Here's The Jordan Analysis I Promised. It Got Really Long So It's Under A Cut

here's the jordan analysis i promised. it got really long so it's under a cut </3 also to any jordan fans jsyk this is more a meta analysis of the role she serves rather than an in-universe analysis of her character, so. no major character insights if that's what you're hoping for.

as i've said before, i also don't understand the vitriol i've seen directed towards her when she was in eight episodes and occasionally mildly annoying at worst. i think most of the people who hate her do because she was a. being shipteased with morgan b. (temporarily) replacing jj and c. a woman of colour who breathed. i don't love her, although i do think her and emily should have fu— uh. who said that? anyway:

what i do really like is the narrative role she serves during her episodes, and especially during this one. with any long-running show with dark themes, there's always a risk of the audience becoming desensitized—a guarantee, even, if it goes on long enough. i think a lot of these shows (including cm, on occasion) fall into this trap where they think the solution to that is to constantly escalate, which i think is a huge mistake. you'll desensitize the audience faster when you're just showing them increasingly awful things; at a certain point you'll even bore them. also, it will inevitably become extremely unrealistic, and you'll start to sensationalize if you aren't already.

i think jordan's introduction was a really fantastic early effort to prevent the audience from becoming desensitized. we're following a cast of characters who have all been embroiled in awful things for years or decades. it's their job and it has been for a long time. the characters are already varying degrees of desensitized and they're the ones we're identifying with as the protagonists.

and then jordan. right away she's out of her depth and overwhelmed, and in this episode, she says outright that she can't do the job. i think it was also a great choice that the case in the episode isn't a particularly horrifying one (obviously they all are and the revelation at the end of this episode is really tragic, but jordan saying "im out" after this case reads very different than if it had been after something like no way out where it's clearly among their worst cases).

she's a reminder to the audience that the people we're watching are not normal. no normal person could do the job they do. the vast majority of the audience, if transplanted into the show, wouldn't be reid or emily or morgan or hotch—they would be jordan.

if spencer reid was a stage of grief he would be bargaining. can anyone hear me

Important post

I was getting suspicions but now I'm very 100% sure that most of this website's userbase hates Palestinians and not passively. I'm now fully 100% comprehending that the vast majority of this website's userbase passes by any mention of Palestinians and seethes to their core and the only reason little of it came out was because you thought there might be social repercussions for attacking Palestinians in our time of need. All it took was an easily debunkable false accusation to get people to attack people undergoing genocide as well as a genocide survivor, and now he's been stopped from doing the work he has spent months doing. I will not allow this experience to go undocumented or forgotten. Those who partook in the harassment know what they've done and the unspeakable repurcussions of it. I expected this honestly, because that is exactly what happened to BLM and other Black rights activists since 2014; a cycle of unbelievable praise before horrendous abuse and harassment once they stopped being deified. I also saw the way people treated Moataz Azaiza after he evacuated Ghazzah, and expected the same to happen to Ahmed, who also survived unspeakable things for months in an accelerated genocide, and got harassed and attacked by the THOUSANDS on tumblr after this harassment campaign was put out. I will not forgive any one involved, especially not for what they've done to Ahmed.

Here's a collection of links to posts about the issue in the past couple of days, in chronological order I think. And under the cut will be screenshots of the initial post that I saw that brought this to my attention.

[Post 1] [Post 2] [Post 3] [Post 4] [Post 5]

[Post 6] [Post 7] [Post 8] [Post 9] [Post 10]

[Post 11] [Post 12] Edit: forgot one [Post 13].

These links are absolutely non-exhaustive and there's more shit these people have said that I don't have the patience to go collect and link here.

Honorable mention for white victim-playing after leading a hate-campaign against Palestinians surviving genocide:

Hotch is like I’m not leaving Reid alone with a father like that, the guy won’t make it out alive Rossi go and make sure Reid doesn’t kill anyone.

Does the son of a sociopath ever really have a chance?

the team goes to the beach and reid refuses to go into the water because “what if something touches my leg 😟” until morgan picks him up and just runs into the ocean with him. send post.