#Hirarchie

[horrorlesbion]

anyone else got worms in their brain

[sumquiasum]

riverdale fandom june 2024 after the invasion of the hirarchie anons, colourised

[normiewizard]

this is an esoteric one sorry to my followers who arent into the riverdale abuse cycles niche. but wrt the hirarchie kiss ask going around i do think its interesting that it goes without saying for everyone that hiram would kiss archie. and like yeah of course because hes obsessed with him and a monster and a loser creep and the whole hirarchie thing is generally a desire to explore archie's feelings of being taken advantage of by someone sexy and horrible. BUT i would like to pose a scenario where at some point, early in their partnership and still reeling from the black hood hurting fred and ms. grundy, archie goes in for a kiss. and hiram does not do anything at all but just knows that about archie for the rest of the show. that aould also be fucked up and interesting right

[saturnaftertaste]

I would like to hear your hirarchie opinions!

oh anon, you’re too sweet. you do spoil me so ♡

so, my take on hirarchie?

look. as a feminist, my first thought in the archie-ronnie-hiram subplot/relationship triangle will always be veronica. as such, my thoughts on hirarchie come from the angle of thinking about veronica, who is a very interesting figure in the case of the Jughead-Narrated Riverdale Universe.

first of all - veronica is a legacy outsider to Riverdale. i’ve mentioned this before, but out of s1’s protagonist cast, ronnie was the only one to not be white. not only this, but hiram’s history itself starts outside of riverdale. unlike betty | alice, archie | fred, cheryl | penelope, jughead | fp, veronica | hiram do not have history here. in fact, archie, betty, jughead, and cheryl all have direct ancestors who landed in riverdale in 1580 - i.e. as per colonial “american” practice, the town was “built” by them and their descendants.

so what role do the lodges play in all of this? the blossoms are rich, the andrews’ are good, the coopers are cunning and the joneses write the history, so what role do the lodges play in the existence of riverdale? are they even necessary for that existence? my point is this - nothing happens in riverdale until a lodge shows up.

think about it! we’ve seen riverdale prime start up twice - once in season 1, once in season 7. a lot of people pin jughead’s narration from s1 on jason blossom’s death (“little miss inciting incident”) but my take on this is that the starting point of any riverdale story is the entrance of a lodge. one of my main riverdale theories is that while the events of s1-4 are narrated by jughead, s5-7 are original written pieces by jughead within the meta of the river-verse. as given in the canon, jughead is not a very good writer - so to keep riverdale afloat from s5-7, the stories he tells are essentially ripped off from the first four of seasons, remixed and then re-presented: hence, when s7 starts in the 50s, it starts on the day when veronica comes to town, just like s1, except there is no murder; jason blossom doesn’t exist.

what does this have to do with archie? good question. i’m getting there (i promise. i hope).

this post by @/wallbeatjournal talks about how just because archie and hiram aren’t related, it doesn’t make it any less incestuous. that is what got me thinking about the riverdale citizens’ roles in their society. as the town pares down in terms of citizens, season by season, and the “following in. families’ footsteps” themes become more and more in-your-face, one must question the cycles and where they came from. interestingly enough, the modern-day riverdalians are 1-to-1 copies of their ancestors, with a specific focus on gender. the farthest ancestors shown are not patriarchal heads of houses— instead you have: asher andrews, blessing cooper, james jones, charity blossom. obviously, we do not know if these are “true”; as per my personal theory, this is all jughead making filler backstory for s6 bc he’s alone and trapped in an empty bunker trying to power a dead universe for himself. however, the genders and the naming conventions match our current protagonists. moving forward in time and referencing the parents of the riverdale citizens, all of them who have a historical colonial ancestor become one of their parents, usually looking like one of them as well, despite the end goal being to break out of their cycles of perpetual violence; usually, the parent they become is the one they share a gender with:

betty is the “gang leader’s girlfriend/perfect small-town girl/thrill-seeking investigator” -> all roles alice has occupied, in that order. notice how despite hal’s attempted influence on her, she does not become a serial killer.

jughead is the “writer/gang leader/scholarship kid/alcoholic” -> roles both F.P and his grandfather occupied. he is incapable of leaving riverdale permanently, like F.P., but unlike gladys who left prior to any inciting incident.

cheryl is the “alive half of a pair/center of tragedy/repressed rich kid/witch” -> roles occupied by penelope blossom as more of the story is unveiled, reflecting cheryl’s life? or cheryl reflecting penelope? (remember, clifford blossom dies before s1 is up, so in this way, jason and clifford match in that they are the Dead ones.)

