Riverdale is Cringe and I’m honestly okay with that.
First off.I also didn't leave a music review for last week so here’s mine before i forget
Seafeld City - Honkai: Star Rail
Can’t believe there’s more star rail in my blog again!!!
But this might be one of my favourite songs in the game, it’s like an Undertale track. I really enjoyed the new HSR update. I’m not going to go on a tangent about it because I don’t really have a lot to say?
It’s interesting to start to see the darkness in Planarcadia that isn’t the product of serial killers, but arguably worse; Producers.
Just saying, if I was the lone survivor of a serial killer that went on a killing spree in the school I went to, brutalising all of my peers and smearing their bloody handprints on the wall in the name of appeasing the silly laughter god, had my entire support network fabricated by a news channel for a make a 10/10 tv show about my immense trauma and then left me to die, like…
I mean I’d be pretty fucked up about that to.
Idk if I’d be fucked up enough to start lobotomising people with immortal demon flesh but, you do you sis.
Just kind of curious about Himeko’s circumstances regarding her not dying to her chronic illness, but that's probably the main focus of the remaining 4 or 5 patches. I have a theory she’s actually a kind of imaginae puppet that AHA gave her original soul, something similar to like, Xueyi, but we’ll see.
Last star rail thing, for my persona 4 fans, does 0:21 sound kind of like this song sound like ‘New Days'? It sounds a lot like it to me and I love it.
Moving on!!!
(suprise cameo from the mario galaxy tin lmao)
I own my first piece of Evil Merchandise.
Context? Uh.
Pressure is a Roblox game.
Do I even need to elaborate?
No like actually, do I????
Look, I just like reading fanfiction about the big fish guy, but it’s still pretty bad to hear that the creator is an awful person.
It feels pretty shit to financially support a shitty person, even by accident.
(update, this was around the start of april, i’ve been writing this review post for a while. People are switching sides a lot, idk whats happening anymore, id go into details but it’s just very unpleasant stuff all round, always do your own research.)
Again, I just like the big fish man, who absolutely hates me. He just sits inside of my Mario Galaxy Popcorn tin and Nagito Komedea Nendoroid.
Addressing the actual title of this blog post…
Uh. I watched just about all of Riverdale.
It’s…not as bad as people made it out today, honestly?
This is going to have spoilers, because I don’t think I could write a spoiler free review that fully encapsulates how I feel about it.
Great drama. Great characters. A lot of singing.
Maybe too much singing later on? I think we’re doing something a little weird when essential plot points are through song in our murder mystery series.
Not awful, but odd.
The first 2 seasons are really good. Quintessential murder mystery experience.
The main 4 have quite have a compelling dynamic, but I feel like Archie is super isolated from most of murder conflict? At least, earlier on. Of course there’s ‘A’ plot of murder and then there’s whatever he’s doing being really boring or really uncomfortable, but always insane.
I really enjoy Veronica’s dynamic with her mother, it’s honestly just pretty wholesome, especially in comparison to how it devolves later and also serves to further enforce Betty’s own exceptionally negative relationship with her own mum.
Also, Betty’s dad is the post office manager from Christmas Mail, which Drew Gooden made a video on like 8 years ago. I didn’t know where to put this, but I’ve seen that video at least 30 times and I completely lost my shit when I saw him.
Jughead is well…Why is his name Jughead?
Apparently it’s because of his hat, which used to be a crown in the comics was called "jag cap," and Jughead was a play on "jag head."
My personal headcanon is that with a goofy ass like Forsythe Pendleton Jones III, I’d also go by a nickname as well.
Also I saw this and thought it was funny.
I…don’t like how Bughead starts. It’s just woman is traumatised and man is like “I'm gonna kiss you.” and that’s…eh. They had time to develop their start as more than that, but overall they have pretty good chemistry, even though a lot of their relationship is Jughead yapping post makeout sesh and then Betty having a Detective Pikachu moment.
Also them sharing a half-brother is just like…guys.
