From romance comedies to dystopian futures, the young adult fiction genre has seen a sort of resurgence over the last several years.
What started with Lord of the Flies and Chronicles of Narnia in the 1950s, was almost completely dead for several decades
only to rise again with the Harry Potter series in 1997. Since then the 13 to 18 year old young adult demographic has become a
money-making juggernaut with television studios, movie houses, and publishing firms desperately grasping at anything they could find.
Twilight, Hunger Games, Gossip Girl, Supernatural, Divergent, and probably a whole bunch of others
I really can't be bothered to remember right now. Teens have proven that
they will eat up just about anything. Take any random town, throw in a girl who feels out of place for some reason and have
her meet this really hot guy who has a sensitive side and watch the money start rolling in and nowhere is this cookie cutter
colored by numbers formula more prominent, then the CW's new Archie comics reimagining, Riverdale.
*Intro music* Believer by Imagine Dragons
To be fair, Riverdale is not a bad show. It's perfectly fine, but it lays out the teen drama formula
so clearly it's like it was pulled straight out of the Martha Stewart young adult fiction cookbook.
So what makes Riverdale such a cliche teen drama? Well, at the heart of any good drama of course are the characters.
First up you have Archie. In this reimagining,
Archie is the captain of the football team.
But is he just another dumb jock who enjoys picking on nerds playing their new Nintendo DS's at the corner lunch table? Of course not!
Because that's that's a little too real. You see Archie has a secret - a secret
He can never tell anyone except his closest friends, who happen to all pretty much be really attractive girls.
What is this secret, you may ask? Well you see he
plays guitar. That's right, Archie plays football, has the body of a Greek god, and writes emo songs from 2002.
I mean, what more could you ask for? His ex-best-friend-just-kidding-now-they're-friends-again best friend is Jughead.
First of all, yes this is based on the comics of the 1940s and 50s.
But having everyone including teachers and parents call him Jughead.. like it's totally normal...
It's a little weird. Now by looking at him
you might think that Jughead is just another bad boy from a broken home who wears the same denim jacket pretty much every day and
somehow doesn't smell like a barnyard.
But no
this is a teen drama after all. Jughead
also has a secret sensitive side. While he may look like a loner who totally doesn't care
he actually loves old movies and is trying to write a book about the world that no one else
but him can see. But yet, even though he spends all his time watching movies and writing books, somehow
he's able to maintain a body that looks like this.
Now I'm sure you're starting to already see the pattern here. A guy who is stoic and emotionally unavailable to everyone else
but to that one special girl, and by extension every girl watching the show, he opens up and shows you his true self.
It's your little secret.
Only you know the real Archie or Jughead. Now moving on, we come to these three main girl characters of the show.
Although Archie is actually the main character, these three girls are who the audience who's mostly teen girls between the ages of 10 to 20 ish
relate to.
Basically it boils down to: a good girl who wants to be bad, a bad girl who wants to be good, and a bad girl
who likes being bad. First up you have Betty:
if Wonderbread came to life it would probably look like this. While her lifestyle is not particularly extravagant, her family is pretty well-off.
She has nice clothes, nice makeup
and somehow can drink milkshakes and eat french fries all day, every day and still look like this. Her parents are overly strict and oddly
enough even more immature than their 16 year old daughter. This is what gives Betty her bad girl streak. At school and at home
she has to keep up her girl-next-door image, but secretly she feels like she has a dark side inside
She feels like she might be someone else. The new girl is Veronica, who's rich beyond
the audience's wildest dreams.
Expensive New York clothes, accessories from random, vaguely
European sounding brands, makeup and hair that somehow stays perfect even when being woken up in the middle of the night, her life must be pretty great.
Veronica is a bad girl
who's trying to turn over a new leaf in a new town. She used to be the queen bee back in New York
but now as the new girl she's hoping to atone for the sins in the past.
And lastly, we have Cheryl. Now, is there anyone more annoying than Cheryl? I mean really she's like the Draco Malfoy of the Riverdale universe.
Cheryl is a ridiculously rich girl who has to be the best of everything and apparently lives in the house from Beetlejuice.
And that's about all she has going for her. So here
we have three characters who essentially represent the three internal
fantasies of every teenage girl: the nice girl with a secret dark side who can also eat whatever she wants and still have a gap
between her thighs almost as big as the one between Mike Tyson's teeth, the mean girl who gets whatever she wants, the bad girl who
wants to be good by getting revenge on the other mean girls and can also wake up with perfect makeup every time. And of course
In the end you have to end up with a really hot stoic guy who secretly plays guitar. And also all these girls are great
singers and dancers without ever actually practicing so that's great too. Now the key point is this:
the two male characters are in many ways the same character - emotionally unavailable, secretly sensitive, really attractive.
But like totally don't know it. They got troubles at home.. you get the idea.
You just do a quick palette swap and you're ready to go. But the three female characters act as a set. On their own
they're actually kind of shallow and at times cartoonishly two-dimensional
but together they form a cohesive unit that
represents the apparently not at all unique inner struggle of girls between the ages of 13 to 18. To put it in more
psychological terms I guess we could apply the Sigmund Freud school of thought and say that these characters represent the ego, super ego, and id
of the average teenage girl. The characters show the balance between what you want, what you know is right, and how to balance between the two.
As an example, you can take a look at gossip girl. Once again
we have a bad girl trying to be good,
the bad girl who's just bad for some reason, and the good girl with the dark side
It's really nothing new here. And that is the main bread and butter of the teen drama genre.
Every girl is in some way a fish-out-of-water.
Feeling awkward and unsure of herself and trying to walk that thin line between what she wants and what her parents want and what her friends want.
Every guy is basically Edward or Jacob from Twilight. So by following this formula
you can put any set of characters into any situation in any town in the USA, and you'll have yourself six seasons and a movie.