just found your blog and I LOVE finding someone who understands and enjoys discussing riverdale for what it is, and who analyses it from a similar pov as I do(rare). I found your description from a previous post fascinating “jason is not a person or even really a character; he is a myth, an amalgamation of conflicting testimonies, a memory and therefore a mirror.” I’ve always seen jason as a symbol of sorts, rvd’s inciting incident, the uncovering of its shadows. I’m curious about your take on jason as a myth, the meaning of him and his death. essentially I find your take/description a lot more thoughtful than mine, and would love you to expand on it?! (sorry if you’ve answered this before, and I would love a link to that post!).

ty! i dont think ive talked about jason much on this blog but the jason tag from my liveblog might be of interest! i can say some more about him by way of summarizing my basic thoughts, under a cut because it got long lol

re: the description of jason you quote, everything about my reading of him stems from the fact that he is dead before the story begins. the show, whether intentionally or not, supports this reading by rarely flashing back to jason. in the few short flashbacks we do get, it's always because someone else is narrating their version of events leading up to his murder. in those scenes, he rarely acts, he does not emote; he never speaks, even when people are asking him a direct question, as cheryl does at sweetwater river: "are you afraid?" (i will say in fairness that this is consistent with how riverdale tends to approach flashbacks overall; usually the people in the scene don't talk because someone else is narrating. HOWEVER imo it does really stand out in jason's portrayal in particular.) all of this makes it hard for the viewer to get any information about jason for themselves, because our usual technologies of omniscience don't seem to apply when it comes to jason; the very format of the story prevents us from being able to meaningfully access him in the time before his death.

because of this lack, all we have to go on are the words of those who knew him, which may or may not be truthful and which produce a conflicting portrait of the person he was before he died. according to polly, he was a saint; according to alice and hal, he was the devil incarnate. we're told he would never hurt polly only to be shown that he cited her as a sexual conquest; we're told he was a model of perfect behavior only to discover he dealt drugs. these reversals are reversed; the drug deal which at first is cited as evidence of his dangerous character is later framed as the last resort of a boy attempting to escape his controlling parents. ultimately everyone has something different to say about jason, such that their testimony tells us more about them than about jason himself. that's what i meant by jason as mirror; people look at him and see what they want to see. they use his story for their own ends, to push their own agendas and ideas about what kind of town riverdale is and what kinds of people live in it.

this leads us to jason as myth; jason's murder ruptures the previously dominant collective myth about riverdale, namely that it was an innocent and picturesque small town. of course there were people whose experiences proved this to be false even before jason was killed, but by and large the governing structures in riverdale managed to marginalize and suppress those perspectives in order to preserve the idea that riverdale was fundamentally and essentially a happy, good, and safe place to live. after jason's death, the town as a whole has to find a new story to tell about itself; they have to find a way to incorporate this atrocity into their collective history and also retain the ability to go on living in riverdale. in trying to fix the events of jason's death in place, in order to find or create a story about what happened that everyone can agree on, the town is scrambling to recuperate its own image, to stabilize its identity.

the story that emerges from this struggle is that jason's death corrupted riverdale. this allows the town to preserve untarnished the image of innocent, wholesome pre-s1 riverdale that it held so dearly and allows the residents to sustain the hope that there might be some way to return riverdale to that innocent state, if only they can figure out how. after all, if riverdale WAS truly innocent at one point, even if it's innocent no longer, than surely it can be so again. some residents earnestly believe this to be true; some are more jaded about riverdale's redemptive potential and simply use this narrative as a means to their own ends (see hal terrorizing betty via the ostensible project of cleansing the town of sinners & hiram and hermione consolidating power while framing it as a return to a safer riverdale).

however, whether sincere or not, none of these efforts have anything to do with jason as a person; none of it is about honoring his memory or remembering his life. for the town's purposes, he is nothing more than the crisis of collective identity and reckoning sparked by his death. as ive already said, this is repeatedly reinforced by cinematic choices made throughout the show, by the fact that we arrive after jason is gone and are never allowed to meet him or hear his account of the story. even when he furnishes the clue that solves his own murder, via a zip drive discovered in his letterman jacket, he does so through a video that proves to be a clip in which jason never speaks and is positioned so that he faced away from the camera. his only movement is the result of clifford's shot, his head falling forward onto his chest. his own accusal of his murderer is wordless, motionless, and does not give us access to any interiority; it does not help us to know him better. ultimately, we can make no judgements about his character, because there is no character to speak of. within the context of the show, he is what others say about him and do to him, and nothing more.