I wonder if Hannibal realizes that he sometimes behaves like the orphaned child that he is. There's something missing and it's the love that he should have received but was instead violently ripped from him.
In addition, Will is the only one who notices.
Hannibal's childlike wonder with the world, his anxious attachments, his mood swings, his possessiveness over the few people he lets himself be attached to, his need for everything to be exactly how he molded it, his jealousy at being sidelined by the few people he loves...
...and most of all his stubborn idea that everybody should be kind, polite and considering to each other, and if they aren't, the scared starved child in Hannibal will see to it that those Rude People can't hurt him anymore. He desperatly wants to keep on his rose colored glasses while the world keeps yanking them away. In order to get them back, he has to defeat and quite literally put down the people who keep ruining his illusion of a world where he is loved. He needs that illusion so much that he modelled his whole life to adhere to it, starting with a higher education, a respectable job, nice clothes, nice food for guests, etc, in hope that those things and atteibutes will make people love him.
Will understood this to be true both in Hannibal and in the Ripper, way before he knew they cohabitated in the same body. He understood that they both need to eliminate everything that threatens to break them, and it's a lot of things/ people, considering how fragile Hannibal and the Ripper are.
A lot of things/people have the audacity to hurt him, and once they do, Hannibal needs to assure himself that they'll never hurt him again, while also assuring himself that he was always superior to them (he does this by eating them) so to convince himself that they never really hurt him.
This way, he can keep convincing himself that the soldiers that ate Misha did not actually hurt him, since they are inferior to him —they are, since he hunted them down and consumed them; this demostrates their inferiority— and what's inferior to him can't really hurt him. ("Nothing [traumatic] happened to me")
The problem to this reasoning is that upon further scrutiny it crubles fast. And to keep it steady and straight, Hannibal needs to reassure himself of his invulnerability more and more often, with more show of force and superiority each time.
He's one of those pitiful things born in hospitals who miracolously survive their damned conditions and will forever be more vulnerable to the outside world; their only hope to not be shattered upon contact with others is to annihilate those others.
He is starved, most of all, of affection, and you know the saying "those who never received love with spoons, adapt to lick it off knives"? (It isnt the exact phrasing, I know). Well, he doesn't willingly lick knives and cuts himself; but since he never developed appropriate armour (aka, a healthy self esteem), every small slight from other people hurts him like a bitch, and the only way to make sure the pain doesn't come back is to waste the son of a bitch that caused it.
stormborns
baratheonpilled
titsay
