's message that psychiatric help is a lost cause.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A future episode of BoJack Horseman has BoJack in Ren's shoes, where he discovers that the horse who he thought was his therapist is just a therapy horse. He even uses "I'm a horse!" as justification for not being able to help BoJack.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ren is revealed to have inflicted sadistic Cold-Blooded Torture onto various animals in his youth, including a frog. The moment he proves himself to be irredeemably evil, however, is when upon hearing the frog's pleas to be put out of its misery, he spitefully decides to spare the helpless frog so he can continue being miserable.
• Older Than They Think:
  • According to John K., the premise for the episode was his belief that there had never been a cartoon about an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist going to therapy. There's a good chance he never saw the Hey Arnold! episode "Helga on the Couch".^note Granted, a character going to therapy wasn't as absurd a notion on a show as grounded as Hey, Arnold! as it would be for a Zany Cartoon like Ren & Stimpy.
  • Inversely, this was also ten years before Rick and Morty and eleven years before BoJack Horseman, both shows which were extremely well received for their depictions of an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist dealing with the serious repercussions of his hilariously selfish antics. Humorously enough, not only was the former show created by a professed Ren & Stimpy fan, but there's a particularly gruesome episode about the main character going to therapy. Meanwhile, the title character in BoJack is often visually compared to Mr. Horse and there's even an episode where he discovers that a horse he thought was a therapist isn't actually a therapist.
  • For that matter, this isn't the first time John K. tried to deliberately go as dark as possible with Funny Animal characters acting out a '40s style psychodrama. Weekend Pussy Hunt is more or less the precursor to this episode.
• Reviews Are the Gospel: Before The Mysterious Mr. Enter reviewed this episode, it was more of a Broken Base, with some people thinking it was one of the better episodes of the show. Now, it's hated by many Ren & Stimpy fans, though others still think it's the best episode in the series, if only for its atmosphere and having an actual plot, which the other five episodes lack.
• Signature Scene:
  • Ren deciding to give Cruel Mercy to the helpless frog. As well as being Ren's Moral Event Horizon, it's also the moment that classifies the overall quality of the episode.
  • Mr. Horse and Ren giving "The Reason You Suck" speeches to each other, followed by Ren's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Mr. Horse as well as getting dragged away by Animal Control.
• Spiritual Successor: To Weekend Pussy Hunt, another psychodrama by John K. where the only joke appears to be that cartoon characters are acting out an ugly, dramatic Film Noir story which gets uglier and uglier as it goes along.
• Squick: Among other things, Ren's parents passionately making out over the sound of their son revving up a chainsaw in preparation of giving the frog a Mercy Kill.
• Strawman Has a Point: While it's made clear that Ren is completely Beyond Redemption, he still manages to rightfully point out how Mr. Horse's behavior of telling Ren that he's crazy is completely unfitting of a therapist.
  Ren: I don't understand! I came to you for help! I bared my soul to you! I told you all my darkest secrets! And now you tell me I'm crazy? What kind of a psychologist are you?!
• Values Dissonance: The ending of the episode brings up the idea that if you go to a therapist, you are at risk of being institutionalized. This would likely not fly super well in The New '20s, where that fear is well-known as preventing quite a few people from getting the help they need. However, many therapists are required to inform authorities if their patient is at risk of harming themselves or others. See Harsher in Hindsight.
• The Woobie:
  • The frog that Ren tortures, then lets live as it begs to be put out of its misery. It eventually shoots itself in the mouth with, ironically, a "Bang!" Flag Gun which impales him with the flag.
  • Stimpy is quite pitiable. Whatever Ren did to him, you can tell it was bad.

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