#commentary;

[ftm-hotch]

Extremely funny detail in 4.03 "Minimal Loss":

Hotch draws a shitty diagram circa 32:40 and by 33:02 it's been replaced with a neater version of the same diagram

[elganac]

leah seeing a muse she used to interact with like AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[personnotfound]

i hope whoever actually shot that CEO is having a good day.

[shyjusticewarrior]

At some point "fanfic can be as good as professional writing" became "fanfic should be as good as professional writing" and that's caused major damage to fandom spaces.

[adam-scott]

ROMEO + JULIET (1996) + IMDb Trivia

[goddess-of-doubt]

there was obviously so much happening this episode. however, i don’t see enough people discussing milchick’s scene.

the way he literally is practicing using paper clips and forcing himself to dumb down his language. actually heartbreaking. his hands shaking, his voice breaking.

it’s that moment right before deconstruction of your religion where you can feel it starting to slip through your fingers, so you clench them into fists and double down on your commitment to it because without it, your entire worldview falls apart. and he doesn’t want all his years of service to lumon to have been wasted.

[innieirving]

how to ask the demon you've been smitten over for 6000 years to dance: an angel's guide

bonus:

[political-us]

[alchemicalterror]

[itsbasil]

this literally never stops being funny like dog they made starship troopers with the Baby's First Satire cranked up to 11 and these people are still fucking dumbfounded that the creators don't share their politics

[ftm-hotch]

thinking about how haley and hotch really were great together but the fandom fundamentally misunderstands their relationship because of misogyny

this is my white whale. I believe the tiktok girlies call it a "roman empire." I am Haley Hotchner's defense lawyer, and I work pro bono.

I started to draft this in my head and then I realized you know what I hate? I hate it when I'm in my own little corner of fandom and someone comes in from another corner and makes baseless accusations. So while I will be engaging in some counter-bashing, it will not be baseless, because for you, dear mutual, I have entered the belly of the beast.

Let's get into it, and then into what we actually see from Haley in the show.

Note: I'm going to stay in my lane here, my lane being ao3. It's been five years since I was what I would consider active enough on Criminal Minds tumblr to give an accurate report from the front lines, so I won't try.

So first of all, there are only 22 works. Not a lot to work with, but taking a look at the most commonly occurring tags within this one, we see:

Dr. Spencer Reid appears more in the "Not Haley Hotchner Friendly" tag than Haley Hotchner herself. 22% more, in fact (81% to 59%, Haley appears in roughly half of the works in a tag that has her name in it). Not looking good on the "erasing women" front. Haley isn't even present in a lot of these fics to show her side of the story, and she's often shunted aside in favor of Hotch/Reid. Nothing wrong with Hotch/Reid at all btw! But when a woman is consistently sidelined and demonized to make room for a man, there's a problem with how the fandom as a whole is thinking about women.

And sure enough, that's what's happening. Haley is serving as Hotch's tragic backstory in a lot of these fics, and not in the way she does in canon. In a perfect world, I would skim these fics and find out exactly how many this trope occurs in, but one of them is 10k words of omegaverse and it's two in the morning. I can tell you anecdotally, though, that it's a lot, and that the theme continues outside of fics explicitly tagged "Not Haley Hotchner Friendly."

The "Additional Tags" section doesn't show me much, which isn't surprising considering there are only 22 fics.

Now on to the content of the fics. Like I said, I didn't read or even skim every single one of these, but I did pull two that I consider representative of the two dominant strains of Haley hate: cheating and abuse.

Note: one of these fics is what I would consider an outlier. It's a fic depicting Haley sexually assaulting Hotch in a very dubcon way, and having read it, I would consider it more like a huge departure from canon than a misogynistic misreading of Haley's character. The author wasn't concerned with Haley and Hotch's canon relationship, but rather with themes of sexual coercion. That's not the kind of Haley bashing I'm talking about. I'm talking about misogynistic interpretations of canon.

Cheating:

Ah, the trope of the cheating bitch. Yes, it is implied that Haley was cheating in canon (I'm 99% sure it was in 3.02 where they had the hang-up call to the house and then Haley's phone started ringing). So if she's canonically a cheater, where the hell am I going with this?

