Also "you lied to me" its like dude you're surprised? I mean I love Hannibal. So I'm actually a little disappointed that he would fall for Wills acting. But on the one hand wasn't he impressed by Will putting a hut on him?
You’ve been lying to me, Will.
Hannibal isn’t actually referring to Will’s acting this season. He’s referring to the sum total of Will’s behavior throughout their entire relationship and suggesting that all that was a lie. What Hannibal fell for was the truth, which was that “Will Graham is not a murderer.”
The lie he felt Will was telling was that Will is at base, innocent—that he is ashamed of himself for having that “grotesque but useful” mentality, that he regretted his enjoyment of killing, and that he loathes those parts of himself that are attuned to violence.
I feel like I’ve been watching our friendship on a split screen, the friendship I perceived on one side and the truth on the other.
Hannibal exerted every weapon in his massive arsenal of manipulative machinery to make Will accept the part of himself that was a killer for all of season one, and in the end, Hannibal had to admit defeat. He couldn’t force, trick, drug, suggest, plant evidence, or gaslight Will into believing that he’s a murderer, or get him to actually kill three out of four (or four out of five, depending on whether you believe Hannibal thought it was possible for Will to kill Abigail in the Hobbs cabin) people that he set Will after, and the one Will did kill—Hobbs—he did in a clear emergency with a need to save someone else’s life besides his own.
Although Hannibal did have a small seed of victory in the fact that Will tried to take a shot at him in “Savoureux” before Jack shot Will, Will was deathly ill, hallucinating and feverish, so even though he made an attempt (gold star for you, Will), it wasn’t the victory that Hannibal would have liked to see if Will had accepted that he was a killer and had “become someone other than yourself.”
As Hannibal tells Jack over Will’s hospital bed, “I believe I have failed to satisfy my obligation to Will, more than I care to admit.” He failed.
As we come into season two, Hannibal learns that he misses Will so much that he isn’t content to just let Will rot away in the asylum, so he tries to “help” with Will’s trial and resumes Will’s therapy even though he knows—through Bedelia’s comments, Beverly’s actions, Chilton’s double-dealing, and his own instincts—that Will is lying to him about being a “poor, confused, wounded bird,” as Chilton puts it. The truth, then, is that Will is persistently clinging to the knowledge of his own innocence through his insistence on Hannibal’s guilt. And we also see, finally, Hannibal admit this truth.
Will Graham is not a murderer.
But then that truth is overwhelmed by another truth, when Matthew Brown enacts Will’s attempted murder-by-proxy.
The truth has become the lie and the lie is now the truth.
The lie Will has been telling throughout the whole of his friendship with Hannibal is that he is innocent, not of the copycat crimes, but innocent as a human being.
On one side of the split screen is the truth as it has always been: Will isn’t a murderer: Will withstands all that Hannibal can throw at him and then some, and in so doing, he finally convinces Hannibal that he is truly innocent (just as Jack has claimed all along). He is sincere about his shame and self-loathing and regret. He is innocent, he knows he is innocent, and so does Hannibal.
But on the other side of the split screen, a new truth emerges: Will is not so innocent after all. The irony is that Hannibal didn’t kill Beverly to push Will’s buttons to try to motivate Will to do anything. He killed her to protect himself. It was not some part of a manipulation Hannibal concocted as a part of his “radically unorthodox therapy” of Will Graham. Hannibal killed her without expecting Will to do anything about it. That means that, essentially, Will motivated himself to kill Hannibal. Hannibal may have incidentally created the circumstance, but the psychology was all in Will’s hands.
And therein is the lie that Will has been telling: all along, Will has been proving to Hannibal that no amount of outside influence can turn him into the killer that Hannibal sees in him because at heart, he is innocent. The shame and regret and self-loathing that he has always felt about his own grotesque mentality has been evidence of this basic innocence at his core.
But now, Will has proven that the reason no outside influence can make him a killer is not because he is basically innocent, but because Will himself holds those keys. It isn’t that the killer part of himself doesn’t exist, it’s that Will himself is in control of it. The shame and regret and self-loathing all concealed that truth. They made Will appear to be innocent deep down, they made it look like he struggled with impulses he couldn’t control as a side effect of his empathy, and that is what brought him such guilt. But, in fact, the guilt was the lie, because Will had control of those urges and impulses all along. Will isn’t delusional: he does understand the reality of Beverly’s death and his role in it. He just reserves all of the guilt (and all of his anger) for Hannibal, which is very different from his feelings in the past. And that is a matter of choice.
H: I don’t expect you to feel self-loathing, or regret, or shame. You knew what you were doing, and you made your own decisions, decisions that were under your control.
W: Oh, you think I’m in control?
H: I think you are more in control now than you have ever been. You found a way to hurt me. I wonder how many more people are going to get hurt by what you do.
[insert cannibal happy dance]
(Whether or not Hannibal Lecter is correct in this assessment of Will Graham is a discussion for another day.)
(FYI @divinesugar: You started this ask with the word “also,” but if there was an ask that came before this, Tumblr must have eaten it because I didn’t get it.)
