Spencer Reid (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
leftinbasketforfbi) wrote2012-10-03 03:38 pm
leftinbasketforfbi) wrote2012-10-03 03:38 pm
Entry tags:
Monster Character Survey
Since I have a lot of head canon for Reid, a friend suggested that I fill this thing out so that people can understand my idea of Reid better. That being said, a lot of this is interpretation and head canon, so don't be confused if I list something that hasn't been mentioned in the show. If there's something that hasn't been explicitly stated in the show but has been OOCly, I'll try to say so.
Some of the questions have been deleted, partially because it's a huge-ass survey.
Body and Appearance
1. Describe the character's height and build. Is he heavyset, thin, short, rangy?
He's like a fleshy praying mantis. He has been described as looking like 'a pipe cleaner with eyes'. He is mostly only seen drinking coffee and eating vendor machine junk food.
HE'S A TALL, SKINNY MAN.
2. How old is he?
Thirty years old, but he looks like he's fourteen.
3. Describe his posture. Does he carry himself well or does he slouch?
He doesn't exactly slouch, but the way he holds himself makes him seem much smaller than he is. He's not a big presence in a room, and that's the way he likes it.
4. How is his health? Is he fit or out of shape? Any illnesses or conditions? Any physical disabilities?
Well, he's more fit than people give him credit for, mostly because he's running after unsubs all the time, and Hotch and Morgan would have NEVER allowed him out on the field without meeting some minimum fitness requirement, no matter what the higher-ups said.
Although that mostly manifests in being able to run quickly rather than being able to overpower someone, and his bad knee really screws up his ability to run for too long.
Speaking of, while it’s not debilitating, Reid does have issues with his leg. Mostly because a guy shot it when he was protecting a victim with his own body. And then Reid told the victim (who was a doctor) to save the unsub instead of his leg when the unsub tried shooting himself. His leg is healed now and you won’t see him limping everywhere, but long walks, rain, cold, or being too still will make the joint get stiff and that can screw up his ability to move around too much.
5. How does he move? Is he clumsy, graceful, tense, fluid?
When he's comfortable, his movement does have some kind of grace to it, especially in the way he moves his hands. When he is not comfortable, which is whenever he's around someone who isn't part of his team, he gets pretty clumsy and can trip over himself sometimes.
6. How attractive is this character physically? How does he perceive himself in the mirror?
It depends on one's taste in men. Reid is played by an actor who used to be a super model, and a fellow actor described him as 'so pretty he's almost a girl'. If one doesn't mind the lack of muscles, he's extremely attractive physically.
But his personality tends to offset that for most people. Or, at least, most people in the show. Poor man's got hordes of fangirls outside of the show.
How Reid perceives himself is an entirely different story. He doesn't think he's ugly, but if anyone ever seriously suggested that he was attractive, he'd give them the strangest look he ever gave anyone. The idea that he could possibly be attractive to anyone is completely foreign to him, and when he looks in the mirror, he only sees an awkward, clumsy man who's too skinny and looks like he's twelve.
7. Describe his complexion. Dark, light, clear, scarred?
Clear and very pale. He doesn't get much sun.
8. Describe his hair: color, texture, style.
Brown, but sometimes looks dirty blond in the right light. It's very soft, and while it's short, he always somehow manages to look like he's part of a boy band.
9. What color are his eyes?
Dark brown. They are frequently described as 'big brown Bambi eyes'. No, seriously, you should see him when he makes sad eyes. It makes you want to wrap him up in a big blanket.
10. Does the character have any other noteworthy features?
No visible ones.
11. What are his chief tension centers?
His head, mostly. He gets horrible migraines, especially when he's stressed out.
13. Does he dress the same on the job as he does in his free time? If not, what are the differences?
Absolutely. Sweater vests, long-sleeved buttoned shirts, khakis, cardigans... His wardrobe is all appropriate for work, but very nerdy for any informal interaction.
14. You knew it was coming: Boxers, briefs or commando?
Boxers. He prefers loose-fitting clothing.
Speech
1. What does this character's voice sound like? High-pitched, deep, hoarse?
Here is a basic summary of how he usually talks.
2. How does he normally speak? Loud, soft, fast, evenly? Does he talk easily, or does he hesitate?
He tends to speak softly with strange inflections, but when he’s talking about something he knows a lot about (or even if he’s just nervous), he’ll start speaking faster until you can barely understand what he’s saying.
3. What language/s does he speak, and with how much fluency?
He can’t really speak languages that well, but he’s recently managed to pin down French and Spanish with relative fluency. He can understand most languages fine, though, and he can also read most of the languages in use today.
4. Is he eloquent or inarticulate? Under what circumstances might this change?
He’s very articulate when he’s talking about facts and things he knows about, but when talking about personal things or things he’s unsure of, he stumbles and trips over his words a lot and can’t always get the right idea across.
Mental and Emotional
1. How intelligent is this character? Is he book-smart or street-smart?
Easily the smartest man you'll probably ever meet... when it comes to book smarts.
His street smarts leave a hell of a lot to be desired, though. All the street smarts he has are from his training in the FBI Academy.
2. Does he think on his feet, or does he need time to deliberate?
He's said before that he does his 'best work under extreme terror'. He can think on his feet and he does it well, but if he has time to deliberate, all the better for him. He can work with various working conditions.
3. Describe the character's thought process. Is he more logical, or more intuitive? Idealistic or practical?
He likes to think that he's logical and practical, but he absolutely is not. He'll always value his logic over his intuition in theory and when working on something like a geographical profile, but in practice, he likes to believe in the best of people and can do really stupid things if his emotions say so.
Basically, if you're looking for an Einstein who can sit down and tell you the most logical course of action, he's your guy. If you're looking for a Spock or Machiavelli who will go through with the logical course of action no matter the cost? Not so much.
4. What kind of education has the character had?
He has three BAs, three PhD's, and another PhD on the way. What kind of education do you think he's had?
5. What are his areas of expertise? What, if anything, is he interested in learning more about?
He's been called 'our expert on, well, everything'. His degrees are in psychology, sociology, philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and chemistry. He could easily have degrees in medieval and classical literature as well, since his mom was a professor of those topics, but she's already read him all the course material and he'd rather get a degree with something he might learn from. He's also the team's unofficial psycholinguist, geographical profiler, and identifier of obscure physical, neurological, and mental issues. He is has expert-level knowledge of forensic anthropology (and can identify the sex of a skeleton looking at the pelvic bone and nothing else, and then figure out the race from the skull), is an expert graphologist, a bastion of statistical information, has encyclopedic knowledge of historical serial killers, and is an expert on reading body language. He understands Russian, Spanish, French, and several other languages (although he can't really speak all of them and his accent universally sucks). He is a fantastic illusionist/magician, and can make a card appear behind a woman's ear without even putting his hands near her. If there is some random tangent, fact, or theory that will lead to the arrest of an unsub, Reid will be the one to know it.
EXPERT. IN. EVERYTHING.
6. Is he an introvert or an extrovert?
Introvert. No contest.
7. Describe the character's temperament. Is he even-tempered or does he have mood swings? Cheerful or melancholy? Laid-back or driven?
He's very sweet-tempered, and it takes a lot to make him angry. His default is always to be passive, but he can confront people if he thinks it's worth it. He tends to behave calmly unless he's talking about something he's interested in, when he starts speaking quickly and will sometimes even become cheerful.
8. How does he respond to new people or situations? Is he suspicious, relaxed, timid, enthusiastic?
Timid when dealing with new people, wary with new situations. He likes to think that new people won't be monsters, but he's still nervous around strangers and he knows he's not very good socially, so he prefers to avoid them if possible.
Reid likes some semblance of routine, and new situations that disrupt that routine will trigger a tense response, mainly because 'new situations' usually equal 'oh shit something awful is happening'. Examples of new situations have been: getting kidnapped by an unsub, getting addicted to drugs, developing migraines, having an unsub mail him, his team, and his mother trinkets (and a head) to put them on a 'quest' that ended with them nearly getting blown up and a partner being shot, one of his teammates scooting off on her own without saying a word and then getting herself (seemingly) killed, and so on and so forth.
