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.
constantly thinking about how casually Hannibal and Will would just go to each other's houses as if they don't live two+ hours away. like sure it's not *that* far, but also i feel like this is just not portrayed at all to anyone who doesn't know how far they are. not a casual drive but then again nothing about them has ever been casual
