They/them. Artist, poet and passionate lawful evil player in a DnD campaign. Other current interests include Hannibal, Good Omens, Phantom of the Opera and LotR. Welcome to my blog.
I am re-watching the show for the 23rd time and I am Having Thoughts. Hannibal’s desire to push Will into his “becoming” is very transparently rooted in his desperate desire for an equal, for someone who could understand him and see him as he is without running away. I think some of the fandom assumptions about the medical malpractice and manipulations that Hannibal carried out with Will interpret it as Hannibal only toying with him, turning Will into someone whose darkness is subservient to his. If that was what he wanted, there were plenty other easier targets who had already embraced or acquiesced to acts of violence that he could pick— Randall, Dolarhyde, Tobias, maybe even Margot. And yet he chose Will, time and time again. He wants someone who has the ability to choose him in return, someone who can see— not someone who is blinded. When Will pulls a gun on him, he says “the scales have fallen from my eyes”— and Hannibal smiles.
Hannibal often seems like a very complicated and even mysterious character on the surface, but he’s actually supremely understandable— part of the horror of it all is that you can’t help but sympathize with the villain, once you look into him further, and you can’t help but wonder how far you might have gone in his place. The audience is cleverly made into a mirror of Will’s own struggles with those questions. It’s baked into our DNA to seek connection and others who can understand and therefore aid and support us, our ancient ancestor’s main evolutionary advantage was their ability to form social groups and have strength in numbers. Hannibal knows this, too, and he knows the futility of it regarding himself— one of the first things Jack says to him is that he enjoyed his paper on “the evolutionary origins of social exclusion”. There’s irony here. Jack enjoys the paper, he does not have to suffer its truths like its author does.
Hannibal can either let the cold fact of how he’s destined to be alone in a world that’s against him by nature crush him slowly, or he can convince himself that his singularity means that he’s superior, that he’s above all others. Being different is a useless pain unless different means better. Who wouldn’t choose comfort over suffering? Hannibal’s tableaus are almost always referred to as mockeries, as an outlet for his sadism and superiority complex. However, I disagree with this a little— they’re also beacons. They are the work of a desperate man, whether he realizes it or not. Hannibal’s elaborate tableaus are publicly displayed, he puts the utmost effort into them, he makes the brutality beautiful, too— which makes the average and sane person shy away from them even more, and that’s the point of them! His tableaus are messages, sent out into the world in the hopes that someone can see the beauty of the darkness in them like he can, that someone can understand them, and through that, understand him and choose him. It’s reminiscent of how bowerbirds build their elaborate nests in the hopes of finding a mate their choices of flowers, twigs and berries will agree with.
Will is the first person who sees them as something more than abominations. He truly considers Hannibal’s statement that “God kills people all the time, and are we not created in his image?” in episode two when they’re still essentially strangers, after he’s admitted that killing Hobbs felt good and powerful. He considers the fact that they share an appetite before the encephalitis and Hannibal’s manipulations get ahold of him— and then he ignores and rejects it. He and Will are the only two people in their separate world— and yet Will has still rejected him, choosing the slow suffocation of being different without being better, without “becoming”. To Hannibal, this is a waste not only of Will’s life, but of his, too.
Will has chosen to continue subsisting on the scraps of other’s darknesses, afraid of committing to his own, afraid of the facts of his existence. Hannibal’s decision to scale Will’s walls just as Bedelia said about his comes with the extra weight of choosing to tear them down behind him. The fact that he never anticipated the result of finding his only equal in the world being falling in love with him is a testament to how utterly alone he’s always been. Love and true connection is foreign to him, and it is terrifying in how helpless it makes him, in how terrible it is because of the fact he can’t resist its beauty and allure. Beauty and terror are the features of a God. Hannibal tells Bedelia that love is a God, and he compares Will to God over and over.
Will is his God. He has made Hannibal’s world anew, and Hannibal can’t help but be willing to do anything to have Will join him there.
I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
god i love the part of the leroux novel when erik “have i really committed murders?” phantomopera is like “christine if you marry me i would be as gentle as a lamb………….” while the daroga and raoul are being microwaved and there’s a mountain of gunpowder beneath their feet ready to explode and kill them all if she says no
erik to christine like "you hate me because i am just so ugly you don't even care about my loving personality 😔" meanwhile he is roasting her fiance to a nice crisp behind the wall
I don't think we talk about the moment in Leroux's Phantom where Christine asks Erik to play from his Don Juan enough like he literally goes "nah it's too #deep you wouldn't understand, I'll play you some basic bitch shit like Mozart instead"-- I aspire to match that level of wild, unprecedented ego
This sounds fake but the logic behind it is actually really interesting? She said obsession with a new fandom triggers quick dopamine release when we consume all this related content--it's easy and addictive.
What we're NOT getting is that 'slow dopamine' that's more sustainable and engaging. That's the kind we get from DOING things that take effort but are ultimately rewarding.
So like, she suggested that writing fic and making fanart are ways to balance the quick dopamine of watching a show/reading fic with the slow dopamine of working at something that takes effort.
Moral of the story is you should engage in the process of creation around your favorite things. You'll feel better for it.
Something that always confused me when I read TPOTO was why The Phantom chose box five out of all the private boxes to be his.
Out of all the seats in the house, box five is among the worst and would be (and still is) sold cheaply (average 65 francs at cheapest in 1880, now sold a between 10-25 euros nowadays) on general sale. A higher profit would've been made from a year-long booking, especially since there are multiple seats, so it would be 65 francs per person on a yearly booking no matter how many people are in there at once, but still not as much as other seats.
Visual wise, a good chunk of the left side of the stage is cut off and parts of the performance that would occur in the higher wings would be completely unseen, so, why choose it? Isn't the main point of going to go watch an Opera is to actually see the performance?
(A screenshot from the Palais Garnier's seat listing stating the best seats for viewing and the view from the box five via this video)
Having been there myself in late May, I found an answer to my own question and I'm gonna share it with you guys because maybe someone else was asking the same thing!
Although yes, the stage is half cut off, it's one of, if not the, best seats acoustic wise. You're a perfect distance from the orchestra as well as the stage for everything to sound just right. As much as The Phantom would've loved the operatic performance, I don't doubt he would've been more focused on the music itself as well as the vocals, and, mainly, Christine.
Further, although going to the opera was more of a social thing than an entertainment thing, so the boxes were built for aristocracy to be seen above all things, you can disappear from public view quite easily in that box. There are two to three rows of seats going backwards to the door, so all one would have to do to disappear from sight of anyone on stage or in the audience would be to just move a seat backwards (which means he wouldn't have been able to see the stage at all, but would still be able to hear everything perfectly well).
Plus, the box is located right at the end of the row of private boxes, as well as very close to entry and exit stairs, both public ones and private ones meant for stage hands and general workers.
All in all, those three reasons are why the box was chosen and kept in high priority for The Phantom, because he could quite literally disappear, like a ghost, by just moving himself in the box, as well as disappear out of the box and hear Christine almost perfectly.
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