He doesn't like new situations.
9. Is he more likely to act, or to react?
React. He likes being led and he really only acts out when something provokes him, like recent trauma (or withdrawal).
10. Which is his default: fight or flight?
Flight, all the way. If it looks like it might kill you, run the fuck away because goddamn he is not a fighter.
If, however, someone else is in trouble, then he will switch over to fight in a heartbeat. He doesn't like it and he will try to rely on his brain more than his brawn, but he will not leave someone behind.
11. Describe the character's sense of humor. Does he appreciate jokes? Puns? Gallows humor? Bathroom humor? Pranks?
He actually has a good sense of humor, but his attempts at jokes are really only funny if you're a genius. So he's kind of stuck just laughing at other people's jokes, and those jokes are usually high-brow, pranks, or very, very clear sarcasm.
12. Does the character have any diagnosable mental disorders? If yes, how does he deal with them?
Well, that's an interesting question. According to Matthew Gray Gubler (Reid's actor), Reid is on the autistic spectrum, but only mildly. Aspergers was harder for him when he was growing up and didn't have strategies to cope, but as an adult, he has a firm grasp on his strengths and weaknesses and has gotten much better at picking up social cues (although he's far from perfect).
One of his persisting symptoms is a dislike of being touched by strangers; if he has his way, he won't even shake a stranger's hand. That doesn't mean that he can't deal with touch in general. If he's close to someone, he likes the intimacy that touch provides, and while he doesn't initiate touch often, he likes it when someone he loves gives him a hug or squeezes his hand or gives him the occasional kiss on the cheek. He’s also capable of putting aside his dislike of a stranger’s touch if it seems like the other person needs it—for instance, he awkwardly petted a crying woman’s hair after he disarmed her, wrapped his arms around another woman and helped her get up and walk when someone had gravely wounded her, and got up very close and personal to keep a man from drawing a gun and shooting his daughter’s murderer without alerting anyone else—and he doesn’t mind being touched by children or animals too much.
As well as Aspergers, Gubler has confirmed that Reid has shades of developing schizophrenia. His mother is schizophrenic, which gave Reid a roughly 10% of developing it. Unfortunately, Reid has always had very bad luck.
It’s not very serious yet, since it’s still developing and the symptoms aren’t obvious, and I’ll be playing it as a very mild case of schizophrenia if I’m in any games long enough and the TV show doesn’t turn it into an explicitly severe case. For now, his most severe symptom is tactile hallucinations.
His hallucinations can be mistaken for normal, which is part of the reason Reid isn’t sure if they’re a physical or mental symptom. He has horrible migraines, especially when he’s stressed out, that can vary from making him miserable for a while to being utterly debilitating. Other hallucinations are small and nearly unnoticeable, like feeling like an insect has landed on his skin when it hasn’t or particularly intense prickling on the insides of his elbows where he used to shoot up.
Since I don’t have much practical experience with schizophrenia, I’ll probably avoid playing it out too explicitly unless Reid has been around one place for a year or something and really should be getting worse, or if he’s under really extreme stress, which would exacerbate existing symptoms. If Reid starts showing more explicit symptoms in the show, that may change.
Some people theorize that he's also OCD, but I don't believe that's the case. He's particular about things being put in their right places, but to me, that's a symptom of his Aspergers and just a desire to maintain order in his environment, since he's sensitive to sensory stimuli.
Kid’s screwed up.
13. What moments in this character's life have defined him as a person?
Oh my God, do you seriously want me to list them all?
Alright, here’s a bullet point list in chronological order:
• The murder of Riley Jenkins and the subsequent murder of his killer: Reid didn’t know about it at the time, but it’s what caused a schism between his parents, and four-year-old Spencer saw his father burning bloody clothes in the backyard. Those clothes belonged to Spencer’s mother, since she was witness to Riley’s father killing Riley’s killer.
• His father’s abandonment: when Reid was ten, his father couldn’t take the weight of the murder on his mind and Diana’s (Reid’s mom) out of control schizophrenia anymore, so he packed up and left as Reid quietly pointed out that children in single-parent households statistically are more likely to drop out of school. His father only left a note behind.
• Various instances of bullying: Reid was bullied viciously in school while the teachers knowingly turned blind eyes. This culminated in him, when he was twelve and a senior in high school, being told that the prettiest girl in school wanted to meet him behind the bleachers after class. When he went to see her, she was there with the whole football team and half the school. They beat him, stripped him naked, then tied him to the goal post as they shouted abuse. They eventually got bored of him and left, and he managed to untie himself at midnight, when he ran back home alone on the Las Vegas streets. Diana was in the middle of one of her episodes and didn’t even notice that her son had been missing.
• First serious relationship: When he was seventeen and in graduate school, he began a relationship with normal student of appropriate age for graduate school. This was an extremely emotionally manipulative (and even sometimes emotionally abusive) relationship that Reid didn’t really know how to traverse due to inexperience, but he broke it off when he was eighteen because of the following bullet point:
• Committed his mother in a sanitarium without her consent: When he was eighteen, he was officially allowed to act in his mother’s stead, and he knew that his mother’s way of life was unhealthy. Every time he picked up the phone to call or someone called him, he was terrified his mother was dead since he wasn’t there to take care of her. So when he could, he went to their house with men in white, and watched them take her away while she begged him to not do this to her. For a while afterwards, she suffered abuse from orderlies and poor care in her state hospital, which she blamed him for when she wasn’t on her medication. Reid was only able to send her to a nice, private sanitarium a year later when he got enough money.
• Being recruited to the FBI: A man named Jason Gideon discovered him in graduate school and convinced him to become an FBI agent. Gideon became his mentor and a second father.
• Getting into the BAU: He joined a team that included his superior, Aaron Hotchner, and a man named Derek Morgan. Later on, they gained a media liason named Jennifer Jareau, a technical analyst named Penelope Garcia, an agent named Elle Greenaway, and Jason Gideon. Later on, Gideon and Elle left the BAU, and a man named David Rossi and a woman named Emily Prentiss replaced them.
• Killed for the first time: He was on a case with an unsub that killed by shooting long-distance. The unsub caught him and Hotch in a hospital with dozens of innocent victims. Through a very difficult fifteen minutes (which involved being insulted viciously and then kicked by Hotch), Reid managed to grab a gun Hotch kept on his ankle and shot the unsub in the head.
• Second serious relationship: Reid started a relationship with a rising star named Lila Archer after saving her from her stalker. It eventually ended due to distance and the incredible differences between them, but they’re still friends and Lila taught him a lot about what a healthy relationship looks like.
• Captured and tortured by an unsub: Reid was captured by a man named Tobias Hankel. Hankel, due to the horrible abuse he suffered at the hands of his father and the drugs he took to numb the pain, developed Dissociative Identity Disorder. His three personalities were Charles, who was his father and who was deeply (and aggressively) religious, Raphael, who was an angel sent to kill the sinners of the world, and Tobias himself, who was dragged along for the ride and wanted desperately for all of this awfulness to be over. Raphael and Charles tortured Reid while Tobias did his damndest to at the very least make Reid comfortable, since he saw Reid as an innocent but he wasn’t strong enough to defy Raphael and his father. In order to make Reid comfortable, Tobias shot him up with Dilaudid mixed with hallucinogen at least six or seven times while Reid was captive. It all ended when Reid shot Charles and sat with Tobias as he died. Reid took Tobias’s Dilaudid and was hooked.
• Gideon broke down: Gideon broke down and abandoned the team after a serial killer killed his girlfriend. He only left a note for Reid to find.
• Reid investigated Riley Jenkins’ death: He had dreams about Riley, and when he looked it up, he found out that Riley died when Reid was four and just lived down the street. Reid thought his father killed Riley, and saw his father for the first time in twenty years, determined to nail him for anything. He found out the truth, and realized that his father hadn’t abandoned them because he was sick of them, but because he couldn’t handle the weight of knowing. Reid found out that his father had been keeping tabs on him for his whole life, and his father told him that he loved him, and he never came back because he never thought he could take care of Reid the way he needed to be.
