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and we’re off to the bear s4! see you all on the other side once again. xoxo

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You good ?

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THE BEAR | 1.01: SYSTEM So, how you gonna pass the family test?

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One more day. It's back tomorrow. I can't freaking believe it.

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I'm so enamored by this picture

The dedication. The connection, Carmy in his curly glory, Syd's skin glowing, my favorite bandana she has ever worn. I would put it on an oil painting.

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the reason the sydcarmy thing bothers me so much is honestly not even because I’m some sort of rabid shipper. it’s because so much is being told to us in the TEXT of the SHOW. why have Claire (carmy’s LOVE INTEREST) be the one to drive a wedge between carmy and Sydney? Why have the scene where syd tells carmy she knows that he writes in the margins??? Why have carmy make fan cams of syd in his head to calm down from panic attacks?????????? it bothers me as someone who wants dialogue and editing and conscious storytelling choices to MEAN something.

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This season has polarized what was once a united fandom and not gonna lie, it kinda breaks my heart.

I'm not gonna ever tell someone how to like a show, how they should view it, what they should and shouldn't take issue with. Your viewing experience is all your own. The emotions and thoughts you came away with from viewing the show is all your own and valid.

If you hated this season, I respect that. If you loved this season, I respect that. If you hate Carmy's guts and wish to blast him off to the moon for the forseeable future, I respect that. If you completely empathize with him and trust the direction of where the show is going, I respect that.

Personally, I'm caught in the middle. I am still curious for more, but not as hungry for it. I disliked the way the show chose to depict certain characters and their development (or lack thereof). I disliked the pace, the Faks, Claire. But there were moments that I loved. That part near the end of 3x03 where we are shown the calming effect Sydney has on Carmy. Ted and Gary talking about Gary's time in the league. Sydney being supportive and patient with Tina, shielding her from Carmy's anger.

I still love this show and want it to succeed. But, to me, this season didn't do a good job of handling Carmy's trauma in a way that would keep the audience rooting for him. He's become unsympathetic and all the blowback he will most certainly face will feel deserved.

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Slowly inch-worming my way back into The Bear fandom for season 4 (I can't believe the time is almost upon us). I'll be heavily on here once the season drops, so I'm taking a little stroll through the SydCarmy tag to reorient myself with everything. Hi to everyone who is still here! Y'all are legit superstars.

I just saw something that ruffled my feathers a little bit, so I just thought I'd give a fair warning to any future offenders. Stop using the SydCarmy tag for your posts about why you don't ship them. We've been through this too many times y'all. Kindly take your opinions into the anti-SydCarmy tag where they belong. I'm sure they will be much more appreciated there. Please and thank you.

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The Bear S4 Teaser #4 (?)

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THE BEAR SEASON 4 TRAILER

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Watching season 3 ep 2 of The Bear for "funsies" (still trying to wrap my head around it after nearly a whole year has passed lol). Mainly watching for Sydney. I'm mad that the episode begins with this super sweet, rare moment between Syd and her dad because it's literally working so hard to lull you into a false sense of security. We've never gotten such a domestic view of Sydney before. She's a little whiny from having to cut her bathroom time, but she's happy, cracking jokes and reminding her dad to take his medicine for the umpteenth time. She even sounds happy to say she's going to work. She has no clue of Carmy's hostile takeover until it smacks her in the face and there's absolutely nothing she can do about it by then. All that happiness and those good feelings and familiarity that started the episode, yeah that's gone.

Sydney's excitement for the menu? Gone. The warm atmosphere of a ship and its crew finally being on the right course? Gone. Having a partner she could rely on and share ideas with? Did she ever really have that?

What's worse is how the Berzattos unceremoniously shove their proposal of ownership on to her. Like they expect Sydney to just be on board with the daily scheduled program of their, specifically Carmy's, chaotic bullshit. Not gonna lie, I'm thoroughly sickened by how they did not care in the slightest how Sydney would feel about having ownership. "Oh don't worry, you don't need to discuss anything with us, it's all been drafted and looked over by one of our guys. Oh no, you don't need an attorney, we already have one for you. Just sign this legally binding document so we can move on. It's not like you wouldn't want to."