(remember, this is all through the jughead lens, so it’s all subjective. anyway)*

so where does that leave archiekins and veronica?

veronica is interesting, like i said before. she has no colonial ancestor; her ties to riverdale do not extend beyond hiram’s own. in fact, you could say that veronica and hiram have no ties to riverdale at all, since it was jaime luna that came to riverdale, and hiram lodge who left to manhattan after he married hermione.

veronica is also interesting in that she’s the only one out of the main cast to not be the same gender as her primary-complex-relationship parent. although hiram is not present for season 1, most of veronica’s conflict still stems from his existence as her father. veronica is a girl, yet she does not resemble hermione in her riverdale role**; she is her father’s daughter, constantly actively fighting him while mirroring his own traits. the owning of businesses, the murderous intent, the guns for hire (reggie, circa s3?) thé illegal activity? the mob interactions? she is not a gangster’s moll like hermione ends up as; she is the gangster. remember that episode when they all got sent to therapy in the guise of “college counseling” in their senior year? it’s openly stated that one interpretation of hiram and veronica’s relationship is combative, and that hiram doesn’t see her as an extension of himself, but rather an outside agent who might take his place (hence veronica has to “beat” him to win.)

all this to say that the lodges are, on a narrative level, instigators. (the party don’t start till i walk in! - veronica lodge, 2017) not the blossoms. veronica comes to town, and the story starts. hiram comes to town, and veronica and hiram start fighting on various battlegrounds, for some unnamed, constantly shifting purpose. the lodges do not belong in riverdale, and the story is aware of this, but the story/the town also knows that it cannot exist in reality without the lodges jumpstarting it’s existence. only one lodge can bring back the other (veronica in riverdale brings hiram to riverdale; hiram’s nefarious plans for sunnydale truly bring veronica back to riverdale); only one lodge can get rid of the other (hiram attempts to send veronica to harvard, veronica chases him out of town with the shotgun AND orders a hit on him), and yet - the town needs one lodge to keep things moving (the juvenile prison, the speakeasy under pops. the sunnydale development project, the babylonium) the lodges are the only access to growth and change the town has. otherwise, it sits on its haunches, repeatedly producing people who are named like their ancestors and look&behave like their parents.

all except for one person; the one person who becomes the rope in the lodges’ metaphorical game of tug-of-war.

see, archie, through the jughead lens, is special. archie is complex. where everyone else has to be bent to fit a stereotype (girl next door, rich girl, tragic victim, mindless jock, gay best friend), jughead’s narration expands to fill in the gaps about archie (he was a victim? he was clout-chasing football star? a musician? a folk hero?every government service? he fought a bear???) archie, i think, is the only one he allows free will/choices—archie is his protagonist, so he must have a story, but also is the object of his affection. hence, archie “tries” to be like his perception of his father (“good” “kind”, “strong”, male) but often ends up behaving like his mother (leaves people, bisexual***, protective, desperate for the american dream****, redheaded) while also making other choices - presumably, those choices were based in the reality that jughead is recording from s1-s4, and everyone’s actions around archie’s choices are folded into their characters to the fit the stereotypes and story arcs they inhabit.

so what happens when an instigator meets the only other person in their path who has free will? when veronica comes into contact with archie, she jumpstarts the betty/archie thing that supposedly has been simmering for years. when hiram comes into contact with archie, archie unlocks a new ability to take matters into his own hands. veronica consistently enables the choices that archie makes, whether good or bad, and hiram constantly unlocks new levels of action in archie, whether good or bad.

