started monologuing too hard to brush my teeth so i'm posting instead. what's interesting about riverdale and the symbolic weight its characters bear, especially and specifically the core four, is that/how being a symbol has different effects on each character's ability to love and be loved.
okay, so, obvious starting place is archie, right? because archie's battle between personself and symbolself is the most thoroughly explored and textually engaged-with but also the most overtly detrimental to his relationships. archie perceives the gap between himself and the symbol people see him for - Goodness, or else fred andrews (still goodness, but a kind of agentive upright adult goodness, an active see-a-need-fill-a-need goodness, one whose suffering can be acknowledged, one whose can make choices even if they're always the Right Choices), or else jason blossom (innocence) - and instead of saying, "wow, that has absolutely nothing to do with me and has zero bearing on whether or not i'm a good person, because i'm a person, not a static unflinching paragon of moral purity and heroicness," he beats himself over the head with it. he's not good enough, he'll never be good enough, he's not a real person and he deserves to suffer for that. and it's not just him! everyone wants him to be a symbol, everyone sees him for a symbol. it's his position as a symbol of fred that first draws hiram to him, because hermione cheated on hiram with fred, and hermione in hiram's absence is especially haunted by the life she could've lived if she and fred stayed together, which means she's considering a world where she did bear her husband a son but that son is fred's, not hiram's. hiram cannot have a son, a man with a son stole hiram's wife, so hiram will steal that man's son. that that man's son also represents Goodness which he can pervert and innocence he can destroy is icing on the cake, but first and foremost, archie is vengeance for hermione's choice in affair partner and the universe's refusal to give him his own son outright. jughead, our narrator/author/etc. and archie's bestie, repeatedly reduces archie to a symbol and it always comes and bites archie in the ass. when he tries to literally diegetically turn archie into a symbol with his folk hero plan, archie is objectified, humiliated, and brutalized, all on the public stage, all because jughead can't reconcile his desires with their object OR using archie with archie's humanity. if archie is a symbol, then jughead desires what he represents, not archie himself; if archie is a symbol, then being used is what he's for, and jughead doesn't have to consider how it affects him to be used.
and jughead keeps fucking doing it! archie is a symbol of Goodness which jughead desires all the more because he thinks he can't have the traditional obvious Goodness he's inflicted on archie and because he won't let himself embrace the full scope of his desire for archie. toni is a symbol of the serpent community and lifestyle and belonging to which jughead feels entitled and of which he was robbed by fp's shame and attempts to protect him, and she CALLS HIM OUT for reducing her grandfather to a stereotype, a flat empty pathetic symbol. time and again he sabotages his relationship with betty by rendering her symbolic of, if not Goodness, then Perfection, or riverdalian class stratification. he makes it longer than any other romantic interest of his not reducing tabitha to a symbol, but when we get to s6 and s7, tabitha is an angel, tabitha is the arc of history bending towards justice, tabitha is just another flavor of goodness. at least he's got a consistent type but jfc, dude! jughead's fetish for objectifying people as symbols kind of extends to include him, in that his fetish is really for contrast and so he ascribes to himself the absence of whatever he symbolizes through the object of his desires, but he also obscures himself in the narrative so much that we don't really get a consistent symbolic throughline for him. his relationships are ruined by symbolism, not because his symbolic weight is crushing him, but because he won't stop trying to crush other people with their own symbolic weight and that's the only way he knows how to handle his own wants.
and then there's veronica. she, like archie, is a symbolic representation of her father, who is himself a symbolic representation of a broad concept: Evil. she, like archie, is trapped by that symbolism, is punished by the people around her for trying to live up to their idea of her and for trying to stray from it, wants nothing more than to escape the shadow of this enormous Idea. because she is reduced to representing her father, she is repeatedly abandoned by her friends, by her lovers. because she is reduced to representing her father, she is subjected to constant violence. because she is reduced to representing her father, her actual actions and the desires and ethics they represent - making reparations to the muggses by giving ethel the only assets she has left, fighting against her father at every turn, cutting him out of her life as an adult up to the point of fully having him killed because she knows he's not safe for her or the people she loves - are brushed aside, ignored wholecloth, or deliberately reinterpreted in the worst possible light by everyone around her. every romantic relationship she attempts is ruined by it - archie is turned into a fascist militant, then framed for murder and sent to jail, then forced to go on the run; reggie tells her that she is her father when they fight because he resents not having as much wealth and power as her; chad, who wanted to use her to make her father adopt him as his criminal heir, takes that resentment so much further that he actually tries to murder her - and multiple friendships are damaged, too.
weirdly, though, betty handles her symbolism very differently. sure, she's supposed to be Good, like archie is supposed to be Good, and sure, she grows into an increasing awareness of all the ways she and that mold don't fit, and sure, that knowledge constitutes several devastating emotional blows. but she also resents Goodness in ways that archie doesn't. he resents himself for failing to achieve it; she resents other people for inflicting it upon her. she tells alice in the pilot that she's sick of having to be perfect and she wants to live for herself; she tells jughead at his birthday party that she hates that word when he throws it in her face. what's interesting, though, is that her ability to step away from that symbol preserves her relationships. her willingness to be dangerous and deviant and dark leads to some of her and alice's closest moments; as represented by the dark betty costume/her own sexual desire for control, she's able to engage jughead sexually as a person on her own terms rather than as a symbol on his, and we see that set the tone for basically every sexual encounter they have. her loser stalker fed situationship is interested in her, not because she's Good or even Perfect but because of the ways in which she's fundamentally Not (oooooh, sexy evil murder mutant!). betty resists Perfection so much that she gets to loop all the way back around and represent Corruption - she points out the violent hypocrisy and inequity in riverdale and thereby awakens the black hood, revealing herself to be the daughter of murder and hypocrisy; she goes from little miss sweater set, doing her best to save the town from evil, to the harlot of babylon, harbinger of the apocalypse - and then she resists that symbolic role, too! sure, alice and hal are pieces of shit to her when she doesn't live up to their hopes and dreams for her Perfectly, but they don't stop loving her because of it. her friends only love her more for trying to be more than just Perfect, more than just Corruption. her willingness and ability to separate her personself from her symbolself is why she and archie are able to be together so healthily after the time jump.
which is crazy, right? betty is given more latitude and aptitude for self-determination than any other core fourian. unlike archie, who goes through a corruption arc at the hands of Evil Hiram Lodge and is forever defined and scarred by it, her entanglements with corrupting forces (hal, chic, charles, the stonies, tbk) only ever make her more committed to and capable of resisting. it's the situationality of her resistance that comes the closest to an outside corrupting force; she's willing to do whatever it takes to beat the big bad, even if it's fucked up (playing along with the black hood, faking jughead's death), and in the end, she is the arbiter of her own changes, for better or for worse. in the end, everyone she loves - the rest of the core four, the rest of their riverdale high graduating class (at least the ones in town who she speaks to regularly), her living family, and even her dead-then-resurrected sister - loves her back for precisely who she's chosen to become.
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