im gonna have a michie chrashing out because canon richie is actually a creepy weirdo and calls steph a waifu and fanon richie goes uwu and cosplays hatsune miku and i want that richie and max to kiss but they arent real and once frankenruth releases everything will explode :(
The thing with Richie is that he is criminally mischaracterised but instead of a chunk of his character being removed, making him less compelling and interesting, a chunk is removed to make him more compelling. And that's because the romance story most fanworks with Michie use kind of don't work if Richie is characterised correctly, and by that, I mean acts like a creepy jerk. I adore Richie with all my heart, but oh lord would I hate him in real life.
I can throw all my headcanons and theories to excuse his behaviour that I like, but straight up, he's not a 'good' person. One of the Lang's (I forget which) once said that Richie and the nerds (or at least Richie and Pete) were never really friends and they just hung out together so they had safety in numbers, and you can absolutely see that in Richie's characterisation. He's a dick, he insults Pete literally whenever he sees an opportunity, he immediately turns on Ruth because she made a star wars analogy and he perceives his own interests as inherently superior, and then crumbles at the sight of Max. He's aware of his social standing, yes, but he's also a spineless coward.
But, that's not actually a compelling character to write about, especially when much of fanon Michie is built on woobifying him and generating sympathy. It's hard to do that when he's objectively a jerk. The only sympathy garnering thing he ever really did in the musical was die. Max has his off hand line about his dad that lets the fandom theorise about why he acts the way he does, but Richie's just a jerk because he is one.
I fear Frankenruth for similar reasons you do, that it will fracture the carefully crafted ignorance that holds itself in the fanon Richie. But then again, if they appeal to fanon it would feel disingenuous and I really hope they don't, even if the illusion does break and Michie kind of falls apart as a ship
I'm going to combust if I think about them any more