hiram’s influence on archie is obviously paralleled with hiram’s own story, but instead of inflicting it on his daughter who he comes into conflict with, he tries to instigate new levels of action from archie. i think if hiram had had a son, riverdale as a story would cease to exist because the point of lodges, (and i do mean lodges, not lunas) is to be different, even to each other - hence them creating change. riverdale’s near-all-white population in hiram’s years? he moves there, and now the town has someone new and different to them in poverty. his daughter comes to riverdale, and all of a sudden the entire social balance and relationship structures of the town’s youth are upended, because she’s new and different to them and rich. he becomes a lodge; she becomes a luna. he pushes archie to take action (i.e, red circle); she takes actions for archie (raising money for the community center). if veronica had been a son, chances are he would’ve followed so completely in hiram’s steps that he wouldn’t have come to riverdale at all.

why else would they fight as equals? only one of them can be in riverdale at a time. otherwise, they cancel out - hiram puts archie in prison, ronnie gets him out. hiram buys pop’s? ronnie buys pop’s back. and so on and so forth.

hirarchie exists and functions because hiram is one of the only two factors the town can rely on for any kind of change, and archie is jughead’s clumsy (remember he’s a bad writer!) projection of the town’s soul onto his best friend; thus archie is at the mercy of the lodges because the town wishes to express itself through a story, and a story requires conflict, something that cannot be produced without the presence of an outsider.

*the jughead lens is both misogynistic and apathetic but most importantly it’s simplistic. jughead himself does not make it as a writer in nyc beyond his one book - this is because he is unable to write characters that cannot eventually be folded into one-dimensional tropes that are very obviously props for his own opinions and desires.

**side note: while hermione does not have any ancestors mentioned in historical riverdale, someone matching a younger version of her/teenage veronica does exist in rivervale. this, along with teenage hermione’s description of her mother’s job cleaning houses in the “midnight club” episode, establishes that hermione may have been here longer than hiram — and yet, veronica only follows hiram’s patterns, not hermione or her unnamed grandmothers’.

***bisexuality is presumed on account of the interest-in-reggie-and-jughead sub?text and the absence-is-presence of jarchie in the polycule from s7.

****it is implied that mary explores her sexuality after she leaves fred (at least, that’s how i remember it, please correct me if i’m wrong) and the marrying fred and settling into the american dream as fast as possible draws parallels with archie being desperate to maintain “normal” - the wedding fantasies with veronica in s2, the trying to make it work with betty in s5, the insistence on a baby in s6 - this, apart from the red hair, is the greatest similarity archie has with his mother.

[wallbeatjournal]

THOUGHT EXERCISE TIME you have to script one (1) hiram/archie kiss into the existing show somewhere. no plot impact at all, it's never going to be brought up again onscreen it just becomes part of the overall texture of everything that's already going on in canon between them. where does it go, for maximum high camp and/or dramatic impact (double spaced on lined paper by friday eod)

i think my answer is any archie dream sequence/hallucination but especially during the 3x09 no exit "kill the man in black" scene. direct joaquin callback/parallel as archie kisses hiram before he stabs him, INTENSE emotional transition into archie in his childhood bedroom violently repressing the parts of himself he doesn't like with a baseball bat in front of his dad.

and then he never does anything with it! never addresses it consciously ever. no unpacking of what it actually means if part of him thinks he should/could/would kiss hiram lodge. nope! bottled up and buried! moving on!

(doing it during the football war dream sequence in 5x04 is super super potent too. just color archie's entire return to riverdale differently. make it even WEIRDER when he and hiram finally do face off on the football field while cheryl performs lady gaga stupid love and they make heavy eye contact timed to the look at me look at me lyrics like they're in an amv)

[veronicalodgefaghag]

"THOUGHT EXERCISE TIME you have to script one (1) hiram/archie kiss into the existing show somewhere. no plot impact at all, it's never going to be brought up again onscreen it just becomes part of the overall texture of everything that's already going on in canon between them. where does it go, for maximum high camp and/or dramatic impact (double spaced on lined paper by whenever)"

Well?

