please note that this is all in good fun and these are just a silly little guy's opinions
carmy: straight. has never once questioned this, has never thought about romance with a dude
sydney: unlabeled/doesn't think about it much
natalie: bisexual!!! and this is canon too!!! (i am a very lowkey sydney x natalie shipper. very very lowkey)
richie: bisexual (i can see him with fak, mikey, and jess at different points)
marcus: gay. i know there was that whole thing with syd, but like. he's gay to me
tina: straight, but she's like the world's best ally. she's def in her local pflag chapter
ebraheim: straight, and he would have a hard time grasping a lot of the newer terms (he'd still try though, and tina would probably be the one to explain it all)
neil geoff fak: pansexual. at first he has no idea what that is but when he finds out about he's like. yup that's me!
mikey: bi but has no idea
pete: straight, but he's a really good ally. he'd be so chill to have at pride
claire: straight
kelly: she's giving lesbian vibes. i know she's with ted but i just feel it
luca: queer/unlabeled. good news for literally everyone tbh
chester: gay but only for marcus
jess: straight
tiff: i think she's straight but she COULD be lesbian experiencing comphet
ted fak: straight but the annoying kind
cicero: i can't for the life of me tell you why but this man is not straight. that's all i can say. also i ship him with the computer
I know when a lot of people in the bear fandom think about Neil Fak and Richie, they think comedically sexually charged banter but not actual flirting or possible romance.
One of the reasons is probably because Neil is accidentally a little bit annoying even though he is written to be a kind of comic relief character - a little bit cute, a little bit (or a lot) stupid and a little bit useful. Some people find his stereotypical-ness a little bit much and it doesn't help that he goes around complicating a certain matter.
The other reason, and I know a lot of people will hate to admit it, is the aesthetics of it. What it looks like. It's an unusual sight for a guy like Richie to be smitten with a guy like Neil Fak even in the queer world and especially in media and this is exactly why I eat it up.
1. Because woke
(Richie breaking the 4th wall for the first time while making his infamous announcement to the Ball Breaker nerds)
I love wokeness. I love woke shit. I love inclusion. I want to see all types of people and all forms of (adult and consenting) relationships on my screen. With Fakrichie, as with Sydcarmy, I know that the unspoken sentiments and unacknowledged theatrics of desirability politics is always obviously in play in different forms. And just so you know, everything is political. Everything you see in media plays a political role and there's no such thing as leave politics out of it (for those getting ready to yell at me lol).
I've always read Richie's announcement to the nerds as a way to subliminally convey to the public that some wokeness is going to go down on the show (which I'm still waiting for). Calling out the incel, 4chan, Snydercut crowd who expectedly would naturally be a part of the audience in that manner couldn't have been for nothing on a show where every interaction has several layers of meaning under the surface. It is also very interesting to me that this announcement was made by the most reddit bro-y character on the show as at the time (and still current messiah of the reddit bros). Talk about a perfect messenger.
The general assumption is that Jess is the one and obvious choice for Richie. This is because people tend to naturally favour more heteronormative relationships and Jess is the only woman Richie has really had a close friendly interaction with apart from ladies of the bear family. Also he's been known to be in and pursue relationships with women.
And Jess is fine. She's beautiful, intelligent, ambitious, driven, kind and all the good stuff. If it is the story they want to tell, it makes sense. It is perfectly normal and interesting. They fit aesthetically in the desirability hierarchy of things which makes them acceptable to the wider audience and there's nothing wrong with being acceptable.
However, personally, I don't think that is Richie's story. It's a good story but I don't buy it. Interestingly, the possibility of Richie and Fak being genuinely into each other is never brought up in mainstream discussions and even any suggestion is dismissed even though these two have had very sexually charged interactions throughout the seasons. Everyone just assumes they can't be doing anything else but trying to be funny. Because Fak is the exact stereotype of the fat, gluttonous, idiot comic relief character.
But what if they're not?
2. Richie is written as a queer character
You can't pay attention to Richie, in my opinion, and not see that this guy has a little sugar in his tank. I wouldn't imagine there's a lot of people who see Richie as a straight guy (except his subjects on reddit). I know I've seen a few posts and comments on other platforms pegging him as bisexual at least.
Richie is written as a common trope in my opinion. He is the queer guy whose struggle and character arc is based on his identity. He has built his entire identity around things that can be taken away from him but who is he, really? When you take away his being Mickey's best friend and Tiff's (ex) husband and Eva's dad, who is he? He keeps trying to hold onto being a fringe Berzatto and the ex who wouldn't let go or the dad who wonders if he is enough of a dad because deep down he has a hard time accepting himself for him. He is all of those things but his struggle to define himself based on these things points to a struggle to accept himself as something else that is a crisis for him.
