Ash

I'm glad you enjoyed, it was actually 1 am when I sent this and I was sleep deprived, I was just listening to the playlist and thought "Spencer whould like this. I have to tell Cate". Music is just closely related to my memories so this was me rambling about it 😭

So now that I am actually awake and capable of coherent thoughts, let me elaborate.

Classical music and house music are structured the same in the sense that they layer instruments in almost 1 by 1 and do the same when fading out. And the songs w lyrics use the voice in the same way as all the other instruments. So Spencer being a great classical music enjoyer, I think he would like this sense of familiarity in structure in more modern music.

I think he'd also really like them as background noise for paperwork days or just to drown out his thoughts (mood). Especially the really repetitive ones like chase, it's meant to sound like a train (which is p obvious imo) and just the repetitiveness of it is just so soothing to me.

I think this kind of music would be a good way for him to start enjoying more pop music bc we never really hear his opinion on it and I think this would be a good introduction to familiarize him w more modern sounding stuff. Bc tbh I think his mom also p much listened to classical music and like, Elvis.

Now for the Tron legacy soundtrack, it's more cyberpunk-y bc the movie is about a dude who accidentally gets stuck in the game his dad created, but I think Spencer would like the movie bc he's canonically a sci-fi fan and I can see him over analyzing the setting and how the programs are sentient etc. (Spencer is never normal about any media he consumes, that man is looking at all the crumbs of lore to explain the world building and you can't convince me otherwise. This is him about every piece of media he enjoys:

And again; mood)

Ok ty for coming to my Ted talk.

okay, so, exit wounds (s05e21). i know we all hotch girls know this episode for “sit down and shut up” reasons, but something just came up in my mind about this episode

FROM NOW ON WE’RE GONNA TALK ABOUT DOMESTIC ABUSE, SO THIS IS A HUGE TRIGGER WARNING!!!!

• it’s not cannon (because the writers couldn’t give anyone a cohesive backstory), but i guess most of us believe Aaron was abused by his dad (based on what he said on season 01 about some abused people becoming the ones who hunt bad guys)

• if Aaron was abused, chances are that his mom was abused, too, if not physically, psychologically (which probably didn’t happen to Sean, seen that he didn’t speak i’ll about his dad, but i have another theory about it, too)

• so in exit wounds when he sees how Peter Owens was raised and what he turned out, that his dad was an abuser and Peter/Mrs Owens were victims, he saw his family there, and he finally got to confront Mr Owens the way he could never confront his father, and since he told Mrs Owens that he’d never lay a hand on her, i assume she pressed charges and he was arrested — something Mrs Hotchner never had the courage to do

just wanted to share my thoughts with you because it got me 😭

sean’s theory: while he never said anything bad about his dad, he didn’t seem thrilled about him either (season one, when he talks about the way he died); at some point in season 8, Aaron says that he didn’t see Sean growing up because he was sent to boarding school.

my theory is that, like Aaron and his mom, Sean was abused by Mr Hotchner and he blamed Aaron for leaving them to that — they didn’t grow up together and there’s at least 10 years between them, so Sean wouldn’t know he was abused, too (and considering that some victims of abuse don’t have the courage to talk about it, maybe Mrs Hotchner wouldn’t have told him, which only made things worst — but she’s a victim, so she’s not the one to blame)

he grew up believing Aaron was “the perfect son” his father was proud of, because he became a lawyer like his father and all, and that’s why he resents Aaron — not only for leaving then, but for never suffering the way they did.

anyway, just a thought

I’m going to add my unsolicited opinion because I have been thinking about this for too long

My very loose theory on why I think Aaron was sent to boarding school, how it affected Sean’s view, and why that boarding school was in DC/northern Virginia:

Like the 5x21 episode, I came up with this theory due to how he reacted when confronted with an abuse situation.

In 6x07, the episode with three unsubs SAing girls in rural Indiana, one of them is getting abused by his dad who is the police chief. And they deal with a lot of DV in the BAU but this one is (in my opinion) one of three episodes where it’s clear Aaron has been through something like that because of how he reacts.

When the figure out the police chief abused his son, Aaron asks him “has he started to hit you back?” I think why he commented on this was because of the similarities he sees in their situations: both abused by fathers in positions of authority.

