![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abraxas :: application.
OOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Noa
Are you over 18?: Y
Contact: discontinued @ plurk
Other Characters in Game: Geralt of Rivia, Edward Teach
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto
Canon: The Bear
Canon Point: 2x10 (end of, but before he's let out of The Freezer)
Age: ~31
Background: Here
Arrival Scenario: Thorne
Suitability: Thorne's culinary focus and general high-end vibes will give Carmy the ideal entry point into a world that he is 100% not prepared to be in at all. He will cope the way he always does, which is to ignore everything else falling apart in his life and the world around him to throw himself into his food. In the process, I'm aiming for him to do one or more of the following, if allowed:
1. Eventually earn a modestly distinct position in Thorne's castle kitchen. Carmy is not pursuing fame or recognition for himself, but he would pursue doing everything to his exacting standards as much as possible, and I feel like that would naturally garner him some kudos. To begin with, though, he'd be perfectly content with a form of "staging," i.e. the industry version of a free internship so he can learn how everything works in Thorne—which would, obviously, have none of the tools and equipment he's used.
2. Sampling food and ingredients from around Thorne's territory, but also expanding past that if he can, which means he might reach out to people in other factions to basically...bring him food into Nocwich that he can taste. Because that's his life now, I guess. He'll understand the stuff he's used to getting isn't always going to be available (no chocolate??), and he will be determined to not let that slow him down.
3. Accepting he will need to Learn Magic to accommodate the lack of tools required to achieve certain culinary techniques, which I am hoping will lead him into a variety of shenanigans and get involved with the magical elements of Thorne.
4. Any manner of kitchen nonsense involving NPCs or other Summoned. He'll help serve mingles, he'll take requests for food, he'll make efforts to recreate modern dishes using what he's got on hand, he'll stumble into the black market for ingredients if he has to. Carmy does not want to do anything illegal—not from a moral standpoint; he just doesn't want to jeopardize his career or get arrested—but his family has its share of shady connections, so he's not exactly fresh-faced. Carmy might've made his name in the world of fine dining, but his roots are still in River North where his "cousin" dealt coke in the back alley and the sandwich shop gets its window shot out in broad daylight.
Powers: He can make the perfect consommé.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
CW: addiction, suicide, alcoholism, emotional abuse
Though the series starts with his brother Michael's suicide, the moment that really launched Carmy's journey is when Michael chose not to let Carmy into the family business, a shitty sandwich shop in Chicago called The Original Beef. Feeling rejected by the brother he always looked up to, Carmy leaves to prove something to Michael, his family, and—most significantly—himself. He abandons home for Paris, Copenhagen, New York; he becomes one of the youngest chefs named best chef at 21, earns a James Beard Award, and runs a 3 Michelin star restaurant that defined much of his ambitious career. In the industry, Carmy's name is global, with articles written about him in magazines and books. New and eager chefs know his name.
It should be noted that Carmy admits he didn't do well in school, socially or academically. He was shy with a stutter, never dated, and his grades suffered due to his inability to focus in class. For Carmy, the only time he felt any sense of accomplishment was when he was cooking or when he was with Michael—and doubly so when he cooked with Michael. It's why his brother's rejection struck him so hard and why it drove him away. While focusing on his career, however, Carmy alienates the majority of his fucked up family, though the reality is that he just traded them for an equally abusive chef and industry rife with issues. Carmy's return to Chicago stirs up old resentments and traumatic memories that he never fully left behind.
Still, the distance from his childhood home is what allows him to grow into who he is today. He begins to express himself through his food, the one avenue where he feels seen and heard. He learns what he's capable of, avoids the pitfalls of addiction by channelling that energy into his career instead, and discovers a passion in his cooking if not necessarily any sense of enjoyment. It's because of this that The Bear, his dream restaurant, even exists: a culmination of his fraught history with his family and his complicated relationship with cooking.