Didn’t answer this ask back when it was going around cause I wasn’t into Riverdale enough at the time to feel prepared to answer it. I’m on a riverblogging kick tonight and it’s been weighing on me so here goes:

My personal favorite answer is @normiewizard ’s post about Archie going for it earlyish in the grand scheme of things and Hiram just Knowing That about him and Having That Over him for the rest of the show, that was a stroke of genius on their part that makes me fucking insane.

As to answering the question for myself, so much has already been covered by more adept hirarchie scholars than I, so I’m gonna go with my gut feeling from the very beginning and say my answer from the very beginning of this question going around has been the possibly very basic scenario of “Archie kisses Hiram during the stabbing dream in No Exit.” As a first half of season 3 scholar before any other area with this show, and an Archie scholar this is just the obvious answer to me. I love Hiram as much as the next guy and am very interested in him because I’m obsessed with Archie and Veronica, but I don’t feel I know him quite well enough as a character. Whereas, I know Archie very well. Hirarchie is most interesting to me as the result of Archie’s relationship with Grundy and its/her shaping of him, so Archie’s desire for him which Hiram is quite aware of, finds amusing, plays into (and don’t get me wrong, Hiram is attracted to Archie of course, and as many have said, there was a sexual relationship there in the show on our screens if you’re watching one way. To think there are some people to whom Archie being forced to fight in a secret underground prison fight club is not forced sexual violence… we live in different worlds.) is most interestingly explored from the Archie’s character side of things in a situation like this where we are not seeing Hiram’s true reaction to anything, but Archie’s mind’s Hiram. To actually answer the question, I think that Archie comes into the room, picks up the knife and kisses Hiram as he holds it between them. Hiram’s sly smile in this scene is then a reflection of the knowing way he plays Archie wrt his desire for him and his vulnerability resulting from the Grundy relationship. We go to the shot of their shadows on the wall now, and shots of their faces and the knife stabbing in. Yes, Joaquin parallels but also season 6 Archiereggie stabbing to death/gay sex parallels. I also think that Hiram should be awful about it (Archie’s desire for him) in some way in Archie’s imagination, because Archie’s dreams in that episode are all cruel to him because he is cruel to himself, but specifically because the kiss alone (despite the stabbing) could convey the wrong idea about what Archie thinks of Hiram kind of? If that makes sense?

I think No Exit is perfect if we’re talking about it never being mentioned in the show like you’ve prompted because so much of that episode is never mentioned again. Archie’s dream sequences in No Exit lay bare so much of his subtextual conflict that is never brought up again and doesn’t really add to anything because it all already underlies his whole story—his having to kill his “soft” self most importantly, but also, like the other core three showing up in their first episode outfits, “are you working on any new music, Arch?” pushing the show to finally acknowledge that he does. not. do that anymore after so much of his story revolves around music for the first season. This is of course another thing Hiram is responsible for in large part. So then this sojourn of his from Riverdale, spurred by an event which involved his being kissed by Joaquin, during which he runs away with Jughead (acknowledged by the show as making then look queer), ending with his subconscious instigating a Hiram/Archie kiss that never gets mentioned again but sets the final tone for his return to Riverdale as a man revived from death works so beautifully to me.

I’m really torn on whether I think that, in this hypothetical version of the show, they have kissed outside of that offscreen, or they eventually do or what. Like is this Archie taking his own control of something Hiram already physically uses against him as he kills him? Is this him acknowledging not only his homosexual desire but the homoerotic capacity/side of the relationship with Hiram only in his near-death subconscious? Tangentially relatedly, what if Grundy is the game master who hands him the “kill the Man in Black” card instead of the warden who’s another of his dead sexual abusers anyway?

[ladyculebras]

i saw you put riverdale on ur fandom list for prompts for the spotify fic meme, so riverdale (dealers choice on ship) #17

This is Love - Air Traffic Controller || spotify fic meme

Forget everything you used to know I think you better tell your friends to go Stick around 'cause I'm about to show you The beginning is the end

you gave me free reign, so I hope Archie/Hiram vibes is okay. Set during Prisoners. 

