Hi! There’s obviously a lot going on that’s really cool and thought-out with your latest/last halloween fic. Is there any world- or character-building that didn’t make it into the fic proper that you’d want to share?
Ohhhhhhhhh, man, thank you so much for this ask - it really made my day to get it.
(For anyone who's curious, this ask is in reference to "Wickedness Like Food," the witch!Hannibal fic I posted on Halloween. Fair warning: it does have some kink themes.)
There's a lot of world and character-building that didn't make it into the fic proper. I was originally planning on fleshing this out into a full AU/series called Suffer Not (as in "suffer not a witch to live"), but with the other projects I've started working on and the lukewarm reception this fic got (your ask excluded, Anon!), I'm not sure if that's gonna happen or not.
But anyway, have some tidbits, for your viewing pleasure.
The narrator of this fic is Frederick Chilton (though it wasn't obvious enough for me to feel like I should add him to the tags). He's also a witch, and describes what kind he is in this line: "Some let other witches do all the hard work and then all they have to do to siphon off a little power for themselves is write about them." He hates Hannibal for a lot of reasons, one of them being that Hannibal is among his main reservoirs...which means that Frederick knows everything he does, whether he wants to or not.
Hannibal's backstory in this conforms to the timeline of the books, which means his powers awoke during the second World War. As Frederick says, he's older than he looks.
Keeping another witch as a familiar, even a blind witch, is Not Done, to say the least. In terms of taboo, it falls somewhere between incest and cannibalism in witch society, and is honestly kind of a mix of the two, magically speaking. The fact Hannibal is one of the most powerful witches in the DMV area will cushion him from a lot of the fallout, but nevertheless, there is going to be fallout for what happened with Will.
I had tentatively decided to call Will's specific breed of witch a "dream witch." Essentially, he's psychic: he can walk in the minds and dreams of others, something he does unconsciously and which has been mistaken for an empathy disorder.
I'd murkily envisioned most of the original killers from the show as other witches, both blind and not. That's why so many of them are drawn specifically to Will. Their crimes also would have been informed by what breed of witch they were, but I hadn't really decided what exactly I was going to do with any of them, narratively speaking.
