So. Garcia Is Not In Broken Mirror. Sad. Reid Takes What Would Usually Be Her Place W The Trap And Trace

so. garcia is not in broken mirror. sad. reid takes what would usually be her place w the trap and trace which is. interesting given his establishment as a luddite*. and funny because of his terrible typing skills.

anyway. obviously doylist (real world) answer is probably that kirsten vangsness either just wasn't available, or they didn't have her in this episode because she wasn't yet a main role (kirsten vangsness is credited as "also starring" during season one).

but watsonian (in universe) answers are way more fun, so. sound off: why wasn't garcia in s01e05?

*this is a tangent and a half, but I think this lends credence to the idea i sometimes see that reid isn't so much bad with technology (horrendous typing skills aside) as he does just not like it and avoid it for that reason. this + his engineering degree, which—correct me if i'm wrong—would be rather difficult without some tech knowledge...just makes me hmm. from what i've seen, i think that early characterization is forgotten a bit in the later seasons (not surprising. with all the love in my heart, the cm writers really could have benefitted from, like, a collaborative google doc titled "continuity") but it's interesting to think about

request guidelines

do not be afraid. i am a reasonable person. probably. hopefully!

things i will not write:

general

first of all: none of this is a moral judgement on what other people write. tag your stuff appropriately and we'll get on great. everything is either in line with a personal headcanon or a personal discomfort.

adult/minor ships, even if one or more party's ages are changed to make the relationship legal.

incest

romanticized abuse

sex scenes with underage characters, even if they are aged up to be 18+

onscreen rape/"non-con"

reader-insert

a/b/o

oh also pregnancy. for some reason.

okay just to reiterate. none of the above is a judgement on what other people write or read. just things i, personally, don't want to write for one reason or another. no idea if this is something that needs to be stated—this may well be holdover from the fact that i joined tumblr in *shivers* 2017

atla

endgame zuko/any women (mai/zuko mutual beards to besties is delightful and welcome)

toph/any men

endgame azula/anyone (not because i hate her, but because i ship her with therapy. i specify endgame because i won't not write her in a relationship (esp partial to tyzula), the relationship just won't last.

zuko/sokka where sokka permanently relocates to the fire nation. most zukka i write, if i write it, will also involve sokka/suki because i adore them, but i won't not write monogamous zuko/sokka.

cm

unsub!bau (owie)

jj/reid

prentiss/any men (actually, prentiss/anyone except for me /j)

i know this is...very long. advice on cutting it down is welcome. i don't expect people to memorize this and i won't bite you if you slide into my asks asking me to write endgame mai/zuko—all of this is more so people who are looking for that kind of content know that i'm not where to look.

may or may not write:

smut and romance, for the simple reason that genfic is my shit and i'm not nearly as confident in my ability to write either or those. probably more likely to write f/f because i am a big ol' lesbian. if you do send a request for smut, i'll only fulfill it if a. your age is in your bio (incl. given as a range) and b. that age is over eighteen. i'm not your mother and i can't control what you read but i'm uncomfortable with fulfilling 18+ requests from anyone who isn't at least eighteen.

major character death. depends on how mean i'm feeling.

pleasepleasepleaseplease:

genfic

found family

mental health issues

angst

hurt/comfort

complicated relationships

expanding on what canon neglected. if that makes sense.

this is not even a little bit related to criminal minds (or atla or tma/tmagp or any other fandom I’m in) but I am on my way to a show tonight !! my friends are in a band and they’re playing at a dive bar they’ve played at a few times before. I will get a little tipsy* and show up in a couple hours with video if they’re cool with it

*before any Americans check my bio and get heart palpitations, drinking age here is eighteen :)

okay. confession. part of the reason i haven't updated anything in so long is because:

a. i had no energy for a while

b. i regained energy, but by that point it had been long enough that i got the itchy feeling of needing to edit/revise all my wips before continuing them. i know that's silly. i don't know if anyone else does that. if i spend too long between updates, i have to go back and edit all the older stuff before i can even think of writing new stuff. in the past, this has been bad as "the gap was too long between chapter 5 and chapter 6, so i have to edit chapters 1-4. oops, the gap was too long between chapters 2 and 3 and now i have to edit 1 and 2 again before i edit 3-6 before i write 7. something is wrong with me!