Hiram cups his hand around Archie’s chin and tilts the boy’s head back, getting a good look at his wounded face. Bruised face, tender swollen skin around his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. Blood dirtying his sincere face in dark red splotches. Jaw set in a hard, stubborn line. 

“You sure don’t know when to quit, do you?” He tells him.

Archie swallows, throat working, but doesn’t answer. He acquiesces to Hiram’s touch, two fingers on his chin, tilting his head back to survey the column of his throat, the veins jumping under his gaze. 

Archie lets himself be examined—he’s a good boy like that. 

Hiram opens his palm wide, the warm wide expanse of his hand covering Archie’s cheek. He presses a thumb to the bruising there, right above the smear of blood on his face. He watches the pain flash across Archie’s eyes, but he doesn’t flinch. He looks Hiram right in the eye. 

“I’m fine, sir,” he says, voice hoarse. He stands up straight, full height, towering over Hiram. How deferential Archie can be, even with inches of height over Hiram. 

“We should check your ribs,” Hiram says, perfunctory. He removes his hand to place his palm on the side of Archie’s sternum, feeling for bones under the threadbare shirt, stretched tight over his body, torn in places. He feels more than hears the aborted gasp Archie makes against his touch but still, he doesn’t flinch away from the pain. Hiram slowly drags his long fingers across Archie’s ribs, counting them one by one. Archie’s breath goes reedy the longer his touch lingers, but he does as he’s told. 

He tells Archie to go to his study for further care, a hand on his shoulder guiding him and urging him along. 

Veronica is waiting for him outside the door, arms folded across her chest. Her face softens for Archie, turning her into the picture of pure teenage Madonna innocence, but as Archie enters the study, Hiram lingers outside the door by his daughter. The look on her face twists, turns to cool rage as their eyes meet. 

“What are you doing to him?” She asks.  

Veronica is a storm of fury, gnashing teeth, her beautiful brown eyes locked in cold fury as they gaze at him. He can anticipate her line of questioning—how could you do this, how could you let this happen? She is still a little too young to understand what Archie and him are doing. To understand a young man who desperately needs to prove himself. 

See, Archie isn’t angry that he denied him the ramson. Archie understands.

He smiles at her, keeping his expression genial and beatific. “Nothing you wouldn’t do,” he tells her. 

I’m gonna take your boyfriend, Mija, he thinks, right out from under you. 

He closes the door in her face. 

[the-epic-hiram-lows]

a time loop curse is placed on a riverdale character of your choosing. who would you hit with it and when?

due to brand awareness, i am obligated to say s2 hirarchie.

they live out their dark, arguably erotic mentorship over and over and over. lines blur. hiram takes advantage of the situation.

[sumquiasum]

His eyes was his tools and his smile was his gun But all he had come for was having some fun

[saturnaftertaste]

what if hiram and archie but they're both girls

what if we were hiram and archie . and we were both girls

interesting premise, anon! it could go lots of different ways imo. really depends on the configuration. see one of the things that really creates the unique dynamic of hiram/archie is the fact that it’s built on the very patriarchal patterns of father-son relationships and ALSO the mafia/mob/cartel whatever (crime rings, essentially, are a male business.)

(there is also the question of race, but.)

hiram is brought into the mob the same way that archie is turned into a capo in season 2. i think before anything else, that is what shapes their dynamic that hiram does Wrong and archie Tries to Do Right. that’s the thing that shapes the entirety of season 2, right? archie wants to Do Right (protect fred) -> hiram offers him a way to do that by Doing Wrong (suggesting he start a vigilante group). archie then gets sucked into hiram’s world, with the lure of what i would call very male narrative motivations (this doesn’t mean these apply to men alone, but in fiction, are often seen as inherent traits for a male character to have) such protectiveness - over fred and veronica, power - over those who would seek to hurt fred and veronica. there was a point somewhere in the thousands of meta posts i’ve devoured in the last two days that fred getting shot makes him weak in archie’s eyes, and that hiram’s traditionally “powerful” persona becomes very attractive to him in the time following the fred incident.

