#the lodges

veronica & hermione & hermosa & being a dog -- sister's keeper/woman's best friend au by @pzyii and @aingeal98

In the therapy charts, my parents are quoted as saying that they felt a need to ‘scale down my expectations.’ They apparently mentioned, not once but four times in a single session, plans I made when I was three for a birthday party that was, admittedly, a bit elaborate. Their ‘scaling down’ of my expectations, which seemed to me more like an abiding doubt in my ability to do so much as blow my nose properly, would continue from early childhood until, oh, last year. It had an interesting effect: my behavior became ever more grandiose, while I myself became progressively less certain that I could accomplish even simple tasks, let alone achieve any significant success. My parents, I sense, thought I was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Who knows? Maybe they were right. They say, in the charts: fears, nightmares, too much fantasy.

—and nobody will ever be able to convince me that that doesn't absolutely scream Veronica's repeated attempts at getting her parents to take her seriously as part of the business (which is really the Family) (and therefore of the family).

She wants to be good, to go straight (ha! straight.); they refuse, as if this is an unreasonable and immature demand. She reacts by trying to throw herself into the business they refuse to give up for her happiness and sense of (ethical/existential/identitarian) security; they react by rejecting her efforts. She forces their hands; they let her in, but in name only, with busywork and playdates, none of her ideas or business contributions taken seriously. She outmaneuvers Daddy by buying the Wyrm and then trading it for Pop's, he kicks her out; she proves she can hack it on her own by starting a second business underneath Pop's, he starts undercutting her before eventually arranging a set of circumstances that forces her back home. She goes into business against him, she defies him, she helps other people defy him, she plans and executes (to varying degrees of success) an absolute smorgasbord of grandiose plots to thwart him and earn her place in the social ecosystem of Good Riverdale rather than Crime Riverdale (an ecosystem which often contains at least one gang and also cops, so), and with every failure, her belief that she'll ever be able to succeed totally against him is chipped away at and she's dragged further back into Hiram's orbit.

Changing her name to get into college without his influence is a phenomenally massive scheme. Even marrying Chad to infiltrate the UES social scene and cement herself as a legitimate non-criminal smacks of plotting. And time and time again, something bad happens, she "fails" (resources, maybe, experience, maybe, access, maybe, being directly lied to and manipulated by someone who intentionally positioned themself as trustworthy to undercut her goals and efforts, often!), and in failing, she is pushed right back into Hiram's hands. He won't help her escape her abusive husband because he's mad at her, so she tries to do it on her own with the help of the townspeople of the town he wants to destroy, and he gets so mad at her for basically succeeding with the help of his enemies that he gives her husband a gun with which to kill her! Fuck! The only time she pulls off a grandiose scheme and is even kind of acknowledged is when she assassinates him and gets his goodbye tape telling her he loves her, and even that's not a real, sense-of-self-securing win because now all she has is that tape and a lifelong hole in her chest.