(in honor of my first ever fandom… yea i get the implications of how that makes me look 😂 anyways, my absolute favorites recs are the ones with red titles)
Pièce Montée, 3k words, episode-style case fic with well-written original characters and plot, sympathetic killers, would kill (ha) for this to be an actual episode on the show
where there is smoke, there is fire, 3k, georgia madchen character study, reading experience comparable to the joy and dread of watching sparks catch on kindling
Foreplay, 1.5k, despite the title not a smut fic but is actually a hannibal character study which takes the premise “seeing people as meat” and seeing how he does/doesn’t view people’s humanity
Salome, 6k words, tension, delves into the dark obsessive side of oscar wilde’s work, excellent hannibal pov
As Smoke to Flame, 3k, wherein the seduction does include fucking and predictably doesn’t make anything better, focuses on the inherent angst and betrayal of will’s ploy
Trotline, 7k, takes the fluffy-sounding premise of “will takes hannibal fishing” and makes it uh hannibal, an incredible take on hannibal’s sadism/cruelty, gorgeous looming sense of dread
each according to its own kind, 192k, after getting released will ditches the fbi and leaves for the other side of the continent, a love letter to the pacific northwest, the best will graham interpretation i have ever seen, slowburn character study, bonus points bc hannibal gets decked not once but twice in glorious detail, john steinbeck vibes, one of my favorite pieces of writing ever
pitiful things sometimes born in hospitals, 8k, daemon au where will has yet another difference, not a hannigram fic, beverly/will vibes, bittersweet and tragic
your heart is a vast stone desert, 10k, a conversation goes left field and enters the thorny splendor of psychedelic imagery and the most sinuous dialogue you’ve ever read, inspiration of ives’s play venus in fur
Silver Springs, 2k, a Dolce “let’s make this worse,” non-linear writing, heavy angst but god it hurts so good, gorgeous feels from the eponymous song
Tenderest touch leaves the darkest of marks, 6k, a short scene in the BSHCI, what it means to be loved gently by a monster, grotesque and tender at the same time
highway 190, 10k, will graham growing up as a queer man in the deep south and beyond, religious trauma, prose as vivid and striking as a poisonous snake
Churrasco, 2k, leans into the avant-garde vibes of the show, all characters start out using false identities and you get to see them revealed slowly
Au Natur, 9k, a bleak but beautiful imagining of post-fall hannigram, fully embraces will graham’s manipulative tendencies
forgiveness, 1k, a poem-with-footnotes format as Will attempts to explain what his life has become to his father
Sins of Omission, 15k, Jack Crawford’s perspective on the development of hannigram, regret, very good outsider pov
VIBES-ADJACENT (aka fics that don’t “feel hannibal” or are vy AU, but are vy good nonetheless)
Adrasteia, 96k words, Kitchen Nightmares AU, nsfc (not safe for chilton), a hilariously sarcastic and done(tm) will graham, the first long hannibal fic that i read
Black Swan, 10k, as per the tags “all serial killers are birds, some birds are serial killers,” a cracky Swan Lake AU
Separately to a Wood, 13k, a “love at first sight” leads to “proposal during the breakfast scene,” soft
They Came to Florence or: Plagiarize This Fic, 5k, hannibal is a huge fan of will graham’s novels and becomes incensed when someone plagiarizes them, the author was apparently inspired to write this after someone plagiarized one of her fics and i respect that
Poppies, 5k, wherein it is acknowledged that for all the horror she’s been through abigail is just a teenage girl and is allowed some soft moments
their beaks not yet turned red, 134k, magical realism au where the baby does miraculously save the marriage, includes hilarious takes on the inherent absurdities of hannibal’s trial
Be Your Dog, 4k, a rock band au that adapts will graham’s proverbial “descent to the dark side” with an ominous intensity
Sagittarius, 13k, a salem witch trials au where will seeks to avenge abigail’s death by any means necessary, dark but cathartic
a siphon; to pass through, 71k, will has type one diabetes and hannibal is an infuriatingly smug vampire, crack but extremely well-written
yousharknotpass
ellievsbear
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
theartofmadeline
