okay so. kate (@greatkateweathermachine ) and I have an extended riverdale au we've lovingly dubbed the riververse that we'd like to tell you about </3 it follows canon all the way up until season six, which is where things begin to diverge. percival isn't present here, and none of the characters have long-term superpowers. anyway.
- in the riververse betty actually does end up pregnant, but rather than be excited by the prospect of having a baby, she becomes terrified of motherhood and raising a child who she believes is genetically predisposed to become the antichrist. she carries the baby through all three trimesters and gives birth to it, but freaks out and leaves it on the doorstep of pop's instead of taking it home.
- jabitha find the baby and decide to raise it as their own, forming a lie that tabitha was secretly pregnant for the last nine months and really good at hiding it, and claiming that this notably ginger child is biologically theirs. tabitha names the baby manny, after don mancini, because to ME she is a diehard chucky fan. it's an unspoken but open secret that manny is actually the barchie baby, and the only two people who don't know are alice and archie (betty told archie the baby ran away.) jabitha also get married shortly after "adopting" manny.
- a little bit about manny: manny is a pretty quiet kid, but he's also like ridiculously creepy. he's got betty's big ol' bug eyes and he did inhereit the serial killer genes from her, but he's better at not giving into his violent urges. instead he develops a love of taxidermy, a hobby he eventually turns into a career. he also looks like this.
- since jabitha are workaholics and jughead has twice as many jobs as barbie, archie ends up getting involved with the process of raising manny. it also helps him cope with his own runaway child. the three of them become very close during their collaborative babysitting sessions, and over time (in part because of the escaped baby) barchie drifts apart, so archie just kind of ends up dating jughead and tabitha instead. jabitha have their second wedding to archie within a year of them getting together.
- veronica gets added to the relationship when she and jughead end up making out after one of their magic acts. she freaks out and assumed she's being a homewrecker, and jughead has to reassure her that tabitha and archie also want to fuck her, so actually it's fine. the third wedding happens within a few months.
- okay. let's switch gears to cheryl for a bit. cheryl is still with heather in the riververse, and the two of th embark on a personal journey to become the most powerful witches in riverhistory. in order to do this they need a lot of energy, though, and since heather isn't too keen on delving into dark magic, they decide to settle for harvesting sexual energy instead. they're only two people, and their energy alone won't be enough to achieve elite witchhood status, so cheryl proposes hosting monthly orgies as a way of harvesting a massive amount of sexergy all at once. obviously she's not participating, and neither is heather, but most of the other characters are.
- notably, jabronchie (jughead/tabitha/veronica/archie) and reggie all participate, and during one of these orgies veronica ends up pregnant.
- this sparks a huge scandal because veronica doesn't know who the father is. she has it narrowed down to archie, jughead, or reggie, but it isn't until the baby is born that they find out who the actual father is (it's archie).
- a little about the varchie baby: her name is tina </3. her full name is actually quintina, which jughead chose in honor of quentin tarantino, but he lies to veronica for several years and manages to convince her that her daughter's full name is tina and that it has no questionable connections to any director. tina is one of the most normal of the riververse kids. she's very outgoing and ambitious, and her weirdest trait is probably that she became obsessed with horror movies at way too young of an age. as an adult she chooses to go by tina andrews instead of tina andrews-jones-lodge-tate for simplicity's sake, and she settles down outside of riverdale with a husband and two kids. also she's a real estate agent, and she's close to three years younger than manny.
- the last of the jabronchie kids is riley. she's born eight years after tina (eleven years after manny), and she's the unplanned jabitha kid. riley is a bit of a nutcase. she's got very little impulse control and often gets injured during pranks or protecting the people she loves. she has a habit of becoming overly invested in hobbies and odd jobs before dropping them entirely (how veronica of her) and she makes a living as a stunt actor, a podcaster, etc etc.
- okay. now that we have jabronchie covered let's focus on reggie for a little bit. almost immediately after breaking up with getting fired by hiram, he and sweet pea start dating. I think they had a fling in high school, so they've already got some chemistry and some history to begin with.
- reggie becomes a famous influencer on both rivinstagram and metube by exploiting his time henching for hiram and using the lodge name to gain notarioty. his charm and taste for scandals keeps him the limelight though, and it isn't long before he's made a name completely for himself. he also has a job as the riverdale high sex ed teacher and the second riverdale high english teacher (toni didn't think it made sense for jughead to teach his own kids, particularly riley, since he'd let so much slide with her).
- at the same time as tabitha gets pregnant with riley, reggie and sweet pea decide to adopt a kid. instead of announcing their adoption, though, reggie decides to pretend he is also pregnant, and continues the lie for all nine months leading up to his kid's miraculous existence.
- a little about the regpea kid: his name is cameron (not for any weird reasons this time I promise), and he was born mere hours after riley was, which causes the two of them to convince themselves that they're actually twins. cameron is pretty easy-going and has a love of music, but he's also a little stupid. he and riley are practically joined at the hip. in the riververse regpea and jabronchie are neighbors on the non-betty side, so the two of them spend almost every waking moment together, whether it be placing ladders between each others' windows to climb across at one in the morning, or trying to flood the school together as a senior prank. even after they enter long-term serious relationships, the two of them refuse to live apart. they're like conjoined twins. oh also, this is what cameron looks like.
