Nigonigo

Doctor Who: The Kaleidoscope: Circuit Breaker

Thanks for the ask @cleos-rightfoot! Hope you are having an amazing summer.

I think the glazing of Richie is because, compared to Sydcarmy, his character arc does not force the "incel, QAnon, 4chan, Snydercut motherf*ckers" to re-evaluate their own shortcomings. By focusing on Richie, they can ignore what the narrative is critiquing of fine dining, its elevation of white men at the expense of others, race, gender relations, the whole lot. All their biases and illusions about themselves are reaffirmed through Richie. Look at how loving Syd has meant Carmy becoming one of the most progressive heterosexual characters in modern TV: he realizes she is a better person than him, he acknowledges she has surpassed him in the profession he took greatest pride in, he hands over more and more control to her till she is running his business and her advice governs him even in his relations with other people. He admits she handles crises with more grace than he would and he is always apologizing to her and looking for her approval constantly. She has not even slept with him (the usual heteronormative bargain) yet he has signed over his entire inheritance to her. Carmy is ultimately going to live his life in service to Sydney, a Nigerian-African American immigrant woman. Carmy is terrified that his racist, dysfunctional family and his own chaos will drive Syd away and is constantly trying to improve himself for her. Claire barely registers on his consciousness because he is totally obsessed with Sydney. What might it mean for the Reddit bros to acknowledge a love like this which humbles a man, and requires him to change himself for a person that an increasingly fascist society does not treat as the ideal but who he now recognizes as his standard of perfection against whom even his dear departed brother cannot compare?

Now let's contrast that with Richie's relationships. He married his high school sweetheart, the blonde girl from the neighborhood, Tiff. When he failed to be the provider and show up for his daughter's birth due to goofing off with Mikey (arguably the real homoerotic love of his life which is fine by the Reddit bro crowd), Tiff divorced him and married a richer guy. After a brief stint as a tragic divorced dad (garnering all their brotastic sympathies and stoking their endless brotastic capacity for grievance), Richie managed to keep his job supervising black and brown workers. He failed upwards in fact. Despite his sexual harassment of Syd, he never really had to re-evaluate his sexist biases. He championed Claire as the "hot nerd" and never retracted that verdict to praise Syd's allure. He went through a short training under Asian bosses (Rene and Garrett) in the foremost establishment (run by a female chef) where, again despite his lousy attitude, he was hailed as their best and within a week emerged as a born-again convert to the cult of fine dining. Low effort and burnishing the self-image of white men as innate geniuses. He gets to be Syd's partner and is muscling in the very next morning wanting to know how the shares are to be divvied up. He countermands Syd's direct order about the reservations and faces no professional repercussions for it. Syd, in giving him a care package and fielding his texts, acts as a work wife and Jess is also stepping up to share that load. He is flying off to Japan to fulfill all the weeaboo fantasies (because you know Richie is absolutely going to leverage his reading of a few books and that one-week trip to present himself as a Japan expert). The Richie-Jess romance is utterly shallow in comparison to Sydcarmy; some flirting, some touching, no conflict, no need to change oneself, no angst. Now that Jess is his employee, the rightful hierarchy the Reddit bros want to maintain is reinstated. Sarah Ramos has some Fillipina ancestry but Wasian love interests don't puncture their white supremacist bubble the way Sydcarmy does.

one thing the creator said has been stuck in my head ever since.

imagine a straight white guy who's grown up believing there's already a script written for him. work hard, get the job, get the wife, have kids, find your purpose. that's just how life is supposed to go.

and then it doesn't.

sometimes he genuinely tried. sometimes he only thinks he did. either way, the promise falls apart. and because we've spent decades watching stories like this, we're almost conditioned to meet that frustration with empathy first. before anything else, we want to understand him.

i'm not saying the bear is one of those stories (or... Yeh)

i'm saying we've all spent years watching them.

