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Emotional Appraisals

 "Everyone who's got a knife, grab it! It's fight to the death!!" - Louise, Bob's Burgers, Season 3 Episode 1

According to general appraisal theories, we as humans experience emotions related to our personal concerns, interests, fears, and worries. This is no different than in characters such as Louise Belcher. Louise is known as a character for her childlike, pink bunny ears hat that never leaves her head, even when she is seen going to the pool or going to sleep. They are considered an important part of her character, conveying her mischievous and nonconformist nature, while also still signaling her childish side. Louise feels that her bunny ears make her "her", and make her stand out in the crowd. Ensue horror when Louise taunts a teenage boy messing with her at the skate park, and as a form of retaliation, he snatches her bunny ears off her head and runs away with them. After Louise has her "ears" stolen from her, she immediately puts on a hoodie to cover her head (she refuses to let her head be seen uncovered and without her ears) and is seen experiencing a range of emotions, most notably anger, frustration, and insecurity.

As Louise feels that a piece of her identity has been taken from her, we as the viewer get to examine her in the midst of an emotional breakdown. For the rest of the episode until she has her ears back, she is seen acting very erratically and off-kilter, and refuses to be seen with her head uncovered. She tries everything to get her ears back from Logan, by attempting to bribe him, follow him, stalk him, and even resorts to ratting him out to his parents. At one point, Louise mistakenly believes that Logan has thrown her ears into the Waste Management truck and frantically searches through the dump and believes that they are gone forever. At this point, she is seen laughing crazily and acting very erratically. Luckily for Louise, at the end of the episode, Louise does have her ears returned to her but from the short period that she was without them, we were able to see that Louise feels that these ears are a deep and important part of her personal identity, and without them, she acts very insecure and lost. The viewer is able to appraise from this situation that when Louise is without her usual hat, she is not able to quickly recover and move on like most children. We see Louise act frantically, desperate and willing to do anything (even criminal) to get her ears back, and can see she feels she has lost her identity. Additionally, her family even tries to present her with a new kind of hat to wear/different styles to try and she adamantly refuses, she will only be seen with her bunny ears or nothing at all. This demonstrates her stubbornness and inability to let go of this part of her identity.





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