• Reid became a godfather: JJ gave birth to Henry, and she asked Reid to be Henry’s godfather. Reid agreed.
• Reid got infected with anthrax: When investigating the home of an unsub, he found a special strain of anthrax was circulating through the house. He locked his team out until medics could come with full-body hazard suits. He was almost certain he was going to die, and he recorded a phone message with Garcia to send to his mother if he did. He told her that he loved her and that he spent every day proud to be her son. He later found the cure within the house, but he nearly died despite it.
• Emily died: At least he though she did. An international arms dealer from Emily’s spy past (which no one knew about until now) came after her and threatened the team. Emily chose to leave the team behind to take on the arms dealer herself, since she knew that if she didn’t, they would all be murdered. Had Reid put the pieces together sooner, they would have gotten to her before the arms dealer stabbed her through with a wooden spike. She survived and was put in witness protection, but as far as Reid knew, she was dead.
• Emily came back: When the arms dealer (Ian Doyle) is found, Emily is taken out of witness protection and she joins up with the team again to help them take him down. Reid found out that JJ and Hotch had both known that Emily was alive, but had allowed the rest of them to grieve for her for months without saying a word. After a long, dangerous operation, Reid ended up shooting a woman (who was an international terrorist) in the head without regret. Afterwards, the whole team was reviewed by the FBI, and Reid was ready to not even apply for reentry if they fired him.
• Reid chooses to forgive: Reid was furious with JJ for not saying Emily was alive, since he had come to JJ’s home ‘crying for ten weeks straight’, and had even nearly relapsed on Dilaudid over his grief. After lashing out and considering never forgiving JJ, he finally decides that while he was still angry, she wasn’t like his father or Gideon, and she hadn’t allowed him to feel abandoned again of her own volition.
And those are just the moments that had a clear impact on him, his life, his way of thinking, and/or his personality. Much happened over time, he met many people, and there were many cases that clearly affected him and he continues to carry; to try to list them all and their effects would probably take half this post.
An incomplete list of people who have changed or at least noticeably affected him during his job that I haven’t mentioned so far: Ted Bryar, Nathan Harris, Randall Garner, Jason Clark Battle, Frank Breitkopf, Owen Savage, Mr. Corbett, Benjamin Cyrus, Michael Bridges, Claire Bates, Adam/Amanda Jackson, George Foyet, Chad Brown, Patrick Meyers, Samantha Malcolm, Shane Wyland, Julio Ruiz, Sammy Sparks, and so on and so forth.
And after all of this, he STILL happily works in the BAU.
14. What does he fear?
He’s scared of the dark, developing schizophrenia, and being abandoned.
15. What are his hopes or aspirations?
To find a way to cure schizophrenia is really his only aspiration. As it is, he’s pretty okay with the way his life is going at the moment. There was a brief period when he was dissatisfied with his choices, but he got over it when he realized that he really was integral to the team and that he was saving lives, one at a time.
16. What is something he doesn't want anyone to find out about him?
He doesn’t want anyone to know that he could develop schizophrenia. He also doesn’t want anyone to know that he used to be an addict and still struggles with cravings sometimes. He also doesn’t want anyone to know that he has horrible nightmares, that his father abandoned him, that he practically took care of his mother growing up, that he’s been in abusive relationships…
There are a lot of things he doesn’t want people to know.
Relationships
1. Describe this character's relationship with his parents.
He loves his mother dearly, and vice versa, but she’s very sick and he knows it. He doesn’t visit her often—partially because it’s hard to find the time and partially because it’s painful and scary to see her that way—but he writes her a letter every day.
His relationship with his father was nonexistent before his investigation into the Riley Jenkins murder, and since then, William Reid has been slowly trying to reconnect with Reid. Reid spurned him at first, but then kind of warmed up to the idea. He’s still not sure how he feels about his father, but he at least won’t immediately hang up if William calls, or stuff the letters and cards he receives into a box unread.
2. Does the character have any siblings? What is/was their relationship like?
Reid’s an only child. Probably for the best, considering.
3. Are there other blood relatives to whom he is close? Are there ones he can't stand?
There is legitimately only him, his mother, and his father.
4. Are there other, unrelated people whom he considers part of his family? What are his relationships with them?
His team. His team is his family.
Morgan, JJ, and Emily are like his big brother and sisters. Garcia is like his cousin or sister close to his age. Hotch and Rossi are, as Morgan called them, Mom and Dad. No one knows who’s the mom and who’s the dad. And really, that’s only stuffing them into categories if they need to be put in them—all their relationships are pretty fluid, but the constant is that they’re all family and any one of them will die for another.
They are, besides his mother, the only people he trusts to not hurt him and who he can gladly enjoy touches from.
5. Who is/was the character's best friend? How did they meet?
One could argue that Morgan’s his best friend, although the term doesn’t really do their relationship justice. They met when Reid became part of the BAU, and when Morgan and Hotch found out that Reid hadn’t passed any of his athletic exams in the Academy, they both worked together to get him in shape. It was awful, but Morgan was always good to him, and brotherly affection slowly grew over the years.
6. Does he have other close friends?
Besides his team? Lila, a girl named Austin (strangely, both of which are victims), and a man named John from Beltway Clean Cops (an anonymous support group) are all friends, but none as close as his teammates.
7. Does he make friends easily, or does he have trouble getting along with people?
It’s not that he has trouble getting along with people. He’s actually really easy to get along with. He’s just very socially awkward, and people don’t like that very much.
8. Which does he consider more important: family or friends?
His friends are his family. Although if it came down to some kind of choice between his mother and a teammate… it’d be very difficult to know who he would choose, and no matter what he’d did, it’d utterly destroy him.
9. Is the character single, married, divorced, widowed? Has he been married more than once?
He’s single. He’s never really thought about marriage much, either.
10. Is he currently in a romantic relationship with someone other than a spouse?
He has a weird on and off thing with Austin that’s been going on for a while, but they are currently ‘just friends’.
11. Who was his first crush? Who is his latest?
His first crush was on the prettiest girl in his high school (who lured him into the worst humiliation he has ever experienced—that got rid of the crush pretty fast).
His latest… Well, he’s found plenty of people attractive before, and he’s even had crushes on teammates before they became family instead (although those crushes were mostly confined to JJ and Rossi), but he doesn’t have them so frequently as to have a latest.
12. What does he look for in a romantic partner?
Well, he doesn’t think about what he looks for, but there are a few traits that consistently attract him. A partner has to be at least above average intelligence, and they have to be forgiving of his social awkwardness. All the better if they’re an intellectual and can give him some kind of challenge, even if only by playing a mean game of chess.
But although all that is enough to make him physically attracted to a person, it’s not enough to make him want them as a partner. To be a love interest, he needs to feel safe with that person, and he needs to feel like they won’t abandon, betray, or abuse him the way so many others have.
13. Does the character have children? Grandchildren? If yes, how does he relate to them? If no, does he want any?
He has no kids, nor does he really intend to have any. He loves Jack (Hotch’s son) and Henry (JJ’s son) dearly, and he spoils them in his own way, but he’d be afraid of passing on schizophrenia to a child, and since he didn’t have the best example of being a father, he would feel woefully unprepared for taking care of a little boy or girl, even with the help of a mother.
14. Does he have any rivals or enemies?
Any rivals he has are friendly ones he’s picked up over the years. He’s actually pretty hard to turn into a legitimate enemy, since he’s such a sweet-tempered guy, and any enemies were unsubs and are dead by now.
15. What is the character's sexual orientation? Where does he fall on the Kinsey scale?
He would fit between two and three, since while he does tend to gravitate more towards women (partially since it’s a little easier to feel safe with them), the sex of the person doesn’t matter to him as much as their personality and mind. His physical preferences may shift according to the sex of the person, but his emotional preferences don’t change much at all.
