Big Mouth recaptures all the horror and hilarity of puberty in animated form, allowing it to be as obscene and awkward as possible. Following pre-teen Andrew Glouberman and his friends as they navigate adolescence and their own bodies, the Netflix original series showcases all the traumatic and tantalizing ways that puberty affects boys and girls. To spice things up, the series created Hormone Monsters, furry manifestations of puberty’s driving forces that instigate the kids to give in to their hormonal urges.
It’s precisely because the show is so relatable that even though its dark humor isn’t for everyone, it’s gained fans with each passing season. It’s explored everything from first periods to first boners, and in doing so, it’s also created language to help prepubescent kids explain what they’re going through. Now, when puberty rears its ugly head, they can say, “the Hormone Monster made me do it”. By doing so, it reminds us that while the process is painful at times, we were all in it at one point together.
Nick Being A Late Bloomer
While Andrew’s burst into puberty jumpstarts the entire series, his best friend Nick is floundering in prepubescence. Small for his age, without any body hair, and with no signs of an onset vocal drop in sight, he feels doomed to be a little kid forever.
Despite the fact that none of his friends are too excited about nocturnal emissions and boners at the most inopportune moments, Nick envies the fact that they’re changing. He feels like he’s being left behind - that is, until he gets his very own Hormone Monster and the horror begins!
Raging Hormones (& Monsters)
Arguably the funniest and most effective plot devices in the show are the Hormone Monsters. Like a sudden hormonal flair-up, they appear at the worst possible times, to instigate all sorts of chaos and mayhem that make their little pre-teen chargers miserable.
Maury is the first Hormone Monster we see in season 1 when Andrew is the first of his friends to hit puberty. Once his friend Jessi gets her period, we see her Hormone Monstress Connie materialize and proceed to wreak havoc. Who couldn’t relate to embarrassing teenage hormones making your life miserable 24/7?
Missy’s Body Image Issues
Of all her peers, Missy is one of the most well-adjusted. She’s been brought up in an open-minded, free-thinking, mixed-race household, with a mother who has always endeavored to make her feel beautiful exactly how she is. But the mirror has different ideas for Missy in season 2, and who hasn’t, despite their better judgment, hated the way they look at one time or another?
Missy becomes her own worst enemy, declaring that no one will ever be attracted to her because her body is so ugly. Sensing her hostility, her mom invites her and Jessi to a Korean Spa to take a look at dozens of other naked women, and celebrate what makes them all look uniquely beautiful.
Awkward First Kisses
There are many firsts in Big Mouth, but one of the most important for the main characters is the -gasp!- first kiss. It’s something both simultaneously longed for and dreaded by teenagers, but incredibly difficult to work up the nerve to do. The hormones are there, but the confidence is not.
Big Mouth has all sorts of types of first kisses, and the uncertainties leading up to them. Nick kisses Jessi for the first time in Season 1, because sometimes a kiss between friends as “practice” is as good as one for true love? Andrew kisses Nick to see if he’s gay. Jay does the same thing to Matthew in Season 2 and, it turns out, he may be a little.
Embarrassing Parents
One of the challenges of growing up involves growing apart from your parents. The two figures in your life that have been there for you through your early stages of development are suddenly cramping your style. As a teen, you’re beginning to assert your independence in ways that their authoritative framework just won’t allow.
Nick hates being called “Nicky”, and begins to feel highly uncomfortable around his parent’s sex-positive lifestyle given his friends’ parents are so straight-laced. Our parents embarrass us frequently as teens, but a positive thing about growing apart from them is growing closer to them as adults.
Sexual Identity Exploration
During our puberty years, when our hormones are raging and we’re assaulted by imagery and situations that prove all kinds of stimulating, we may begin to question our sexual identity. To whom are we attracted, and why? Big Mouth doesn’t shy away from this topic - in fact it goes full speed ahead.
After a movie trailer starring The Rock leaves Andrew questioning his sexuality, he shares his first kiss with Nick to see if he gets stimulated. And while nothing happens for him, Jay shows he’s not scared to kiss Matthew during a game of smooch and share, which makes him think he might be bisexual (before that encounter, his pillows were a variety of “genders” he explored).
Bodily Fluids
Big Mouth isn’t very comfortable to watch, either purely based on the graphic animated nature of the show, or because we’ve all experienced its embarrassing moments as pre-teens. In the first few episodes of season 1, we were already exposed to full-frontal animated male nudity and bodily fluids, to name a few jarring things.
Whether it’s Andrew shamefully discovering he can’t control his urge to touch himself, or Missy getting it on with her glow-worm plushie until she feels all “tingly”, or Jessi coping with starting her period, everyone can relate to the discomfort of new bodily fluids.
