#i also particularly miss elle and morgan for the same reason as you

[frankiebirds]

started binging criminal minds, i was gutted when elle left & now watching the next couple of s2 episodes i really felt her absence. especially in 'the last word' when a women has to pretend to be dead so they can catch one of the serial killers (they so needed to have a frank convo about making elle relieve her trauma + this couldve been a great intro to that). i read your post, i agree it did make sense why elle left considering her background as a sexual offence specialist & what she says to reid but i found the writing lacking. her exit felt rushed + not final bc she only really shared scenes with hotch. also she also seems the type to not wanna give up the bau bc that would mean the fisher king wins + is a determined person so it would've been better to see her slow realisation she cant do the job she desperately wanted in s1. also the fact her relationships with the rest of the team + their reactions weren't fully explored is annoying since she was quite friendly with everyone particularly close to morgan, reid even gideon. especially since gideon inadvertently caused her get shot as he didnt want to follow the rules then said elle would understand?? so a confrontation w gideon similar to the one w hotchner wouldve been nice. i miss morgan's fun bantery friendship with elle in the later eps when she wasn't there to partner up with him (idk they seemed to be a go to partnership to me) & the elle/morgan/reid trio is sorely missed. ive largely enjoyed everything so far (just finished 2x09) but i wish they'd more deeply explore the characters' history. like the inclusion of reids mom was interesting & really liked how garcia respected reids privacy to keep her illness a secret. it was a missed opportunity i felt not to see elle & morgan not bonding over losing their cop dads or hotch and gideon talking about fatherhood when hotch is missing out on his babys key milestones (ik there was that bit in s1 when hotch tells gideon to get in touch w his son but more of those moments wouldve been nice). whilst i feel the team all like each other and there's some interesting/fun friendships (reid&gideon , garcia&morgan etc) id be nice to have some downtime scenes showcasing them as a makeshift found family (sorry i love that trope & c'mon they spend more time with each other than with their acc families). anyway sorry for the long rant this show is eating at my brain lord my brain mass will be equivalent to a pea by the time i finish this show. <3

thats fair and i get what you mean! there are definitely moments when i felt elle's absence and there are definitely things about her leaving that i would change if i had the power—i absolutely agree that the reactions from the rest of the team to her leaving and the actions leading up to it were sorely lacking, and a slower realisation that she cant do the job anymore would have been very cool to see, although i think the latter was less due to writing problems and more to the fact that elle left the show because lola glaudini chose to leave (ie they couldn't write a fully fleshed out leaving arc for elle because it was driven by out-of-show events and therefore not planned/they had limited time to execute it). the lack of reaction from the team is a writing problem though, so again i very much agree with that!

i hope you enjoy the rest of the show and get some of your wishes, and if you dont, you can find some good fics to fulfill them <3

[yoakkemae-moved]

@hlyrlrs asked: Meta about how Spencer felt towards the BAU team members are first. Especially the OG season 1 team.

gideon, everyone knows, met spencer during a lecture gideon was having. spencer just finished his engineering degree and wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to go into physics or psychology next (psychology because it was different to all of the hard sciences he had been learning). he saw gideon lecture and thought he was interesting and wanted to speak more on the subject of profiling, and they talked for several hours until spencer realised he was potentially going to run late for a date and left. 

funnily enough, his date was with stephen gideon, and spencer found out about the relation during dinner when he talked about the interesting lecture he went to. they still went on a few dates, but when stephen found out that spencer was going to join the bau, he bounced because while his relationship with his dad was kind of getting better (or, at least, was evening out), he didn’t want to lose another person to that job. spencer wasn’t too upset about it because they weren’t that close yet. 

spencer knew things between gideon and stephen weren’t airtight, and knew that when gideon was trying to get him to join the team, it was both because spencer was an asset and also out of some bizarre quasi-replacement son thing, but spencer never really had a father figure and didn’t quite mind that either. in a way, they were both using each other, and both of them knew that (but one was twenty and one was fifty, and, on gideon’s part, it wasn’t always the most innocent). 