16. How does he feel about sex? How important is it to him?
Oh boy…
Well, Reid considers sex to be very important. Because of his issues with touch and trust, it takes some serious time before he’s comfortable even taking part in heavy petting, let alone sex. That being said, when someone eventually gains the trust and love required, the intimacy can be pretty damn mind-blowing, since he is very meticulous about learning what his partner likes and doesn’t like, and while the first time may be awkward and unsure, the sex gets exponentially better with the more experience he has with that specific person.
He’s actually kind of scared of sex. It’s the ultimate expression of trust for him, and he feels kind of dirty after his drug addiction caused him to sleep with a lot of strangers while he was high. For someone so sensitive to touch, very little is so unpleasant as waking up aching head to toe with a naked person you don’t know up against your body. That’s given him some issues, since he feels like he’s cheapened his own body that way. (Although it should be noted that he thinks nothing of other people sleeping around or prostituting themselves—it’s just that the idea of him doing that freaks him out.)
All that being said, there are some exceptions to the rule, and there have been one or two instances where he slept with a person relatively quickly and didn’t regret it (although he’s always universally very awkward the day afterwards and scrambles away from any morning cuddles as quick as possible). It takes a special personality to pull that off with him, though.
17. What are his turn-ons? Turn-offs? Weird bedroom habits?
Dominant personalities and intelligence are major turn-ons for him. He also likes girls with long hair and men with darker skin, even if it’s only a tan.
Turn-offs would probably mostly include general roughness. Reid can deal with people being gruff or uncouth, but someone who is genuinely cruel or treats him very roughly during sex without seeking permission (which has happened before) are big turn-offs. More than anything, someone who seems disingenuous about their intentions for him is hugely unattractive, partially because he needs someone to be upfront about what they’ll do in order to not be hurt by an unexpected abandonment or injury.
One weird bedroom habit is that, contrary to his usual behavior, he turns into a huge cuddle monster if he’s sleeping with a person he loves. If his partner wakes up in the morning, chances are they’re waking up with a Reid-shaped koala strapped around them.
Beliefs
1. Is this character religious, spiritual, both, or neither? How important are these elements in his life?
He’s not religious, and he would never call himself spiritual, but he does have connections to Palo, or more specifically, Palo Mayombe. For those who don’t know, Palo Mayombe is a religion developed in the Caribbean Spanish colonies among African slaves, and a lot of its practices are similar to hoodoo, which is part of the reason a lot of people side-eye it hard.
The reason Reid of all people has this connection is because, when he was first developing migraines and he was afraid of them being symptoms of schizophrenia, he was put on a case that seemed to be committed by a follower of Palo Mayombe. The local Babalawo (kind of like a priest) was named Julio Ruiz, and when he was brought in for questioning, he demonstrated an uncanny understanding of Reid’s migraines and ‘the ghosts in his head’. Through a bunch of horrifying experiences that may or may not have religious and magical elements, Reid developed some strange bond with Ruiz, and Ruiz gave Reid his Ide of Orunmila. An Orula’s Ide is a green and white bead bracelet/necklace/accessory that is meant to bestow Orunmila’s protection on a Babalawo, but Ruiz chose to pass on Orunmila’s protection to Reid. Ever since, Reid always wears the Ide around his wrist. Whether through a general feeling of safety or real, genuine magic, having it helps calms Reid’s tactile hallucinations.
2. Does this character have a personal code of morals or ethics? If so, how did that begin? What would it take to compromise it?
Reid does have a strong sense of right and wrong, partially because his mother raised him to be a good person and partially because he’s just a naturally gentle and kind man. His code of ethics roughly just follows the Golden Rule: don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have done unto yourself.
Although he can and will deviate from that code if he must, which he sometimes does in his line of work. He’s shot and killed at least three people, probably more, and he will use manipulative tactics while interrogating a suspect or hostile witness. He will very rarely, if ever, deviate from his ethics for anything less than to protect people.
3. How does he regard beliefs that differ from his? Is he tolerant, intolerant, curious, indifferent?
Reid… really doesn’t care what a person believes. Sometimes intense belief in God or something will puzzle him a little, but he doesn’t think any different of a person for it.
4. What prejudices does he hold? Are they irrational or does he have a good reason for them?
He doesn’t really have prejudices. The closest thing he has to a prejudice is being hostile towards people who commit or turn a blind eye to childhood bullying, and even then, it’s not exactly prejudice if he’s mad about something they do.
Daily Life
1. What is the character's financial situation? Is he rich, poor, comfortable, in debt?
Reid really doesn't need a lot of money. All he really wants is enough to afford a small place to himself, a few things for various hobbies, and his mother’s medical bills. He has the capability of becoming rich, and whenever he wants more money, he just takes a few days to game the stock market and go to a casino or two, and BAM. Money. That doesn't happen often, though, since his government paycheck is more than enough to pay for his humble lifestyle.
Really, the only time when he started actually trying to rake in more money was when he was actively taking Dilaudid and needed to pay his drug dealer.
2. Where does he live? House, apartment, trailer? Is his home his castle or just a place to crash? What condition is it in? Does he share it with others?
He lives in a little one-bedroom apartment in DC. It’s actually a pretty barren place—there are basic necessities, some books, some papers he’s writing, a scrapbook he keeps of the people who he doesn’t want to forget, but not too much else. Home is where the heart is, and his heart is in the BAU. He goes to his apartment to sleep and work on things he does when he’s not chasing serial killers, but he spends the vast majority of his waking hours in the office.
3. Besides the basic necessities, what does he spend his money on?
A little keyboard, some books (although he usually relies on the library and reading through things at the book store), Tylenol, tickets to fly out to Vegas to visit his mother or to visit Adam/Amanda (a killer he caught) in another sanitarium, stuff like that.
4. What does he do for a living? Is he good at it? Does he enjoy it, or would he rather be doing something else?
He works in the BAU of the FBI. He loves his job and can’t imagine doing anything else, but it’s an extremely emotionally draining job. If Reid had been a lesser man, he would have been utterly broken by it a long time ago, but a curious thing about him is that while he’s passive, he’s amazingly resilient. If he’s hurt, he’ll withdraw into his shell, he’ll nurse his wounds, he might even have some nightmares long-term, but he’ll always walk back to work happily, and he’ll always be ready to roll up his sleeves again and throw his all into saving people. No matter how many times he’s been knocked to his knees, he always finds a way to get back up and keep walking as if nothing happened.
5. What are his interests or hobbies? How does he spend his free time?
Usually by getting more degrees and occasionally doing independent research in the field of physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, so on and so forth. He actually does do ongoing research on schizophrenia, but he can’t do anything too serious with most of his time taken up by his job.
6. What are his eating habits? Does he skip meals, eat out, drink alcohol, avoid certain foods?
He’s skinny for a reason. His idea of a good meal is a cup of coffee and maybe a bag of chips.
Associations
Which of the following do you associate with the character, or which is his favorite:
1. Color? He generally likes dark blues and browns—natural colors that don’t stimulate his over-stimulated mind more nor make his migraines worse if he looks at them.
2. Smell? When I think of him, I think of the smell of old books. His favorite smells, which he doesn’t exactly think about, would probably be the smell of coffee, Garcia’s perfume, and baked goods cooking.
3. Time of day? Noon.
4. Season? Reid likes spring and summer, mostly because they’re warm (and he gets cold easily due to being so thin) and they have the longest days.
5. Book? Reid can’t possibly pick a favorite book, but he loves Isaac Asimov and eats up most classic literature. Isaac Asimov is an unconscious connection to his father, whereas the classics are clear connections to his mother.
6. Music? He doesn’t listen to music much, but when he does, he usually likes a little of every genre (except stuff that involves a lot of screaming and roaring—that’s just scary). He tends more towards classical music, though.
7. Place? He really likes the park near where he lives, since he often plays chess with the people who gather there, and he and various teammates usually go out nearby.
8. Substance? Dilaudid. He absolutely loathes it, though, and has managed to keep from relapsing for years.
9. Plant? I associate him with poppy flowers, mostly because of the opiate drug he was addicted to.
10. Animal? I associate him with Pandas. On one hand, he’s cute and passive and rare and oh God don’t you just want to pet him, and on the other hand, he’s still a bear and will fuck your shit up if you somehow get him angry enough.
