All about me: My user is @patchouii, but you can call me Fern. I’m queer and go by she/her. I mostly post about Hannibal NBC, the Hannibal novel series, aesthetic-based art and photography and some other fantasy and horror media like BBC Merlin, LOTR, TSHD & Eggers films. I’m a history and philosophy buff who loves the great outdoors, so there’s some of that here too.
Blog basics: My blog is 18+ for various reasons, so be responsible. Common blog cw’s are blood and gore. I block indiscriminately, I like to enjoy my online experience. Feel free to drop me a follow if you enjoy my posts!
By ask or message: Do you want your own digital file copies of all the episodes of NBC Hannibal or the scripts? DM me! Sadly, I don’t publicly post them because of takedowns.
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.
Happy pride month, followers, friends & fannibals! To celebrate, have some WOTL fanart of two canonically queer messes making a splash— fun rainbow edition! 🌈 💖
I really love this gifset for many reasons, but one of them is definitely because of how it really allows us to break down the details of Will’s facial wound. There’s a lot of wonderful fanart out there that depicts Will’s facial scar as a simple jagged line, and I’m not bashing that at all— fandom is a sandbox we all play in, I’m just detailing my own interpretation of it based on anatomical facts and some plausible assumptions.
We can see in the first two gifs how Francis was supporting part of Will’s upper body weight with his arm and his hold on the knife in Will’s cheek, and how that resulted in Will twisting his head and neck around while impaled on the blade. This isn’t a typical in-and-out stab wound. This would be a very messy one with several slices back and forth throughout. Speaking of slices, the blade of Francis’s knife was around 6-7 inches at a rough estimate, comparing his closed fist to the blade using the width of the average adult male’s and rounding up.
The knife went in a few inches in front of where the jawbone hinges with the skull, so luckily the chances of it damaging his tongue and thus his speech are lower, but he’d probably need dental replacements for a few of his molars that would’ve been heavily battered and cracked or even sliced down. Tooth rot is a big risk here. We can also see that the knife tore through the buccinator and masseter muscles on his right side— the masseter helps us chew, bite, move our jaw and align it properly when relaxed. The buccinator muscles help us move our cheeks and aid in speaking, swallowing, and facial expressions that use the mouth.
Safe to say that without surgical intervention, Will’s going to have a whole host of problems on his hands. The surgical intervention in question would likely involve a tendon transfer/graft to replace the heavily damaged tissues and help the muscles grow and reattach faster and better, an insert like a surgical button might be used to help hold the high-tension facial sutures in place during recovery, and plastic surgery involving a skin graft would be needed after several months to a year of recovery time if Will wanted to obscure a massive section of indented scarring left from the injury and surgery to draw less notice on the run and feel more confident, in the novels he developed serious traumatic and depressive issues with the scarring from Dolarhyde.
He would also need dental surgery to remove and replace the damaged upper and/or lower molars with dental implants. Will would be eating not very good soup again for a WHILE post-fall. It might’ve been a blast in the moment, but the aftermath would still last like a year or more to get back to “normal” as much as possible if we assume Hannibal found them proper medical treatment after escaping. Fighting dragons isn’t advised for many reasons, even if said dragon is a huge buff ex-military serial killer juiced up on a painting-eating psychotic break 💀
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914
Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.
I think Hannibal never tells people about his super unusual olfactory sense because that would make everyone super nervous and hyper-aware around him and that would ruin his observations plus people would find it a bit harder to get comfortable with him. Like, imagine all the sweaty people, women on their periods, women ovulating, horny people etc
He can also smell the fluctuations in hormones that contribute to people’s emotional states and even taste them, he told Will that Randall’s meat “tasted afraid” because the adrenaline and cortisol made the meat taste more “acerbic” and “bitter” to him. As a highly educated former medical doctor, psychiatrist and an expert at reading people and intuiting their thoughts and motives to further his own, being able to parse emotions and the potential causes of them in their current context from spikes, dips or fluctuations in hormones would be as easy and as potentially helpful as someone fluent in both braille and a spoken language reading the text they’re feeling aloud.
Adrenaline and cortisol can correspond to stress and fear, dopamine, testosterone and oxytocin to joy or arousal, progesterone to relaxation or fatigue, estrogen to heightened sociability and contentment or to lowered confidence, anxiety or sadness— Will’s fictional “empathy disorder” that gives him psychic insight into people’s emotions, thoughts and motives gives him the same advantage the millions more olfactory receptors and altered olfactory cortex Hannibal would need to detect, interpret and remember such a vast gradient of molecular traces invisible to human senses in real life could give him.
Elliot Buddish, the “Angel Maker”, was able to sense the things people had done and began to pursue the “sinners” who had done morally reprehensible things after developing a brain tumor, sorting them from others by envisioning flames around their heads much like Will delved into the minds of killers from the evidence they left using his “light bar” visualization to guide him. But Buddish’s psychic ability seems a lot simpler and less capable of delving into the intricacies of people’s minds than Will’s, less than Hannibal’s superior senses would allow him, too.
Hannibal and Will’s deeply complex, almost mystical “instinctual” understanding of each other seems to make even more sense based on this— they can literally communicate without words, able to see and know each other on an innately personal level that no others can reach that it renders bonding and intimacy a foregone conclusion…….. and it also means that Hannibal knew whenever Will was “feeling randy” over him 💀