How this relates to boarding school is that I think Aaron finally hit his father back at some point, and that’s why he got sent to boarding school.

With Sean, I think his father preemptively sent him to boarding school, before he was old/big enough to hit his father back. From Sean’s perspective, Aaron’s the favorite because 1) he wasn’t abused and 2) Aaron got more time with his parents because he wasn’t sent away so young.

Why I think their boarding school was in DC/Virginia? Mostly because I don’t think the Hotchner family lived in DC area. The only canon piece of information about this is that Aaron’s mom was from Manassas, but what do abusers do first? Isolate their victims, so Aaron’s dad could have moved them out of the area so she had no support, but when it came to picking a boarding school, she requested DC so he’d have some support. But it was too late because he was already closed off. Additionally, Haley’s family (Jess and her dad, Roy) seem to be from DC, since they both live there after her death and Roy has had a store there for many years so Aaron could have been boarding at a school Haley was attending by day only.

Adding my unsolicited opinion here, too, and we can make a whole friendship out of it, thank you so much.

Back to Natural Born Killer (01x08), that was the first time Aaron kinda clicked with an Unsub who was abused by their father. He didn't think Vincent was innocent (he knew he wasn't), but at the end of the day he kinda "understood" him and tried to make him understand why he turned up like that, something like "you didn't want to end up like this, your context made you end up like this".

That theory also adds up to Pleasure is My Business (04x16).

Megan was also abused by her father (mostly psychologically, I think, but they don't exactly give us details about it), and Aaron immediately clicks with her, two abused children who ended up completely differently, and again he makes it known to Megan that if she became a killer, it wasn't because she wanted to, but because she had a backstory that triggered her into becoming a killer.

And then Exit Wounds (05x21) and Middle Man (06x07).

Aaron always empathize with killers that had a background like his, UnSubs that were abused, he's always trying to tell them that the context ruined them, and not something inside themselves. And I think that happens not because he really believes it, but because he's trying to convince himself that he can turn out like his father, or like one of them.

Rossi said in Ominivore and I quote, "But that voice in your head, it's not your conscience, it's your ego".

Now, Haley.

I strongly advise you that this all will be based on the voices in my head, and not in anything that's on the series (mostly because his background story is a complete mess).

Ok, Aaron loved Haley — we can see it a lot of times through the show, even after she was killed — but I also think that they may have married out of selfishness? And Jack would be a "problem fixer" baby, too.

For what we see in Haley's behavior after the divorce, and even Jess' after she's killed (how none of them really left Aaron), it's almost certain that Haley's family was a good family (Roy is a pain in the ass? Yeah, but his daughter was killed and he blames Aaron, so it kinda make sense); they seemed to be close to each other, a family Aaron never had. So for a young high-school Aaron, it would make sense getting married with her because he'd finally have the family he always wanted, right?

Not exactly.

I suppose the fights started when he decided to leave the US Attorneys to become an FBI Agent. He didn't spend as many time at home, and the job was pretty much everything to him.

The Reaper's case was his first case as lead profiler, and it happened in 1998. Considering that he says that for the past 10 years he kept coming back to that case, that profile, I deduce that he was working on it at home, which only opened a even bigger stain on their relationship.

Time skip to 2005, Adrian Bale's bomb and Gideon is on medical leave. Who takes up on his job? Aaron — if the job already demanded a lot, now it would demand even more, so what's the only solution they found?

Let's get pregnant.

The only thing is that getting pregnant didn't change the fact that Aaron was a workaholic (exactly like his father), and it started to take a toll on Haley, who started to seek what she couldn't find in her own marriage with other people (the call that suggested she had an affair on 03x02), but it didn't make her feel better, principally after he found out, so she left him.

Also, in 01x01, Aaron and Haley are living in Washington, VA. So, based on @radiant-reid theory, I think Haley might have convinced Aaron to return to Virginia after his dad passed to try and reconnect him with his mom.

Now we go back to Sean.

I think that returning home was damaging for their relationship, because Aaron immediately took the role of Sean's father figure (that he hadn't asked for, by the way), and the fact that he tried to convince Sean that he should follow Mr Hotchner's steps, and the fact Aaron never shared about the abuse with him, it only made Sean even more sure that he was the only Hotchner abused.

