gimme all the headcanons on Dr Curdle Jr being Betty and Jughead’s guardian. do it, Cat. ✊🏻
I have reasons. They are threefold.
1) Dr Curdle Jr appears creepy, but so far what we’ve learned in Riverdale is that things tend to rarely be what they appear on the surface. He’s definitely a dude who got out of Riverdale, got his doctorate, 100% knows Riverdale is Crimetown, uses that to his advantage (Nothing shocks this guy in a town which seemed perfect to everyone else until recently. Oh, cult stuff? Ritualistic symbols? Murder cover-up? Whatevs. Small bills, please.), & is mad fond of both Betty’s & Jughead’s investigative pursuits. The dude was paid off by the mayor/mob wife of Hiram Lodge (talk about people who run the town) to lie on a post-mortem, but here comes teenage Jughead Jones with a little cash, & Dr Curdle Jr goes, “Here are all my secrets. You guys are great. I love the enthusiasm. Go get em!” He wants them to succeed, and I think he’d help them both in the immediate future with town shenanigans & longterm with college applications & stuff. Ch. Maybe he even uses some of his (& his dad’s) years of pay-off money to help cover any tuition gaps his favorite duo’s scholarships don’t meet.
2) He would totally encourage their interests. Betty & Jughead have interests which align with his, & he has all those “personal” case files he’s kept all this time! The amount of research & investigating into cold case files they could do as a family project is the stuff of my Bughead dreams. DREAMS I TELL YOU. Absolutely picture them casually sitting at the kitchen table, with something wholesome & unmurdery, like cookies & milk, as a snack, while looking over several unsolved post-mortems containing similar markings & realizing all of them are linked murder cases. (Do I like that juxtaposition of an innocent snack with a side of murder solving hobby? Yes. Yes, I do.) They’d still be putting away murderers & getting their crime solving kink on, but yano, with a significantly smaller chance of getting maimed or murdered in the process. (Not to say they wouldn’t still be getting up to normal Riverdale hijinks, because the town would literally fall apart without them, but they’d have a supportive parental figure in their corner instead of hiding in the background waiting to pop up & be a reason the thing happened in the first place.) He wouldn’t shut them down or discredit them for being teenage sleuths, because he’s obviously aware they’re the few people in that town getting anything done.
3) Imagine Weatherbee or the Sheriff’s department (whoever is leading it in the future) pulling Betty or Jughead in for questioning/some sort of reprimand for sleuthing & calling their guardian, Dr Curdle Jr, in to deal with them. He’d totally just come at the allegations with his deadpan stare & say, “You’re trying to punish the two people in this town who work every day to keep it functioning, have solved all of the major crimes, & do your jobs for you? Perhaps you should revisit your decisions.” He would not be here for any of that nonsense, but he would take them home & tell them to be more careful about getting caught. No paper trail that way.
PS I love this supportive, intelligent, crime-loving/solving family unit I’ve created out of thin air.
