Thinking About What It Must Have Been Like For Jj And Her Family After Her Sister's Suicide. Living In

thinking about what it must have been like for jj and her family after her sister's suicide. living in a small town (a population of 2136 in 2010) where everyone knows everyone. possibly quite religious. the way everyone would look at them. the way everyone would look at her. the way she can never go back, because they'll always look at her like that. and maybe that's why she keeps it a secret from the team for so long—she spent so much time with everybody knowing, once she's somewhere else, she wants nobody to know.

i have so many feelings about the "why mess with perfection" scene. im going to analyze it in a way it was probably never intended to be. fuck you silly crime show i can overthink ANYTHING. this got long so it's under a cut. please please read it though im actually very proud of this one.

personally i count this line as being more evidence that william reid is a scumbag. this is how diana describes her pregnancy with spencer in the episode immediately proceeding this:

"I went off my medication when I was pregnant with you. I spent every day in terror, but I made it. And it was beautiful. I had you."

it's a bit of a mixed bag, because she clearly considers it to have been worth it, but. i mean, maybe this is just me, but if my wife went off her antipsychotic medication for the duration of her pregnancy and "spent every day in terror", i wouldn't be raring to put her through that again. "I made it" also feels quite charged to me, like there were moments where she wasn't sure she would.

from what i could find, there's still no real consensus on whether antipsychotics are safe for use during pregnancy (as much as any medication can be) and i imagine there was even less certainty during the early 80s. any subsequent pregnancies would likely have also involved diana going off her meds, and pregnancy is difficult enough when you AREN'T also skipping your antipsychotics.

and diana's expression here—to me, that's not the expression of a woman who had one kid and was then just like "nah im happy with this one." it's a woman who had an extremely difficult pregnancy and whose husband then tried to convince her to do it over and over again. there's resentment in the way she delivers that line.

as sweet as this line is, i think it's ultimately diana protecting spencer. she can't say "my pregnancy was incredibly difficult, i couldn't bring myself to do it again" because spencer will get a complex about it. so she says this, although that doesn't mean it isn't also true. in a perfect world where diana's pregnancy was as smooth sailing as pregnancies get (because i don't think there's really such thing as an easy pregnancy), i think she still probably would have only wanted one child. it's not that this isn't why diana wanted to stop at baby number one, but i do think there's a second reason she's leaving out because she knows the truth will make spencer feel guilty.

but i think he sees through it. not that he'd ever tell her. (she knows anyway. not that she'd ever tell him.)

here's the jordan analysis i promised. it got really long so it's under a cut </3 also to any jordan fans jsyk this is more a meta analysis of the role she serves rather than an in-universe analysis of her character, so. no major character insights if that's what you're hoping for.

as i've said before, i also don't understand the vitriol i've seen directed towards her when she was in eight episodes and occasionally mildly annoying at worst. i think most of the people who hate her do because she was a. being shipteased with morgan b. (temporarily) replacing jj and c. a woman of colour who breathed. i don't love her, although i do think her and emily should have fu— uh. who said that? anyway:

what i do really like is the narrative role she serves during her episodes, and especially during this one. with any long-running show with dark themes, there's always a risk of the audience becoming desensitized—a guarantee, even, if it goes on long enough. i think a lot of these shows (including cm, on occasion) fall into this trap where they think the solution to that is to constantly escalate, which i think is a huge mistake. you'll desensitize the audience faster when you're just showing them increasingly awful things; at a certain point you'll even bore them. also, it will inevitably become extremely unrealistic, and you'll start to sensationalize if you aren't already.

i think jordan's introduction was a really fantastic early effort to prevent the audience from becoming desensitized. we're following a cast of characters who have all been embroiled in awful things for years or decades. it's their job and it has been for a long time. the characters are already varying degrees of desensitized and they're the ones we're identifying with as the protagonists.

and then jordan. right away she's out of her depth and overwhelmed, and in this episode, she says outright that she can't do the job. i think it was also a great choice that the case in the episode isn't a particularly horrifying one (obviously they all are and the revelation at the end of this episode is really tragic, but jordan saying "im out" after this case reads very different than if it had been after something like no way out where it's clearly among their worst cases).

she's a reminder to the audience that the people we're watching are not normal. no normal person could do the job they do. the vast majority of the audience, if transplanted into the show, wouldn't be reid or emily or morgan or hotch—they would be jordan.

if spencer reid was a stage of grief he would be bargaining. can anyone hear me

Another fundraiser I trust!

I think their words say this much better than I ever could: "We left our home, our cats, and all of our belongings behind. For ten days, we stayed in the health clinic belonging to UNRWA. When the Israeli tanks reached our location, just a street away, we were forced to leave again. We started to walk towards Rafah.

The road took three hours on foot. My sister has a mobility disability, and my father is elderly and suffers from high blood pressure, diabetes, and a previous injury to his foot and pelvis. It was a terrifying walk, especially hard for them to cover this distance. We were in a terrified state, with corpses on the ground, unable to look at them, knowing that we couldn’t let fear get to us. We have seen the horrors of this war. Despite that, we thank God we are alive."

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Gaza: Support Nada and her familly rebuild their life

Hi, My name is Nada, and I am 28 years old. I live in Gaza with my parents and six siblings. My brother Raffeq and I used to work to support

i know i've said it a thousand times before but the way reid interacts with sympathetic unsubs (particularly ones in psychosis) makes me

i really wish there were more fics about it and especially more of the team acknowledging it. give me the team Knowing that this is something reid is particularly good at and sending him in on purpose. give me the pre-fisher king team being unsure of why he's so particularly good but appreciating it, and then it clicking post-fisher king. i need to eat it. i could talk about this for days.