We’re theory sharing besties now

I also think with Vincent he was grateful (not the right word) that he didn’t hurt woman because the BAU see so much violence against women, like that one unsub later on who had a tape recording of his mom getting abused and then abused women and recorded them saying that same thing

I think Megan could also add another theory because her whole thing is killing men that cut their ex wives and kids completely off, and he sympathizes deeply with her, so what if something similar happened to him? Maybe his mom never had a job (his dad keeping her isolated plus the southern attitude of women being at home) and his dad, a lawyer who would know all about trusts and wills, somehow made it so she didn’t get a lot of money. This could also add another level to Sean’s resentment of Aaron if Aaron had his education paid for before his dad died, but Sean never got the same thing and so he had to work in a diner during his undergraduate degree and that’s how he gets into that job path.

Also with Haley, I think because of what happened to his mom, he was very generous with alimony and child support. Their house before they divorced was pretty massive and he earns good money from his job but his apartment is proportionally small. Also why he’s so willing to help Jess out later on when she needs money for Roy’s care.

And yes I agree so much with him being scared to turn out like his father, maybe that’s why he got into profiling because being a prosecutor, all he saw was the end result of childhood abuse not all the other factors that made a murderer murder.

Haley… lots to say about her and them. It’s said that they’re high school sweethearts and he probably wasn’t in a good place during high school so I think he really latched on to the loving family dynamic, especially since he’s away from home and there’s that whole thing about thinking the whole world is on fire when you live in a house that’s on fire. One of the other things he tells Vincent is that not everyone’s father hit them and I think he’s talking about Haley’s family. So he sees Haley and the love in her family and he latches onto it and it seems realistic he could have that with her so he marries her, makes sense.

But the thing is, he never worked through his childhood trauma and I seriously doubt he went to a therapist so while he never picked up his father’s abusive traits, he saw how much his dad worked as a good thing (if his dad is working, he’s not home abusing his mom) so that’s the trait he picked up (I mean, we all pick up something from our parents)

Then Jack, poor baby Jack who definitely was a band-aid baby. I guess Haley’s thinking was that Aaron would work less, since I think her dad was very present him her life. I also think Roy sacrificed a lot for his girls. I doubt Aaron went to public school, mr hotchner wouldn’t want his family having that reputation (said in a snobby tone) and if they went to the same high school. I mean there’s a chance Roy made lots of money owning a store but not nearly as much as a lawyer, and a heavy financial investment in Haley’s education could also explain why he doesn’t have savings when he’s elderly.

But obviously Aaron doesn’t work less and things fall massively apart for them

Ok, @radiant-reid this is only getting better (or maybe worst, because things keep falling apart for Aaron).

When you talked about how Mrs Hotchner was a housewife it got me thinking about Haley (again). I mean, on 05x01 she tells Aaron that she has a job, so probably she had also been a housewife the whole time from the moment they got married.

I don’t think Aaron did it on purpose, there’s more than one moment he really gets pissed off about how women are treated (probably because of the way his mom was treated), but I can imagine Aaron wanting to be the one who provides. He works his ass off and than brings home everything Haley may want, except for her husband.

Also, the alimony thing — do I think he does it out of generosity? Yes. Do I also think he does it to overcompensate the fact he was extremely absent? Absolutely. It’s hinted that after the divorce he let Haley keep their old house, too, so even if he wasn’t there anymore, even if they weren’t together, he kept trying to prove he wasn’t like his father (and I don’t think Haley ever thought about it, because it’s clear that even after the divorce, she still loved him until some point).

Also, in Haley’s funeral Aaron says she was his best friend, so I suppose even after the divorce they still kept in touch, not only because they were co-parenting, but because they’ve spent most of their lives together, so Haley was literally the only person who understood him at that point.

About the therapist, I’m convinced Aaron is that kind of man who believes he doesn’t need one, and considering that the Bureau assigned a therapist for them — and Derek stated on 05x02 that they wrote the questions on the psychological evaluation —, it’s clear that he never worked his issues. It’s funny though that when it came to the team, he has the need to make them open up (like on Emily’s thing); he wanted to make sure the team would open up, that they wouldn’t bottle up their feelings, and as stated by Rossi, everyone can talk to him, but with who he talks to?