(I had to draw the family tree, idk how to explain it with words)
Of course, they’re like, well the last person who said they were betty’s half brother was actually an evil murderer so we don't trust you, but actually since you’re with the FBI, we will actually trust you.
And then he turned out to be evil. Just because.
Also he’s dating the first evil half brother.
It’s just like really weird.
I do agree season 3 is where things go a bit wonky honestly. I think its overarching themes and story is really interesting, but it’s just way too long. Edgar Evernever, name of an insane person (what kind of fuckass looney toons name???), is harvesting organs with his wife, who pretends to be a highschooler and his daughter to recruit people to brainwash around the country.
????
Also evil DND from an evil conversion therapy church and all the nuns drink Kool Aid and die and the boardgame was a way to control unruly children who they started drugging because of the evil druglord Hiram Lodge and Cheryl's mother has a dominatrix business is sleeping with Betty’s Dad whose a serial killer and Betty’s half brother (the first one who isn’t actually related to her at all, he just lied) who Cheryl’s mother adopted because her son died and wanted to replace him and then makes the main 4 for participate in a bunch of murder games and shoots Betty’s dad in the face in front of her.
We never get back to the psychic babies.
Did I mention the psychic babies actually???
Okay so Betty’s sister, Polly, who had children with Jason, Cheryl's brother, who turned out to be like 3rd cousins (this has to stop, fucking hell) throws them in a fire as part of a cult thing presumably and they start floating???????????
And it’s just…not explained??????
They were putting drugs in the water (that only affected women for some reason???) but that was causing mass blackouts, NOT FUCKING PSI????
I thought this was related to stuff in Season 6 and Juniper and Dagwood (psychic babies in question) would be more relevant but they barely appear and when they do it’s super inconsistent about what they even do. Where do they even live?? Sometimes they’re with Cheryl (highschooler who barely has time raise children) and sometimes they're with Alice, which makes more sense but they’re hardly ever seen interacting outside the time they (twins) pushed someone down the stairs.
In THEORY, all of this should be interesting but the pacing isn't great and from here on out (season 3 and beyond), it’s kind of just Hiram (Veronica’s dad) is evil and does things that are bad.
I feel like this is kind of the point where character’s start switching sides and motivations way too much for most people.
I really enjoy it personally because it makes them feel more real. Even the most logical person can slip up in the emotional consistency department sometimes.
I think the only character this doesn’t really happen to is Archie, which honestly might be why he’s probably my least favorite member of the group.
He’s just not very interesting? His whole thing is that he’s an ultra wholesome guy who’s always trying to do the right thing and it just never works out because he gets groomed by his music teacher (this goes on from like, season 1 episode 2 until near the end of the season, i hate it so much, can we just not have graphic depictions of shit like this in the first hour of a show (looking at you, Hazbin Hotel -_-) ), starting a vigilante group featuring a bunch of teenagers to fight against a serial killer who shot his dad, pleading guilty to murder, joining an illegal fighting ring in prison, escaping from prison, owns a boxing gym/community center for troubled children who’ve all been recruited by a drug dealer, who Archie beats up later on, gets held in a hostage situation with aforementioned troubled children for beating other aforementioned drug dealer and extremely traumatised from serving in the military since he failed high school for well…
I just listed it.
Oh right, he also got mauled by a bear.
Also Kevin is just the worst.
He just never develops as a person. Every time a major shift happens in the social climate of Riverdale, he always sides with the bad guys till the end.
He’s supposed to be Betty’s best friend and he just never has her back?
He never has a moment where he’s like “No, I’m going to stand by my friends because they’ve always defended and cared for me” and it’s just so annoying to watch him act like he’s better than everyone only to come crawling back at the season finale.
I get it. He has low self esteem. He wants someone to care about him.
But people do!!!
There’s multiple full episodes of the cast supporting him through endeavours regarding his self worth, showing how much he’s valued as a friend, as a creative, as a queer person and overall I think they just…forgot to resolve that element of his character because of all the insane shit that happens in this season, which is way too long.
I don’t have an excuse for the rest of the show.
Anyways, season 4.