have you ever heard of the theory of homosociality, anon?

the thing about the mafia, like i said before, is that it is a predominantly male business. the women, like hermione often cites in s2 to veronica, are supposed to stand behind their man as he makes his moves. the issue with hiram is the same issue that logan roy had in succession, which is that he had no acceptable male heir, so he does, again, what logan roy did: used his idiot son-in-law as a conduit for power. (idiot here used affectionately for archie, derogatory for tom wambsgans) what’s interesting to me is that hiram obviously prides himself on veronica having turned out to be such a cunning, self-sufficient young woman - and while this frustrates him as well, i have to believe that as some point he must’ve considered handing his empire over to her. but the fact remains that ultimately the mafia is a male business, and archie-and-veronica would’ve been a really odd, controlling couple because veronica would be running everything from behind archie’s stature. she does so, even, with nick st. clair and the speakeasy/casino side hustle in s2. she still has to rely on a man to pull the strings.

you know the riverdale genre theory? because of the way that hiram’s entire character is constructed around the mafia, and by extension, so is veronica’s relationship with archie, i think a lot of archie and hiram’s relationship has to specifically with their gender. think about it - none of the women on riverdale have such an intense relationship with the girls on the show who aren’t their daughters. even though alice HATES hermione and veronica, she doesn’t do anything more than forbid betty from being friends with veronica. mary doesn’t really interact with veronica the same way that hiram does with archie. gladys never even comes into meaningful contact with betty - for that matter, neither does hermione. all the girls have very complex minefield-esque relationships with their mothers, but none of the rivermoms ever reach out to the other daughters.

i would say on some level archie and hiram’s relationship cannot be replicated if they were female; say, for example, that hiram were to be woman, and still married to hermione; a lesbian mob boss would always be fighting her way into again, what is predominantly a male space. i don’t think she would’ve had the time to groom female!archie the same way into becoming her capo, because it wouldn’t supplement her position in the mafia to have more female capos. i believe if hiram were female, also, and veronica was still her daughter, there would be no focus on female archie (veronica’s gf in this scenario) and instead, veronica would have a very fraught, tense relationship with hiram instead, because hiram would be actively trying to groom her to take over the empire (?) instead of spoiling her and treating her as someone who would eventually marry into a different position of power. veronica would then fight hiram on all these things, because her girlfriend archie would be protesting against all the evil things that fem!hiram is doing, because fem!archie would be able to see it from the outside of the relationship. riverdale loves a mother-daughter struggle.

if, say, instead, this was a genderswap situation, where hermione is male and hiram is female, and veronica is male and archie is female, i believe nothing would really come of it either. again, fem!archie would be trying to convince veronica that male!hermione is evil, but male veronica would’ve been indoctrinated a long time ago. hiram being female and archie being female completely sap all the tension from their relationship, because all of a sudden fem!hiram would be using her cunning to ensure male!hermione stayed on top of everything, and fem!archie would be busy trying to ensure male!veronica wouldn’t succumb to the dark side. they would simply never interact! riverdale wouldn’t put them in the same room, even. it is possible i just lack imagination; but i just think the layers of repression and violence that form archie and hiram just don’t click in the same way if they were women. i don’t know.

(i do think, though, that fem!hiram would be a very possessive boymom over male!veronica. perhaps there’s something there? fem!hiram beefing with fem!archie over male!veronica’s attention? even so, riverdale, for all its female characters, doesn’t really do non-familial intergenerational interactions all that much. i have a jughead-meta reason for why this is, but that’s a story for a different time.)

