It’s cliché to say that being a teenager is about finding your identity. It’s maybe the most obvious, universal (and, for most, oversimplified) statement anyone could make about life. Unlike a lot of other milestones, we’re even pretty aware it’s happening to us, maybe because there are multiple subgenres of fiction dedicated to the human coming-of-age. As I said in part one of this weirdly personal essay about a cartoon show, I knew when I discovered Home Movies in its first season that this was my thing, this was for me. This was an entertainment product I could look into and see myself.

What we only realize with years and distance is how much more complex “coming-of-age” is than relating to jokes written by people older than us. Our identities are products of our relationships—our relationships with the people who raise us, with our friends, with our surroundings, with the art we consume, with the state of the world at the exact moment we’re in it. Some of these relationships last our entire lives and form our basic shapes, while others are fleeting brushes that leave a blip of new texture on our surfaces. Sometimes we’re even scathed just by observing other relationships near us.

Having fully fleshed out its characters through its second season, Home Movies begins its third by peeling back their layers and forcing them all to look inward. In the soft, dry fashion it had remained in comfortably since the pilot, the show doesn’t do any “Very Special” episodes or even call attention to its own subtle shift in focus. It’s unmistakable, though, when you look at the whole of these thirteen episodes, that the theme of the year is self-discovery. If season two was when the adults’ problems (Paula’s drinking, McGuirk’s jealousy) started intruding on the kids’ lives, season three is when the kids start noticing.