#ace jughead

[runn3rup]

Another redrawing of my Jughead fanart. this one took about a month, way longer than i intended. but it came out well

[bees-in-my-bonnet]

I love the idea of Jughead and Betty getting married in the 50s. Not bc i think they’re “endgame”(I’m sorry I cringed as i wrote that) but bc I want the arc of repressed housewife Betty getting tired of her husband’s distance and following him and she sees him and Archie just hanging out shirtless like best bros do and assumes they are having an affair.

This unleashes her female rage and she finds her inner serial killer. But just as she’s about to take revenge on Jughead, Famous Hollywood star Veronica who has recently moved to Riverdale shows up at her book club. Betty is so distracted and into Veronica that she decides to just divorce jughead. Turns out she was the one cheating! She and Veronica leave town and go to Hollywood, where they secretly continue their affair while remaining “best gal pals” in public. Betty puts her killer instincts to use and becomes a producer.

Meanwhile, Jughead figures out that he’s gay and ace after Betty tells him that she knows about him and Archie. Through no homo damage control he re-examines his and Archie’s relationship and finally picks up on the homoeroticism dripping from every interaction (puts warning triangle on floor, “watch out for this puddle of homoeroticism, dear”). He and Archie go on to be “business partners” in whatever job Archie is doing that week. The End.

[moonlightfilly]

Feel like shit just want him back

[arokermit]

I CANT BELIEVE THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED!! Aroace Jughead fans stay winning 👏🏻

(more info and screenshots on the comic in reblog, bc I can’t figure out how to do a read more on mobile)

[aliteralchicken]

i think about this scene every goddamn day of my life

[wandering-waywardly]

I started reading the Jughead 2015 series for the ace/aro rep (cause I am s t a r v e d let me tell you), and it's just such a fun read. This is really the first Archie property I've ever consumed, but I got hooked fast. And because I can't be normal about any media ever, the natural next step from reading the series was doing an entire page of fanart based off of it! So enjoy more comfort character fanart

(This is kind of an old page in my sketchbook, and I can't remember if I posted this on my main blog or not. If not, here it is, and if so, here it is again!)

[arotechno]

Jughead (2015), Issues 7-8: Discussion and Commentary

Boy oh boy am I excited to talk about this arc!! These two issues hold a very special place in my cold little aro heart.

(By the way, do you see that? I managed to get a digital copy from my library via Hoopla, which means you are spared from my shitty phone grabs. I’ll fix the previous post, don’t worry. Try clicking on the screenshots if tumblr blurs them. And try Hoopla, if you’ve got a library card and have been looking to read these.)

Fed up with him sitting around the house playing video games all summer, Mr. Jones forces Jughead to get out of the house and do something outside. Jughead finds Archie at the pool where he’s working as a lifeguard, and convinces him to take time off to go camping in the woods with him at their friend Dilton’s cottage.

They take Archie’s car out to the woods, only to find that the lake is overrun with Reggie’s over-the-top relatives at the Mantle family reunion. Horrified, Jughead and Archie go out on a hike to get away. This is where things go downhill—literally.

Jughead calls Archie out for his growing fixation with Veronica Lodge, whose father is the one trying to clear out Fox Forest. Archie immediately goes on the defensive, but Jughead, understandably, really doesn’t get it. And here’s where we see that this is a divide that has been brewing between them for quite some time, even if Archie seemingly had no idea it was happening.

The boys end up getting lost, which only serves to fuel their frustrations. It occurs to Jughead, some time later, that the lake they’re camping at is not that far from Camp Lucey, an all-girls summer camp. Shocked and hurt, he accuses Archie of only agreeing to go on the trip to pick up girls, and not to hang out with him. He tackles Archie and they tumble down a hill into the woods below.

This is a really interesting story, from an aro’s perspective. Jughead can’t relate to Archie’s teenage obsession with girls, and it isn’t something they can bond over like other friends may have been able to do. On a simple level, all Jughead really wants to do is hang out with his best friend, just the two of them, just like old times—back when they were younger, before Archie’s interest in girls seemed to take over his every waking moment. Importantly, Jughead never objects to Archie’s romantic pursuits on principle (he does have an issue with Veronica, but that has to do more with her father’s actions than her). It isn’t that he wants to stand in the way of Archie’s happiness—he just feels left behind, and that’s something I think a lot of aromantic people, teenagers especially, can resonate with.

Eventually, Archie and Jughead run into Mr. Weatherbee of all people, who begrudgingly offers to help lead them back to camp. It’s at this point that we get one of my favorite moments in the entire series, one that I have waxed poetic about on this blog before and probably will again.