END
{{ Get the HTML here so you can do it yourself. }}
Some of the questions have been deleted, partially because it's a huge-ass survey.
Body and Appearance
1. Describe the character's height and build. Is he heavyset, thin, short, rangy?
He's like a fleshy praying mantis. He has been described as looking like 'a pipe cleaner with eyes'. He is mostly only seen drinking coffee and eating vendor machine junk food.
HE'S A TALL, SKINNY MAN.
2. How old is he?
Thirty years old, but he looks like he's fourteen.
3. Describe his posture. Does he carry himself well or does he slouch?
He doesn't exactly slouch, but the way he holds himself makes him seem much smaller than he is. He's not a big presence in a room, and that's the way he likes it.
4. How is his health? Is he fit or out of shape? Any illnesses or conditions? Any physical disabilities?
Well, he's more fit than people give him credit for, mostly because he's running after unsubs all the time, and Hotch and Morgan would have NEVER allowed him out on the field without meeting some minimum fitness requirement, no matter what the higher-ups said.
Although that mostly manifests in being able to run quickly rather than being able to overpower someone, and his bad knee really screws up his ability to run for too long.
Speaking of, while it’s not debilitating, Reid does have issues with his leg. Mostly because a guy shot it when he was protecting a victim with his own body. And then Reid told the victim (who was a doctor) to save the unsub instead of his leg when the unsub tried shooting himself. His leg is healed now and you won’t see him limping everywhere, but long walks, rain, cold, or being too still will make the joint get stiff and that can screw up his ability to move around too much.
5. How does he move? Is he clumsy, graceful, tense, fluid?
When he's comfortable, his movement does have some kind of grace to it, especially in the way he moves his hands. When he is not comfortable, which is whenever he's around someone who isn't part of his team, he gets pretty clumsy and can trip over himself sometimes.
6. How attractive is this character physically? How does he perceive himself in the mirror?
It depends on one's taste in men. Reid is played by an actor who used to be a super model, and a fellow actor described him as 'so pretty he's almost a girl'. If one doesn't mind the lack of muscles, he's extremely attractive physically.
But his personality tends to offset that for most people. Or, at least, most people in the show. Poor man's got hordes of fangirls outside of the show.
How Reid perceives himself is an entirely different story. He doesn't think he's ugly, but if anyone ever seriously suggested that he was attractive, he'd give them the strangest look he ever gave anyone. The idea that he could possibly be attractive to anyone is completely foreign to him, and when he looks in the mirror, he only sees an awkward, clumsy man who's too skinny and looks like he's twelve.
7. Describe his complexion. Dark, light, clear, scarred?
Clear and very pale. He doesn't get much sun.
8. Describe his hair: color, texture, style.
Brown, but sometimes looks dirty blond in the right light. It's very soft, and while it's short, he always somehow manages to look like he's part of a boy band.
9. What color are his eyes?
Dark brown. They are frequently described as 'big brown Bambi eyes'. No, seriously, you should see him when he makes sad eyes. It makes you want to wrap him up in a big blanket.
10. Does the character have any other noteworthy features?
No visible ones.
11. What are his chief tension centers?
His head, mostly. He gets horrible migraines, especially when he's stressed out.
13. Does he dress the same on the job as he does in his free time? If not, what are the differences?
Absolutely. Sweater vests, long-sleeved buttoned shirts, khakis, cardigans... His wardrobe is all appropriate for work, but very nerdy for any informal interaction.
14. You knew it was coming: Boxers, briefs or commando?
Boxers. He prefers loose-fitting clothing.
Speech
1. What does this character's voice sound like? High-pitched, deep, hoarse?
Here is a basic summary of how he usually talks.
2. How does he normally speak? Loud, soft, fast, evenly? Does he talk easily, or does he hesitate?
He tends to speak softly with strange inflections, but when he’s talking about something he knows a lot about (or even if he’s just nervous), he’ll start speaking faster until you can barely understand what he’s saying.
3. What language/s does he speak, and with how much fluency?
He can’t really speak languages that well, but he’s recently managed to pin down French and Spanish with relative fluency. He can understand most languages fine, though, and he can also read most of the languages in use today.
4. Is he eloquent or inarticulate? Under what circumstances might this change?
He’s very articulate when he’s talking about facts and things he knows about, but when talking about personal things or things he’s unsure of, he stumbles and trips over his words a lot and can’t always get the right idea across.
Mental and Emotional
1. How intelligent is this character? Is he book-smart or street-smart?
Easily the smartest man you'll probably ever meet... when it comes to book smarts.
His street smarts leave a hell of a lot to be desired, though. All the street smarts he has are from his training in the FBI Academy.
2. Does he think on his feet, or does he need time to deliberate?
He's said before that he does his 'best work under extreme terror'. He can think on his feet and he does it well, but if he has time to deliberate, all the better for him. He can work with various working conditions.
3. Describe the character's thought process. Is he more logical, or more intuitive? Idealistic or practical?
He likes to think that he's logical and practical, but he absolutely is not. He'll always value his logic over his intuition in theory and when working on something like a geographical profile, but in practice, he likes to believe in the best of people and can do really stupid things if his emotions say so.
Basically, if you're looking for an Einstein who can sit down and tell you the most logical course of action, he's your guy. If you're looking for a Spock or Machiavelli who will go through with the logical course of action no matter the cost? Not so much.
4. What kind of education has the character had?
He has three BAs, three PhD's, and another PhD on the way. What kind of education do you think he's had?
5. What are his areas of expertise? What, if anything, is he interested in learning more about?
He's been called 'our expert on, well, everything'. His degrees are in psychology, sociology, philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and chemistry. He could easily have degrees in medieval and classical literature as well, since his mom was a professor of those topics, but she's already read him all the course material and he'd rather get a degree with something he might learn from. He's also the team's unofficial psycholinguist, geographical profiler, and identifier of obscure physical, neurological, and mental issues. He is has expert-level knowledge of forensic anthropology (and can identify the sex of a skeleton looking at the pelvic bone and nothing else, and then figure out the race from the skull), is an expert graphologist, a bastion of statistical information, has encyclopedic knowledge of historical serial killers, and is an expert on reading body language. He understands Russian, Spanish, French, and several other languages (although he can't really speak all of them and his accent universally sucks). He is a fantastic illusionist/magician, and can make a card appear behind a woman's ear without even putting his hands near her. If there is some random tangent, fact, or theory that will lead to the arrest of an unsub, Reid will be the one to know it.
EXPERT. IN. EVERYTHING.
6. Is he an introvert or an extrovert?
Introvert. No contest.
7. Describe the character's temperament. Is he even-tempered or does he have mood swings? Cheerful or melancholy? Laid-back or driven?
He's very sweet-tempered, and it takes a lot to make him angry. His default is always to be passive, but he can confront people if he thinks it's worth it. He tends to behave calmly unless he's talking about something he's interested in, when he starts speaking quickly and will sometimes even become cheerful.
8. How does he respond to new people or situations? Is he suspicious, relaxed, timid, enthusiastic?
Timid when dealing with new people, wary with new situations. He likes to think that new people won't be monsters, but he's still nervous around strangers and he knows he's not very good socially, so he prefers to avoid them if possible.
Reid likes some semblance of routine, and new situations that disrupt that routine will trigger a tense response, mainly because 'new situations' usually equal 'oh shit something awful is happening'. Examples of new situations have been: getting kidnapped by an unsub, getting addicted to drugs, developing migraines, having an unsub mail him, his team, and his mother trinkets (and a head) to put them on a 'quest' that ended with them nearly getting blown up and a partner being shot, one of his teammates scooting off on her own without saying a word and then getting herself (seemingly) killed, and so on and so forth.
He doesn't like new situations.
9. Is he more likely to act, or to react?
React. He likes being led and he really only acts out when something provokes him, like recent trauma (or withdrawal).