- regpea do have another child about a year after cameron, but they don't pretend this one is biologically theirs. his name is greg, and he's a very quiet, very normal kid, who wants nothing more than to get out of riverdale. he's got a very close-knit but small group of friends, and he's extremely close to his parents.
- in early high school, greg starts dating a girl named jessica. jessica is the daughter of one of the normal couples's living in riverdale, but she herself is anything but. she's impulsive and a little bit reckless, but socially she's very chill. shortly after she and greg get together they end things, and she starts dating riley. jessica and riley stay in a mostly-on-again-sometimes-off-again relationship until the day they die. jessica and cameron are also very close. jessica is pictured below <3
- let's get back to regpea. when cameron and greg are toddlers josie returns to town and, with reggie's blessing, she and sweet pea start dating again. reggie and sweet pea stay married of course, but sweet pea begins switching between staying in riverdale to raise his kids and going to travel the world with josie.
- josie never admits that she and sweet pea are anything serious, and even though both his kids (ESPECIALLY greg) view her as something akin to a mother figure, she isn't always the most comfortable interacting with them. she loves them in her own way, but she has some difficultly expressing that. josie and reggie also start hooking up a few years down the line, although they aren't together in the same way reggie and sweet pea are or josie and sweet pea are. sometimes when sweet pea is away reggie hooks up with varchie, because a man has needs afterall and none of their spouses mind the arrangement.
- the fourth member of cameron, riley, and jessica's friend group is april. april escaped from a cult just outside of town when she was eleven and the first house she stumbled upon was betty's. initially betty only let her in because the cult she escaped from was apart of an active case betty had been investigating, but after a while she and alice grow attached to her presence, and she becomes a permanent addition to the family. april fits right in alongside the coopers, too. she's got the serial killer genes and the same quiet, unnerving presence that betty does. she's a very nice girl once you get to know her, she can be quick to judge, and is extremely unforgiving when you slight her or her friends. she's the same age as jessica and greg, and a year younger than riley and cameron.
- moving on to cheryl. cheryl and heather happen to have two kids of their own. they're the world's least social set of twins, a pair of terrifying near-identical redheads cheryl scoured every adoption clinic to find before ultimately stealing. and yes, I do mean stealing. their names are chrysanthemum (chryssy for short) and petunia, since both she and heather wanted to go with something floral. the twins spend a lot of time inside the manor and tend to keep to themselves. they're both into witchcraft, but chryssy has more of a knack for it than her sister. instead, petunia spends a lot of her creating art. petunia is pictured on the left, and chryssy is on the right.
- tangs also have two more kids following baby anthony. their first one is fangs jr, who they have about two years after baby anthony.
- the second kid is gonzo. he's about six years younger than fangs jr, and his legal name is ethan, but he chose the name gonzo for himself as a child, so it became his unofficial identity forever. gonzo is very eccentric and outgoing, but he's also extremely kind and selfless. he is friends with the riley, cameron, jessica, and april group, but not very close ones, since they are a few years younger than he is. he takes a part-time job at archie and tabitha's new joint community center in high school, and he almost instantly falls in love with social work the same way his mother did.
some other facts about the riververse:
- since jughead has so much going on in his day to day life, he's able to write a lot more books than he can in canon. they remain relatively unpopular at first, until a conspiracy metuber manages to connect some of the plots back to public figures reggie mantle, veronica andrews-jones-lodge-tate, and josie mccoy, sparking a huge wave of interest in his novels. he ends up garnering a large and devoted fanbase of teenagers in the process, and cements his place in shitty ya author history.
- veronica opens up her own sex club called TGI Veronica's underneath the whyte wyrm (the sub-sub-section of pop's) as a feminist project, but until most of her endeavors, she keeps this one open for a long time. it has a stage that archie and kevin sometimes use for perfomances, and jughead helps out with the lighting there (mostly so he can hide in his own little booth). tangs help bartend there on weekdays, and reggie spends most of his time there seducing and blackmailing any billionaire who stops by, growing his fortune in the unique way only reggie can <33
- toni gets a pet snake who tabitha makes special milkshakes called snakeshakes for.
- since tabitha is a crazy woman who is obsessed with her job she keeps working at pop's well into the late stages of her pregnancy, and when her water breaks during one of her shifts, she decides to follow in toni's footsteps and give birth to riley in the backroom of pop's. this prompts her to start a wall decided to all the babies born in pop's, which she lovingly covers in photos of riley and baby anthony. she's always too eager to tell customers about this story, though, and she can never understand why it scares some of them off.
I'm sorry this post was so long, but I hope that helps give you some kind of understanding of how the riververse functions. unfortunately this isn't everything in the au, but I didn't want the post to be longer than it already is 😭 if you have any questions I'd love to answer them, and I do plan on discussing this au more in the future using the tag #riververse. tysm to everyone who actually read the post!! blessed to have you with me for this wild ride <3
