"What A Cunning Boy You Are."

"What a cunning boy you are."

You ever think about the version of Will that was only starting to get corrupted by Hannibal? The version of him that kissed Alana in search for stability and comfort and for something that was real and not a hallucination, the version nodding and almost crying when being asked if he felt unstable?

I love this show and how it plays out as much as the next person, it's so fucking good. But man, I want to give this Will a hug and tell him it'll be okay and keep him safe while I pluck him out of the narrative as I stare down Hannibal and Chilton.

You know, normal feelings to have about a show. /lh

I just realized

Like can you imagine telling episode 1 Will Graham everything that was gonna happen?? Like everyone who watches Hannibal goes into it with the knowledge of who Hannibal Lecter is, nothing was a surprise, but think about it for a second and you realize how batshit crazy everything is

Like

“So Will y’know that psychiatrist assigned to you rn? Yeah so first he’s gonna become one of your only friends, you’ll feel undeniably safe around him and he’ll be the only person you’ll feel comfortable enough around to actually tell the truth about everything you’re experiencing. And then you’re gonna start to hallucinate randomly and have seizures and dissociate for days at a time, and think you’re a murderer. Then you’ll find out that your psychiatrist and best friend was the murderer all along and then you’ll go to prison, and when you finally get out and start convincing people that HES the murderer you’ll realize that you love him and want to continue seeing him and you’ll choose to continue seeing him and pretend to kill people to get on his good side and then you’ll rat him out to the FBI and he’ll stab you and kill your daughter then run off to Italy. And after a while and after you’ve healed you’ll go on a huge journey to find him and then you’ll come back to America and realize that he’s actually super toxic and you shouldn’t see him because he tried to cut open your head and eat your brain. But then he’ll turn himself to the police so that you know where he is in jail all the time because he knows you won’t be able to resist going to see him. And then after five years away from each other you start talking again and he breaks out of prison with you and you kill someone together and you realize how beautiful it is and then you both fall off a cliff”

“What… the fuck are you talking about…?”

It took me probably close to 30 hours but I finally finished this drawing of the arm squeeze because I'm still not over that moment :')

Click for better quality!

Please don't remove the watermark or repost without credit and my explicit permission!

Chapter Two: The Cardinal (2018) Rite Here Rite Now (2024)

EMPATHY AS A FORM OF CANNIBALISM

Okay okay, so cannibalism can be understood either literally (physical consumption of the flesh of another person) or metaphorically (incorporating another within the self). This dual notion of cannibalism has been omnipresent across contexts (cannibalism as a form of grieving or as a way to gain the strength of the consumed enemy).

Now what if Will and Hannibal represent this dual notion of cannibalism?

Hannibal is obviously cooking and eating human flesh but he makes sure he does it only in the literal sense - he does not even think about it as cannibalism because “it’s only cannibalism if we are equals” and he considers his victims to be pigs, beneath him. He always keeps a psychological distance from his victims (represented by his murder suit).

Will, on the other hand, does not (at the beginning) eat human flesh but nevertheless, engages in cannibalism in the metaphorical sense through his amazing ability to fully empathise with the murderers. At a crime scene, he literally becomes them, he sometimes acts like them (“had to open you up to get a decent sound out of you”) and there are instances where he struggles with finding a clear separation between himself and the killer. This is most obvious with Garret Jacob Hobbs but happens with other killers too. He literally incorporates them within his mind and they “haunt” him even after he leaves the crime scene.

This separation of two forms of cannibalism is clearly visible in the first season but my theory is that the moment Will realises what Hannibal is, the lines between the two men start to blur and so the two forms of cannibalism become one.

Obviously, this can be demonstrated on several moments in season two. First, Will willingly starts to engage in literal cannibalism with Hannibal. Second, Hannibal starts to emphasise with Will (he says things like “you have been applying yourself to my perspective as I’ve been applying myself to yours”). They basically start engaging in the other’s form of cannibalism.

This climaxes in the third season. Will needs to complete his understanding of Hannibal, and so he goes to Lithuania to meet with his past. Chiyoh recognises this blurring of lines between the two men by saying to Will that “you're afraid you're going to become him”.

Meanwhile, Hannibal literally eats a Will-lookalike (Antony Dimmond) and decides that he needs to eat Will too. Then they meet in the Uffizi gallery, where Will says that they “have become to blurr”. This is a pivotal moment because they acknowledge that they are conjoined, they have become one. Hannibal says: “Freeing yourself from me and... me freeing myself from you, they're the same”. And so, their representations of cannibalism become one too.

Inspiration from: “The Empath and the Psychopath: Ethics, Imagination, and Intercorporeality in Bryan Fuller's Hannibal” by Jane Stadler