Maybe that’s another thing he got from the abuse. Abusers always try to make sure the victims won’t tell anyone about the abuse, and Mr Hotchner was a lawyer, so he was probably really influential in the community, so who’d believe that Dr Hotchner, a lawyer, was abusing his family? No one. So he closed himself off and only told to the person he knew would believe him: Haley.

But I also think that Gideon and Rossi knew (or at least Gideon knew, and Rossi had his doubts). I’m gonna be looking for evidence in the episodes and we can talk about it later.

The ‘men have to provide’ thing would definitely be talked into him from a young age but I think he was cautious about how he handled his and Haley’s finances so she didn’t end up in a situation where she felt like she couldn’t leave if she wanted to. I think, even though it’s not the normal way things are done, some of Aaron’s paychecks went into an account only she had a card for so she was free to leave, just because he’d really want to avoid her feeling what his mom felt.

I think Jack got very spoilt because of Aaron’s guilt, firstly for never being there and then secondly for his mom dying, like he gets everything he wants and I don’t think he’d be a bratty kid because of it but when he grows up, he realizes he always had money but never his dad and he wishes it was the other way around.

Their divorce hurts so much because they were clearly still in love with each other… although I do think she was cheating on him, which also reminds me of what he said about his dad always cheating on his mom

I think the whole BAU were finessing that therapists, Emily does it with hers so much. and I have always wondered why the orders kept coming from Aaron/someone higher up to send them there, like obviously when something traumatic happens, there’s a protocol, but it’s common knowledge that the BAU wrote the questions so why did they keep expecting honest answers?

And yes about his dad being important enough for people to ignore the abuse. There’s that one episode but it’s just him and Rossi talking to a women who murdered her husband but it was actually because she was abused and no one believed her because her husband was the typical amazing family dad so I feel like Mr Hotchner was involved in charities and pretty much anything that didn’t involve his wife or kids since he didn’t really like them. It wouldn’t have been hard for a top prosecutor to sway the police into thinking nothing is wrong at home, and no jury would convict the generous, wonderful Mr Hotchner

I personally think Aaron played sport and his dad refused to ever come to a game so when Jack plays soccer, he jumps in to coach even though he’s so freaking busy because he can remember looking around and not seeing his dad when he gets a goal/scores a point.

okay, so, exit wounds (s05e21). i know we all hotch girls know this episode for “sit down and shut up” reasons, but something just came up in my mind about this episode

FROM NOW ON WE’RE GONNA TALK ABOUT DOMESTIC ABUSE, SO THIS IS A HUGE TRIGGER WARNING!!!!

• it’s not cannon (because the writers couldn’t give anyone a cohesive backstory), but i guess most of us believe Aaron was abused by his dad (based on what he said on season 01 about some abused people becoming the ones who hunt bad guys)

• if Aaron was abused, chances are that his mom was abused, too, if not physically, psychologically (which probably didn’t happen to Sean, seen that he didn’t speak i’ll about his dad, but i have another theory about it, too)

• so in exit wounds when he sees how Peter Owens was raised and what he turned out, that his dad was an abuser and Peter/Mrs Owens were victims, he saw his family there, and he finally got to confront Mr Owens the way he could never confront his father, and since he told Mrs Owens that he’d never lay a hand on her, i assume she pressed charges and he was arrested — something Mrs Hotchner never had the courage to do

just wanted to share my thoughts with you because it got me 😭

sean’s theory: while he never said anything bad about his dad, he didn’t seem thrilled about him either (season one, when he talks about the way he died); at some point in season 8, Aaron says that he didn’t see Sean growing up because he was sent to boarding school.

my theory is that, like Aaron and his mom, Sean was abused by Mr Hotchner and he blamed Aaron for leaving them to that — they didn’t grow up together and there’s at least 10 years between them, so Sean wouldn’t know he was abused, too (and considering that some victims of abuse don’t have the courage to talk about it, maybe Mrs Hotchner wouldn’t have told him, which only made things worst — but she’s a victim, so she’s not the one to blame)

he grew up believing Aaron was “the perfect son” his father was proud of, because he became a lawyer like his father and all, and that’s why he resents Aaron — not only for leaving then, but for never suffering the way they did.

anyway, just a thought

I’m going to add my unsolicited opinion because I have been thinking about this for too long

My very loose theory on why I think Aaron was sent to boarding school, how it affected Sean’s view, and why that boarding school was in DC/northern Virginia:

Like the 5x21 episode, I came up with this theory due to how he reacted when confronted with an abuse situation.

