#I don’t care if ‘he got his fill of angst in s1&2’ NO HE DIDNT

[lunabug2004]

Okay first of all: LEADER MIKE IS BACK LETS GOOOO!!!! (Did he ever really leave?)

Second of all: there’s no way “he is well! He is good” is the truth. I’m onto you Finn Wolfhard. This boy is suffering like he never has before. Or we are at least seeing some of his past suffering come to light. Either way, that boy better not be doing “well” or “good”. I need his story to be well-rounded and well-written PLEASE!!!

[fredheads]

When and why did you start liking Hal?

I honestly don’t know. An accurate answer to this would probably require a s1 rewatch that I am not strong enough to do now or ever. 

When I started watching Riverdale I was actually really invested in the kids plotlines (shocking, I know) and didn’t pay a lot of attention to Hal. I somehow didn’t even notice his sexy windbreaker look in the pilot. If anything I found him vaguely untrustworthy, but that’s because he was written to be a possible suspect all the way along. I wasn’t even smitten with Fred until episode two. 

But then (i don’t remember what order these events happened in sorry) we got the “stepfords of riverdale” opening and BAMMO!! I was hooked on each and every member of the Cooper family. The kids had kind of failed me at that point but oh man do I have a big fat emotional attachment to the “golden boy” trope and suburban discontent in general. That stuff is my bread and butter in fiction. Being presented Hal as this former RHS golden boy who married his high school sweetheart and went on to have a less than perfect life that he was struggling to keep manicured on the outside...bam I wanted him. 

That was also when I flipped from “I can’t like her she’s abusive” to “I want more of this woman” on Alice. When she was being fake in the church for the cameras??? MOM. I imprinted fast. I didn’t find them necessarily “likable” yet but I wanted more of the Coopers backstory ASAP (oh how the turntables..) 

I also have (hold on tight this one will shock you) a big soft spot for dad characters and I wanted to like Hal all along. When he was fixing the car with Betty (I also have a big soft spot for mechanic!betty) and talking about Polly I was so hopeful it was time for his redemption. I don’t think you guys remember how much they were holding back from us character-wise in season one and anyone suddenly becoming likeable was fair game. Also, Hal was just fun to watch. I knew he had secrets and I wanted to know what they were. 

So honestly from almost the get-go I was rooting for a redemption arc for Hal. Then we got one for Alice instead, and for an episode I almost disowned him because it felt to me that we were going down the route that most of you have accepted as canon now, that Hal was potentially abusive to Alice throughout her marriage and that he forced her to abort her first kid against her will. (We didn’t find out Alice’s first kid was actually born at all until later - I remember standing up on my couch in front of my housemate and yelling CHIC COOPER at the abortion reveal. I’m a big comics fan.) 

(Man did that scene get my motor running though like Hal as the flawed patriarch watching baseball alone in the den in the dark, Alice doing a 180 on us and confronting him in full hysterical housewife mode........ The gotcha! reveal that Riverdale hadn’t written Betty’s oldest sibling out they had a plan for him all along.... I look back on it and I don’t like it anymore because of what it’s turned into but day one that scene had me quaking in my artfully faded jorts. I love suburban stuff like that. ) 

Then we got more information - that Hal was never abusive to Alice, that he only offered Polly money for an abortion and didn’t force her into one, that Alice didn’t abort Chic at all and that there’s no evidence Hal put pressure on her to do so. He only suggested it. In my opinion, the whole drama of the scene was because Riverdale was actually trying to make everyone unlikeable then, because someone was supposed to have shot Jason in the head. 

By the time Alice threw a brick through the Register window I was rooting on her and Hal to reconcile to protect their kids. It was so clear they loved each other to me. The thought of this flawed suburban stepford wives couple going back to their flawed but functional marriage with a few key improvements... fabulous. And they did and we got Hal dropping “What the hell is wrong with you people?” and Riverdale should have ended right there because it was great. 

Also when we found out he was homecoming king once it cranked my Hal love up to 11. Side note. 

(This is going to sound shady but I don’t know why 90% of you go around yelling “HAL FORCED ALICE TO GET AN ABORTION” when Chic was RIGHT THERE for 99.99999% of season two please check your facts he absolutely didnt and the evidence is right there drinking milk out of the carton it boggles my mind)

As the season ended I was kind of shaky on adult Hal character-wise because my feeling toward him was that he cared about this blood feud stuff more than his own family and I also didn’t want to get too attached to anyone in case they were the killer. Bear in mind, this was back when I was still semi-protective of the child characters and I was under the sway of the stream of thought in this fandom that was really concerned with purity and only liking characters who weren’t troublesome. Now I just like who I like. 

I was writing a lot of parentdale fanfic at that point, and I love love loved my multiple conceptions of teen!Hal. I still had that soft spot for him onscreen though. I felt overwhelmingly what I’d felt in the car scene with Betty - that he wanted to be a good dad but was letting his personal prejudice and confusion about his lot in life get in the way of succeeding. I thought he should learn some things from Fred and then they could all be happy there on Elm St but for the time being he was entertaining as shit to watch and pushed all my buttons and I had dreams of him being a deep complex character whose motivations they were going to draw out for a long time and contrast him with Fred and it would be fabulous... 

I don’t remember how I felt about Hal early season 2 but by the middle of it I was fed up with everyone and everything and Hal was the only was dropping truth bombs so I loved him. He was roasting Chic and snapping on Alice and I was fed up with them too! After season one I had to check out for my own mental health and I had to start taking the show a lot less seriously and a little more cynically than I had. I had also stopped caring about the kids entirely at some point so I was watching it in a different way. I’d met Kim at this point and we were making up our own headcanons to fill in the gaps and well... that was more entertaining than anything the show was going to give us. 

Around there people turned against Hal in fandom because they were rooting for f/lice and whenever the fandom abandons a character like that I start to love them more so there went the old ball game. I loved him again because no one else was going to do it. 

If we’re being serious for a minute though, by the time we got to the s2 Hal/Alice reconcile I was so so hopeful we were going back into a halice redemption arc. For some reason all of you read “I worshiped you” as something gross but for me, Hal was at his most likable during that fight. What I saw was that he really did love Alice and he knew he had made mistakes but the thought of being without her was crushing his world. That for everything that was fake and plastic and manicured in their shared “perfect” lives, their love for each other was never part of it. Apparently, I was supposed to read that differently but I truly didn’t. 

Hal shooting Fred is so ludicrous I don’t even hold it against him. That whole ending was lazy and if nothing else he blessed me with at least a half-episode of Fred-centric drama and angst so honestly I owe him one. 

This answer is a big freaking mess so if you read it (or hate-read it) all the way to the end thanks but please don’t send me hate or anything for it. This is just honestly how I experienced the series and that’s all there is to it. That’s the that on that. 

tl;dr i always loved hal i just didnt know it for awhile.