There's an alternate timeline where Carmy worked alongside Michael, making sandwiches at a struggling business without ever having the chance to advance beyond it. Given Michael's drug problems, his volatile family, and his mother's alcoholism, it's not hard to guess that Carmy probably wouldn't have fared too well in this environment. There's a reason Michael kept him from the business, a decision Carmy only begins to understand once he returns home and takes over The Beef.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
In the most general sense, Carmy lives by the modern social code of doing your best to 1) not be a piece of shit; and 2) not go to jail. He tries to pay his bills, doesn't steal, and avoids murdering and other Really Bad Crimes. He makes an effort to listen to people and change his behavior when they tell him he's an asshole, though his success is questionable and he often slips back into old habits.
The real standards, though, are in his restaurant. Carmy's home life is a mess. He stores his jeans in his oven because the food he makes for himself is frozen shit on his stove top or in the microwave. His bookshelf contains primarily cookbooks, we only ever see him watching cooking shows, and his most valuable possession seems to be a giant bottle of ibuprofen. The restaurant is where he maintains control, and Carmy has a very precise vision of how he wants things to run.
Not that he isn't open to new ideas (he and Sydney work together to build the restaurant, and she's responsible for him agreeing to several key changes), but those ideas also have to match his standards: the quality and care of the food, the service, the treatment of his chefs, the placement of equipment and cleanliness. He'll fuss over details as small as the ragged edges of pieces of tape, insisting that they need to use scissors to cut it instead of just tearing it.
That said, Carmy doesn't expect people to adhere by these same standards unless they're in his kitchen. If it's your space, it's your space, and he won't fuck with that, just as he won't want anyone fucking with his.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
There are two sides to this, which is that the little brother in Carmy admires everything that Michael was to him: charismatic, funny, so confident that he could make you feel confident, too, just by standing next to him.
The chef in Carmy admires persistence and innovation. He's drawn to Sydney's dishes, Marcus' inspired pastries, and he believes that if you want to be better, then you can be better. He goes out of his way to keep the cooks that work in the chaotic sandwich shop when he could easily have fired them and built the restaurant fresh. But that's not what Carmy wants. What he wants is to see those people reach their full potential. He sends them to culinary school and to respected restaurants to learn. For Carmy, it's passion, tenacity, and ambition that strikes him more than pure skill or talent.
Ironically, communication is also important to him despite how much he struggles with it in his personal his life. When it comes to his work, though, Carmy will tell you exactly what he thinks and wants, and he both expects and appreciates the same directness in return. If you have a problem with him or something he did, he wants to know and he wants to know how he can fix it, mostly because that kind of tension can grind a kitchen to a halt. He doesn't hold back praise; if your dish is good or your idea is good, he'll tell you so wholeheartedly. If he needs time to think about it, he'll say that, too. If it's bad, he won't hesitate to let you know. He is not cruel about it, but nor does he go out of his way to couch his thoughts ("I said it was great, I didn't say it was perfect"), and his candidness is not for those who shy away from critique.
Some of this is tied into how much of an utter failure his family has always been about communicating with him. His home life was rife with passive aggressive remarks, Carmy can't seem to tell when certain friends and family are fucking with him or being sincere (because they're always fucking with him, he contends), and they insist he tells them he loves them—whether he means it or not—because they just want to hear the words. It's a minefield of eggshells and emotional management, an aspect Carmy is able to shed when he enters the culinary world where the food is either perfect or not, and the diners are either happy or not.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Carmy dislikes everything about himself that came before he was a chef. He dislikes his awkward years in high school, his inability to cope with his family's neuroticism, his failure to communicate and understand his emotions. A lot of these things remain to this day, but he ignores it by turning his focus on his career.
Deep down, Carmy is incapable of feeling good. When Uncle Jimmy says that being in that restaurant just makes him feel shitty and he doesn't enjoy being there, Carmy replies that maybe that's why he likes it so much. Carmy isn't so much unhappy with his life as he doesn't know who he is when he isn't feeling like a hot mess. His self-destructive tendencies don't allow him to accept that things can just be good for him. He's always waiting for something to come along and mess it up, and the longer it takes for his good thing to fall apart, the more anxious Carmy gets until he eventually blows it up himself.
