The Morbid Reason Why Criminal Minds Fans Are Inspecting Their Homes

Watch any TV show enough and the main characters will start to rub off on you. At any given point, you're one Great British Baking Show binge away from thinking you can cook, a Dexter DVD set removed from thinking you can get away with murder, or a weekend of Hannibal reruns from thinking you can do both.

And as pop culture entries with the potential to get in your noggin go, Criminal Minds ranks somewhere between David Lynch's more experimental movies and Baby Shark. For fifteen seasons, the acclaimed police procedural took audiences into the work-a-day world of FBI criminal profilers, its revolving door of complex protagonists solving mysteries and trying to understand the psyches of both ne'er-do-wells and their victims. 324 episodes later, some fans of Criminal Minds are starting to feel "seen" — not in the heartwarming-social-media-post kind of way, more like the way that Ray Brower felt "seen" when those kids found his body in Stand by Me.

"Am I morbid or do you all do this too?" was the title of a Reddit post on the site's /r/CriminalMinds forum, written roughly eight months after the series' finale. Based on the 99% upvote ratio and dozens of comments, the answer, from many Criminal Minds fans, is "both."

"I'm constantly wondering what victomology would say about me," user Jayyyrabbit wrote on October 23, 2020. "Like do you ever wonder what the team would deduce from your hand writing, or job, or the way you decorate your apartment, or the lack of food in the fridge? Reid would be like she painted her room green which tells us that.... or based on the lack of family photos we know she...."

They continued, "I wonder what they would say about my hobbies or the way I live. The psychology behind decisions that I don't even think about. Not obvious stuff like all of the mirrors in my place aren't smashed ... but like I said my tiny handwriting, my lack of photos, my apartment is colorful but I wear alot of black. I wanna know what they think it all means lol."

Responses to the post ranged from various forms of "omg yes!" to spec scripts featuring Doctor Spencer Reid describing the users' homes. In a particularly glass-is-half-empty reply, one user wrote "honestly after watching American Murder on Netflix, NOW i'm the most paranoid that like, If I got murdered my family would allow a documentary to be made and they'd use all my private messages and unflattering photos," prompting others to share that they've made pacts with their families to ensure that they'll provide documentarians with flattering pictures if they ever mysteriously vanish.