which is why it doesn't really surprise me that so many people treat richie's arc like it's the arc of the show. i love richie. genuinely. the show completely sold me on him. but his story is also the most immediately recognizable. it's the easiest one for audiences to latch onto because they've already seen versions of it a hundred times before.

then i make the mistake of opening reddit. that website needs to be launched back into the fucking sun!!!!

and suddenly syd has to earn every ounce of empathy. every mistake gets catalogued. every disagreement becomes proof she's impossible. meanwhile carmy can spend entire seasons hurting people and the first instinct is still to ask what happened to him. what gets lost is that syd, tina, marcus... they never moved through the world believing it owed them a neat little future. disappointment isn't some shocking betrayal for them. it's just part of life. but when they get frustrated, they're difficult. selfish. annoying. when richie, mikey or carmy fall apart, people are much quicker to go looking for the wound.

Basically, this creator analyzes a lot of films, and this recurring theme of "frustrated men" is something that really stuck with me. She articulates it much better than I can. after reading so many posts on here about masculinity in the bear, I kept thinking about that playlist. It also made some of the s5 discourse click for me. People complaining that Carmy isn't the sole narrative center anymore, that he somehow "gave" the restaurant to Syd, or acting like the show betrayed itself by spending time on other characters instead of revolving almost entirely around one depressed white guy (even though I'd argue it still doesn't do that nearly as much as I'd like...). One thing I also find kind of funny is how many of the films in that playlist, especially Fight club, have become favorites among exactly the audience they're critiquing. The conversation somehow always circles back to identifying with the guy who's been wronged by the world. The critique itself gets flattened into another story about a man whose anger deserves to be understood.

And I think that's part of why Richie's arc lands so immediately for so many people. I love Richie. The show completely sold me on him. But his story is also one audiences have been trained to recognize for decades: a man who feels left behind, finds purpose again, and earns his place back in the world. When Richie changes, it's inspiring. When Carmy spirals, people instinctively ask what happened to him. When Mikey self-destructs, the conversation becomes about everything that led him there. Meanwhile, so many of the show's non-white characters are expected to be endlessly patient, endlessly competent, endlessly emotionally mature before they're afforded the same generosity. The second they're frustrated, guarded, stubborn or make a mistake, the conversation shifts from "what happened to them?" to "what's wrong with them?" It reminds me of that line from Racionais MC's Negro Drama: "That crazy one that can’t make a mistake." Some people get to be complicated. Some people get to fail spectacularly and still be read with compassion. others have to keep proving they're worthy of it in the first place

Also, if u're interested in this kind of discussion, there are a few books/texts I'd recommend looking into. They don't argue something as simplistic as "white people want white people to win" but they offer some really interesting ways of thinking about why audiences relate to certain protagonists the way they do

Richard Dyer's White is a big one. Murray Smith's Engaging characters is another, especially if you're interested in why we stay emotionally invested in morally flawed protagonists. Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion is also worth checking out.

Thanks for the ask @cleos-rightfoot! Hope you are having an amazing summer.

I think the glazing of Richie is because, compared to Sydcarmy, his character arc does not force the "incel, QAnon, 4chan, Snydercut motherf*ckers" to re-evaluate their own shortcomings. By focusing on Richie, they can ignore what the narrative is critiquing of fine dining, its elevation of white men at the expense of others, race, gender relations, the whole lot. All their biases and illusions about themselves are reaffirmed through Richie. Look at how loving Syd has meant Carmy becoming one of the most progressive heterosexual characters in modern TV: he realizes she is a better person than him, he acknowledges she has surpassed him in the profession he took greatest pride in, he hands over more and more control to her till she is running his business and her advice governs him even in his relations with other people. He admits she handles crises with more grace than he would and he is always apologizing to her and looking for her approval constantly. She has not even slept with him (the usual heteronormative bargain) yet he has signed over his entire inheritance to her. Carmy is ultimately going to live his life in service to Sydney, a Nigerian-African American immigrant woman. Carmy is terrified that his racist, dysfunctional family and his own chaos will drive Syd away and is constantly trying to improve himself for her. Claire barely registers on his consciousness because he is totally obsessed with Sydney. What might it mean for the Reddit bros to acknowledge a love like this which humbles a man, and requires him to change himself for a person that an increasingly fascist society does not treat as the ideal but who he now recognizes as his standard of perfection against whom even his dear departed brother cannot compare?