Uncontrollable Urges
With pesky Hormone Monsters inspiring all the main characters to indulge in any activity that might be remotely sexually stimulating, it can be difficult for them to keep a grip on their uncontrollable teenage urges. Consider when Missy broke up with Andrew in season 1, and Nick decided that would be a great time for them to watch their first porn.
Or how about in season 2 when Andrew spies Leah’s bathing suit hanging up in the bathroom, and decides that imagining her inside of it would be good fuel for a wank fantasy? No matter how ashamed we all felt of these urges, the point is we had them, and seeing them on the screen makes us feel slightly less alone in the embarrassment.
Sudden Aggression
Sometimes during puberty, and for no reason at all, teens get angry. Eyes-crossed, headache-inducing angry, and for things that in retrospect don’t seem like that big of a deal. But to teens, with little experience of the adult years that lay ahead, small problems represented giant hills to die on.
Take Jessi’s transformation, when she gets her Hormone Monstress. She suddenly yells at her mother for no reason and begins distantly calling her by her first name out of spite. Or take Andrew during the Valentine’s Day Special, shrieking at Missy to give up the goods because he bought her a 5-pound giant gummy bear.
So Much Shame
The Shame Wizard was a new manifestation in season 2. Whereas the antics of the Hormone Monsters could be awkwardly amusing, the Shame Wizard was a much more malevolent entity, bringing only devastation in his wake. Nothing was more devastating than when Jessi, upset over the possibility of her mother and father divorcing, took some of her dad’s edible gummies and shared them with Nick.
After an afternoon of drug-induced antics, she came home to face the consequences of her actions. Because the gummies were her father’s, her mother throws him out, and Jessi feels like she’s the one who ruined any possible chance of reconciliation between her parents. The shame makes her wish she’d never been born.
Hating Siblings & Family Members
There are times during puberty when teens and their siblings or parents will become unkind to one another. Thanks to hormones, stress, depression, and other things teens will find themselves combating the people they love - or the people they love will antagonize them for no apparent reason. Either way leads to a run in the a Hate-Worm.
Nick’s older brother Judd bullies him simply because he’s young and hasn’t figured out how to set boundaries. Andrew hates his father because he’s abrasive and doesn’t understand his son’s sexual urges, while Jessi goes back and forth between hating her mom and step-mom equally after the divorce. It’s common for teens to feel pain in ways they can’t always express and lash out, only to regret their words later.
Awkward Crushes
All the Big Mouth romances start with some kind of crush and the appropriate nervous butterflies that come with it. When Nick first likes Jessi, he’s slow to admit it because he’s worried about how she’ll receive the news, in the same way, that she doesn’t know how Ali would feel if she admitted her feelings to her.
One of the most extreme examples of the inherent awkwardness that can come from first-time crushes is Jessi’s infatuation with Judd. She can barely form complete sentences when he’s around, and thinks that she’s stupid compared to him just because she’s younger. It’s easy to feel that way as a teen, until adulthood helps give perspective and helps cut some slack.
Depression
Dealing with her parent’s divorce, starting her period, and navigating the choppy waters of romance all contribute to a visit from the Depression Kitty for Jessi in season 4. and while she’s in the thick of it she can’t seem to find a way out. Typical feelings of helplessness make her turn away from the world for a while and try to block everything out.
Sometimes these feelings of numbness and disconnect last a short period of time, and sometimes they stretch on for a lot longer, but for teens, with a limited perspective of time, any visit from the Depression Kitty seems to be an eternity.
Anxiety
After the Shame Wizard and Depression Kitty, the next monster to visit the teens is the Anxiety Mosquito who buzzes incessantly in their ears about everything from pimples to armpit sweat. Soon, they have a hard time being around one another because their anxiety convinces them they’re not good enough.
Anxiety has a way of distorting a person’s perspective of how they see the world and how the world sees them, and in the grip of anxiety, it’s difficult to hear and accept compliments. Like shame, the enemy of anxiety is compassion and empathy, and the more teens practice it with one another, the less anxiety they’ll have.
Outgrowing Friends & Relationships
Just as is true for adults, teens outgrow the people around them, whether they’re friends or romantic partners. Ali and Jessi go from friends, to love interests, to frenemies, and Jay and Lola go from ride-or-die lovers to tepid acquaintances.
Relationships naturally run their course sometimes and should be celebrated for what memories and lessons they provided. The teens in Big Mouth eventually understand this in time, but caught up in the moment, the end of a relationship feels like the end of the world.
