Where do you think it all went wrong with Riverdale?
honestly, part of me is like, the show's over and nothing but fandom matters. so who cares?
the other part of me loves to complain about Riverdale and will continue to do so until the day I die in the parking lot of Michael's Diner in Montgomeryville, PA at the age of 86. so, long-winded answer under the cut
I'm tempted to say it's the s4 b*rchie kiss. It was so wildly out of character for both Betty and Archie that it's laughable. You know how you can tell when something is just blatantly OOC with no justification? They...don't justify it. They find ways to dance around any interaction that might offer clarification. They mute the reactions of the characters who should be devastated by it. And then they jump ahead 7 years so it's easier to just handwave it away as something that happened a long time ago.
but the thing is, I did keep watching after that. I thought: okay, at least we should get an exes-to-lovers arc out of this, which is one of my favorite tropes. there is no way they would spend 4 seasons developing Bughead as this loving, supportive, communicative, sexy, and almost-unbelievably-compatible couple just to tear them apart and never do anything with that dynamic again. maybe it'll be even sweeter seeing them come back together after so much hurt and longing.
boy was i wrong!!!!!!!!!
so, the episode that actually made me stop watching for good, with the exception of some standalones like The Jughead Paradox and the finale, was the s5 musical. that was when i realized that this team of writers was 100% willing, maybe even eager, to completely drop storylines they themselves had been building over the course of a season - do a 180 with all of the characterization and relationships - and then act as though the buildup they wrote never even happened.
in this case, i'm specifically talking about the Bughead reunion storyline they dropped in s5. i'm not going to pretend like it was a GREAT buildup - and it was mostly on Jughead's side, Betty's character in s5 was basically an emotionless misery bot that had sex sometimes - but it was there. Jughead told Tabitha he had unresolved feelings around Betty. that's followed by an entire episode that lays out Betty & Jug's time jump relationship, and how Jughead still believes she's the one who saves him from himself. they work on a case together, they start opening up to one another. Jughead's so worried about her he can't eat.
and then...you know what happens.
(i'll also note here that there was random bts stuff that strongly indicated the musical ep storyline had a drastic last-minute rewrite: lili tweeted a blue dress, suggesting the song with that line was meant for her character; RAS said cole had to do last-minute recording sessions; supposedly crew members have confirmed this was the case, too. since none of it's 100% confirmed you can take it all with a grain of salt, but i believe it.)
it was so fucking insulting as a viewer to give my time and attention to a show made by people who would not only randomly drop the threads they set up, but torpedo them altogether, and then behave like the fans are the ones somehow at fault for expecting a story that actually follows through on its own emotional and plot beats. we're just shippers, so our opinions are dumb and biased! it's just a tv show, so who cares! get over it!
so, i stopped watching, because i knew they would continue to write without any thought or respect for their characters or their audience, and therefore inevitably write themselves into another corner. and, shocker, i was right. they did it again, whisking everyone away to the 1950s because actually resolving any of the scenarios they set up was ToO hArD. why bother when you could just make every single character Righteously Angry and Incurably Horny all the time, lecture the audience about social issues that have already been mainstream progressive for the last several decades, and call it a "love letter" to your fans?
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I mean, a lot of things from this season are hard to get over, but to me, even after watching RD all this time, it is genuinely hard to believe how blatant and loud the writers are being that a) they hate women, and b) they are in this to lust on some hot young people. They're here to leer on underage people (yes, I know the actors aren't underage but the characters are and the demographic of the actors is like 24-30, while the demographic of the writers is 45-55).
The amount of sex, sex parties, unclothed canonical teenagers, and explicit scenes is wow. It's always been a sexual show but this season we're nearly in softcore porn territory. And the women's plotlines involve "they are horny." Oftentimes accompanied by "they are horny and deceptive to the poor sweet innocent males."
Like, the misogyny and creepiness is max and it's disgusting.
You can see it in his eyes, in each new stint of Cole’s 4th wall narration, the simultaneous laughter and tears waging a war of being locked in a contract to CW’s Riverdale, but also having a steady paycheck.
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nothing to do with ships or anything, it honestly just looks painfully dumb to me. trailers lack context, sure, and i get that they're doing a whole new round of "something is wrong, we don't belong here" timelines nonsense but...no.
the way these writers treat the audience like they're idiots and act like they're so innovative for being the standard of mediocrity is just sort of offensive at this point.
