Also what should people read to TRULY understand how Hannibal is an anime?
Well, the joke isn’t that Hannibal is an anime, the joke is that Hannibal is quite specifically a 90s dark shoujo anime/manga/light novel, like CLAMP’s early works - Tokyo Babylon, RG Veda, X:1999 - or Angel Sanctuary, Mirage of Blaze, or gawd forbid, Zetsuai/Bronze. XD; This stuff was full-on sin/problematic: homosexual love as transgressive tragedy, murder and dismemberment, incest, underage sex, rape, misogynist anxiety, the whole nine yards. But it was/is a YA genre written for intense teenage girls, by intense young female mangaka who in retrospect weren’t that much older, trying to make sense of big questions like social isolation and free will. Memory assigns these manga the same emotional vividness as the Bronte sisters’ novels.
In particular, the way Bryan Fuller plots character arcs/reveals in the show is extremely similar to how CLAMP used to do it. Basically, the characters’ ends (core motivation, or Wish in CLAMP’s parlance) don’t change, whereas the means can switch up and be completely wacko as long as they serve the ends, and neither ends nor means are predictable based on how “nice” the character seems/is to others. So you always have to be asking yourself, what do I know to be true about this character, and what have I merely assumed to be true? I was always sure that Alana was using Mason to get to Hannibal first, for instance, rather than being fully onboard with his torture revenge plot, because I know that Alana’s Wish is to save and protect others. Jack’s Wish is to catch the killer. Abigail’s Wish is to survive. Et cetera. And the point of a Wish is that it does not bend to compromise: Jack will always choose catching the killer over Will’s safety and sanity, and in CLAMP’s worldview, that is what constitutes Jack’s honour. CLAMP has had characters who’ve wished for – children, say, or oblivion, or for someone else to live on – enough to trigger genocide and the destruction of entire worlds. All that to constitute a message in metaphor to the teenage girls: what you want deep in your heart is what matters most of all.
On top of that, Tokyo Babylon just has the same plot, except the main character is a teenager and the cases-of-the-week are supernatural. Seishirou is absolutely bog-literally a murder wizard who tends a murder cherry tree. I’m not sure I’d actually recommend that Hannibal fans go dig up the series, but if you happen to know both, the parallels are hilarious.
@petrichordiam
YAMI NO MATSUEI
