Web Animation / Dora the Grown Up

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The show premiered 2017 and ran for ten episodes.

This show provides examples of:

• Accent Slip-Up: Dora will occasionally slip out of her overly chipper Spanish accent into an American one whenever she gets overly stressed.
• Awful Wedded Life: Dora states that her parents have a loveless marriage and only stay together out of obligation, which is supported by her father usually sleeping on the couch. That said we don’t see the two interacting much and they seem to get along better whenever Dora isn’t in the equation.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Downplayed. It was always shown that Dora’s need to break the fourth wall has caused her to be ill prepared for society, however, she still had a nicer side to her character and did have a conscience. Eventually, her character would evolve into narcissism and directly ruin the lives of those around her.
• Characterization Marches On: While Dora has always been a Womanchild in this series, early on she was at least trying to be nice to the other characters (like not knowing how to break up with her boyfriend at the time, because she didn't want to hurt his feelings) and her hurting others was a result of her acting as if she is in an episode of the original series, rather than in a more realistic world, giving in to temptations or simply not thinking things through and she showed guilt when she pissed others off. She was also passive and kind of distant towards Boots early on rather than abusive and there was no indication of her forcing him to do any work. As time went on, she became such a Jerkass, that there was a Christmas Carol parody of her learning about kindness, but she didn't change. These changes possibly indicates a Sanity Slippage akin to Boris, Caillou’s father.
• Clashing Cousins: Downplayed with Dora and Diego. Dora gets compared a lot to her more successful cousin Diego. It has put a wrench in their relationship.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Implied with Boots. Many times Dora will ask the audience things like "Have you ever had a bad experience with edibles?", and Boots will say "I have".
• Deadpan Snarker: Dora's parents will often mockingly imitate her childish speech patterns, seemingly having been driven nuts by it for years and years and unwilling to put up with it anymore. Examples include asking if she bought food or if she has money in that same questioning tone, complete with the drawn-out 'you'.
  Dora's mother: Do you see any food here that you bought?
  Dora's father: Do you have $10.99 a month?
• Drowning My Sorrows: After losing her job and getting evicted from her house, a depressed Dora goes to the bar to take shots. Boots tags along with her.
• Dude Magnet: Surprisingly, yes. Despite her being a woman child, Dora is attractive enough to get noticed by a lot of men.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In episode 2, Dora’s mom had grey hair and a couple of wrinkles. Later episodes show her having brown hair and little to no wrinkles, giving her a younger appearance.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Dora is quite a Jerkass and Womanchild, but even she can't stand the 22-year-old Caillou.
  • When Dora keeps avoiding to pay the electric bill, it’s one of the few times Boots isn’t just a yes man to Dora and tells her her ideas are bad.
• Foil: Dora to other AOK characters:
  • To Arthur: Dora and Arthur face growing up sucks syndrome, but both have different ways to in dealing with it. Arthur is usually depressed and has anger issues about life, but remains grounded to reality. Dora tries to tackle each day with a smile, but has to make believe she’s talking to an audience to cope.
  • To Caillou: Both display manchild syndrome, but there are key differences. For starters, Caillou still acts like a child to the point of being a psychopath. Meanwhile, even though Dora often displays selfishness befitting a child, she still has some capacity of acting her age and outside of being emotionally abusive and being a criminal, Dora has yet to display the same sorry excuse for a human being Caillou is.
• Freudian Excuse: Dora says the reason she has difficulty moving away from her childhood is because Backpack died.
• Gambling Ruins Lives: The eighth episode has Dora resorting to gambling to pay her electricity bill; she wins the lottery, but Swiper robs her winning ticket. She latter uses her emergency credit card to gamble online rather than pay her bill, and she only decides to pay it when her electricity goes out right before she can blow her money.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Parodied, as many times Dora speaks some bad Spanish and sometimes says lines like this one:
  Dora: We are in Las Vegas! Las Vegas!
• Growing Up Sucks: A recurrent theme. For example, in the second episode, Dora loses her job, disappoints her parents, gets a mediocre job as a driver, gets evicted, and goes to drown her sorrows at a bar.
• Hairstyle Inertia: Dora’s hair somehow looks a bit like her childhood bob.
• Hidden Depths: While he may be apathetic to life itself, Boots does make a better attempt at integrating to society than Dora. Especially when most of their troubles stem from Dora’s life spiraling out of control.
