#btw i rewatched and made this in between rewatching scenes from flower of evil and vincenzo

[waitingforminjae]

i’ve seen the greatest actors of my generation wasted away in the worst shows you’ve ever seen

[violetemerald]

So the tumblr mobile app is really frustrating me these past couple of days but…

for this: http://luvtheheaven.tumblr.com/post/159203462757/jerseydevious-ricobrzenskas-hypocean

I got two asks. One I accidentally answered privately despite a really long answer I meant to have be public. Great. Stay tuned to see if I can get it back from the person I sent it to via copying and pasting.

And the other…

@traumacarriedsara asked me the other of the two “asks” I received about this… and THANK YOU. This was too much fun lol. (BTW I’d happily do this again and much much shorter once you catch up on Legends of Tomorrow…) I had a lot of fun with this, saved it as a draft, and… lost it. Maybe I sent it privately by mistake *again* just like the other, I don’t even know…

So… idk what’s going on but let’s just create a text post, shall I? I still have the whole post because of the magic of copying and pasting and me having prepared this time to maybe lose it... lol

Character Aaron Hotchner from Criminal Minds, you say?

Headcanon A: what I think realistically

Headcanon B: what I think is fucking hilarious

Headcanon C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends

Headcanon D: what would never work with canon but the canon is shit so I believe it anyway

…

Well really, almost all my Hotch headcanons are some combination of the A, C, and D types.

I think they wouldn’t realistically call it that, but David Rossi and Aaron Hotchner are straight (albeit Hotch I think has a more specific type or might lean demisexual) yet they are clearly in a queerplatonic relationship with each other. I’m talking way beyond typical best friends. They have each other’s backs at work and for home life. They know each other’s secrets and hardships. Rossi helps out Hotch with practical things whether it be coaching Jack’s soccer team or helping him go into Witness Protection in the new season. In general Rossi has been painted as everyone’s protector on this show but especially Hotch’s because Hotch helps protect everyone else and doesn’t have anyone else to particularly look out for him. That being said, I like to headcanon that way more than on the actual show, there have been times when Rossi needed things and Hotch goes above and beyond to help him. There’s hints of it anyway but I imagine also that there are times when maybe Hotch has acknowledged to himself, even, however more difficult it is… acknowledged to Rossi! just how important Rossi is to him.

A headcanon that amuses me a bit that I often think about while rewatching the show is that Hotch is in love with JJ. Usually not heartbreaking although… I think if it is requited at all it’s mutual pining at best.

I believe Hotch and Beth wouldn’t have broken up.

I headcanon that until Beth, the only person he’d ever slept with was Haley. They met in high school after all.

I strongly headcanon that Hotch grew up in an extremely complicated abusive situation and only Rossi knows these kinds of details about his past, although the rest of the team are good at their jobs and have plenty of suspicions. It doesn’t work with canon exactly UNLESS I really force it but I’ve been taking notes in my rewatch and so many little things about Hotch add to my thought process about what could’ve happened to him, and I’ll try to write a Hotch fanfic at one point.

Part of what doesn’t work with canon is that his parents, either of them, abused him. Because of the way he talks about his father’s (contradictory two different causes of) death, and after Morgan prompts him in a season 7 episode, his mom too. (She made him good breakfasts and he serves the same to Jack.)

I have concocted an elaborate headcanon for myself in the meantime where Hotch’s father kidnapped, sexually molested, took out rage, and probably killed random kids and Hotch was “only” a helpless witness for some of this, his father’s main form of abusing Hotch was subjecting him to watching this happen to others. This man was the epitome of psychologically abusive to his own family, to his wife/to Hotch’s mom, to Aaron, to his brother Sean but maybe *only Aaron* ended up really knowing a large chunk of the horror.

By high school or so Hotch and Sean ended up luckily in a new home or perhaps separate homes. I forget the age difference between them but Sean is a lot younger so I’m thinking Aaron was in high school and Sean was… very little. The people Hotch chooses to consider Mom and Dad are his adoptive or foster parents. They might’ve been an older couple when they took him in which is why they died before the show started…

I imagine the horrible things that he watched happen to other kids but that didn’t happen directly to him make Aaron constantly feel that he’s lucky, that any trauma he’s endured is nothing compared to the horror others have had to survive or others didn’t survive at all. I imagine his extreme involvement in cases involving trying to rescue children from monsters is not just inspired by his own feelings of love for his own son but much more than that by many memories. I take little moments from the show for his character and interpret how they’d fit in with this, like the way Hotch is often the one doing CPR on children at the end of an ep if there is a child…

Since you, @traumacarriedsara, and I already discussed seasons 1-3 Hotch moments from angles of him being abused I’ll start with some season 4 ones. Hotch tells Morgan at the end of 4x01 that the fact that he’s alive, his own life, means a lot to him. It seems like a significant and oddly vulnerable moment. This is the aftermath of the explosion and an episode where Hotch tries so hard to save a friend’s life but unfortunately fails… and then the next episode, Hotch reacts to the bad news that his hearing problems could become permanent with almost no reaction. Doesn’t let it bother him. And he takes risks that hurt his hearing and cause him physical pain like going on the plane anyway, because his job is so important to him? Hotch is also the agent, of all the agents it could’ve been, to in this episode look into the dead baby’s nursery, Hotch takes it all in, then knows to look in the chest with the flowers on top and finds the corpse.

