Something else that stands out to me is the way Hannibal is supposed to be the creature, the monster, the detached from humanity. Yet Will is the one who feels alien. He’s supposed to be a southern American man, but nothing about him aligns with that image…not the accent, not the behavior, not his preferences or social instincts. He moves through the story as something unrooted, without a recognizable origin point.

Hannibal, for all his inhuman brilliance, is built from a familiar archetype. He is the eccentric European aesthete, the refined hedonist shaped by old-world sensibilities, the aristocratic vampire, the cultivated outsider, the figure who lives among humans while remaining distinct.

Will resists categorization. He doesn’t fit into any cultural or narrative mold. He has no real home, no mythology, no background that anchors him. We learn far more about Hannibal’s past than Will’s, and what little we know of Will feels like fragments scattered across a landscape with no actual center.

It’s ironic that Hannibal once said he “happened,” because Will is the one who seems to have “happened”… to have simply appear in the world without context. It’s why those theories suggesting he might be Hannibal’s hallucination feel so compelling.