I wanna talk about something I see frequently in the CM fandom, so buckle up, y’all, this is a long one.
As a fandom, we tend to portray Reid as a weak, fragile, and small person. And this isn’t just early seasons here, this is until the very end. We want our favorite characters to be perfect and whole and happy, and when it comes to Spencer, we seemingly add ‘non threatening’ and ‘weak’ to that.
I think part of this is our tendency to see the unsubs of this show as the scariest and the team being juxtaposition to that. Watching a show so well-versed in brutal murders makes real-life seem way less frightening when they’re placed side by side. And Reid’s unnerving side tends to be much more passive, his anger less explosive and vicious than that of maybe Hotch or Morgan, and part of that is him being more effeminate than his counterparts. We tend to view femininity and any portrayal of the perceived aspects of femininity as something weak or non threatening (I’m going to be repeating those words a lot.) Brutalized masculinity is not the only thing that would make a person scary or intimidating.
There’s a really good example of his sort of macabre anger in Elephant’s Memory (which you can see a gifset of here). Throughout the whole episode, Spencer is angry. He snaps a couple times, towards the officers, towards the team sometimes, eventually resulting in him acting in what the team perceives as a reckless manner, all because he identifies with Owen. In the ending jet scene, Hotch reprimands Spencer for “keeping score just like Owen” and Spencer seems to employ a sort of “eye for an eye” thinking in response, stating that it should work that way [life for a life]. Identifying with an unsub like Owen (whether or not you view this identification as something justified) is something I would argue makes him utterly terrifying, at least in that moment.
We visit this again in Uncanny Valley, when Spencer has his confrontation with the psychiatrist. In my opinion, this is one of the scenes where his face has his loudest display of anger, and he further emphasizes this with his body language. He’s so startling angry here that you see the doctor physically recoil from him. To me, this anger here is the scariest, watching the anger leak out into his words and his face and his body.
gif courtesy of @imagining-in-the-margins
Post prison Spencer tends to be seen more hard-hitting and scary, but even then, we categorize it as something soft. And in a way, it is, but soft doesn’t mean weak, and it doesn’t rule out being austere. He manages to be both soft and angry, both light and dark.
gif courtesy of @imagining-in-the-margins
In season 13, we see the culmination of Scratch’s storyline. After Scratch dies, Spencer talks to Emily and he brings up the fact that he would’ve murdered Scratch in cold blood given the chance. The most bone-chilling thing here is how calm he is, and just how resigned to his own form of brutality he has become.
So, tldr, Spencer Reid is a terrifying man.
