Riverdale’s Queer Problem

Each of this show’s main characters succumbs to worn-out tropes.

I wrote last month about issues with sexuality in Greg Berlanti’s superhero shows—the CW-owned franchise of Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl. This week, Berlanti’s take on the Archie comics debuted on the channel. Both he and Riverdale’s writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa are gay men, but the first episode is a compendium of bad queer tropes—both the same pitfalls as his other shows and new problems. Some have been written about already, but there are lots of issues to comb through, so I’m taking each character in turn.

Archie

I haven’t read the comics this show is based on, but I have seen enough to know they have a dorky charm, and that Archie is drawn rather average—a bit short and baby-faced, a bit ginger-with-freckles. In keeping with its leading men to date, the CW makes him muscular and modellike—and with a football storyline straight out of Smallville, insistently heteromasculine. In the scene where Archie is first mentioned, it takes the characters fifteen seconds to call him a ‘millennial straight guy’, such is the script’s need to establish its main character isn’t queer.

This is one of the problems I’ve discussed in Greg Berlanti’s shows: while all the CW’s superhero series include queer people, they’re only ever secondary characters, while the leads’ straightness remains cast-iron (even when same sex romances make more dramatic sense than the het ones they’re saddled with). The person who describes Archie as straight is persuading a girl to ask him out—the fact he might say yes is what the story is about, but there’s no indication he doesn’t also like boys. In Riverdale as in the Arrowverse, bisexuality doesn’t exist.

Kevin

The person in question—the other half of the straight-lead-queer-supporting-part duumvirate—is Kevin Keller, who broke ground in the comics as a gay character with his own strip. In the series, he appears to be the only main character who isn’t straight, and both of Archie’s love interests—safe Betty and risqué Veronica—behave like he’s their pet. (‘Let’s be best friends!’ Veronica exclaims on finding out seconds after she first meets him.) So far, Kevin works solely as a token GBF, and is even referred to in those terms. Lampshading the problem doesn’t solve it.

Toward the end, Kevin heads somewhere private with a boy who says he’s not gay and wants to do everything but kiss: ‘I love a good closet case,’ he replies. Shows written by gay men often make versions of that joke, and I’m not wholly cool with it—but as soon as they start to undress by the lake, a plot device washes ashore. The gay character doesn’t actually get to have sex—the scene is only there so he’s in the right place to make a necessary discovery—but more troublingly, his emotional response to the thing he finds is never shown. Again, Kevin has no life of his own.

Betty and Veronica

One of Kevin’s owners, Betty Cooper, is person discussing Archie with him at the start. This version of Betty is a rare female Nice Guy, who seems to think being a good friend to Archie means he’s required to love her, and acts as if the rest of the world has to wait while she seduces him in her own time. By the end of the episode, soothing her bruised feelings is other people’s job, so that when Archie says he can’t be with her and she demands to know why, he tells her he’s not good enough for someone so perfect. If Betty Cooper is your girl next door, move house.

Trailers for the series showed Betty and Veronica kissing passionately, leading to hopes bisexuality might be part of this show—only for the episode to show it as an attention-grabbing ploy, playing to common-or-garden biphobia. (Another character even calls their liplock ‘faux-lesbian’. Again, lampshading bad tropes doesn’t get you off the hook.) Responding to complaints the trailers baited queer fans, Betty’s actor Lili Reinhart stated the ‘show is not meant to be fan fiction’—despite the fact fan fiction is exactly what it is, and suggesting girls can’t like girls anywhere else.

Jughead

Toward the end of the pilot, we meet the show’s narrator Jughead in the flesh. In the comics, Jughead Jones is an aromantic asexual—one of the few canonical ace characters around—but statements from the makers of the show make clear he’ll be given romantic storylines, as seemingly everyone on the CW has to be. There’s been some suggestion it might just take Jughead a few relationships to work out he’s aro and ace. While there’d be nothing wrong with that—it certainly took me a while—why not begin the story after he’s pinned down his preferences?

Like Archie, Jughead on the show is straight-boy masculine, chiselled and emotionally inexpressive. That’s disappointing if the character has been de-aced, but really annoying if he hasn’t. If Jughead’s story does lead him to aromantic self-discovery, he’ll be another Sherlock Holmes or Spock: a further example of how pop culture pictures asexual men as sexlessly straight, too rational for sexuality and yet still heteronormative—still not in any way queer. Real-life ace communities, including the ones Jughead would have found, are female- and LGB-heavy, and lean on queer theory.

I have a feeling I’m going to end up hatewatching this show—partly to see if things improve, partly to tweet comments about what not to do if you’re a screenwriter. I might even read the Archie comics and think about what I’d have done with them—though I maintain the series can be judged as queer representation without reference to its source. Mostly, I’m tired of the CW’s insistence on heteromasculine leading men and tokenised gay characters. That’s an issue bigger than Riverdale, indeed than all of Greg Berlanti’s shows, and after ten years on the air, it’s high time they were called on it.