10. Which is his default: fight or flight?
Flight, all the way. If it looks like it might kill you, run the fuck away because goddamn he is not a fighter.
If, however, someone else is in trouble, then he will switch over to fight in a heartbeat. He doesn't like it and he will try to rely on his brain more than his brawn, but he will not leave someone behind.
11. Describe the character's sense of humor. Does he appreciate jokes? Puns? Gallows humor? Bathroom humor? Pranks?
He actually has a good sense of humor, but his attempts at jokes are really only funny if you're a genius. So he's kind of stuck just laughing at other people's jokes, and those jokes are usually high-brow, pranks, or very, very clear sarcasm.
12. Does the character have any diagnosable mental disorders? If yes, how does he deal with them?
Well, that's an interesting question. According to Matthew Gray Gubler (Reid's actor), Reid is on the autistic spectrum, but only mildly. Aspergers was harder for him when he was growing up and didn't have strategies to cope, but as an adult, he has a firm grasp on his strengths and weaknesses and has gotten much better at picking up social cues (although he's far from perfect).
One of his persisting symptoms is a dislike of being touched by strangers; if he has his way, he won't even shake a stranger's hand. That doesn't mean that he can't deal with touch in general. If he's close to someone, he likes the intimacy that touch provides, and while he doesn't initiate touch often, he likes it when someone he loves gives him a hug or squeezes his hand or gives him the occasional kiss on the cheek. He’s also capable of putting aside his dislike of a stranger’s touch if it seems like the other person needs it—for instance, he awkwardly petted a crying woman’s hair after he disarmed her, wrapped his arms around another woman and helped her get up and walk when someone had gravely wounded her, and got up very close and personal to keep a man from drawing a gun and shooting his daughter’s murderer without alerting anyone else—and he doesn’t mind being touched by children or animals too much.
As well as Aspergers, Gubler has confirmed that Reid has shades of developing schizophrenia. His mother is schizophrenic, which gave Reid a roughly 10% of developing it. Unfortunately, Reid has always had very bad luck.
It’s not very serious yet, since it’s still developing and the symptoms aren’t obvious, and I’ll be playing it as a very mild case of schizophrenia if I’m in any games long enough and the TV show doesn’t turn it into an explicitly severe case. For now, his most severe symptom is tactile hallucinations.
His hallucinations can be mistaken for normal, which is part of the reason Reid isn’t sure if they’re a physical or mental symptom. He has horrible migraines, especially when he’s stressed out, that can vary from making him miserable for a while to being utterly debilitating. Other hallucinations are small and nearly unnoticeable, like feeling like an insect has landed on his skin when it hasn’t or particularly intense prickling on the insides of his elbows where he used to shoot up.
Since I don’t have much practical experience with schizophrenia, I’ll probably avoid playing it out too explicitly unless Reid has been around one place for a year or something and really should be getting worse, or if he’s under really extreme stress, which would exacerbate existing symptoms. If Reid starts showing more explicit symptoms in the show, that may change.
Some people theorize that he's also OCD, but I don't believe that's the case. He's particular about things being put in their right places, but to me, that's a symptom of his Aspergers and just a desire to maintain order in his environment, since he's sensitive to sensory stimuli.
Kid’s screwed up.
13. What moments in this character's life have defined him as a person?
Oh my God, do you seriously want me to list them all?
Alright, here’s a bullet point list in chronological order:
• The murder of Riley Jenkins and the subsequent murder of his killer: Reid didn’t know about it at the time, but it’s what caused a schism between his parents, and four-year-old Spencer saw his father burning bloody clothes in the backyard. Those clothes belonged to Spencer’s mother, since she was witness to Riley’s father killing Riley’s killer.
• His father’s abandonment: when Reid was ten, his father couldn’t take the weight of the murder on his mind and Diana’s (Reid’s mom) out of control schizophrenia anymore, so he packed up and left as Reid quietly pointed out that children in single-parent households statistically are more likely to drop out of school. His father only left a note behind.
• Various instances of bullying: Reid was bullied viciously in school while the teachers knowingly turned blind eyes. This culminated in him, when he was twelve and a senior in high school, being told that the prettiest girl in school wanted to meet him behind the bleachers after class. When he went to see her, she was there with the whole football team and half the school. They beat him, stripped him naked, then tied him to the goal post as they shouted abuse. They eventually got bored of him and left, and he managed to untie himself at midnight, when he ran back home alone on the Las Vegas streets. Diana was in the middle of one of her episodes and didn’t even notice that her son had been missing.
• First serious relationship: When he was seventeen and in graduate school, he began a relationship with normal student of appropriate age for graduate school. This was an extremely emotionally manipulative (and even sometimes emotionally abusive) relationship that Reid didn’t really know how to traverse due to inexperience, but he broke it off when he was eighteen because of the following bullet point:
• Committed his mother in a sanitarium without her consent: When he was eighteen, he was officially allowed to act in his mother’s stead, and he knew that his mother’s way of life was unhealthy. Every time he picked up the phone to call or someone called him, he was terrified his mother was dead since he wasn’t there to take care of her. So when he could, he went to their house with men in white, and watched them take her away while she begged him to not do this to her. For a while afterwards, she suffered abuse from orderlies and poor care in her state hospital, which she blamed him for when she wasn’t on her medication. Reid was only able to send her to a nice, private sanitarium a year later when he got enough money.
• Being recruited to the FBI: A man named Jason Gideon discovered him in graduate school and convinced him to become an FBI agent. Gideon became his mentor and a second father.
• Getting into the BAU: He joined a team that included his superior, Aaron Hotchner, and a man named Derek Morgan. Later on, they gained a media liason named Jennifer Jareau, a technical analyst named Penelope Garcia, an agent named Elle Greenaway, and Jason Gideon. Later on, Gideon and Elle left the BAU, and a man named David Rossi and a woman named Emily Prentiss replaced them.
• Killed for the first time: He was on a case with an unsub that killed by shooting long-distance. The unsub caught him and Hotch in a hospital with dozens of innocent victims. Through a very difficult fifteen minutes (which involved being insulted viciously and then kicked by Hotch), Reid managed to grab a gun Hotch kept on his ankle and shot the unsub in the head.
• Second serious relationship: Reid started a relationship with a rising star named Lila Archer after saving her from her stalker. It eventually ended due to distance and the incredible differences between them, but they’re still friends and Lila taught him a lot about what a healthy relationship looks like.
• Captured and tortured by an unsub: Reid was captured by a man named Tobias Hankel. Hankel, due to the horrible abuse he suffered at the hands of his father and the drugs he took to numb the pain, developed Dissociative Identity Disorder. His three personalities were Charles, who was his father and who was deeply (and aggressively) religious, Raphael, who was an angel sent to kill the sinners of the world, and Tobias himself, who was dragged along for the ride and wanted desperately for all of this awfulness to be over. Raphael and Charles tortured Reid while Tobias did his damndest to at the very least make Reid comfortable, since he saw Reid as an innocent but he wasn’t strong enough to defy Raphael and his father. In order to make Reid comfortable, Tobias shot him up with Dilaudid mixed with hallucinogen at least six or seven times while Reid was captive. It all ended when Reid shot Charles and sat with Tobias as he died. Reid took Tobias’s Dilaudid and was hooked.
• Gideon broke down: Gideon broke down and abandoned the team after a serial killer killed his girlfriend. He only left a note for Reid to find.
• Reid investigated Riley Jenkins’ death: He had dreams about Riley, and when he looked it up, he found out that Riley died when Reid was four and just lived down the street. Reid thought his father killed Riley, and saw his father for the first time in twenty years, determined to nail him for anything. He found out the truth, and realized that his father hadn’t abandoned them because he was sick of them, but because he couldn’t handle the weight of knowing. Reid found out that his father had been keeping tabs on him for his whole life, and his father told him that he loved him, and he never came back because he never thought he could take care of Reid the way he needed to be.
• Reid became a godfather: JJ gave birth to Henry, and she asked Reid to be Henry’s godfather. Reid agreed.
