“Hannibal gave you three years to build a family, confident that he would find a way to take them from you.” Is such a deeply disturbing line to me, because it bleeds heavily into what we already know about Hannibal and one of the things he wants for Will:
Will bonds with his family, Hannibal takes it away. It’s a simple fact of life.
It makes me wish they did give us more scenes of Will and his family before Hannibal intervened, and before Will was taken back to the FBI, because I think what’s important to note when analysing how Will feels about Molly and Walter, is that most of what we see is Will being put in a deeply conflicted place, and the main interaction we get of him and Walter is after a deeply traumatic event, shattering the stability there once may have been. Will I don’t think is a bad father or husband, he’s just unsure how to navigate the blending of these worlds.
We know how Will’s mind works, and so does Hannibal. He knew that if he sent the Red Dragon after Molly and Walter, Will would be put in a place where he envisions them dying over and over again at his own hands — he knew that Will would never be able to return home, whether they were killed or not.
It’s a very common abuse tactic to separate a person from their safest environment, with people who genuinely love and support them and would likely intervene with the abuse and its effects. A lot of what Will feels towards Hannibal stems from that. Molly is like a warm fire, and Hannibal is like the cold sea, but the reason Will chooses to jump into the sea rather than sit by the fire, is because the sea put out the fire, and there was no warmth left.
Will cannot stand to be loved gently when Hannibal is around, because Hannibal’s violent love is like a drug to him now, and violence is simply what Will understands. Hannibal’s taught him that too.