[wallbeatjournal]

If they'd have chosen to just be straight up about it, when in the canon timeline do you think is the most likely place narratively for hirarchie to have gone sexual?

i've said before i think season 2 is already a grooming narrative with a subtextual consummation, but if i'm actually script-doctoring what we've got across the whole series to have hirarchie fuck nasty as a shocking and trashy and high-aesthetic plot development, i'm going to argue that it's more satisfying if we don't have an explicit archie cheating plot at this stage in the story. it works better as an emotional affair. (saying this bc to the characters i think it would be first and foremost about the complication of cheating, not bc that's the biggest problem with hiram/archie.)

imo riverdale should have done it as a mid-seasons escalation in season four. give us a season or two to really sit with how unhinged and obsessed hiram is about archie and then decode it in the worst and most extreme bad taste like the second archie turns 18.

putting my season 4 hirarchie proposal below the cut since it got quite long:

the s4 dodger plot is...extremely uneven and feels a bit cobbled-together on the fly by a writing team grappling with the death of luke perry and the in-universe death of fred andrews, and whether it would be respectful to keep being super weird about hiram in the wake of all that. but there are still useful components in the dodger arc - archie is the oliver twist in the oliver twist riff happening*, a boy "orphaned" without reliably engaged, aware parents who was groomed into criminality and doesn't see a way out without a wealthy benefactor. lean into that!

it can happen as hiram starts working out at archie's gym, mysteriously ill in a dickensian sort of way. riverdale's favorite weird incestuous overtones come into play especially hard if we're considering season four hirarchie, when it can really only be largely about fred for archie and holding on to/deepening a relationship with the sometimes-father-figure he has left. archie has been trying so hard to be a good brick in this monument of fred's legacy but it feels impossible because the only tools that come naturally are violence and sexuality and appealing to benefactors, so why not get a little nihilistic-horny with it.

he's also frankly already being a pretty bad boyfriend to veronica this season, it's stale, they're bickering, they don't have emotional intimacy the way he used to have emotional intimacy with hiram during what he probably still unfortunately remembers as their best days......i just don't think he'd be guilt-ridden about fuck-nastying veronica's dad at this point the way he would have been in season 2 when fred's cheating was the big looming legacy beat to avert and goodboyism seemed like an achievable and real thing archie could prove to others.

this is also i think when indulging in fuck-nasty hirarchie would be least damaging/difficult an option for hiram - he's ill and wants to feel vital again, he's ill and he wants archie to remember and honor him when he's gone the way he remembers and lionizes fred (he knows this isn't possible and that makes him resentful and apt to grasp at another form of intimacy that wasn't available to fred). he's feeling aggression towards his daughter, who is leaving him (by going to college) as much as he might be leaving her (by dying of a mysterious illness). it's a big complicated sick emotional motivations stew and both archie and hiram are looking at getting left behind to cook in it while the rest of the core four move forward in life.

and it would be hot. archie and hiram in the gym "personal training" (gone sexual) with weird grief-hate-reconciliation-validation sex would be hot. archie and hiram doing vigilante violence and then making out in sketchy alleys would be hot. are you kidding me?

all of this would make archie even weirder about hiram's illness and tenser in discussions with veronica about what to do about hiram's illness, and i do think barcheating would still happen - it's escapism/avoidance from what's going on within varchie, it's escapism/avoidance from what's going on within hirarchie, and archie is primed to be impulsive. so we still get barcheating fallout but MORE.

does veronica find out archie hooked up with her dad when they all thought her dad was dying? maybe! maybe she feels more sorrow and guilt (irrationally, about being the conduit bringing hiram into archie's life in the first place) than personal betrayal. or maybe she does feel very betrayed and that's an additional factor in everything (especially archie choosing to run away to the military. sorry everyone i know i've disappointed you all deeply and am very fucked up. instead of talking it out i will simply Leave).

all of this fuck-nastyism of course would make hiram's reaction to the barcheating that much more intense and outsized. veronica was feeling her relationship with archie wane already but hiram was IN IT. he's getting well, he's fighting again, he's offered archie a job, archie is about to be his main special interest while veronica and hermione drift and archie would CHEAT on him?? he's only supposed to be cheating WITH him!!!!

and then we segue into season 5 post-timejump when the riveradults are all kind of weird with each other but moving through it, and hiram has been behaving like a jilted ex throwing a temper tantrum for 7 years. and he will certainly continue.

*i think everyone notices but the dickinson crew is mostly named in reference to the gang of thieves who adopts and trains oliver - the artful dodger, fagan, bill. intertextuality, yippee!