Ticklegate is a thing that happens and Jughead dies.
I’m not doing a deep dive on this one.
After this, an adult man plants a bomb under a bed and murders a bunch of children because they chased him out of town for being too evil.
This creates A PARALLEL UNIVERSE called RIVERVALE with MAGIC and they SACRIFICE ARCHIE in a maple syrup ritual and then there's 2 Jugheads, and one of them has to spend the rest of time creating the Archie comics EXCEPT Archie COMES BACK TO LIFE to try and kill Jughead because he thinks he can bring back his dad who died because everyone comes back to life in Rivervale because it’s being messed up by Riverdale so everyone is dying because they die in Riverdale so reality is trying to equalise itself and Jughead has to make everything non canon.
Through this, a british magic warlock who made a pact with Satan travels from Rivervale to Riverdale to conquer it since nobody has magic there, EXCEPT the main gang gets magic powers too because of universe equalising Jughead’s superhero fanfiction, and then people start dying again so Sabrina the Teenage Witch shows up, just because, brings them back to life because british guy unleashes the plagues from the Bible such as green bugs and killing every first born among other things, anyways, they come back to life and then everyone in Riverdale and Rivervale collab to bring evil british man back to Satan so he can kill him.
Did I mention the evil British warlock has mind control powers and uses them to control a bunch of construction workers to build a ghost train to bring back his great grandfather who murdered a bunch of natives in Ye Old Times. He gets countered by the immortal (they say this but he’s invulnerable actually) baby Cheryl's ex girlfriend Toni had, who Tabitha uses her time powers on, in order to beat him up.
Season 6 is just so fun and ridiculous in every scene, genuinely, for me it rivals the peaks of Season 1 and 2 because it’s just so engaging, even if it's such an insane shift in narrative and stakes.
Like why is Toni and Fang’s baby immortal???
Anyways, british guy (sorry, I realise I haven’t said his name, it’s Percival Pickens because of course it is, he’s an uppercrust british man) summons a meteor that kills everyone except not really and they go back in time in the 50’s!!!!!!!!!!
Season 7 is…I dunno. It’s a lot about taking the future into your own hands as an adolescent, I think?
It’s trying to encourage youth to take charge of their futures but is more interested in reliving the glory days of the epic highs and lows of high school football in earlier seasons then set up for the end of the series, and in that regard it’s a bit disappointing for a final season.
Due to implementing a lot of aspects from prior seasons, it kind of feels muddy and unfocused. It tries to enact a murder plot that doesn't receive that much attention. There’s supposed to be romantic tension between characters that just doesn’t really go anywhere because they’re arguing with their parents about character arcs we’ve seen and had concluded in the last 6 seasons.
Betty and her mother have a turbulent relationship. Archie doesn’t know what he wants to do in life. Veronica and her dad have the most minor scuffle. Kevin is gay. Cheryl is gay.
I kind of hate how it reverses all the character development we’ve had throughout the show. If they wanted a retcon for the show, they should’ve done it earlier, or even better, not have done that.
According to ANGEL!Tabitha, a displaced character due to the new universe + timeskip, the cast is supposed to be making “the arrow bend towards justice” in order to make Riverdale a better place in the future since “darkness was simply too prevalent" but I don’t really know how they do that?
This could have been such an interesting concept honestly? It’s very Homestuck/Undertale pilled. They were always fated to lose the battle against darkness as the world was simply distant from light, so they have to go to turbulent and world changing events and ensure that the world makes positive change and progress.
Real Harry Potter and the Tumbling Towers type beat (if you’ve read this, yes, I know that that isn’t what the story is about but I just had to bring up the fact this exists)
With its queer and POC cast it very easily could’ve done that.
But during season 7, there aren’t any actual major actions or events that contribute towards progress in society; the closest they get is the cheerleading team being like “actually Cheryl, we don’t mind that you’re gay, we’re also gay.” which is a bit cringe and Dhar Mann pilled (it’s one couple but let me explain.)
