Elle Greenaway - Tumblr Posts
"spencelle is a straight ship–"
literally have you seen them? nothing about these nonbinary gay mfers is straight. they share 1 wardrobe and just alternate who dresses hot and who dresses pathetic that day.
I was going through some of my old reading journals on the storygraph, and when I was going through the one I had for the starless sea by erin morgenstern (possibly my favourite novel of all time) I came across this quote i’d written down:
They peel off each other's clothes in layers. He curses at the strange clasps and fasteners on her garments while she laughs at the sheer numbers of buttons on his. […] It is easier to be in love in a room with closed doors. To have the whole world in one room. In one person. The universe condensed and intensified and burning, bright and alive and electric. But doors cannot stay closed forever.
and if I said spencelle…
elle pulling her girlfriend spencer in by his beltloops. send post
goddddd motel scene time. i have a lot of thoughts on it and hopefully i'll be able to put them into some kind of order.
ELLE: After he shot me, he reached into my wound so he could write on the wall in my blood. I was barely conscious, but I...I could feel his hand in there. And sometimes it's like I can still feel it. REID: Elle, he's dead. You're...You're right here. You won.
obviously this is an unhelpful thing to say. i dont think that makes reid evil, or a bad friend, i think it makes him a twenty-four-year-old who's struggling to understand a situation he's never been in.
i dont think elle resents him for it. im sure there's frustration, deservedly so, but i dont think it's targeted at reid, more at the general sense of Nobody Is Getting Me. especially this expression here:
in the moment, this doesnt read to me as anger. it's certainly not a happy smile; she's not comforted by what reid says because it's not a comforting thing to say, and i think it sort of develops into anger later, but in the moment, she doesn't resent him for not being able to say the right thing. again, there's frustration, because he doesn't get it. he can't (not yet, anyway). a part of her wishes he did, a part of her wishes somebody did, and yet a different part of her hopes none of them ever do, because it's an awful, awful thing to understand.
i headcanon that reid and elle stay in contact after elle leaves, but i dont think its immediate. i flipflop between two reasons
reid doesnt reach out because he feels guilty, like if he had just said the right words in the right order in that motel room, she would have stayed. i think this is generally how reid responds to abandonment (and sometimes just conflict in general). if i had just said the right thing, done that differently, been better, i could have fixed it. boy is...a little emotionally stunted. if he was a stage of grief he would be bargaining. do you get me.
reid does reach out, but elle doesn't respond. maybe she's still angry about him not being able to Get It, maybe she wants to distance herself from the bau in general, maybe him not Getting It hurts in particular because they were quite close, etc.
either way, they get back in contact post s02e15, when reid texts her a barely coherent rambling apology for that night, how it was an unsympathetic and unhelpful thing to say, and he does get it now, and he's sorry, there is no winning—
she calls him.
hey do you ever think that the reason reid knocks "shave and a haircut" on elle's door is because post-fisher king elle gets nervous when someone knocks on her door because she doesn't know who it is, so reid (or even the whole team) start knocking a pattern. do you ever think about elle checking the peephole anyway. i do.
i just like. actually need to know if the director TOLD matthew and lola to act like they were earth shatteringly in love with each other. i need to repeat ‘death of the author death of the author death of the author’ to myself to feel sane
making criminal minds moodboards out of things already saved on my photography pinterest board pt3:
elle greenaway
it’s actually so important to have two bisexuals on the opposite spectrums of cool be in love
so. i love this line.
but i want to talk about her expressions after gideon asks if she's alright:
i dont know. throughout the first season, elle expresses the strongest negative feelings towards sex offenders (reasonable!) and sure, she came from a unit dealing specifically with that and that's her specialty (remember when all the characters had specific skill sets and specialties?) but especially this reaction here seems very personal. and this is pre-randall garner, so she doesn't yet have that connection to being attacked in her own home.
also. the team knows sexual offense crimes are elle's specialty. they know that's where she came from. but her response to gideon when he asks if she's okay after she goes off on scott isn't "i've seen a lot of this and it gets me riled up" it's to get defensive and evasive. if it was anger born of something the team is aware of, why hide it? her response to gideon and her expression afterwards very much read to me as someone hiding something.
don't think about hotch laying in the hospital bed in 5x1 suddenly knowing exactly how elle felt and the guilt tearing him apart all over again don't think about it don't think about don't th
Wait. Wait. Spoilers below about Elle’s exit and the Hotch/Foyet arc because I AM SO CONFUSED.
I’ve seen people say before how angry they are with how the Elle situation was handled because in later seasons, other characters do the exact same things and aren’t treated the same. I’ve always wondered what they were talking about, as I couldn’t figure out who they meant.
Just read a post that they mean Hotch killing Foyet???? (And then subsequently lost said post because I was so shocked)
IN WHAT WORLD IS THAT THE SAME THING????
Look, I LOVE Elle. I wish Lola had loved LA and stayed on the show forever.
But Elle tracked down a rapist, alone, without telling anyone, and murdered him. Then she lied about it, and claimed it was self defense. That means she also had to plant evidence on the man - to say he had a gun when it was never shown that he did (at that moment at least). IF he did have a gun on him, she had to physically move it from wherever it was and put it in his hand. She had never been physically harmed by this man. (We won’t get into the whole “he mentally harmed her by triggering her” debate). Was he an absolute scum bag? Without a doubt.
Aaron Hotchner elected to arrest George Foyet because that was his job. The man escaped, stabbed him repeatedly, and then as if that wasn’t enough, killed his (ex)wife. THEN, when fighting with Hotch, stated he was going to go kill his son. Hotch didn’t lie about anything during the investigation- he stated the truth - if Foyet managed to get up, he was going to find and kill Jack. Should Hotch have maybe just handcuffed him once he had the upper hand? Possibly. But the man had already escaped once - he memorized every prison in his state. Plus it was a literal dirty fist fight - Hotch had the upper hand at the moment, who knows if he would have if he stopped to get the cuffs out.
SOMEONE TELL ME HOW THESE SITUATIONS ARE EVEN REMOTELY SIMILAR. (Besides both killing someone. If that’s the similarity, every single member of the BAU has done that, excluding Penelope - although she does shoot someone so!!)
Ellle: You really don't know someone until you take a road trip with them.
Derek: What are you trying to say?
like im gonna see this and not say ‘cool, stylish bisexual gf w/ her well dressed but in a ‘college student that moonlights as a folk singer’ way, also bisexual, nonbinary gf’ . . . get REAL
☆ ☾ spencelle moodboard ☆ ☾
i'm a slut for elle greenaway wearing her double gun holster
1x20 - charm and harm
7x6 - epilogue
or, elle goading reid into rambling, and emily trying to do the same over five years later
thinking abt elle greenaway in drag. thats bf fr
Criminal Minds | Plain Sight (1x04)