muses who did nothing wrong: mercedes, inigo
muses who do some things wrong, but with good intentions: mercy, vieta
muses who do wrong, but largely against their own damn self: daniel
muses who pretend not to care but care immensely: claude
muses who believe the end justifies the means: cirila
muses who don’t give a good god damn about morality: hannibal, gabrielle
canon divergences for the worst muse of my career:
harris wrote a deeply problematic origin story. he wrote a lot of deeply problematic stories into this franchise, but some of the race relations and treatment of women/girls in the backstory is especially sour. it’s honestly in this era leading up to his capture by graham that you’re going to find a lot of my divergence.
ok first off the *rientalist stereotype, not in my fucking house. i am not opposed to his having some female character integral to his character between mischa and clarice, but not like this. if i do include murasaki, it is likely to be a complete rewrite because there’s so much that simply cannot and should not be salvaged by me, a white person. whatever figure i do use if i go ahead with this idea would likely be the ‘mother’ in his schema, just as clarice replaces mischa as the ‘sister’ or ‘daughter’ figure. idk why harris had to add a romantic angle to literally every woman he runs into post-war but i ain’t having it.
hannibal never got his revenge. it’s a pretty pipe dream and was a goal for a younger man, but he never got his catharsis on those who ruined him. they were all either already dead, out of reach, or too powerful for him to pursue. there was no justice on these men, not at our villain protagonist’s hands, at least. his taste for blood and lack of peace came about due to a lack of, rather than as a result of, a chance to avenge mischa.
‘eat the rude’ and ‘nothing happened to me. i happened to me.’ is all just pretty, prideful ways of ignoring his underlying emotional and mental trauma. in his crimes he reenacts this trauma, but in such a way that he is the conqueror rather than the victim. it’s not healthy and it’s almost a compulsion, but he’s still the master of his own destiny and has no excuse for picking victims so arbitrarily. i am not here to excuse this fucker, only to explain where he is coming from as more than ‘cultured grand guignol vampire straight out of a penny dreadful with class anxiety parable asserts his control over the masses.’ it’s both more personal and impersonal than that.
he started experimenting with his mo during university, the odd mucking about with and nibble of a cadaver, the manipulation and control of his peers once he had a solid idea of what he wanted from the, a few fumbling early kills to refine his work. by his final year of schooling, he was experimenting with marrying his interest in the arts in how he arranged and disposed of his victims. i would say by his thirties he had matured into an old world take on the vampire lore, an aristocrat preying on class horror to drain and destroy those he deemed inferior both literally and figuratively. as i play hannibal in his 40s, he definitely has a good handle on how he carries himself and goes about his crimes.
i like to imagine during the early period of his work, there was a young woman, some determined and durable ‘inferior’ who proved her mettle as his equal. just when he might have killed her, he arbitrarily let her go about her life -- foreshadowing of his ‘type’ when it comes to weighing and interacting with women who remind him of what his sister never became. there was no mercy in his actions towards her, merely curiosity and, at the end, a sense of amusement and perceived loyalty that persuaded him to turn her loose.
his moral compass is a fucking roulette wheel, never let anyone convince you my hannibal is anything but deeply unstable when it comes to interacting with others and evil all the way through. you upend what he thinks a situation should be and you become prey. you ‘prove’ yourself to him, however, and you win whatever passes as grace from him for a certain period.
he’s never had a romantic relationship. he tried for something purely physical in his university years and was unmade completely by the realities of lust. not merely enough to stop him in his tracks, the man dressed and left before the evening was consummated. if he was barely curious before he's wholly repulsed with the reality of sex. orgasm is a complete surrender of control, sharing a bed a bond of trust he cannot tolerate.
hannibal is a man that believes he is above animal impulses, even as he kills in attempts to assert dominance and power like an old world apex predator. even consumption of the flesh and hunting of his prey is definitely far more basic than he would ever believe himself to be. i truly believe if anyone made him out to be what he is, pure impulse and a desperate, ingrained need for control to assert his own worth, then he would really let loose and show what he is beneath the mask of genteel composure. whatever hannibal says he is, he is not.
his feelings towards clarice are a many meandering burden upon him, half the determined girl in the snow fighting to survive among the monsters, half the razor-sharp daughter he never had, the protégé he was robbed of by his time behind glass. in some ways, he evens sees a mirror -- his own doomed lamb screams his name in his sleep. he won’t admit to that ‘intimacy,’ however, and so he keeps to the scheme that clarice is a sort of echo of mischa. i do not ship it. i will never present it as romantic on hannibal’s side, and the ending to hannibal can kiss my ass.
likewise with will, while he was the worthy opponent, the only one that could have defeated him, he’s not really aligned to the show’s idea of their relationship. reminder that my muse is purely book based, so i won’t really engage with fuller’s concept of what they were. he thought he found a likeminded individual in graham, certainly, but would never sully it with mere human desire. after the dollarhyde incident, i don’t think he takes much interest in will and his family. he left his mark. he will haunt the three of them for the rest of their lives, and in his escape they will always wait with bated breath for retribution that is never to arrive.