He is portrayed initially as a homophobic and sexist character all the while displaying very homoerotic behavior. He seems very strangely fixated on Fak, showing very aggressive homophobic and simultaneously homoerotic displays to him. He's is a very old and unpopular queer trope; the guy who struggles with his sexual identity and manifests it as a violent aggression towards the person he's most attracted to. Even his baseline bodily mannerisms and the way he carries himself subtly hint that he's a little sweet on the inside even as he tries his hardest to display classic toxic masculinity on the outside.
3. The material is there
Even as we sydcarmys scream that the crumbs for that romance has been strewn around since S1, this has also been happening for Fakrichie. The same way a lot of people never see Fak as a viable love interest is the same way a lot of people deny seeing it with Syd. It's a classic desexualization of certain characters on TV as a way to diminish their personhood. Even us sydcarmys are guilty of this as well and vice versa, because there are layers and filters to desirability politics and what is being perceived and allowed in media.
Richie is strangely obsessed with Neil Fak in my opinion. He zeros in on him once he's mentioned in the episode, eavesdrops on his conversation with Marcus, sexually harasses and bullies him (think Adam and Eric in Sex Education), singles him out unprovoked when Carmy is telling the story about the scar he got on Mickey's 15th birthday, works with him on fixing the machine in the S1 finale with all that flirty compliment Fak was giving him about getting stabbed.
We see him carry Neil along as he improves on his own lifestyle, getting him to not say the banned words, making him wear suits like him and being sweeter and more encouraging to him as he learns to be a better person himself. He defends Neil when he makes the hilarious mirepoix mistake during service. All in all, this could be explained as him having a soft spot for Fak.
The curious case of Phil
This is the scene where I firmly clocked Richie as queer. There is a scene that is never explained further in Dogs (an episode which I find very exposing for both Carmy and Richie).
Remember this guy?
Phil.
There was never a real explanation for why this very short but insanely odd and charged interaction took place. The way this guy came by and made Richie clearly uncomfortable- calling him by his full name "Richard", the only time anyone ever called him that on the show with Richie mumbling a response not wanting to engage with him.
He looks clearly hurt by Richie's lack of acknowledgement and very abruptly walks away
Cicero of course notices the strangeness of the interaction and comments as much wondering whether Richie had ruined any of his property with his neglectfulness which Richie jumps on and explains in terms of what was happening between him and Cicero at that moment. What Richie never actually does is answer honestly what the real deal actually was between him and that guy. He just deflects.
Richie is been known to love to squabble. He's not afraid to get in a fight with anyone especially guys like him. But this guy? Crickets. He couldn't wait for him to get out of there. Why was that?
For me I read it as him encountering someone he had a secret with. He wouldn't acknowledge him because he wasn't ready to deal with that side of his identity. The DL queer man. If he had tried to have a conversation with him it probably would have been too obvious so he avoids it and so does the show.
Another thing I noticed was how the guy looked. Does he bear a resemblance to anyone else on the show? The chubby guy with a mustache? To me he looks like Fak in another font. Just a cleaner, more put together and a thinner version of Neil Fak. So not only that Richie might like men, he might actually have a type LOL.
I'm even suspicious of this interaction
I feel like it was awkward and charged for no reason. The way this guy kept beating around the bush with the subject as if he was going to say something more serious, only ending up just saying that he should have given Richie a heads up? The conversation felt like a waste of time to me (the only interaction I hated more than Claire's) which is why I started overthinking it. I feel like more was being said than what was said. I feel like they know each other way more than what is being shown here.
There may have been a hint that the Berzattos know him a little more than just the guy Tiff got with after Richie. Their relationship with Frank seems to go way beyond that based on this little sneak (now, of course, it could be a different person but what are the odds?)
However, whatever extent to this relationship is not known. In fact, the history of Richie and Tiff's relationship has been neglected through the storyline and that might throw some light on this. But the conversation feels weird to me. The way it seemed like Frank had more to say and Richie had his guard fully up. Frank commenting about his looks in the middle of this "important" conversation. He was talking to Richie like he knew him differently to what was assumed all along. Cornplating? Maybe. But it still seemed very strange and left a lot to be seen.
All of this is to say that there's enough material to explore Richie's arc as a queer man coming into himself and finding love in a relationship that has been there and has been fleshing out under the surface. Classic slow burn style.
4. Subverting tropes and stereotypes
A trope is a plot structure, theme, storyline, character trait, motif, or plot device that is commonly used in storytelling.
There are a million tropes you can find in the storytelling of The Bear. They deliberately lean in ever so slightly into those tropes with the aim of subverting, upholding, subverting the subversions and so on and so forth. There's so much going on in there.
The characters are also very archetypal, as expected, with some leaning ever so slightly into the stereotypical. Now the problem with stereotypes is not the image in itself, because characters like these actually exist, but in the perception and subsequent flattening of whole groups to that image, making the stereotype.