spencer didn’t think that gideon was perfect, of course, spencer knew better than to ever really believe in anyone like that (especially a quasi-father figure), but spencer ignored a lot of gideon flaws and tried to really focus on the positives. it wasn’t until gideon left the team, in a similar fashion to how his father did, that spencer really allowed himself to ruminate on the flaws that gideon had. so, his first impression of gideon was that he was wicked smart and interesting to learn from. 

despite how things sometimes were, spencer was thankful that gideon encouraged him to join the bau. he’s not sure what his life would have looked like, otherwise. 

with hotch and morgan, he was initially intimidated by both of them for different reasons. despite them both being alpha males, they both presented it very differently, and, in certain ways, hotch reminded spencer of his father and morgan reminded spencer of his high school bullies. it didn’t help that it took a while for morgan to truly warm up to spencer -- for what reason, spencer still isn’t quite sure, and will probably never know because he doesn’t want to know. 

(i’m not a morgan rper, but personally i headcanon that some of morgan’s uncomfortableness with spencer joining the team came from his age -- yes, spencer was an uncommonly smart twenty-two year old, but should he really be at the bau at that age? i feel like morgan was probably the only one on the team to really question that, at first.) 

despite being intimidated by both hotch and morgan, spencer tried not to really show it. used to hostility from bullies at any age, and knowing just how badly showing fear could go, spencer tried to show neutrality as much as he could. it took time for spencer to really get over his intimidation of morgan, and that happened at around the same time that morgan stopped treating spencer with any sort of hostility. 

with hotch, spencer didn’t really stop being intimidated by him until the ldsk case -- not because hotch was as hostile as morgan (because he wasn’t, and sometimes he was even nicer than gideon), but because hotch was the boss and spencer didn’t want to piss him off. however, you can’t be held hostage together and trust someone with a plan and not get a little bit more comfortable with each other. 

with j.j., spencer was also intimidated by her, in a similar fashion to morgan -- j.j. reminded him of the popular girls in his school, particularly alexa lisbon (as they shared similarities -- blonde, skinny, very very pretty, and seemingly nice). it took a while for spencer realised that j.j. was genuinely nice, and a lot of his worries about j.j. disappeared. personally speaking, i’m still unsure of whether or not my spencer did have a crush on j.j., but they did go on the date at the urging of gideon, and the two of them had a conversation and they remained platonic ever since. 

with garcia, spencer wasn’t intimidated of her; although, she was definitely a bigger personality than he was really used to. (both ethan and stephen, the only people he could really call “friends” at that point in his life, were rather calm). she went for a hug when they finally officially met, but spencer cited his discomfort with physical affection, and garcia made sure to remember that and either asked before she touched or made sure that it was always minimal, which really helped to endear her to spencer and spencer really appreciated. it also helped that they were both nerds, and they became really fast friends, faster than spencer had ever really been friends with anyone else. 

elle was always going to be a different story. she was hot, intelligent, and didn’t seem to fall into the same illusions as the others -- well, elle accepted spencer almost instantly, talked to him, and understood him in ways that surprised him. despite hanging out with penelope more outside of work and knowing gideon (and, technically, the rest of the team) for longer, spencer felt the closest to elle. (he was also very attracted to elle but pushed that down hard. not only did he think that elle would never be interested, but he didn’t need the complications of dating a teammate, especially a new one, and i say that even though i do headcanon that ashley seaver and spencer did go on a date together, but shhh). 

he really missed elle a lot when she left, and he did send her letters every four months, just to touch base (not talking about the team or their cases, but other things, like his research or just stories). once in a while, he would receive letters back that said “thanks”, and it’s all he needed to keep sending them. he’s pretty sure that the rest of the team doesn’t know he’s still in contact with elle (and, after a few years, they evolve from mostly one-sided letters to actual text conversations and then calls), and he’s not going to say anything about it either. 

his closeness with elle is what initially sparked his dislike of emily (well, and the drug problem), until emily, in a sense, kind of took elle’s place in a slightly different but similar way (and, clearly, spencer has a type for intelligent people who don’t mind him). 

this is all i’m doing for now, but maybe i’ll do one of these later with the entire cast. for now, here’s the entire season one line-up.