[theultimatewildcard]

What do you think of hirarchie now? Do you think of hirarchie now?

i think of hirarchie every day, anon. every day.

what specifically do i think of it now? so so many things it's hard to put into words, it's such a layered dynamic and represents so much in the show. for now i am focusing on the abuse/reshaping hiram forced upon archie and his immense impact on archie's life and self-conceptualisation of his identity , so basically attempting a mini-essay version of my greatest achievement in amv creation (my hirarchie would've could've should've by t swift amv). so if this doesn't make sense. basically just watch that.

i think what makes hirarchie so compelling is that hiram is possibly the single most impactful character on archie's entire life and plot throughout the show. he is constantly getting groomed and exploited by authorities (grundy -> hiram -> the army), but hiram is the longest running of those and continues to plague archie even in his dreams well into his 20s after not seeing hiram for years!!

we watch archie go from a kid who just loves music and his friends to a young man who conceptualises his entire self through violence and his capacity for evil, largely (or perhaps entirely) due to hiram's influence, intentionally trying to disassemble archie and build him back up in the attack-dog image he sees fit, starting immediately in season 2 when he suggests archie take the black hood issue into his own hands, and continuing to reinforce this over and over (making archie his capo, sending him to juvie fight club, assigning him a fantasy identity and defining him through violence with the red paladin boxing match, being the reason archie missed senior year and couldn't graduate, which is what lead him to joining the army, etc etc etc)

all the riverdale kids experience extreme trauma but i think archie's hiram-related trauma is the clearest narrative line, you can really follow it through and see all the direct lines and echoes of hiram in archie's mind and choices as he grows up and into adulthood. it's just so clear and satisfying as a piece of the riverdale trauma plot/symbolism puzzle, and there is always more and more to unpack upon every rewatch.

and that is without even touching on the many other things going on with hirarchie - the fact that hiram is the one to instigate this rivalry with a TEEN basically over masculinity, the (sexual) grooming subtext that is constantly lurking right there, the #cycles we see in their life parallels, the veronica of it all, etc. these things all tie in to each other and you cannot really ever have any one without the others but i haven't had breakfast and we would truly be here all day.

[veronicas-reading-glasses]

Thoughts on hirarchie?

i’ve been waiting for someone to send in an ask about this actually lol. i have MANY thoughts about hirarchie so i might write a longer post about it.

hirarchie is just so, so tragic. it is fucked up and messy and sad. the blood oath thing in season 2 specifically fucks me up. also archie’s dream after the time jump in season 5 omg … i could have a long discussion about that. do i ship it?? not at all. however, as a girl who is super interested in riverdale character trauma studies, of course i’d be interested in reading random tumblr posts about hirarchie lol

[thrillhoues]

Always surprise me that Hiram / Archie didn't blow up during the height of Riverdale. It's such a dumb crackship that coulda become huge

[curlytemple]

why isn't hirarchie summer thriving?

oh that’s not what i meant. hirarchie summer isnt thriving because it’s a crackship. it’s thriving for other reasons.

that being said i am really not the one to get into it. and actually i think i would like to ask to be excluded from the hiram lodge anon game from here on out lol

[the-epic-hiram-lows]

last 10 song listens as riverdale things?

I answered this yesterday, but luckily I have been listening to a ton of music today, so I can give a brand new answer. Feel free to ask again later, because I'm been doing a lot of listening these days.

Ricky DeSantos

Cavetown- Boys Will Be Bugs

Archie Andrews

Grizzly- Owner of a Lonely Heart

Cheryl Blossom

Roar- Heart for Brains

(Dark?) Jarchie

Cults- Always Forever

Archie Andrews being a perpetual martyr

Gang of Youths- Achilles Come Down

Jughead Jones

Sidney Gish- Sin Triangle

Early Veronica Lodge/Varchie

Poppy- Lowlife

Hirarchie?

Emma Shapplin- The Lovers

Archie's drinking phase

DellaXOZ- sad times, grow up

The Farm

Deerhunter- Revival