Not to wax too academical about it, I'm trying to say, for example, fat, gluttonous, goofy people do exist but fat people do not exist solely to be gluttonous and goofy. And there are many iterations of this but I want to focus on the fatphobia of it all and Fak for now.
Society and media has made fat people a subject of derision and the butt of jokes. It's like they exist in media only to make people laugh and to be laughed at, so much so that they almost seem to have no value as anything else. You see a fat person on your screen, you instinctively expect them to be comic relief. Then especially when they fit that bill, it is almost an absolute impossibility to also see them as people who could be an object of desire or adoration.
Sydcarmy has received pushback from the media simply because, in as much as they deny it, they can see the potential of them breaking out of a particular trope they love to see with a black female lead. They write unnecessary think pieces waxing lyrical about the beauty of complex platonic relationships because they do not want to see Syd as an object of Carmy's desire. They have to do this because one thing they can't deny is that Syd is objectively beautiful and believable as desirable.
But with Fakrichie, it's absolute crickets. I haven't even seen a just for fun article about the chemistry between them and if it means something, haha. And this is even after Ebon has kissed Matty on live television!! It's like Fak doesn't even exist. I saw a random post talking about the brotherly love between Richie and Fak and they didn't mean the Philadelphia kind. Sure, they've joked about "calling mom" and all that but I doubt (normal) brothers want to dry hump each other in the bathroom.
Now I'm not saying Fakrichie is absolutely a thing or have to be. Maybe all he's meant to be is a fat gluttonous goofy character. Maybe Storer meant for him solely to be a joke as per usual. Maybe all that flirting and tenderness is meant to be for the laughs after all, because fat people amarite?
But imagine if it wasn't a joke. Imagine if Storer set this up to shake things up by making them real lovers. Imagine if a character can be fat and even goofy and still be an object of desire and adoration to another objectively beautiful main character. Imagine if this wasn't some fucked up queer bait (maybe alongside an equally fucked up straight bait) but a real slow burn love story simultaneously happening.
In honor of pride month🌈 and bear month🐻, I'm listing my favorite parallels in The Bear of my favorite queer ships- Sydney x Carmy and Neil x Richie.
If you know you know 😉😊
1. New opportunities
Both Sydney and Neil came to Carmy and Richie respectively for jobs.
2. Vibrant collaboration
They both have to work closely together on projects.
3. Sexy fighting
Need I say more?
4. Dressed up and stood up
In "Sundae", Sydney looks gorgeous all dressed up at Kasama but get stood up by Carmy because Carmy decides to go move boxes for Claire.
In "Pop" Neil says he had been waiting for Richie on the roof but he didn't show because he was turned away by Carmy who wants to hang out there with... you guessed it... Claire!
(Claire being the master c*ckblocker in all these by the way- fucking queen IJBOL)
That scene was the best dressed we had ever seen him at that point.
Let's ignore how Neil was looking like a burglar in that scene for now lol.
5. The grooms grooming
Both Sydney and Neil get dressed up by their partners ,Carmy and Richie, in "Omelette". Another funny parallel is that both Sydney and Neil showed admiration for their partners fit beforehand, even using the same expression.
Syd says "It looks sick" about Carmy's chef whites.
Neil says "That's so sick" about Richie's suit.
6) Mirrors
There's been a lot made about the sydcarmy parallels depicting them as two halves of a whole including this mirror parallel.
I see that, and I raise you...
...
...
...
The Fakrichie Sydcarmy parallel where they are both looking in the mirror together in a very intimate way.
7. The Pepto bismol potion
In "Bolognese", the four of them pass the Pepto bismol bottle between each other through out the course of the episode which I like to think of as some kind of love potion or a symbol of the magic happening between them.
Bonus parallel : the white board
I've talked about how this lewd background only showed up in sydcarmy scenes as a hilarious way to signal their attraction for each other under the surface...
...But we all know in all reality these h0rny fanatical scribblings about Neil didn't just appear by magic, right?
In absolutely no order and with an acknowledgement toward recency bias and also I don't have very strong opinions about things:
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Facebook Effect - David Kirkpatrick
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing - Hank Green
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir (admittedly self-indulgent)
Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
9. when do you tend to read most?
I've been listening to audiobooks a lot, so if that counts, while I'm doing chores and such. But in terms of physically reading, usually evening once I've done everything else I need to do. Or afternoon if I'm lucky and had a light chore/homework load.
19. most disliked popular books?
This is an even more difficult question than the first one, mostly because I tend not to finish books I don't like and thus don't have a strong opinion of them. I listened to Sapiens (at 2x speed so I probably missed stuff) recently and Harari's take on Frankenstein actually enraged me. I also came away with a generally uncomfortable feeling about his writing, but I didn't take any specific notes on it (the downside of listening to audiobooks is that I'm doing other things while I do and don't stop to take notes) so I can't say anything more.