c. this i think is actual writing advice that i got from Somewhere. or maybe there's another thing wrong with me. either way: the way i edit is by retyping the whole thing and figuring out things i want to change/spotting mistakes as i go, rather than reading it over, where i skim and skip over things.

d. i have generally had less time to write than i did before.

if you've ever gone back and reread a fic i wrote, you might have noticed stuff changing (it's never anything major. usually it's a paragraph or two being cut, added, or replaced. what i'm about to share is probably the biggest edit i've done in a bit.

anyway, rn im rewriting the opening scene of "like the strength of an army", and my weird process wound up with a change that i really do like.

Emily cleared her throat. "Hey, Reid?" "Hm?" He didn't look up from his new file. "Lunch is in twenty." This did get his attention. He raised his head and glanced at his watch, eyebrows shooting up. Hm. Reid usually had a clock running in his head. For him to have lost track of the time... "Oh. Uh, okay." He blinked and went back to the file, apparently not catching the invitation in the statement. Of course. Silly her. Reid would never believe that anyone would like him enough to voluntarily spend time with him. He needed to be smacked in the face with a social cue if he was to notice it. "You. Me. Indian food. Twenty minutes." That should do it.

I realised as I was rewriting that I didn't like the original exchange that was in place of the last two paragraphs. it read as being too long because it had five lines of dialogue, interrupted the flow, and served mostly as a reference to a line from canon i think is funny. that's not a good enough reason to exist at the expense of the pacing! so. that'll change...within the next few days. i'm sorry, i flipflop what i'm revising/working on from day to day. because there's something wrong with me.

maybe feel slightly comforted to know that i'm restraining myself from starting another wip until SOMETHING is marked as complete.

lmao nobody is reading this. i'm yelling into the void about my incredibly strange writing/revising process that makes me take eons to update. thank you for listening, void.

so. this scene has been talked about a lot:

I think this scene is a really interesting example of the criminal minds writers giving tiny pieces of character backstories that are never elaborated upon, (or, more broadly, forgetting early established character details) because unlike a lot of examples where lines are said and immediately forgotten about, I do think this revelation informs a lot of Hotch's character. I'm not necessarily saying that the writers always had it in mind when writing Hotch that he experienced childhood abuse, but I do feel like you can see the ways in which he was affected. I don't know—this made more sense in my head, but it feels a little less forgotten about and a little less thrown in than some other examples. I think a big difference between this scene and some later ones is that:

The trauma happened pre-series

and

It was established in the first season.

criminal minds isn't great at letting their characters be affected by their in-series trauma for more than a few episodes (and then maybe it'll come up once or twice down the line because the writers remembered it happened) and a lot of later instances* of characters being revealed to have some major pre-series trauma suffer because the impact it would have reasonably had on them isn't consistent with earlier portrayals and sometimes even contradicts established information.

not that it can't be interesting to look at those earlier portrayals of their characters with the backstory that is added later. again, this all made more sense in my head: essentially, the reason i think this feels different to me is that the writers knew when they started writing hotch that he was abused as a child, while other characters who have traumatic backstories revealed have those backstories added much later, and so the writers have a not-great choice between showing the effects their trauma had on them when there was no sign of it earlier, or moving on with their character as if none of it ever happened.

*i'd like to quickly establish that i'm not talking about morgan here. that was also a pretty early reveal and feels consistent enough with early characterization that i wouldn't be shocked if the idea was first floated while season one was being written

One thing I keep thinking about is that Reid joined the FBI below the minimum required age right? But he also failed a bunch of qualifications in the academy. So he was not only the wrong age but also not exactly qualified and it's safe to assume Gideon is the one who got him in despite all that since he is the one who convinced him to join the FBI. Reid certainly couldn't have forced his way in lmao

But why? What was the hurry when it seems he could have used those extra years of experience? It always felt to me like he was very much pressed for time to get this job Right Now, and the only reason I can think of it that maybe it was immensely difficult to pay for Diana's care in these years ever since he was 18, and perhaps Gideon was sympathetic to that while also seeing potential in him.