theres a special pain that hits me when i think about richie and carmy’s dynamic for too long because speaking as a middle child who couldn’t imagine a life without my siblings, it’s so real to shout the most horrendous shit you can think of to their face and expect to move past it with an off-handed apology and quick hug, if that at all, because you know as a sibling that the sibling bond is unbreakable; no matter what, you have been tied together since birth and nothing can sever that. the problem is richie doesn’t have the assurance of a blood relation— he only had mikey. and now, without him, his place, his purpose in the berzatto family, is suddenly no longer clear. in the freezer scene, carmy and richie were functioning exactly as family because that’s kind of who they’ve been to each other their whole life. so carmys half-assed apology makes sense, because to him, that’s how family, specifically his family, apologizes. but richie only had that relationship to the berzattos because of mikey, and they both know it, richie even more so after the s2 finale.
and so, much of the tension between them is because they don’t know how to function without mikey as their tether. mikey was a brother to both of them and now that he’s gone the two of them are clinging to each other to try and fill the gaping hole he left behind and make sense of themselves without him.
carmy and richie’s entire relationship is a desperate attempt to try and keep a dead man alive.
except. neither of them are mikey and they never will be because mikeys charisma, his personality, his spirit was one of a kind. and so, there’s a part of each of them that resents the other for not doing enough for mikey, but there’s an even greater part that’s struggling with not being enough for each other.