There needs to be an entire entry dedicated to the entire Bear community because it’s massive and there are a lot of people to keep up with. It was one of the more interesting ones to write because of this, though.

Daniel

I used the singer Devendra Banhart as a working example for this character. He is not Native, however, so the actor could possibly be a better reference point. I stuck with Banhart mostly for his body structure and dress; skinny and slightly unkempt. This really surmises a lot of what Daniel is like. He’s casual and almost unruly in how he carries himself and keeps his environment (room is always messy), but he is articulate and very intelligent. His thoughts on culture and critique of Thomas’ perception of him were largely influenced by the documentary film Reel Injun, which I would highly recommend.

I like these first two, but he has shorter hair, like this (and no tattoos):

Outside of Daniel, there are a lot of people and this can get quite confusing. The four that basically run The Bear include him, Paul, Tonya, and Kristen.

Tonya:

In the story, it is revealed that she is a trangender woman, and I suppose to a degree she also looks like Cece McDonald, who is serving a prison sentence right now (in a male facility) for killing one of her attackers. I stress a few times in this section about how hard it is for Tonya to be Tonya in the “real” world, and Cece is an unfortunate example of what I mean. Transgender woman of colour are usually the most targeted people, especially if they are below the poverty line, which Tonya also was for a time. The Bear community acts as a haven for a lot of the people who live there, and as Daniel states in a few instances, it’s not because they haven’t tried in the “real” world.

Paul

First off, it was incredibly hard to find someone who remotely looked like how I envisioned Paul. I kept trying to google-image search the characteristics, only to realize that I would basically be putting in “generic white guy” into the search engine and get a million results. Hah. So the closest thing I did was go through QI panelists and found Johnny Vaughan, who at least matches a little.

Paul, other than being the generic every day white guy, is really tall and a bit heavier than Johnny, but not by much. He appears older than he is – hence the hair loss. This is probably the closest rendering I can get, and I’m happy enough with it. Paul is really not so much about what he looks like, rather what he stands for.

Movies like Collapse, Inside Job, and The Corporation helped to inspire Paul’s character and the type of political strife he’s talking about, which is also kind of off the grid, in a way. Paul’s stance on a lot of this type of rhetoric is informed from his homeschooling, and then subsequently being in a relationship with Tonya. Although he seems to be the epitome of privilege - straight white cis man – he has had to deal with a lot because of who he has chosen to love. This is another reason why identity politics cannot be viewed in isolation. Paul, in this sense, is very similar to Barry Winchell. Although Barry fit all the identity markers, he was still killed in a hate crime. Things like this are never that simple.

Kristen

Although, she is in her mid-thirites in the story, so imagine if Kristen Stewart aged a bit more. And maybe was a bit more expressive? Yeah, that works. :P

Gwen

Eventually as the story goes on, Gwen joins this basic structure, since she stayed a winter. Imagine a less made-up version of Gwen Stefani, but this is her basic facial structure. Also, she is asexual, which is actually more common than some people may realize. She is also a physicist, which is a lot of fun. Personally, I find theoretical physics the more interesting variety, but from the way Gwen talks in here, she is probably more heavily invested in experimental physics. There is no real straight dividing line there in a lot of the literature, but there is a huge difference between doing experiments with lasers and thinking about quantum mechanics. But I’m going to stop talking about physics now as if I know something substantial, show you these videos, and move on to pictures.

These are the core people, so I needed to have a better idea of what they looked like and they came to me fairly easily. Lesser people, and even with them, there are still others in the community that Thomas doesn’t have direct contact with, so even these names don’t reflect the total. So, they are: Catherine, Nicole, Chris, Korey, and ">Ray, obviously.

I have also made a small graph to display the basic relationship clusters. Yay for microsoft paint. :)

If you want a better idea of the type of community they live in, I would recommend watching the Morgan Spurlock show 30 Days. In season one, episode five, they have two people live in one of these and it influenced how I planned The Bear out immensely. In the section itself,  Faulker’s novel Go Down, Moses is present and its allusion is a prominent one. I would highly recommend this book, and many works by Faulkner. The song “Go Down, Moses” is actually an African American Spiritual that has been covered by many artists (from The Fresh Prince of Bell Air to the Louis Armstrong version I have at the end of this), and its lyrics, like the Faulkner text itself, were very evocative of what I wanted to convey with this piece. Everywhere there is the basic feeling of being  trapped or forced someplace because of outside obstacles, especially with these five central people. Unlike a lot of the people in the Spurlock version of off the grid living, it’s not necessarily a choice for a lot of these people here.  As much as some people want to live in the world and participate in it, not everyone is given a fair chance. The group of people who live at The Bear are trying to find a different way of living, one that makes sense to them since they cannot do it on their own terms in society. For people like Daniel and Tonya, this has a lot to do with race and gender/sexuality, but it becomes more politically charged and ideologically for people like Kristen and Paul.

One more thing I want to mention about The Bear as a whole is that there are off the grid communities in New Jersey. I wrote this, then realized I could be screwed for realism, but they do exist! There are tons of them hidden all over the place and it just takes knowing the right people to find them, since they don’t always come up on google searches. Sometimes they’re known as “intentional communities” rather than communes, but it’s all the same basic principles. I don’t know how similar these structures would be to the one I’ve depicted, but places like this are more common than you think. It may no longer be the 1970s, but we ca try. :)