We see this culminate through his relationship with Claire. Claire is a nice girl. He had a crush on her when he was younger. He confesses he loves her, though it's difficult to say what it really means to Carmy to be in love. We mostly see her through his eyes, and so she registers as a little dreamlike, inoffensive and quirky and a bit fun but not too fun or wild. She's supportive, makes no real demands of him in their relationship, and we learn very little about what she wants or gets out of the relationship. The quintessential "Cool Girl," basically. (This is especially noticeable because The Bear features a variety of female characters, and Claire is the only one who comes off like this. Given the show's overall quality, I want to say it's a deliberate choice, not a matter of questionable writing. Claire is not a bad character so much as she's portrayed in a very particular way that makes her feel like she belongs in a different world or show altogether...which she sort of does. She's the only one completely outside the restaurant business.)
Regardless, it's clear he enjoys spending time with her and that he feels okay opening up to her about some things, in part because Claire grew up with him and is familiar with the dynamics he shared with his family. She makes him feel good, and she liked him before he became Carmy the Chef, something that can't be overlooked given how much of Carmy's sense of achievement is wrapped up in his identity as a successful chef. But this is also a problem because Carmy has built his fragile self-worth around his culinary talents. Claire is a reminder that he has the potential to find and have meaning outside of his career...and an equal potential to face disappointment and be a disappointment, the latter of which his anxieties fixate upon. In the end, he has a breakdown about how attempting to maintain a relationship with her alongside his career has caused him to fail at running his restaurant. In reality, the restaurant finishes its first service just fine without him when Sydney and Richie take the reins—but because he wasn't there for it, and because he was distracted with "enjoyment" (i.e. a semblance of a personal life with Claire), he sees it as a fuck-up and blames his relationship for it.
What is their sign, and why?
The Magician. Carmy is skilled at his craft, a perfectionist to the core in his very specific field. He is good at this one thing and one thing only, and he doesn't know who he is without it. If you give him literally anything else (bookkeeping, project management, calling one (1) dude to fix the fucking fridge), he fumbles completely. But he can cook.
SAMPLES
Samples: TDM Top Level
Player Name: Noa
Are you over 18?: Y
Contact: discontinued @ plurk
Other Characters in Game: Geralt of Rivia, Edward Teach
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto
Canon: The Bear
Canon Point: 2x10 (end of, but before he's let out of The Freezer)
Age: ~31
Background: Here
Arrival Scenario: Thorne
Suitability: Thorne's culinary focus and general high-end vibes will give Carmy the ideal entry point into a world that he is 100% not prepared to be in at all. He will cope the way he always does, which is to ignore everything else falling apart in his life and the world around him to throw himself into his food. In the process, I'm aiming for him to do one or more of the following, if allowed:
1. Eventually earn a modestly distinct position in Thorne's castle kitchen. Carmy is not pursuing fame or recognition for himself, but he would pursue doing everything to his exacting standards as much as possible, and I feel like that would naturally garner him some kudos. To begin with, though, he'd be perfectly content with a form of "staging," i.e. the industry version of a free internship so he can learn how everything works in Thorne—which would, obviously, have none of the tools and equipment he's used.
2. Sampling food and ingredients from around Thorne's territory, but also expanding past that if he can, which means he might reach out to people in other factions to basically...bring him food into Nocwich that he can taste. Because that's his life now, I guess. He'll understand the stuff he's used to getting isn't always going to be available (no chocolate??), and he will be determined to not let that slow him down.
3. Accepting he will need to Learn Magic to accommodate the lack of tools required to achieve certain culinary techniques, which I am hoping will lead him into a variety of shenanigans and get involved with the magical elements of Thorne.
4. Any manner of kitchen nonsense involving NPCs or other Summoned. He'll help serve mingles, he'll take requests for food, he'll make efforts to recreate modern dishes using what he's got on hand, he'll stumble into the black market for ingredients if he has to. Carmy does not want to do anything illegal—not from a moral standpoint; he just doesn't want to jeopardize his career or get arrested—but his family has its share of shady connections, so he's not exactly fresh-faced. Carmy might've made his name in the world of fine dining, but his roots are still in River North where his "cousin" dealt coke in the back alley and the sandwich shop gets its window shot out in broad daylight.