Now let's contrast that with Richie's relationships. He married his high school sweetheart, the blonde girl from the neighborhood, Tiff. When he failed to be the provider and show up for his daughter's birth due to goofing off with Mikey (arguably the real homoerotic love of his life which is fine by the Reddit bro crowd), Tiff divorced him and married a richer guy. After a brief stint as a tragic divorced dad (garnering all their brotastic sympathies and stoking their endless brotastic capacity for grievance), Richie managed to keep his job supervising black and brown workers. He failed upwards in fact. Despite his sexual harassment of Syd, he never really had to re-evaluate his sexist biases. He championed Claire as the "hot nerd" and never retracted that verdict to praise Syd's allure. He went through a short training under Asian bosses (Rene and Garrett) in the foremost establishment (run by a female chef) where, again despite his lousy attitude, he was hailed as their best and within a week emerged as a born-again convert to the cult of fine dining. Low effort and burnishing the self-image of white men as innate geniuses. He gets to be Syd's partner and is muscling in the very next morning wanting to know how the shares are to be divvied up. He countermands Syd's direct order about the reservations and faces no professional repercussions for it. Syd, in giving him a care package and fielding his texts, acts as a work wife and Jess is also stepping up to share that load. He is flying off to Japan to fulfill all the weeaboo fantasies (because you know Richie is absolutely going to leverage his reading of a few books and that one-week trip to present himself as a Japan expert). The Richie-Jess romance is utterly shallow in comparison to Sydcarmy; some flirting, some touching, no conflict, no need to change oneself, no angst. Now that Jess is his employee, the rightful hierarchy the Reddit bros want to maintain is reinstated. Sarah Ramos has some Fillipina ancestry but Wasian love interests don't puncture their white supremacist bubble the way Sydcarmy does.

one thing the creator said has been stuck in my head ever since.

imagine a straight white guy who's grown up believing there's already a script written for him. work hard, get the job, get the wife, have kids, find your purpose. that's just how life is supposed to go.

and then it doesn't.

sometimes he genuinely tried. sometimes he only thinks he did. either way, the promise falls apart. and because we've spent decades watching stories like this, we're almost conditioned to meet that frustration with empathy first. before anything else, we want to understand him.

i'm not saying the bear is one of those stories (or... Yeh)

i'm saying we've all spent years watching them.

which is why it doesn't really surprise me that so many people treat richie's arc like it's the arc of the show. i love richie. genuinely. the show completely sold me on him. but his story is also the most immediately recognizable. it's the easiest one for audiences to latch onto because they've already seen versions of it a hundred times before.

then i make the mistake of opening reddit. that website needs to be launched back into the fucking sun!!!!

and suddenly syd has to earn every ounce of empathy. every mistake gets catalogued. every disagreement becomes proof she's impossible. meanwhile carmy can spend entire seasons hurting people and the first instinct is still to ask what happened to him. what gets lost is that syd, tina, marcus... they never moved through the world believing it owed them a neat little future. disappointment isn't some shocking betrayal for them. it's just part of life. but when they get frustrated, they're difficult. selfish. annoying. when richie, mikey or carmy fall apart, people are much quicker to go looking for the wound.

I guessed he liked and was intrigued by her from jump

But mostly was scared because she represented change he wasn't ready for

But oh

Look how far they've got to

After Richie just decided to let his guard down

Partnership

A brief compilation of tenmartha 🩺🏨

On top of that, Richie planned on bringing a couple into the kitchen for a champagne toast to celebrate an engagement. Right in front of the two yearners sharing a fun big secret😏Damn just imagine the energy.