With your deep and nuanced understanding of the show, I wanted to ask you how to write a good Hannibal in fanfic? I struggle writing his emotions and the nuances of that without turning him into a Mary Sue :(

It’s nice of you to consider my opinion!

Hannibal’s Vulnerabilities, Will’s Limitations.

Hannibal’s emotions are particularly challenging to convey through Will’s point of view because Will himself struggles to perceive Hannibal as someone with genuine vulnerabilities. When he says things like “I wasn’t aware you had one (a better nature),” “Hannibal never worries,” “He’s always playing with us”, it reflect his deeply ingrained belief that Hannibal operates on an entirely different plane, detached from ordinary human emotions. To Will, Hannibal is more a creature than a man, a creature of control and manipulation rather than one capable of suffering.

It is only when Will gains an external perspective, through characters like Bedelia or Chiyoh, who understand Hannibal intimately but without Will’s projections, that he can grasp the depth of Hannibal’s grief, anxiety, death drive, and profound emptiness. This is why Will needed Bedelia to tell him that Hannibal was in love with him…he could not, or would not, trust his own perception.

Will’s tendency to project is at the core of this dynamic. His entire profession is built on slipping into the minds of others, particularly killers, to understand them from within. But this skill, which makes him an extraordinary profiler, also isolates him. He sees reflections of himself in others rather than truly perceiving them for who they are. This is why his relationships, whether with Abigail, Molly, Alana, or even Jack, remain fraught and distant. He is not simply a man who knows others too well; he is a man who only knows himself through others.

This is why moments of true revelation unsettle him, why he is so visibly taken aback when Hannibal speaks of Mischa or asks him to run away together. Will believes he understands everyone, yet he is constantly confronted with the limits of his own projections. His ability to profile depends entirely on how much he can see himself in another. He struggled with the organ harvesters because they were not serial killers in the traditional sense, there was no psychological mirroring, Hannibal was the one to suggest this possibility. And he failed to see the Ripper standing right before him, not because of a lack of intelligence, but because Hannibal didn’t share the exact same darkness as he did. As Jack said, they are “identically different.”

If writing from Will’s perspective, you need allow space for this confusion. His understanding of Hannibal must be gradual, fragmented, shaped by outside perspectives and long periods of familiarity. It is not immediate or instinctive; it is painstakingly earned.

Writing from Hannibal’s point of view, though, is much easier. Hannibal aestheticizes his pain, transforming vulnerability into something poetic, grandiose, always reframing his suffering in a way that reinforces his own sense of control. He did not eat Mischa in pure shock; in his mind, it was an act of symbolic forgiveness. He does not acknowledge compulsion, only choice. Even when he loses control, he will not admit it, he will rewrite the narrative to ensure he remains its master.

At his core, Hannibal’s greatest fear is powerlessness. And so, he does what he does because he can, because it is elegant, because it is fun. But the truth, one he will never allow himself to face, is that he is bound by an impulse as consuming as any of the killers Will has ever known. The difference is that he will never surrender to it. Instead, he will sculpt it into something exquisite, something that appears deliberate, something that keeps him sovereign over himself and the world around him.