There are more moments I wrote down but I want to skip to a few more pertinent ones:

4x04 Hotch is upset he had talked to the unsub and missed the this was the guy they’d been looking for. He’s driving, rossi in the passenger seat,and Rossi reassures him that it could’ve been any of them. Hotch is still upset about it at the end if the episode though. He bows his head shamefully and Rossi tells him we’ve all been there. Hotch takes it so personally that he couldn’t tell.

4x06 there’s a lot to unpack but… skipping a little… he has to regretfully inform the parents of the kidnapped boy that they did find a preferential sex offender at the funeral but not the person who has their son. The mother asks how many of these people are out there and he sadly and solemnly answers “more than you want to know”. I think it’s interesting how much Hotch gets to be the one dealing with the emotional parents in this episode. Later, the mother grabs the phone from Hotch and tearfully begs thar her son not be hurt. He watches her sadly.

4x09 has so much… Hotch yells at Jordan for lying to a family during one of the worst times of their lives, lying about having a sister who died. He takes it very personally. As he leaves angrily, Jordan turns to Morgan 10:45 and asks him how badly she screwed up. Morgan says on a normal scale of 1-10 probably a 6, but on Hotch’s an 11. For some reason this is a particularly sore spot for Hotch. (This reminds me a bit of the serial killer on death row lying about his childhood and Hotch reacting especially negatively.)

There’s other things I took notes on while rewatching season 4 but I’ll slip just to the simple fact that in 4x17, when asked whether or not he believes in evil,  he gives the in between answer between Rossi and Morgan. He mentions how he thinks we’re all capable of unspeakable things.

In 4x18, the first episode with George Foyet, Hotch chooses to make a pretty long trip to Boston when Shaunessy is on his death bed and it seems like that’s kind of what Hotch tends to do repeatedly, people he doesn’t know well, sometimes unsubs, he still wants to be a comfort in a dying moment if they have no one else. Hotch firmly states “we don’t let them get away with it” and what Shaunessy did was wrong. Hotch clearly and explicitly refuses to make a promise to the dying man that he doesn’t intend to keep. He will tell the victim’s families he’s sorry but not that he had no choice, because Hotch believes Shaunessy did have a choice. But by the end of the episode, after Foyet asks Hotch why more people had to die , trying to blame him, Hotch is strong enough to say “Don’t ask me,  you’re the serial killer”. I think from the perspective that Hotch had lived through his father being a serial killer and maybe his mother letting the guy get away with a lot or even helping, a lot of types of scenes work in a new light. I love rewatching the whole show with this headcanon in mind.

Even 4x24 Hotch stays professional whole anthrax ep and can’t focus on Reid dying either, he draws a firm stance around protocol and around how if there’s nothing more that they as fbi agents can do for Reid, they need to focus on the bigger picture. And it’s practically cold and kind of a contrast to how he has acted in some other episodes, but at the same time I think it’s interesting that he’s got that kind of strength and focus and determination and ability to compartmentalize.

I didn’t want to go into later seasons because we’d be here all day but I do briefly want to mention 5x08, where the whole ep deals with families being murdered again.  I find his argument with Emily about whether or not to show pictures of a dead 12 year old to a serial killer interesting. She says they’re not “just” images and he says that’s exactly what they are!! I could honestly see the scene reversed having worked too. Either character could take the practical, “these are pictures, they aren’t causing additional harm to real people” stance and either could be too blinded by emotion. But like.. considering how protective and viscerally angry Hotch is in cases involving kids… considering this headcanon of mine…

I feel like Hotch is focused on whatever it takes saving children. He stopped being a prosecutor because while putting away the monsters felt good, it always felt like it was too late. He wants to catch them earlier, be a part of literally saving lives in a less abstract way, and while it does upset him if a serial killer gets pleasure out of others’ pain, most of the time his focus is more on trying not to care about what the serial killer feels or doesn’t feel. He is extremely determined in wanting to *practically* figure out how to save the most future pain, save victims.

Now the biggest thing is that however much I try to make it work with canon, this extremely intense headcanon actually doesn’t work with canon, I just believe it anyway. It doesn’t make sense that it would never have come up. Especially with the whole Ashley Seaver arc… It probably doesn’t make sense that Hotch is this well adjusted, even. But… I like to believe it all anyway.

I am exploding with so many thoughts and feelings when it comes to so many characters on this show, really…