What's your take on Will's fear as a consequence of his heightened empathy? Do the murders he commits dampen that fear or amplify it?
Sorry it took so long, but life got the better of me very hard and I felt I don't have time to write the answer in a way that would be satisfactory enough for me.
First of all, I consider it as a very muddy topic and let me clarify: Will's heightened empathy comes from the book and there it is Doctor Bloom who points out that Will deals with heightened empathy and it is the reason for his fear.
In the show, the last part is left to Alana, but it's Hannibal who "diagnoses" Will with heightened empathy and considering that this is Hannibal who is curious about a lot of things — I'm unsure if we can trust him with that diagnosis completly or not. I have to also admit, even to myself, that at this stage, Hannibal would have had no reason to mess around in this matter, since he had just met Will and he had no way of knowing yet how their lives would intertwine. Messy from the very beginning!
However, what Will does borders on magical realism anyway, so it's possible that this is really the only diagnosis he can get.
And I also believe Chilton is right about most things in the series (because he is Cassandra of the show), so his diagnosis of Will in court?
Let's break this down a little bit. We do know that Will actually hid all his life, fearing that he understood criminals so well because he had such tendencies himself (by the way, this is also taken from the book).
For the purposes of this analysis, I believe these words from Chilton are most important: "Saving lives is just as arousing as ending them. He likes to play God".
But for now, let's focus on Bedelia's words for a second:
And yes, in the series we see Will only killing actually bad people (criminals): G.J. Hobbs, Randall Tier, Francis Dolarhyde, he also constantly fantasizes about killing Hannibal. It is righteous violence, isn't it? Because he is compassionate.
And having covered all this, I feel we can now move on to answering your question.
Will is afraid, but only for a while, as even Alana points out:
I think his empathy actually frightened him because he was afraid of what his fate might be if he let himself get carried away by it. He spent his entire life trying to convince himself that he was a good person… only to end up in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane anyway! For things he didn't even do!!!
When he realized that empathy had become his only weapon, he began to use it skillfully: a scene where he cries in front of Alana and Hannibal that he is scared, lost and needs their help? Allowing Chilton to be the only one to test him? Exclusive rights to his story for Freddie Lounds? He knew that these people wanted it, so he gave it to them.
So in my opinion? Will's fear was never a direct result of his empathy, but rather the fact that he was afraid of the consequences of using it — hence being a cop, a special agent. He was trying to prove to himself that he was good and normal. Moral. Moral person cannot be killer, right? Right??? He wanted to believe so.
And now about dampen that fear or amplify it. The opinions of Chilton and Bedelia, which I inserted earlier, will be useful here.
Will was vulnerable in the first season when he was sick, but Will himself is a huge manipulator; he plays not only with other characters, but also with the audience.
Will tried to live as a good and moral man.
After killing Hobbs, he said that he did not consider him his victim, but dead. He had hallucinations of Hobbs, but this could have been the result of encephalitis combined with work-related stress.
After killing Randall Tier? While at the crime scene, Tier told Will that it was the becoming for him too. Killing Dolarhyde? "It's beautiful".
BUT! Do you remember the body that was set on fire as the body of Freddie Lounds?
Will had a nightmare about this, where the burning body had his face on it. He woke up sweating like at the beginning of the show. There was still a moral dilemma.
He came back to this job after three long years because of the Red Dragon's case. And so, Hannibal was right as they stood in their memory palace over the broken mirror, "Like you, Will, he [Dolarhyde] needs a family to escape what's inside him" — soon after that Will wakes up drenched in sweat from a nightmare. And when he looks in the mirror then, his reflection is falling apart, which I think parallels nicely with what he said in season one ("I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked through me, past me. Like I was a stranger"). Is it his person suit falling down right now?
And now... In my opinion Chilton and Bedelia are right. Killing can be enjoyable to Will if he feels it is morally justified. The killings he committed were like that.
He had a nightmare after "killing" Freddie because he was playing a very dangerous game with Hannibal, but he also knew that compared to the other perpetrators, Freddie's crimes were minor.
He is like God. He is the one who administers justice. The murders — or transgressions, like what eventually happened to Chilton because of him — that Will commits don't make him more and more afraid, but rather… he becomes more and more confident.
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