You know people can…use empathy? They can understand your tribulations without also having been through them. In Dhar Mann videos (sorry I have to bring this guy up), the conclusion is always related to this idea that only by experiencing turmoil can you understand it.
Rich girl is horrible to a service worker, then she has to be a service worker and then she’s like “ohhh, working in retail is hard, maybe I should be nice to people”, like???? Yeah, no fucking dip.
Anyways, ANGEL!Tabitha does more impactful things in her three 20-minute accidental time blips to protect Pops than the whole town in the full 20 hours of season 7 runtime, which I’m pretty sure is about over a year of actual time.
Episode 1 is based around an actual hate crime that occurred in reality and it’s just exceptionally jarring, despite what I just complained about, but I meant for these things to take place within the context of the show.
Like, I don’t know if it’s their place??? To do that??? With an actual person???? In Riverdale???
THE SHOW WITH F*CKING TICKLEGATE???????????????
There’s just so much disconnect because they won’t fully commit to seeing a message through properly, as well as not having any time to because it’s the final season of the show!
And the big action event of the season is just a single episode conclusion about Russian assassins making a mega atomic bomb, which barely had any set up or payoff.
Their school principal hates comics, he hates sharing stories of the struggles of black people, he’s just an all round bad guy that’s pro-censorship and anti-progress and is enforcing this all over the town.
I really thought this would lead to the school, hell, maybe even the town coming together to be like “actually we should allow children to explore themselves and make the world they want to see”?
But nah.
The Blossoms and Principle are Russian spies about to nuke Riverdale and Veronica just, knows a guy from the FBI, reports them and they go to jail.
There’s genuinely more societal progress made in the single episode where the whole school does drag to support Kevin’s musical because it was “too sexual” according to the headmaster.
Anyways, after this, ANGEL!Tabthia comes back as is like, congrats you guys, I can’t actually repair the timeline so you’ll never get to hear Sabrina Carpenter “Expresso”, BUT, I can give you back your memories, so everyone has to watch Riverdale up to season 6.
Everyone is miserable so she has to erase their memories and only show them the good memories that they had and then the show ends with OLD!Betty remembering how everyone else lives went post-highschool.
Congrats. Happily ever after and everyone else, except for Fangs who dies in a car accident, live moderately swell lives.
I kind of hate how the final season reverses all the character development, but it is, in canon, a way for the characters to avoid all the suffering they went through. It’s nice in a way but also kind of lame.
They really wanted to have their cake and eat it too in regards to having a happy ending for the characters.
They had, or were making peace with the suffering they’d been through, and now they’ve all had that progress and depth ripped away from them.
The “Next to Normal” episode might honest-to-god be one of my favourite episodes of the show because it perfectly exemplifies this.
Alice Cooper has been through a LOT of shit. Her husband was not only an asshole who hates Santa Claus and tried to make her abort her firstborn, but was also a serial killer, her son turned out to be a serial killer as well, her daughter ran away from home, she joined a cult, covered up multiple murders to protect her family, THEN her daughter was murdered just as they were finally starting to repair their broken relationship and just a bunch of other things, which caused her to have such a turbulent relationship with Betty.
There’s a lot to dislike her for, but it’s also heart-wretching to see how she devolves from an overprotective and overbearing mother and how unstable and distraught she becomes throughout the show, to the point of having vivid hallucinations of a happy family while the one she pretended to have for so long is so far in the distance, it’s hard to believe.
Most people don’t really like the musical episodes, which is far enough; the show already has a lot of singing for no reason at all, but this one makes sense. It relays what Alice is going through a lot better than a standard episode could have done.
That isn't because of good writing, they’re songs from an existing musical with a similar, if not identical premise, but the pacing is well done, the spoken segments do a good job of keeping the context of Riverdale at the forefront, both Betty and Alice are incredible singers, and the overall cinematography and choreography is exceptional, so my point still stands; this is absolutely at minimum the best musical episode of the series.