Powers: He can make the perfect consommé.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
CW: addiction, suicide, alcoholism, emotional abuse
Though the series starts with his brother Michael's suicide, the moment that really launched Carmy's journey is when Michael chose not to let Carmy into the family business, a shitty sandwich shop in Chicago called The Original Beef. Feeling rejected by the brother he always looked up to, Carmy leaves to prove something to Michael, his family, and—most significantly—himself. He abandons home for Paris, Copenhagen, New York; he becomes one of the youngest chefs named best chef at 21, earns a James Beard Award, and runs a 3 Michelin star restaurant that defined much of his ambitious career. In the industry, Carmy's name is global, with articles written about him in magazines and books. New and eager chefs know his name.
It should be noted that Carmy admits he didn't do well in school, socially or academically. He was shy with a stutter, never dated, and his grades suffered due to his inability to focus in class. For Carmy, the only time he felt any sense of accomplishment was when he was cooking or when he was with Michael—and doubly so when he cooked with Michael. It's why his brother's rejection struck him so hard and why it drove him away. While focusing on his career, however, Carmy alienates the majority of his fucked up family, though the reality is that he just traded them for an equally abusive chef and industry rife with issues. Carmy's return to Chicago stirs up old resentments and traumatic memories that he never fully left behind.
Still, the distance from his childhood home is what allows him to grow into who he is today. He begins to express himself through his food, the one avenue where he feels seen and heard. He learns what he's capable of, avoids the pitfalls of addiction by channelling that energy into his career instead, and discovers a passion in his cooking if not necessarily any sense of enjoyment. It's because of this that The Bear, his dream restaurant, even exists: a culmination of his fraught history with his family and his complicated relationship with cooking.
There's an alternate timeline where Carmy worked alongside Michael, making sandwiches at a struggling business without ever having the chance to advance beyond it. Given Michael's drug problems, his volatile family, and his mother's alcoholism, it's not hard to guess that Carmy probably wouldn't have fared too well in this environment. There's a reason Michael kept him from the business, a decision Carmy only begins to understand once he returns home and takes over The Beef.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
In the most general sense, Carmy lives by the modern social code of doing your best to 1) not be a piece of shit; and 2) not go to jail. He tries to pay his bills, doesn't steal, and avoids murdering and other Really Bad Crimes. He makes an effort to listen to people and change his behavior when they tell him he's an asshole, though his success is questionable and he often slips back into old habits.
The real standards, though, are in his restaurant. Carmy's home life is a mess. He stores his jeans in his oven because the food he makes for himself is frozen shit on his stove top or in the microwave. His bookshelf contains primarily cookbooks, we only ever see him watching cooking shows, and his most valuable possession seems to be a giant bottle of ibuprofen. The restaurant is where he maintains control, and Carmy has a very precise vision of how he wants things to run.
Not that he isn't open to new ideas (he and Sydney work together to build the restaurant, and she's responsible for him agreeing to several key changes), but those ideas also have to match his standards: the quality and care of the food, the service, the treatment of his chefs, the placement of equipment and cleanliness. He'll fuss over details as small as the ragged edges of pieces of tape, insisting that they need to use scissors to cut it instead of just tearing it.
That said, Carmy doesn't expect people to adhere by these same standards unless they're in his kitchen. If it's your space, it's your space, and he won't fuck with that, just as he won't want anyone fucking with his.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
There are two sides to this, which is that the little brother in Carmy admires everything that Michael was to him: charismatic, funny, so confident that he could make you feel confident, too, just by standing next to him.
The chef in Carmy admires persistence and innovation. He's drawn to Sydney's dishes, Marcus' inspired pastries, and he believes that if you want to be better, then you can be better. He goes out of his way to keep the cooks that work in the chaotic sandwich shop when he could easily have fired them and built the restaurant fresh. But that's not what Carmy wants. What he wants is to see those people reach their full potential. He sends them to culinary school and to respected restaurants to learn. For Carmy, it's passion, tenacity, and ambition that strikes him more than pure skill or talent.
