Will Graham post-fall:
I want to classify Will using the categories (the ones in RED) that John Douglas devised to classify serial killers in his Crime Classification Manual (yes I read it all ‘cause I’m a freak):
Will’s Motivation for killing would be: primarily, power and control, secondarily, lust and thrill.
He craves domination over others, he gets emotional satisfaction from being judge, jury and executioner, from deciding who lives and who dies (like God), and he only feels truly alive when he can do all this.
Victim acquisition: how does Will acquire his victims? Will is a Trapper, primarily. Or a fisherman, if you will. He repeatedly uses psychological manipulation and staged scenarios, and he baits offenders, he lures them, with or without live bait.
He creates conditions where the victim walks into the kill.
He would probably occasionally stalk as well (secondary typology type: the Stalker).
Attack method: now it gets tricky. I think he would oscillate between the three main types of attack methods, which are:
- Blitz: a sudden, overwhelming surprise attack, with no interaction beforehand.
- Con / Ruse: where the offender manipulates the victim with deception before the attack.
- Surprise: the victim is attacked when unaware, but not necessarily with immediate violence.
I think the most important thing for Will is to cause the maximum amount of pain possible (in a given situation). Why? Because it gets him off. It makes him feel alive, and powerful, and intellectually superior, and so it boosts his ego (which in turns gives him more confidence to keep killing, which boosts his ego more, so he kills more, more ego-boosting, and so on and on).
I think he would enjoy torture, both physical and psychological. He’d torture his victims with his words/manipulation, with tools and parafernalia, with his bare hands (we know that this gets him aroused pretty quickly) and he’d probably subject them to some of his sexual deviances too: there would not be penetration (regardless of the victims’ gender) but there would be biting, scratching, knife penetration, ropes, fire, you know. All not consensual. :(
So yeah, Will would use one of the three attacks methods depending on which one lets him inflict the most pain during and after the attack, BUT:
For Will the most consistent is Con/Ruse, because he looooves psychological dominance first, then moral confrontation, then forcing the victim to understand what is happening (he’s a bit like Dexter in this way). But Blitz Attacks always deny that interaction, while Surprise attacks would let him dominate the victim, but more in a psychological than in a physical sense. Blitz would probably be rare unless necessary.
Victim Relationship Pattern:
Will feels righteous (which in my opinion is the family friendly way of saying the he gets off on it) when he dominates and defeats those “deserving”: who deserves it? Everybody who, explicitely or not, shows Will they don’t like him.
After all, when a human defies a God, what does a God do? He punishes. Will is a punisher. Now, “punisher” is not a technical term, but I think it conveys very well what Will is/does.
Those deserving are not necessarily bad guys. Although I’m convinced that he would love to keep murdering killers (because if he can dominate killers, it means that he’s even superior to them, and it reinforces the idea, in his mind, that he’s superior to common humans), he’d probably murder (when curcumstances permit it, of course) the Rude. Yes, Hannibal’s “rudes”, but Will would not murder them just for Hannibal’s sake. It’s a way for him to show his love to Hannibal, sure, but more generally I think Will loves to find any occasion to avenge himself. He is an avenger (another non-technical term, sorry), like, for example, school shooters are: simply put, the world hurt him, and now he’s gonna take his sweet revenge forever. If people don’t like him (or if he even just perceives that people don’t like him) than they deserve to die.
If they don’t like him it means that they’re not evolved enough, and that means that they’re inferior to him (who has undergone a transformation, sure, but was already “superior” to them).
Then we got the Organized/Disorganized dychotomy: this is easy. He’s organized, because he’s highly intelligent, he has control of the crime scene (don’t consider Encefalites Era), he plans, he is forensic savvy and even a bit medically savvy, and he can be emotionally composed during violence (especially if he plans it himself and is not blitzed by someone else).
Spatial pattern: marauder with shifting territory, simply because after the Fall him and Hannibal would have to move around a lot, especially the first few months/years.
Modus Operandi and Signature:
I think this can be glanced from all the other categories. I’m fairly sure that if he wants he can be a “curator” or an aesthetic killer, especially in his shared kills with Hannibal, but he would not need to stage the scene in order to satisfy his urges. When he does it, it’s him following Hannibal’s M.O..
After the kill, he could masturbate (but not always: of course, the more amount of torture and the more types of torture he inflicts, the more aroused he’ll be once the kill is over) or he could have sex with Hannibal (who would probably be very happy to help a very bloody Will).
The bodies would always, always, be mutilated. As I said, bites and scratches, broken bones, heads bashed in, bones protruding from any angles, great gouts of blood spurted from the gaping wounds (rarely inflicted with firearms, ‘cause they’re not intimate enough); there could occasionally be inserted objects and weapons and tools in the bodies, either in anatomical holes or in holes that Will creates. Of course Will would take organs for Hannibal’s pleasure, and he would be happy to make Hannibal happy.
He would not kill often, but not because he doesn’t want to: it’s because he’s on the run, at least for te first few months/years.
But he’s hungry for it, oh, how hungry he is. And Hannibal is too. The Devil has been caged for three years, he hasn’t fed for three years, so his urges will be at a maximum high because of starvation, while Will’s urges will be at a maximum high because he finally stopped suppressing himself. Immediatly after the fall they would rely on raw instict A LOT. It would be a miracle if they don’t get caught in the first few months, as injured and as reckless as they would be.
Then, after a while, they would become gradually more organized and clear-headed, but their main characteistics (the ones I listed in this post) would stay the same.
Next I’ll post an analysis on how the Crime Classification Manual would classify Hannibal.