• Reid got infected with anthrax: When investigating the home of an unsub, he found a special strain of anthrax was circulating through the house. He locked his team out until medics could come with full-body hazard suits. He was almost certain he was going to die, and he recorded a phone message with Garcia to send to his mother if he did. He told her that he loved her and that he spent every day proud to be her son. He later found the cure within the house, but he nearly died despite it.
• Emily died: At least he though she did. An international arms dealer from Emily’s spy past (which no one knew about until now) came after her and threatened the team. Emily chose to leave the team behind to take on the arms dealer herself, since she knew that if she didn’t, they would all be murdered. Had Reid put the pieces together sooner, they would have gotten to her before the arms dealer stabbed her through with a wooden spike. She survived and was put in witness protection, but as far as Reid knew, she was dead.
• Emily came back: When the arms dealer (Ian Doyle) is found, Emily is taken out of witness protection and she joins up with the team again to help them take him down. Reid found out that JJ and Hotch had both known that Emily was alive, but had allowed the rest of them to grieve for her for months without saying a word. After a long, dangerous operation, Reid ended up shooting a woman (who was an international terrorist) in the head without regret. Afterwards, the whole team was reviewed by the FBI, and Reid was ready to not even apply for reentry if they fired him.
• Reid chooses to forgive: Reid was furious with JJ for not saying Emily was alive, since he had come to JJ’s home ‘crying for ten weeks straight’, and had even nearly relapsed on Dilaudid over his grief. After lashing out and considering never forgiving JJ, he finally decides that while he was still angry, she wasn’t like his father or Gideon, and she hadn’t allowed him to feel abandoned again of her own volition.
And those are just the moments that had a clear impact on him, his life, his way of thinking, and/or his personality. Much happened over time, he met many people, and there were many cases that clearly affected him and he continues to carry; to try to list them all and their effects would probably take half this post.
An incomplete list of people who have changed or at least noticeably affected him during his job that I haven’t mentioned so far: Ted Bryar, Nathan Harris, Randall Garner, Jason Clark Battle, Frank Breitkopf, Owen Savage, Mr. Corbett, Benjamin Cyrus, Michael Bridges, Claire Bates, Adam/Amanda Jackson, George Foyet, Chad Brown, Patrick Meyers, Samantha Malcolm, Shane Wyland, Julio Ruiz, Sammy Sparks, and so on and so forth.
And after all of this, he STILL happily works in the BAU.
14. What does he fear?
He’s scared of the dark, developing schizophrenia, and being abandoned.
15. What are his hopes or aspirations?
To find a way to cure schizophrenia is really his only aspiration. As it is, he’s pretty okay with the way his life is going at the moment. There was a brief period when he was dissatisfied with his choices, but he got over it when he realized that he really was integral to the team and that he was saving lives, one at a time.
16. What is something he doesn't want anyone to find out about him?
He doesn’t want anyone to know that he could develop schizophrenia. He also doesn’t want anyone to know that he used to be an addict and still struggles with cravings sometimes. He also doesn’t want anyone to know that he has horrible nightmares, that his father abandoned him, that he practically took care of his mother growing up, that he’s been in abusive relationships…
There are a lot of things he doesn’t want people to know.
Relationships
1. Describe this character's relationship with his parents.
He loves his mother dearly, and vice versa, but she’s very sick and he knows it. He doesn’t visit her often—partially because it’s hard to find the time and partially because it’s painful and scary to see her that way—but he writes her a letter every day.
His relationship with his father was nonexistent before his investigation into the Riley Jenkins murder, and since then, William Reid has been slowly trying to reconnect with Reid. Reid spurned him at first, but then kind of warmed up to the idea. He’s still not sure how he feels about his father, but he at least won’t immediately hang up if William calls, or stuff the letters and cards he receives into a box unread.
2. Does the character have any siblings? What is/was their relationship like?
Reid’s an only child. Probably for the best, considering.
3. Are there other blood relatives to whom he is close? Are there ones he can't stand?
There is legitimately only him, his mother, and his father.
4. Are there other, unrelated people whom he considers part of his family? What are his relationships with them?
His team. His team is his family.
Morgan, JJ, and Emily are like his big brother and sisters. Garcia is like his cousin or sister close to his age. Hotch and Rossi are, as Morgan called them, Mom and Dad. No one knows who’s the mom and who’s the dad. And really, that’s only stuffing them into categories if they need to be put in them—all their relationships are pretty fluid, but the constant is that they’re all family and any one of them will die for another.
They are, besides his mother, the only people he trusts to not hurt him and who he can gladly enjoy touches from.
5. Who is/was the character's best friend? How did they meet?
One could argue that Morgan’s his best friend, although the term doesn’t really do their relationship justice. They met when Reid became part of the BAU, and when Morgan and Hotch found out that Reid hadn’t passed any of his athletic exams in the Academy, they both worked together to get him in shape. It was awful, but Morgan was always good to him, and brotherly affection slowly grew over the years.
6. Does he have other close friends?
Besides his team? Lila, a girl named Austin (strangely, both of which are victims), and a man named John from Beltway Clean Cops (an anonymous support group) are all friends, but none as close as his teammates.
7. Does he make friends easily, or does he have trouble getting along with people?
It’s not that he has trouble getting along with people. He’s actually really easy to get along with. He’s just very socially awkward, and people don’t like that very much.
8. Which does he consider more important: family or friends?
His friends are his family. Although if it came down to some kind of choice between his mother and a teammate… it’d be very difficult to know who he would choose, and no matter what he’d did, it’d utterly destroy him.
9. Is the character single, married, divorced, widowed? Has he been married more than once?
He’s single. He’s never really thought about marriage much, either.
10. Is he currently in a romantic relationship with someone other than a spouse?
He has a weird on and off thing with Austin that’s been going on for a while, but they are currently ‘just friends’.
11. Who was his first crush? Who is his latest?
His first crush was on the prettiest girl in his high school (who lured him into the worst humiliation he has ever experienced—that got rid of the crush pretty fast).
His latest… Well, he’s found plenty of people attractive before, and he’s even had crushes on teammates before they became family instead (although those crushes were mostly confined to JJ and Rossi), but he doesn’t have them so frequently as to have a latest.
12. What does he look for in a romantic partner?
Well, he doesn’t think about what he looks for, but there are a few traits that consistently attract him. A partner has to be at least above average intelligence, and they have to be forgiving of his social awkwardness. All the better if they’re an intellectual and can give him some kind of challenge, even if only by playing a mean game of chess.
But although all that is enough to make him physically attracted to a person, it’s not enough to make him want them as a partner. To be a love interest, he needs to feel safe with that person, and he needs to feel like they won’t abandon, betray, or abuse him the way so many others have.
13. Does the character have children? Grandchildren? If yes, how does he relate to them? If no, does he want any?
He has no kids, nor does he really intend to have any. He loves Jack (Hotch’s son) and Henry (JJ’s son) dearly, and he spoils them in his own way, but he’d be afraid of passing on schizophrenia to a child, and since he didn’t have the best example of being a father, he would feel woefully unprepared for taking care of a little boy or girl, even with the help of a mother.
14. Does he have any rivals or enemies?
Any rivals he has are friendly ones he’s picked up over the years. He’s actually pretty hard to turn into a legitimate enemy, since he’s such a sweet-tempered guy, and any enemies were unsubs and are dead by now.
15. What is the character's sexual orientation? Where does he fall on the Kinsey scale?
He would fit between two and three, since while he does tend to gravitate more towards women (partially since it’s a little easier to feel safe with them), the sex of the person doesn’t matter to him as much as their personality and mind. His physical preferences may shift according to the sex of the person, but his emotional preferences don’t change much at all.
16. How does he feel about sex? How important is it to him?
Oh boy…
Well, Reid considers sex to be very important. Because of his issues with touch and trust, it takes some serious time before he’s comfortable even taking part in heavy petting, let alone sex. That being said, when someone eventually gains the trust and love required, the intimacy can be pretty damn mind-blowing, since he is very meticulous about learning what his partner likes and doesn’t like, and while the first time may be awkward and unsure, the sex gets exponentially better with the more experience he has with that specific person.