It took only five minutes for them to destroy any faith Sydney had in this restaurant being different. But she can't leave because she's too invested, as is shown in the last episode of the season. The Bear staff is her family, for better or worse, and it's eating her alive.

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This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

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Source

"You can't moralize [these characters]. They're all awful. But we also love them. It's the same nuance that exists in human existence. Rolin said something in season one and even before we started shooting: this story does not mix well with reduction. It's far too complex. You just have to feel what you feel and experience behavior that you might feel uncomfortable with. And you can love this character one minute and hate them the next and love them again. Reduction...this show is not gonna work for you."

- Jacob Anderson

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Yes! This explains perfectly why this question from Carmy in 3x02 stuck out to me. He asks Sydney in the most desperate voice I have ever heard, "You don't think I can do it?"

Getting her a star is all he believes he is able to do for Syd, to prove he can be there for her just as much as she was for the restaurant (and for him) when he got locked in the freezer.

In a twist no one asked for, I want to talk about Sydney and Carm and the star.

The fundamental problem with the star is that Sydney has put the idea in Carm's mind (based on his own shit) that a star is basically the only way he can prove himself to her, prove this was worth her time whatever.

Duh he thinks they're bullshit she doesn't ergo they are suddenly not bullshit, this is not news to anyone just a recap.

But it's about what the star represents. The star is the ultimate thing he can win, achieve whatever for her.

Carm has lived in a world his entire life where nothing he could do was ever enough, for Donna to love him, for Mikey to let him work at the restaurant and not push him away, for him to stay alive etc. Now, with the star and getting that star, this has for Carm set out a very specific and well trod path for him to be enough for Sydney. Never mind that he doesn't have to do any of it she just wants to cook good food with him, but let's be real Carm needs a lot more therapy before he'll accept that and frankly so does Syd.

MOVING ON

Before Carm was in his full trauma relapse phase in the fridge, because lets be real that started the second Sugar called him in New York, he was open to the idea that there was another path to getting a star, one set out by people like Chef Terry.

But then he dared to allow himself to have amusement and enjoyment, going so horrifically far as to remember why he loved cooking in the first place, and all of his worst fears were proven correct.

For two seasons, he tried to fight Chef's worst comments about him and in the course of one night they were all (to him proven correct). It feels important to note here too, and I've never seen anyone talk about this, Syd is the only one who doesn't talk to him through the freezer, other than Nat but she's not in a mood to talk him down that night so it's irrelevant.

Carmy is left alone with his own worst enemy for hours and the only person who knows how to counter-program that doesn't talk to him at all while he's in the worst of that.

Yes she stays and talks to him after, but she needed to hear him say the stuff about amusement and enjoyment.

Because she has a hunch about where all this is coming from, but his explicit refusal to talk about anything directly means she has to guess. He's hard to keep up with.

Their shorthand has become their downfall. The other hoping that their connection can mean that they don't have to communicate directly. There's no can I ask you this you can tell me to fuck off this season, they're not even stating the question.

He thinks she wants the star at all costs because that is his only value to her, she can't see that he is killing himself because SHE wants the star. The telepathy is deeply broken right now.

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THE BEAR \\ Hanif Abdurraqib

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Like, I get anxious to pay the rent. Like, to pay for groceries, like, real shit, right? And I was thinking it would be real easy for me to get really angry at these kids. Like, "Fuck them kids. They don't know shit." They haven't been through nothing, they don't know real stress. But I'm also like "I would give anything to be one of them motherfuckers." I'm jealous as fuck.

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Food For Thought: Sydney's Choice

I know we want the best for Sydney because she's awesome and deserves it but we have to acknowledge that she's very avoidant. She can't keep running away and or avoiding issues like in the past.

Sydney has to put on her big girl drawers and confront what's bothering her *cough* Carmy's BS, head-on and let the chips fall where they may.

I think her panic attack may be the result of her realizing this, that for the first time she can't just walk away.