#team alice idec

[thisischaostragic]

(putting the remainder of my liveblogging in one post so as to not bother the mutuals)

OH OH OH OH IS BETTY GONNA RUN INTO JUGHEAD WHILE INVESTIGATING ETHEL'S HOUSE?? HM??? ARE THEY GONNA FALL IN LOVE???? BERONICAHEAD???? HMMMMMM???????

ok i actually hate Vughead but like I want Betty to have them both and if that's the price I have to pay, so be it

"Cheryl, are you in danger?" "no more than usual" right so that was some of the most heartbreaking dialogue of all time. good. IMMEDIATELY followed up by Cheryl saying "also I went to the mines last night". i love riverdale.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BUGHEAD MYSTERY TEAM IDEC IF THEY DATE I JUST NEED THEM TO INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER I'LL DO ANYTHING I'LL SELL MY SOUL TO THAT GUY WHO IS SATAN IN S6 PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Ms. Archie's Lesbian Mom will you pleaseeeeeeeee kill Frank 🥺

"He's on the road to ruin!" evil uncle Frank Andrews have you ever considered that your melodrama is a little bit fruity??? hm???? have you considered going to the mines and never returning??? hMMMM?????

YESSSSS KICK HIM OUT OF YOUR HOUSE MS. ARCHIE'S LESBIAN MOM!!!!!

Hal and his obnoxious ass family secrets, turning many of my favorite queer Betty ships into incest because he hates gay people

Alice Cooper please STOP having actually sad reasons for doing terrible things to your kids???? I wanna throw you off a radio tower

"I failed you" literally yeah you did please stop crying

Betty :( baby :( you don't have to forgive her :( :( :( no :( Betty :(

YESSSS ETHEL SAY NO!!!!!

"you always were the best partner in crime" I'm gonna sob violently. twist the bughead knife a little harder, why don't you??????

so... no bomb?

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

thanks to a conversation with @declermontdiana i’m now thinking about the end of riverdale s2 and where all the characters were at after the chaos in town and the black hood reveal, and i think it’s time to talk about the fact that alice was perfectly positioned to be pulled into a cult.

because while she was vulnerable to the farm because of how traumatized she was, i’ve never seen a discussion of the way that she was also incredibly, horribly alone in the face of nearly being murdered by her husband and finding out he was the source of the town’s terror for all that time.

yes, we know that betty was trying to look after her, but not being able to pull herself together around betty could only have added ‘i suck as a mom’ feelings to alice’s emotional problems in the immediate aftermath. despite what betty thinks because she’s spent her life trying to be everything to everyone, alice would actually be a worse parent if she were using betty for friendship and emotional support, because that shouldn’t be her teenage daughter’s role.

and yes, polly also came and offered her support and potential help. but despite being a mom already, polly is her teenage daughter too, who she shouldn’t expect to lean on, so it makes sense that alice would be more likely to throw all her trust in with the adults in the cult that polly eased her into.

but why, after everything she had been through, would she decide to trust and get help from total strangers? we focus so much on the fact that she was an easy target, like her instability after hal and fake-charles and even polly is the only factor. but alice’s openness to the cult because of what happened to her is just part of it--the world around her matters too.

and the reality of it is that alice let the farm become her most trusted support system because nobody else was there for her.

alice doesn’t have a single female friend in riverdale. though she and sierra probably have the least antagonistic dynamic, that doesn’t make them friends...and hermione, mary, and penelope make it very clear how they feel about her. obviously there are valid reasons why she’s not well-liked, but having made more enemies than friends doesn’t change the fact that alice is a mess after hal and in need of sympathy and support.

arguably, the two people in town who you’d most expect might care about how alice is doing after she’s nearly strangled to death by her husband are fp and fred. with fp, there’s all the history and obvious feelings that s3 showed us were still there even after their affair ended...and fred has both known her forever and is a genuinely nice guy. he may snark back when alice is being a jerk about archie, but it’s hard for me to believe that he wouldn’t check in on his next door neighbor who’s just been through a tragedy.

however, that’s where the events of s2 really conspire to leave alice totally isolated. fp’s son is in the hospital barely alive, and fp dove into a losing fight with a rival gang--he’s in no shape to immediately rush to her side, even once word does reach him about hal. meanwhile, fred was hal’s first victim. he nearly died thanks to alice’s husband, which i imagine would make it hard to offer her unsolicited support, even though fred assures betty she’s not to blame when it comes up.

now personally for the sake of human decency, i think it’s totally crappy that alice was left alone in that house to suffer. i don’t care how little she was liked in town, anybody who’s nearly murdered should get checked on by someone. but as far as we’re aware, that doesn’t happen. after hal tries to kill alice, the only people who come to her door are reporters looking for more scandal. (you could argue that this part is a twisted kind of karma given how often alice’s reporting reveled in others’ pain, but that shouldn’t mean she’s also without other visitors.)

when you really think about it in context, alice and the farm make even less sense. the last thing alice cooper should want to do is trust a stranger just because her daughter vouches for him--the last time she did that, she had to bleach her whole kitchen! and by the end of s2, she’s found out that she can’t trust the last twenty years of her life, the most intimate partner she had, or her own judgement.

only desperation can explain her throwing herself into the arms of polly’s new friends, when she must have the worst trust issues she’s ever had in her life.

but honestly, of course she’s desperate. her entire carefully-crafted life unraveled a piece at a time over the last three years. she lost her older daughter to the blossoms, her younger daughter to the serpents, her husband to madness or evil or both depending on how you look at it, her credibility at her job once her history was revealed, and her rekindling with fp because they’re both idiots who can’t get it together. she wasn’t even left with a shred of normalcy--or the facade of it that made her life worthwhile before.

alice smith became alice cooper who reinvented herself again and again once things started falling apart, and it’s not clear if even she knows who she really is deep down. so she’s heading fast toward middle age, with very little to show for it, living in a house full of ruined memories with no one to talk to, and no reason to believe any of the other adults in riverdale would be there for her if she did reach out.

in the aftermath, all she has is one daughter she didn’t protect from her own father, who she never knows how to save...and another who’s offering her hope.

it’s terrible that she took it, as is everything alice has done since the farm became the center of her world. i don’t know anyone who’s blindly trying to defend her s3 behavior, or who isn’t expecting an awful reckoning someday.

but at the same time, of course she accepted the help that edgar evernever was reaching out to her, during the absolute lowest period in her life.

he was the only one who offered.