He’s actually kind of scared of sex. It’s the ultimate expression of trust for him, and he feels kind of dirty after his drug addiction caused him to sleep with a lot of strangers while he was high. For someone so sensitive to touch, very little is so unpleasant as waking up aching head to toe with a naked person you don’t know up against your body. That’s given him some issues, since he feels like he’s cheapened his own body that way. (Although it should be noted that he thinks nothing of other people sleeping around or prostituting themselves—it’s just that the idea of him doing that freaks him out.)
All that being said, there are some exceptions to the rule, and there have been one or two instances where he slept with a person relatively quickly and didn’t regret it (although he’s always universally very awkward the day afterwards and scrambles away from any morning cuddles as quick as possible). It takes a special personality to pull that off with him, though.
17. What are his turn-ons? Turn-offs? Weird bedroom habits?
Dominant personalities and intelligence are major turn-ons for him. He also likes girls with long hair and men with darker skin, even if it’s only a tan.
Turn-offs would probably mostly include general roughness. Reid can deal with people being gruff or uncouth, but someone who is genuinely cruel or treats him very roughly during sex without seeking permission (which has happened before) are big turn-offs. More than anything, someone who seems disingenuous about their intentions for him is hugely unattractive, partially because he needs someone to be upfront about what they’ll do in order to not be hurt by an unexpected abandonment or injury.
One weird bedroom habit is that, contrary to his usual behavior, he turns into a huge cuddle monster if he’s sleeping with a person he loves. If his partner wakes up in the morning, chances are they’re waking up with a Reid-shaped koala strapped around them.
Beliefs
1. Is this character religious, spiritual, both, or neither? How important are these elements in his life?
He’s not religious, and he would never call himself spiritual, but he does have connections to Palo, or more specifically, Palo Mayombe. For those who don’t know, Palo Mayombe is a religion developed in the Caribbean Spanish colonies among African slaves, and a lot of its practices are similar to hoodoo, which is part of the reason a lot of people side-eye it hard.
The reason Reid of all people has this connection is because, when he was first developing migraines and he was afraid of them being symptoms of schizophrenia, he was put on a case that seemed to be committed by a follower of Palo Mayombe. The local Babalawo (kind of like a priest) was named Julio Ruiz, and when he was brought in for questioning, he demonstrated an uncanny understanding of Reid’s migraines and ‘the ghosts in his head’. Through a bunch of horrifying experiences that may or may not have religious and magical elements, Reid developed some strange bond with Ruiz, and Ruiz gave Reid his Ide of Orunmila. An Orula’s Ide is a green and white bead bracelet/necklace/accessory that is meant to bestow Orunmila’s protection on a Babalawo, but Ruiz chose to pass on Orunmila’s protection to Reid. Ever since, Reid always wears the Ide around his wrist. Whether through a general feeling of safety or real, genuine magic, having it helps calms Reid’s tactile hallucinations.
2. Does this character have a personal code of morals or ethics? If so, how did that begin? What would it take to compromise it?
Reid does have a strong sense of right and wrong, partially because his mother raised him to be a good person and partially because he’s just a naturally gentle and kind man. His code of ethics roughly just follows the Golden Rule: don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have done unto yourself.
Although he can and will deviate from that code if he must, which he sometimes does in his line of work. He’s shot and killed at least three people, probably more, and he will use manipulative tactics while interrogating a suspect or hostile witness. He will very rarely, if ever, deviate from his ethics for anything less than to protect people.
3. How does he regard beliefs that differ from his? Is he tolerant, intolerant, curious, indifferent?
Reid… really doesn’t care what a person believes. Sometimes intense belief in God or something will puzzle him a little, but he doesn’t think any different of a person for it.
4. What prejudices does he hold? Are they irrational or does he have a good reason for them?
He doesn’t really have prejudices. The closest thing he has to a prejudice is being hostile towards people who commit or turn a blind eye to childhood bullying, and even then, it’s not exactly prejudice if he’s mad about something they do.
Daily Life
1. What is the character's financial situation? Is he rich, poor, comfortable, in debt?
Reid really doesn't need a lot of money. All he really wants is enough to afford a small place to himself, a few things for various hobbies, and his mother’s medical bills. He has the capability of becoming rich, and whenever he wants more money, he just takes a few days to game the stock market and go to a casino or two, and BAM. Money. That doesn't happen often, though, since his government paycheck is more than enough to pay for his humble lifestyle.
Really, the only time when he started actually trying to rake in more money was when he was actively taking Dilaudid and needed to pay his drug dealer.
2. Where does he live? House, apartment, trailer? Is his home his castle or just a place to crash? What condition is it in? Does he share it with others?
He lives in a little one-bedroom apartment in DC. It’s actually a pretty barren place—there are basic necessities, some books, some papers he’s writing, a scrapbook he keeps of the people who he doesn’t want to forget, but not too much else. Home is where the heart is, and his heart is in the BAU. He goes to his apartment to sleep and work on things he does when he’s not chasing serial killers, but he spends the vast majority of his waking hours in the office.
3. Besides the basic necessities, what does he spend his money on?
A little keyboard, some books (although he usually relies on the library and reading through things at the book store), Tylenol, tickets to fly out to Vegas to visit his mother or to visit Adam/Amanda (a killer he caught) in another sanitarium, stuff like that.
4. What does he do for a living? Is he good at it? Does he enjoy it, or would he rather be doing something else?
He works in the BAU of the FBI. He loves his job and can’t imagine doing anything else, but it’s an extremely emotionally draining job. If Reid had been a lesser man, he would have been utterly broken by it a long time ago, but a curious thing about him is that while he’s passive, he’s amazingly resilient. If he’s hurt, he’ll withdraw into his shell, he’ll nurse his wounds, he might even have some nightmares long-term, but he’ll always walk back to work happily, and he’ll always be ready to roll up his sleeves again and throw his all into saving people. No matter how many times he’s been knocked to his knees, he always finds a way to get back up and keep walking as if nothing happened.
5. What are his interests or hobbies? How does he spend his free time?
Usually by getting more degrees and occasionally doing independent research in the field of physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, so on and so forth. He actually does do ongoing research on schizophrenia, but he can’t do anything too serious with most of his time taken up by his job.
6. What are his eating habits? Does he skip meals, eat out, drink alcohol, avoid certain foods?
He’s skinny for a reason. His idea of a good meal is a cup of coffee and maybe a bag of chips.
Associations
Which of the following do you associate with the character, or which is his favorite:
1. Color? He generally likes dark blues and browns—natural colors that don’t stimulate his over-stimulated mind more nor make his migraines worse if he looks at them.
2. Smell? When I think of him, I think of the smell of old books. His favorite smells, which he doesn’t exactly think about, would probably be the smell of coffee, Garcia’s perfume, and baked goods cooking.
3. Time of day? Noon.
4. Season? Reid likes spring and summer, mostly because they’re warm (and he gets cold easily due to being so thin) and they have the longest days.
5. Book? Reid can’t possibly pick a favorite book, but he loves Isaac Asimov and eats up most classic literature. Isaac Asimov is an unconscious connection to his father, whereas the classics are clear connections to his mother.
6. Music? He doesn’t listen to music much, but when he does, he usually likes a little of every genre (except stuff that involves a lot of screaming and roaring—that’s just scary). He tends more towards classical music, though.
7. Place? He really likes the park near where he lives, since he often plays chess with the people who gather there, and he and various teammates usually go out nearby.
8. Substance? Dilaudid. He absolutely loathes it, though, and has managed to keep from relapsing for years.
9. Plant? I associate him with poppy flowers, mostly because of the opiate drug he was addicted to.
10. Animal? I associate him with Pandas. On one hand, he’s cute and passive and rare and oh God don’t you just want to pet him, and on the other hand, he’s still a bear and will fuck your shit up if you somehow get him angry enough.
END
{{ Get the HTML here so you can do it yourself. }}