I’d bring forth the argument that she's probably one of the best written characters in the show, but I really don’t want to argue with a bunch of 14 year olds. Seeing how the reviews of Season 6 are somehow not just lower than Season 7, but the whole series, despite how much better written it is, is all the proof I need that the people on IMDB are all illiterate.
When the retrospectives inevitably come out about this show in 2034 or whatever, I hope she’s looked upon fondly.
…
Anyways, it kind of feels like they wanted an ending for the comics and not the show, and that ultimately left a really unsatisfying conclusion.
ANGEL!Tabitha is just a really funny concept to me since I get to type it out in the good old undertale AU way. Riverdale is the last show I expected to have time-travel, let alone a multiverse, and that’s always very amusing to me.
When Betty dies, why is the ending a weird glowing Pops like a suburban creepypasta and not more styled like the sweet hereafter seeing as that's the established endgame canon here?
Why was the whole town abandoned when she went back? I thought Riverdale was supposed to be good now?
I feel like I didn’t really get to say goodbye to the characters. Archie’s mom, Veronica’s parents, and anything regarding Jughead's family isn’t addressed at all. I know the actors didn’t want to return but they’re just not even talked about?
I really liked their send off in Season 5, it made sense, but now it’s just not something that ever happened.
They just decided to make Uncle Frank and Kevin’s dad gay and antagonistic figures with implied homosexual tendencies at the end and then had them die really brutally? What happened to the darkness in Riverdale being gone???
It was just kind of a rough ending for them especially; as people who weren't always perfect but still were good people at heart, especially with Kevin’s dad and how supportive he was of his son.
In some regards it’s sweet; They’re in their original time period.
It just feels a bit half assed in terms of cultural accuracy? Nothing is really 50’s (not that I would know, I’m British). Veronica says something about “the cat's pajamas” at one point and it was just really amusing to me.
They did make Veronica kind of lame for the final season… and it makes me sad….she’s probably my favourite character 2nd to Cheryl, probably because a lot of conflict is set with her personally.
The writers were just like “Oh well she’s always had a business so she can just do that all season” which is probably one of the most frustrating things about the show in general? Like, how are you managing a speakeasy, a rum business, deals with the mob, cheerleading, a professional singer and like, 9 million other things while still attending high school full time and co-operating with her friends murder investigations on a whim?
Granted she’s not doing them all at once, but she has at least 3 on the go in addition to attending school and solving crime.
I think the best thing the show did was age them up because it gave them a lot more freedom in what they could do, So I really resent the backtracking through the return to the 50’s element because it essentially nerfed all their capacity for intrigue and evolution of their characters.
Veronica owns a casino and a jewellery shop, and those make sense considering she has industry ties and experience in sales she acquired during the timeskip and now it's just like..
WHY DO WE HAVE CHARACTERS LESS DEVELOPED THAN THIER SEASON ONE COUNTERPARTS???????????????????
It’s so irritating to me.
Uh, so in the final episode, they introduce the idea that the main 4 were in a polycule for the rest of high school and that is just exceptionally funny.
Or at least it should be, but this is…
it’s kind of just like.
Oh.
Okay.
They BARELY interact the entire season and that’s probably the most disappointing thing this final season. It feels so bad. These are the main characters!!! They didn’t tackle everything together but they would always come together at one point or another. Everyone is just very preoccupied with their own shit in this season. Jughead interacts more with Ethel Muggs which is insane considering that they were trying to start a Vughead ship???
What if we didn’t do crackships in the actual show, why are you wasting my time with this???????
It’s not even compelling, because again, they have even less depth than than their Season 1 counterparts!!!!!!!!!!
They frame it as “well, since we have our old memories back, we should just pick up where we left off” and like…
Sure?
They’ve been queerbaiting V x B since the very first episode so I’m not super surprised they kept doing that on the side, but Jughead and Archie don’t kiss once and honestly I think that would’ve made the finale incredible.
Kevin gets a boyfriend in the form of a Season 7 original character, and that’s the end of his character arc. Toxic shit fr. It would have made way more sense to have been able to find his own happiness by doing what he was passionate about, and then found love after that, while Betty allows herself happiness and love in an (emotionally) open relationship that she was afraid to give and receive because she was scared of herself, but she never gets a partner and dies alone (she adopted a child but theres was never anything to suggest that she would ever want children? Like at all? She’s not a nurturing person really, especially with all the trauma she went through.)