Archie insists that he is in fact here to hang out with Jughead, and that he’s just being dramatic. Jughead, on the other hand, insists that Archie’s the one being dramatic with his love triangle problems, to which Archie replies:

“Look, I’m not going to apologize for being a normal guy, I—”

And Jughead’s reaction to those words has stuck with me since the first time I read this. He’s shocked, hurt, and clearly a little angry that Archie would say something like that. And it’s a subtle moment, one that you might not even feel the gravity of if you didn’t know that Jughead was aro. What’s most important here, though, isn’t Jughead’s reaction, but the fact that Archie is clearly in the wrong, and he knows it. He tries to backtrack immediately (“Jughead! I didn’t mean it like that! Wait!”), but Jughead ignores him, as Mr. Bee has already gotten them lost again.

This singular page is, to me, a deeper and more nuanced portrayal than many works with “on-the-page” canon aromantic characters. This arc isn’t about Jughead being aro (in fact, none of the comics particularly are). But this is a meaningful incorporation of Jughead’s orientation into his daily life and his relationships with other people—namely, with his best friend. Although Jughead is being somewhat harsh with Archie, never does the narrative place him in the wrong for feeling abandoned, hurt, or angry because of Archie’s words and actions. Even Archie, his best friend, is capable of saying things that hurt him, and his words in this scene are never excused or justified by the narrative.

It also means a lot to me that Archie apologizes the second he gets the chance to, and that Jughead is quick to forgive him and explain that he just misses the time before Archie was so obsessed with girls. I wouldn’t want the story to just turn into a feud between them. You know when you’re on a trip with your friends and you get lost and you’re tired and frustrated you just end up airing your grievances and coming out of it with a new understanding of your friendship while trying to solve the mess you’re in? That’s what this arc is.

Anyway, after a run-in with Reggie’s relative and Mr. Weatherbee’s old high school bully Ted Mantle, the trio manage to make it out of the woods—after several hours of walking until the sun has come up. There, they find that Camp Lucey has actually been renamed, and is now a camp for elementary school girls, where Betty happens to be working. So after all of that, Archie just ends up making a fool of himself, like usual. Mr. Bee’s wife drives over to rescue them and brings the boys back to Dilton’s cottage, where she remarks that she’s heard a lot about Archie and Jughead, and that they’re inseparable.

At its core, this is a story about friendship. It’s about the difficulties that come with realizing you can’t always relate to each other, and you can’t always read each other’s minds, and you sometimes say the wrong thing without meaning to. It’s a story about growing up, but not necessarily growing apart, and being able to reconcile your differences.

Archie assumes that after all of their bickering, Jughead would just want to go home and not hang out with him anymore. But turning back now would be contrary to what Jughead wanted in the first place, which was just to hang out with his best friend.

All’s well that end’s well, and Jughead and Archie patch things over and vow that they will always be best friends. It’s a wholesome moment, and reflects a common struggle for aspec teens that I rarely see addressed in media, if at all. Sometimes, it feels like your friends are all moving on without you, and sometimes they don’t even realize it when they’ve been neglecting your friendship. It takes communication to work these things out, and I’m happy to see that illustrated here.

This arc is my favorite, I think, and there’s reasons for that even outside of the aspects I’ve already detailed here. The kids getting lost in the woods on summer vacation is a fun way of framing the deeper story, and there are a lot of funny and endearing moments in these two issues. (Archie falls on his face, a lot, and Mr. Weatherbee is stoically exasperated with both of their antics.)

These are the last issues written by Chip Zdarsky. So shoutout to him for some of the most nuanced representations of aromanticism in fiction to date, even if he never wrote the word down on the page (I’ll get to that, don’t worry). But these are the first issues illustrated by Derek Charm, whose art style I love (no offense Erica Henderson), and the rest of the volume has a lot of other good aro moments in store. Until then, here’s himbo Archie:

See? Pure of heart, dumb of ass. You can’t be mad at him for long. (He falls into a hole later on the same page.)

Yeah, me too.

[cielbyrne]

I absolutely love queer platonic bughead! I love Aro Ace Jughead and I love Betty and Jughead's friendship!

Headcanons

° Betty is the one who tells him about the ace community

° She is the first one he comes out to

° Before he fully knew what being ace was and was comfortable using that term when someone like Ethel would ask him out Betty would always help come up with an excuse and then they usually watch movies together and eat pizza. A "anything to get out of a date" date

° Jughead is now VERY comfortable in his sexuality and

° Betty made him his first Aro and Ace patches with her sewing machine and jughead was so happy HE paid for lunch at Pop's

When I say Bughead this is always what I mean!