In 6x07, the episode with three unsubs SAing girls in rural Indiana, one of them is getting abused by his dad who is the police chief. And they deal with a lot of DV in the BAU but this one is (in my opinion) one of three episodes where it’s clear Aaron has been through something like that because of how he reacts.

When the figure out the police chief abused his son, Aaron asks him “has he started to hit you back?” I think why he commented on this was because of the similarities he sees in their situations: both abused by fathers in positions of authority.

How this relates to boarding school is that I think Aaron finally hit his father back at some point, and that’s why he got sent to boarding school.

With Sean, I think his father preemptively sent him to boarding school, before he was old/big enough to hit his father back. From Sean’s perspective, Aaron’s the favorite because 1) he wasn’t abused and 2) Aaron got more time with his parents because he wasn’t sent away so young.

Why I think their boarding school was in DC/Virginia? Mostly because I don’t think the Hotchner family lived in DC area. The only canon piece of information about this is that Aaron’s mom was from Manassas, but what do abusers do first? Isolate their victims, so Aaron’s dad could have moved them out of the area so she had no support, but when it came to picking a boarding school, she requested DC so he’d have some support. But it was too late because he was already closed off. Additionally, Haley’s family (Jess and her dad, Roy) seem to be from DC, since they both live there after her death and Roy has had a store there for many years so Aaron could have been boarding at a school Haley was attending by day only.

Adding my unsolicited opinion here, too, and we can make a whole friendship out of it, thank you so much.

Back to Natural Born Killer (01x08), that was the first time Aaron kinda clicked with an Unsub who was abused by their father. He didn't think Vincent was innocent (he knew he wasn't), but at the end of the day he kinda "understood" him and tried to make him understand why he turned up like that, something like "you didn't want to end up like this, your context made you end up like this".

That theory also adds up to Pleasure is My Business (04x16).

Megan was also abused by her father (mostly psychologically, I think, but they don't exactly give us details about it), and Aaron immediately clicks with her, two abused children who ended up completely differently, and again he makes it known to Megan that if she became a killer, it wasn't because she wanted to, but because she had a backstory that triggered her into becoming a killer.

And then Exit Wounds (05x21) and Middle Man (06x07).

Aaron always empathize with killers that had a background like his, UnSubs that were abused, he's always trying to tell them that the context ruined them, and not something inside themselves. And I think that happens not because he really believes it, but because he's trying to convince himself that he can turn out like his father, or like one of them.

Rossi said in Ominivore and I quote, "But that voice in your head, it's not your conscience, it's your ego".

Now, Haley.

I strongly advise you that this all will be based on the voices in my head, and not in anything that's on the series (mostly because his background story is a complete mess).

Ok, Aaron loved Haley — we can see it a lot of times through the show, even after she was killed — but I also think that they may have married out of selfishness? And Jack would be a "problem fixer" baby, too.

For what we see in Haley's behavior after the divorce, and even Jess' after she's killed (how none of them really left Aaron), it's almost certain that Haley's family was a good family (Roy is a pain in the ass? Yeah, but his daughter was killed and he blames Aaron, so it kinda make sense); they seemed to be close to each other, a family Aaron never had. So for a young high-school Aaron, it would make sense getting married with her because he'd finally have the family he always wanted, right?

Not exactly.

I suppose the fights started when he decided to leave the US Attorneys to become an FBI Agent. He didn't spend as many time at home, and the job was pretty much everything to him.

The Reaper's case was his first case as lead profiler, and it happened in 1998. Considering that he says that for the past 10 years he kept coming back to that case, that profile, I deduce that he was working on it at home, which only opened a even bigger stain on their relationship.

Time skip to 2005, Adrian Bale's bomb and Gideon is on medical leave. Who takes up on his job? Aaron — if the job already demanded a lot, now it would demand even more, so what's the only solution they found?

Let's get pregnant.