Another thing is how much sex and sexualisation is present in the series.
Like.
I’ve said this before but I’m not against showing graphic things in media without being like, “dID yOu kNoW ThIs iS bAd?” because I’m a media literate person.
I also don’t need my ethics and morals defined and outlined for me through media, ( I feel like this is a bit of a problem recently, but that's not what I’m talking about right now) but also, I’m an adult, and these things I’m making reference to are present in adult media.
Betty has quite sadistic tendencies and this is shown quite early on as she dons a somewhat dominatrix coded persona for when she needs to show authority, and one of her minor character arcs is coming to terms with her sexual desires.
This progresses into her not-real-half-brother convincing her to make camgirl content as it’s something he does, to get these urges out, and it just feels a bit wrong and gross to depict these characters who are teenagers, without explaining how to do these things safely or the potential dangers of such actions.
You might think I’m being a prude but it actually gets worse.
Like for fucks sake, Kevin, who ends up doing this because his first date brings him to his house and says that he would pay him to record tickling videos ends up. After making a load of these videos, Kevin then ends up roping in about 30 people to make tickle fetish videos, where, as I quote “the girls can dominate the boys” like?????????????????
It’s not ever elaborated upon by an adult that what they were doing was highly disturbing and dangerous. Instead it was framed by the Headmaster as "You're giving our school a bad reputation” and that is NOT the issue.
If there was ever a reason for this guy to get in contact with parents, why was it not this???? He brought forth the PTA to ban prom and a musical, but this wasn’t an issue???????
There’s the additional context of them being completely unaware of what they were actually making, as, and I quote “They’re just tickling videos”.
This is obviously an issue if it was shut down, and no further comment or action is done to explain why.
Kevin is a victim.
Sex positivity is something that’s obviously important and something I encourage. But it also needs to be tackled and explained responsibly and for the most part it isn’t, ESPECIALLY since so much of it is about publishing this content online.
It feels, no, it IS highly irresponsible to depict things like this for your target audience of primarily teenagers.
Sorry to be ultra serious towards the end like this, but this is something that happens throughout and I couldn’t not address this.
So conclusions?
Overall, I really do think it’s a series worth getting into, even though it ended in like, 2023. Which isn’t that long ago? I had no idea it was such a long running show since I remember hearing about it as a young child.
I would’ve been 11.
Possibly a little too young to experience the highs and lows of high school football.
I definitely understand how growing up with a show like this shaped the lives of a lot of young people for strange campy nonsense and clearly a lot of people still regard it fondly, even when noting how bad it got in their opinion.
I think the worst thing about this is that I’ve integrated "cuckoo bananas” into my vocabulary and nobody will understand any references I’m invariably going to make in passing now that 300 hours of Riverdale exists near and deer to my heart.
I can’t joke about Dark Betty with anyone.
Sorry this issue has been so long! I had a lot of Riverdale to get off my chest, and some additional posts since I trashed one of my previous issues for being too vent-y.
It should’ve been grande.
I also didn't leave a music review for last week so here’s mine before i forget
Yoasobi But Its Lofi Remix Playlist Ur welcome
Also I found out we’re only getting a measly 5 Seasons of Hazbin Hotel, instead of a glorious 10 billion, and I’m honestly devastated.
At this point I don’t think I’ll be publishing that review, but TLDR:
- season 1 bad
- season 2, less bad
- what the fuck happened in the second half of Helluva Boss Season 2,
Happy Campers is also my HB favourite episode and I’m not apologising for loving peak fiction
If you read all of this, uh, thank you. I’m not the most talkative person IRL so this is my way of sharing my thoughts and feelings that I struggle to articulate with my mouth hole, and it’s nice to feel seen and heard.
Have a good morning or afternoon, or maybe you live in space so uh, good tidings?.