Ironically, communication is also important to him despite how much he struggles with it in his personal his life. When it comes to his work, though, Carmy will tell you exactly what he thinks and wants, and he both expects and appreciates the same directness in return. If you have a problem with him or something he did, he wants to know and he wants to know how he can fix it, mostly because that kind of tension can grind a kitchen to a halt. He doesn't hold back praise; if your dish is good or your idea is good, he'll tell you so wholeheartedly. If he needs time to think about it, he'll say that, too. If it's bad, he won't hesitate to let you know. He is not cruel about it, but nor does he go out of his way to couch his thoughts ("I said it was great, I didn't say it was perfect"), and his candidness is not for those who shy away from critique.
Some of this is tied into how much of an utter failure his family has always been about communicating with him. His home life was rife with passive aggressive remarks, Carmy can't seem to tell when certain friends and family are fucking with him or being sincere (because they're always fucking with him, he contends), and they insist he tells them he loves them—whether he means it or not—because they just want to hear the words. It's a minefield of eggshells and emotional management, an aspect Carmy is able to shed when he enters the culinary world where the food is either perfect or not, and the diners are either happy or not.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Carmy dislikes everything about himself that came before he was a chef. He dislikes his awkward years in high school, his inability to cope with his family's neuroticism, his failure to communicate and understand his emotions. A lot of these things remain to this day, but he ignores it by turning his focus on his career.
Deep down, Carmy is incapable of feeling good. When Uncle Jimmy says that being in that restaurant just makes him feel shitty and he doesn't enjoy being there, Carmy replies that maybe that's why he likes it so much. Carmy isn't so much unhappy with his life as he doesn't know who he is when he isn't feeling like a hot mess. His self-destructive tendencies don't allow him to accept that things can just be good for him. He's always waiting for something to come along and mess it up, and the longer it takes for his good thing to fall apart, the more anxious Carmy gets until he eventually blows it up himself.
We see this culminate through his relationship with Claire. Claire is a nice girl. He had a crush on her when he was younger. He confesses he loves her, though it's difficult to say what it really means to Carmy to be in love. We mostly see her through his eyes, and so she registers as a little dreamlike, inoffensive and quirky and a bit fun but not too fun or wild. She's supportive, makes no real demands of him in their relationship, and we learn very little about what she wants or gets out of the relationship. The quintessential "Cool Girl," basically. (This is especially noticeable because The Bear features a variety of female characters, and Claire is the only one who comes off like this. Given the show's overall quality, I want to say it's a deliberate choice, not a matter of questionable writing. Claire is not a bad character so much as she's portrayed in a very particular way that makes her feel like she belongs in a different world or show altogether...which she sort of does. She's the only one completely outside the restaurant business.)
Regardless, it's clear he enjoys spending time with her and that he feels okay opening up to her about some things, in part because Claire grew up with him and is familiar with the dynamics he shared with his family. She makes him feel good, and she liked him before he became Carmy the Chef, something that can't be overlooked given how much of Carmy's sense of achievement is wrapped up in his identity as a successful chef. But this is also a problem because Carmy has built his fragile self-worth around his culinary talents. Claire is a reminder that he has the potential to find and have meaning outside of his career...and an equal potential to face disappointment and be a disappointment, the latter of which his anxieties fixate upon. In the end, he has a breakdown about how attempting to maintain a relationship with her alongside his career has caused him to fail at running his restaurant. In reality, the restaurant finishes its first service just fine without him when Sydney and Richie take the reins—but because he wasn't there for it, and because he was distracted with "enjoyment" (i.e. a semblance of a personal life with Claire), he sees it as a fuck-up and blames his relationship for it.
What is their sign, and why?
The Magician. Carmy is skilled at his craft, a perfectionist to the core in his very specific field. He is good at this one thing and one thing only, and he doesn't know who he is without it. If you give him literally anything else (bookkeeping, project management, calling one (1) dude to fix the fucking fridge), he fumbles completely. But he can cook.
SAMPLES
Samples: TDM Top Level