The only thing is that getting pregnant didn't change the fact that Aaron was a workaholic (exactly like his father), and it started to take a toll on Haley, who started to seek what she couldn't find in her own marriage with other people (the call that suggested she had an affair on 03x02), but it didn't make her feel better, principally after he found out, so she left him.

Also, in 01x01, Aaron and Haley are living in Washington, VA. So, based on @radiant-reid theory, I think Haley might have convinced Aaron to return to Virginia after his dad passed to try and reconnect him with his mom.

Now we go back to Sean.

I think that returning home was damaging for their relationship, because Aaron immediately took the role of Sean's father figure (that he hadn't asked for, by the way), and the fact that he tried to convince Sean that he should follow Mr Hotchner's steps, and the fact Aaron never shared about the abuse with him, it only made Sean even more sure that he was the only Hotchner abused.

We’re theory sharing besties now

I also think with Vincent he was grateful (not the right word) that he didn’t hurt woman because the BAU see so much violence against women, like that one unsub later on who had a tape recording of his mom getting abused and then abused women and recorded them saying that same thing

I think Megan could also add another theory because her whole thing is killing men that cut their ex wives and kids completely off, and he sympathizes deeply with her, so what if something similar happened to him? Maybe his mom never had a job (his dad keeping her isolated plus the southern attitude of women being at home) and his dad, a lawyer who would know all about trusts and wills, somehow made it so she didn’t get a lot of money. This could also add another level to Sean’s resentment of Aaron if Aaron had his education paid for before his dad died, but Sean never got the same thing and so he had to work in a diner during his undergraduate degree and that’s how he gets into that job path.

Also with Haley, I think because of what happened to his mom, he was very generous with alimony and child support. Their house before they divorced was pretty massive and he earns good money from his job but his apartment is proportionally small. Also why he’s so willing to help Jess out later on when she needs money for Roy’s care.

And yes I agree so much with him being scared to turn out like his father, maybe that’s why he got into profiling because being a prosecutor, all he saw was the end result of childhood abuse not all the other factors that made a murderer murder.

Haley… lots to say about her and them. It’s said that they’re high school sweethearts and he probably wasn’t in a good place during high school so I think he really latched on to the loving family dynamic, especially since he’s away from home and there’s that whole thing about thinking the whole world is on fire when you live in a house that’s on fire. One of the other things he tells Vincent is that not everyone’s father hit them and I think he’s talking about Haley’s family. So he sees Haley and the love in her family and he latches onto it and it seems realistic he could have that with her so he marries her, makes sense.

But the thing is, he never worked through his childhood trauma and I seriously doubt he went to a therapist so while he never picked up his father’s abusive traits, he saw how much his dad worked as a good thing (if his dad is working, he’s not home abusing his mom) so that’s the trait he picked up (I mean, we all pick up something from our parents)

Then Jack, poor baby Jack who definitely was a band-aid baby. I guess Haley’s thinking was that Aaron would work less, since I think her dad was very present him her life. I also think Roy sacrificed a lot for his girls. I doubt Aaron went to public school, mr hotchner wouldn’t want his family having that reputation (said in a snobby tone) and if they went to the same high school. I mean there’s a chance Roy made lots of money owning a store but not nearly as much as a lawyer, and a heavy financial investment in Haley’s education could also explain why he doesn’t have savings when he’s elderly.

But obviously Aaron doesn’t work less and things fall massively apart for them

Well all of this just broke my heart.

I'm still mad that it took Haley dying for Hotch to realize he COULD in fact be a more present father, and that even then, he relied heavily on Jess. I remember that episode where he's on vacation and Gideon calls him to let him know there's a case and he drops the vacation and goes to work. I wish someone had sat him down and made him realize that was him CHOOSING work over his family.

All of it just makes me so sad, especially for Jack.

Fun fact: my father is also a workaholic who's birthday is on November 2nd. Talk about a Hotch kinnie.

Anyways I'm gonna go cry now.

As he grew older, he found himself growing increasingly obsessed with the notion of becoming human enough to get laid by robots.

Me when I broke my own no robot fucking rule to read fanfic about fucking Connor from Detroit: Become Human and my friend answered w

(For context she was talking about Ren from dramatical murder who is apparently a robot dog w a human form???) 😭