• Hope Spot: By some miracle, Dora’s bad decision making pays off and she wins the power ball lottery. And then Swiper shows up...
• Hypocritical Humour: After spending one episode looking for her boyfriend after being ghosted, discovering that he's seeing someone else, and sleeping with Connor, her ex-boyfriend's best friend, as revenge, Dora goes to a coffee shop and discovers that Connor works there, and reflects on how awkward the interaction will be and that she understands now why people ghost.
• Ignored Aesop: When Dora gets the "A Christmas Carol" treatment, the lesson she takes away from it isn't to be a better person so as not to die with no-one to care, but rather not to take cough syrup when you aren't sick. She lampshades it in the "We Did It" song:
  "I saw myself dead and I didn't learn s***..."
• Interspecies Romance: This time, between a human and an object, with Diego and Click.
• Lingerie Scene: When Dora and her friends go to Vegas for a bachelorette party, they visit a club featuring male strippers. Dora says she want's to be a stripper, too, gets on stage next to the stripper performing for them, and takes her top off. Of course, Swiper turns up and swipes the top, leaving Dora in just her bra for the rest of the scene. She and her friends then get thrown out because patrons are required to wear shirts.
• Mushroom Samba: In episode 10, Dora and her friends (Boots and a guy named Johnny) somehow get high on mushrooms.
• No Fourth Wall: Dora frequently breaks the fourth wall, but other characters aren't aware of the audience so from their perspective, Dora is talking to herself. Sometimes this will backfire on her horribly.
  Dora: Should we tell mi jefa^note "my boss" in Spanish, for your information to go [bleep] herself?
  Dora's boss: I don't know who you're talking to, but you're fired.
• Precision F-Strike: Dora, after Swiper steals the bride's bouquet in episode 7.
  Dora: I am sick of that f***ing Swiper!
• Retcon: An interesting variant. Earlier episodes suggests that underneath her childishness, Dora implies that this is a coping mechanism to hide her pain (the death of backpack being one of them). By the Christmas Carol, she takes several levels of jerkass and it’s implied that as child she was always overbearing to the point of ruining Boots’ life.
• Smoking Hot Sex: In Episode 6, after sleeping with her ex's friend, Dora smokes a cigarette.
• Stepford Smiler: Dora has a miserable life and nothing but deadbeat jobs, but she's still a very happy and optimistic Plucky Girl. More evident on the "We Did It!" song at the end of each episode, where Dora will cheerfully sing and dance, even in episodes in which nothing pleasant happened to her.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Like in the original show, Dora talks to the audience, but here other characters notice this, which at times puts Dora in trouble.
  • In the first episode, Dora asks the audience if they have ever been in a relationship that isn't right for them, but won't break up because they're afraid to hurt the other person - in front of her date, who hears everything.
  • In the second short, Dora breaking the fourth wall leads her to be fired from her job and evicted from her house.
  • In episode 7, she almost ruins her best friend's wedding because she asks the audience out loud if she should reveal that the groom cheated on Dora's friend... with Dora herself.
  • Swiper has now became a more efficient villain and Dora saying "Swiper, no swiping!" won't stop him from stealing.
• Swiper, No Swiping!: Subverted. Dora and the audience expect that telling Swiper to not steal stuff will make him stop, just as it did in the original show. But in this adult version, Swiper just ignores it, causing much misery to Dora over the course of the series. In episode 8, when Swiper is about to steal Dora's winning lottery ticket, she even begs Swiper not to steal it, telling him that she is willing to divide the money with him, and do other "favors", to no avail.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Dora merely had trouble being an adult with no inside voice in earlier episodes. With future episodes, she would later become borderline a criminal (one example includes actually going to prison). Reaches its apex in the Christmas special with Dora being insensitive to everyone’s feelings and literally tells people to *F-bleeps* up. It says a lot when Boots denies having a bad relationship with his family and her response was a surprised “What?”
• Toxic Friend Influence: It’s heavily implied that the majority of Boots’ depression stems from having being forced to stick with Dora for the majority of his life.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: While she's not as mean as Caillou, Dora is irresponsible, impatient, and frequently blind to the feelings of others.
• Womanchild: Dora is extremely immature for a 24 year old and is financially irresponsible to where she has to move back with her parents in episode 9. Lampshaded by Dora's mother in episode 2:
  Dora (to the audience, while on the phone with her mother): Have you ever been compared unfavorably to a more successful family member?
  Dora's mother: No Dora, I haven't! Have you ever had a child who refuses to grow up?