Explaining Bean Dad Via Funny Tweets About 2021's First Main Character

Almost a year ago to the day the Bean Dad story broke, Twitter user @maplecocaine wrote, “Each day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.

The problem with this advice is that most people with over 10k followers are absolutely desperate to be the main character. They just don’t realize that almost no one is the main character for a good reason.

The last main character of 2020 was Hilaria Baldwin and her fake Spanish history. The first day or so of 2021 was quiet.

Then Bean Dad, or podcaster John Roderick, decided to share a story he likely thought would be a cute throwaway thread.

Instead, he main charactered himself into oblivion.

The story he told was about his nine-year-old daughter asking to eat and there only being a can of beans in the house. He realized he’d never taught her how to use one, and decided it was a “teachable moment.”

No, he didn’t teach her how to use it, he made her figure it out and refused to feed her or eat himself until she did. It took six hours.

https://twitter.com/ManiacalV/status/1345870405085573122

There are definitely a lot of apologists for this behavior. Some people think this is a normal interaction between an adult and a hungry kid. Far, far more people thought the 23-tweet thread in which he kept calling himself “Apocalypse Dad” was self-aggrandizing and a story about why his daughter will likely stop talking to him as soon as she moves out of his house.

That in itself is kind of an unexpected twist, but it goes deeper. Roderick’s old tweets started to surface and there are a whole bunch of racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic ones in there. He has now deleted his account.

In an unsurprising turn of events, Bean Dad John Roderick cancelled his Twitter account after old tweets resurfaced about how he was racist and anti-Semitic, on top of being abusive to his kid. But don’t take my word for it. pic.twitter.com/bmWLwdUMRc

— FrankenAngel and the Bride (@angelt18) January 3, 2021

And that’s not all!! One of Roderick’s podcasting partners is Ken Jennings, who was tapped to replace Alex Trebek on Jeopardy! But Jennings’ response has been questionable, too, so it might be his job that’s in jeopardy.

Things really spun out of control in less than a day. If Roderick’s tweets weren’t so awful, I’d actually be impressed. He did unite Twitter for a minute, distracting us from all the stories about Trump doing a coup.