Well, context is important. I am of the opinion that Haley's subplot was a (clumsy) commentary on gender roles and female dissatisfaction. Haley was not getting what she needed or wanted from Hotch. I am absolutely not condoning cheating under these circumstances, but narratively, the function that her cheating was serving was as a commentary on female dissatisfaction, and I think overlooking that is a bit misogynistic and unfair. Just as Hotch had his reasons for doing what he was doing, Haley had hers. And again, Haley is often absent from these stories, just like she was in the overwhelming majority of canon.

And then there are the outright misogynistic takes on the whole thing:

"Cheating Aaron Hotchner" is paired with "Aaron Hotchner Needs a Hug." "Cheating Haley Hotchner" is paired with "Not Haley Hotchner Friendly." Hotch is assumed to have complex and emotionally charged reasons behind his cheating. Haley is assumed to be a bitch. Again, any narrative about female dissatisfaction, anything that would give Haley a sense of interiority and well-roundedness, is ignored in favor of Hotch angst.

That brings me to an important point. The discerning reader doth protest: "Mikey! Just because the fic is tagged 'Not Haley Hotchner Friendly' doesn't mean the author hates Haley! It just means the narrative isn't friendly to her, which could be for a variety of reasons, including that Hotch's POV is inherently skewed. After all, didn't you just write a few fics from the POV of a narrator you disagree with?" And to that I say, fair point! But. But. A few things are relevant here. One is that Hotch is just not that unreliable about Haley. He gets frustrated with her, but let's not forget "what I want, I'm not gonna get" (3.14). Hotch loves Haley, and consistently expresses his desire to go back to her. A Hotch who thinks badly of Haley is not a canon-accurate Hotch, and I think reading that into him shows bias on behalf of the author. Another relevant thing is that in reality, a lot of these authors ARE using the tag both to express the narrative's dislike of AND their own dislike of Haley. A third thing: we aren't just talking about individual conscious intent here; we're talking about fandom trends. Haley is not the first female character to go through this. There's more to this, on both sides of the coin, but it's still 2am and my head hurts now.

Abuse:

Now, here, I'm going to lay down a ground rule, and that rule is that whatever you accuse me of, I will not tolerate being accused of denying the reality that women can be abusive. I've been assaulted and abused by women and AFAB people. Don't even try me.

Back to my case studies. For this, I'm going to quote from a fic in the "Not Haley Hotchner Friendly" tag to show that portrayals of Haley as abusive are misreadings of canon.

Spencer didn’t press further, waiting for Aaron to continue. “We fought a lot…on the bad days”, he murmured, looking back down at his knees. “She never understood this - our- job. [...]"

Nah. Haley very much understood Hotch's job, and Hotch knew that. In 5.09, when Rossi asks if Hotch has told Haley yet that he's going back to the BAU, Hotch says he doesn't have to and that she already knows. Haley understood the demands of the job, and what it meant to him. She understood it well enough to put up with it for a long time, even though it put a hell of a lot of stress on her.

This quote also shows a willingness to overlook Haley's side of the story. In canon, as much as it could possibly be said that Haley misunderstands the job, Hotch misunderstands her stress even more. She's essentially a single parent, by Hotch's own 5.09 admission. Once, Hotch forgot a hospital visit for what sounded like a pretty serious condition Jack had as a baby.

“Haley said I wasn't prioritizing our family. Me ”, Aaron chuckled self deprecatingly.

I love Hotch with my whole heart. I really do. But in the early seasons, he consistently made choices that showed he prioritized his work over his family, and was even willing to be pretty cruel about it (the 3.02 fight where he uses the horror of the case as leverage in an argument).

"But wait! Mikey! Remember your own note about extreme canon divergence???? What if that's what this is?" Even if it is, this writing betrays subconscious misogyny. Haley is being used as a tool to create Hotch angst instead of being considered as a well-rounded character. She's being sidelined in favor of men, and the choice to use her as Hotch's abuser when the prompt this fic was based on mentioned nothing about her is in itself a misogynistic rewriting of what was actually going on in canon.

I'm tired now but I rest my case.

[elganac]

hmmmmMMMMMM THATS THAT GOOD SHIT

[dukeofdadykes]

Finally got around to watching I saw the tv glow and I’ve had an incomprehensible sense of dread ever since 🙂‍↕️

[shyjusticewarrior]

[charlesoberonn]