Hannibal: ajfddja jfadjanc akjf a God ndadieoa an cmnag Love eian hgcabn eihadjhfa iooen adhaj Europe
Will: nvmadn adh ajk eajke rhkjaejhas The Ripper akdjasdbf cnladshuebgb akda nc Dr. Lecter akfdan mkldai zhcnvjkekla my design akjdfkl;nc xhabdjk
LOUD AS FUCK BACKGROUND DRUMS: 🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁
Jack Crawford, the only main character who talks at a normal volume and enunciates: We Are Going To Catch The Chesapeake Ripper (he is then silenced by the drums)
so many misguided metaphors around violence and desire. if the open maw of a panting beast fills you with the want to be devoured, that does not make you prey. while the rabbit trembles in fear, its deepest desire is to run. evolution demands it. in fact, the desire to be eaten does not make you any small animal at all.
@justsomeotherdumbblog was trying to leave this essay in the tags:
#there’s a lot of moving parts to this!
#I think in general the answer has to be yes
#psychopaths - not that Hannibal is necessarily a stereotypical or strict psychopath-
#they crave power over life and death
#look at the very first episode. we see him save Abigail
#Hannibal the fucking cannibal SAVES a life in the first ep of the tv show
#it also is a great way to blend in
#he can’t have that many people coming forward saying he convinced me to murder someone or he knew about it
#he needs the majority of people to give rave reviews about his therapy
#he wouldn’t be revered and sought out by the fbi if it were otherwise
#so I think yeah he probably has a fuck ton of patients that aren’t murderers or friends with murderers
#because when the one comes along that he wants to fuck around with he needs to be able to do it
#even Franklyn he never meant to get as involved as he did
#he only freaked out and killed him when Tobias said he’d killed the officers
#he prefers the light touch the gaslighty touch bedelia talks about it too
#she says something like you like your influence to be that which the person afterwards thinks they acted of their own volition
#but so yes. he has to have normal patients but we don’t see them obviously bc that would be boring
#but he takes wills sessions at fucking 730 so like the man probably works a full day before that
#and he only kills those he has a tangential relationship to#Miriam only caught him bc she realized he wasn’t supposed to be the person in the ER that night or something or he was the on call doctor
#Jesus Christ someone make me stop talking slkdfnjd
#hannibal lecter
I think Hannibal saved Abigail primarily (not to discount other reasons such as doing so fitting his cultivated person suit or doing so ingratiating him to Will in whom he's already interested) for the same reason he later gave her for warning her father the FBI were on to him: he was curious to see what would happen.
Hannibal isn't only interested in having the power of life and death over people -- though obviously he does enjoy that, too -- but his bread-and-butter is toying with people. We see him doing this with Franklyn, in fact. He tells Franklyn things like "if you weren't so neurotic, you'd be something worse" because he knows Franklyn is suggestible. He probably is a very good therapist for some patients, but their psyches are all at his mercy and he absolutely gets off on that. He spends all of s1 and much of s2 toying with Will as he becomes more obsessed with Will. His "psychic driving" is performed with such a light touch that no patient of his (unless we count eventually Will) would ever notice it was happening.
Hannibal didn't kill Franklyn because of Tobias's confession. He killed Franklyn because: 1) he found Franklyn annoying, 2) he knew Tobias also found him annoying and probably wanted to be the one to kill him, 3) Tobias had presented himself as the perfect patsy, as law enforcement would readily believe Tobias had been Franklyn's killer, and of course 4) he was curious to see what would happen.
It’s remarkable how often the fandom overlooks Hannibal’s grief for Abigail, reducing his suffering in Season 3 to nothing more than his longing for Will. Yet Hannibal himself equated Abigail to Mischa, a connection that carries a lot of weight. He killed her not out of necessity, but as an impulsive, symbolic gesture to prove a point to Will, an irrational test fueled by emotion rather than logic. The idea that he did not, at the very least, lament that choice is impossible. Regret may not be the right word since Hannibal rarely regrets, as he believes everything he does serves a higher purpose, but lament, or grief is unquestionable.
Hannibal is a master of compartmentalization. He doesn't allow himself to mourn openly, especially for something he chose to do. To grieve would be to acknowledge a mistake, and so he instead internalizes the loss, pushing it into the depths of his psyche, where it festers beneath the surface, or turns it into something poetc. His recklessness in Italy, his lack of caution, his self-destructive indulgence, was not just for Will. He lost more than a lover in that kitchen. He lost the vision of the future he had constructed, the closest thing to a family he had ever allowed himself to imagine. Abigail was the last fragile link to the past that shaped him, a shadow of Mischa reborn in the present. She was his by choice, by fate, by a cruel cycle that neither of them could escape. Her presence, along with Will’s, had formed the illusion of something whole, something that could replace the void inside him.
But Hannibal destroyed it with his own hands.
His hesitation in that final moment was the hesitation of a man who knew he had already lost everything. He could not bring himself to ask Will, Do you want to come with us? because he feared rejection more again. Instead, he acted preemptively, cutting himself off from Will before Will could cut himself off first. He severed the bond before it could be yanked away from him.
And in doing so, he sacrificed Abigail.
She had always been a scapegoat, from the very beginning. She died the death she had always been fated for, returning to the kitchen where she was first marked for slaughter. Given a second life, she failed to take ownership of it, afraid, trapped in the patterns of her past, choosing submission over self-definition. She clung to Hannibal because fear had taught her that devotion was the only way to survive. And so fate played its hand, stripping her of her second chance and delivering her back into death at the hands of the father she had chosen.
Will, too, lost something that night. Not just Abigail, but the illusion he had built around her, a relationship built on unstable ground, an excuse to remain close to Hannibal under the guise of something else. And Hannibal lost the glue that had kept them bound together, the one fragile piece that had made their entanglement feel like more than just violence and hunger. Keeping Abigail alive but hidden had been a test, a way to see if Will wanted him, or if he only wanted her. And when the answer became clear, when Hannibal realized that it wasn’t her absence, but the belief that she had been taken from him, that Will could not forgive, he knew their bond had been broken.
Not because Will loved Abigail, but because that moment, that betrayal, was proof that Hannibal could not be trusted, because he was the one to sever their bond in the first place.
And so, in the end, both men stood in the wreckage, blinded by their own illusions, pleading for the other to see them.
my favourite thing about hannibal is that all the characters just fully believe in whatever will says. he could say “the killer murders people and displays them this way because he was born without a left pinkie toe” and jack will just be like “right, you heard him”
right up until Will’s like “hey guys the well-dressed weirdo European surgeon-turned-psychiatrist who serves organ meats and has a name that literally rhymes with Cannibal might be the Chesapeake Ripper” and suddenly everyone needs a fact check and calls him crazy like his track record isn’t solid fucking gold
stormborns
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