#not saying claire is secretely an awful person that kills puppies for fun

[camcastle]

We need to talk about Claire (I'm so late to the party I know, forgive me)

I procrastinated a bit to start The Bear S2 for some reason, so when I finally started and almost immediately disliked Claire I thought maybe it was just my biased opinion. But no, not entirely at least, apparently A LOT of people disliked Claire. Makes sense, she's an all-tell-no-show nothing burger of a character. But why? This show is amazing, can't be that it's bad writing, not specifically for one character.

I saw a few people theorizing that she's bland like that because the way we're seeing her is the way Carmy sees her. The old tale of falling in love with the imaginary version you created of someone instead of the real person they are. That would make sense, they chose to do it in a extremely annoying way, but it does make sense. Carmy had a crush on her as a teenager but never acted on it, so he probably already had this imaginary version of her ready to go since he was younger. And that's why she seems exactly like that, an imaginary woman idealized by a teenage boy with a crush. The extreme close-ups and ASMR-dialog every scene she's in plays into that as well, we're seeing this very narrow vision of this character. Watching her feels so forced and unreal, because it is.

And even (almost) every male character in the show being like "Claire is so perfect" would play into that same ingenue-trope fantasy these men created of this girl (not in a weird way, btw), because none of them really know-know her as a person.

If that's the case, if that's what they were going for, bravo! And I'm all in to see how this cracks, how Carmy comes to realize it's not healthy to try and date the idealized version of a real person because, sooner or later, reality will prevail and not correspond to the imagination, leaving everyone disappointed.

If that's what they were going for, I'm excited to see how it plays out in S3. This will be some very interesting development in Carmy's arc. - And then we'll need Syd's to be pushed in a similar fashion (but with different means) as well. Hence the Marcus plot. - But ok, that last part is very-very biased speculation, for sure.

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Or not, or I'm all wrong. I am delusional after all, you already knew that by my last post. Curious to see what you guys think though.